burnout isn’t about doing too much—it’s about doing the wrong things.

A lot of “burnout” is just the result of prolonged exposure to environments you were never truly aligned with to start.

Psychologist Mark Travers calls the exhaustion that sets in when your work consistently diverges from your values “misalignment burnout.” He writes that when our behavior is driven by external rewards — money, status, other people’s expectations — rather than internal alignment, we gradually lose our sense of self. That dissonance builds into... See more