I was driving to the gym the other morning, not thinking about anything in particular, when it hit me. I quit an industry years ago, before I ever got into tech, and I never really sat with the reason why. I told myself it wasn't for me. That I wanted something different. But driving along, I realised the actual reason was simpler and more uncomfortable than that. I didn't find meaning in it. And that bothered me more than the work itself ever did. Here's the thing that got me thinking though. There are people in that exact industry, doing that exact job, who are absolutely fine. Some of them are thriving. Some of them have built careers they're proud of, families off the back of it, a life they're happy with. The work didn't break them. It didn't hollow them out. So what was different about me? Why did I need the work to mean something? And why, when it didn't, did I start to deteriorate? I think a lot of people in this community will recognise this feeling, even if they haven't put words to it yet. You start a job or a career with energy. Maybe even excitement. Then the repetition sets in. The same tasks. The same conversations. The same Monday. And somewhere in that loop, something inside you starts to switch off. We call it burnout. But I wonder if burnout, at its core, is actually just what happens when the gap between what you're doing and what you believe matters becomes too wide to ignore. The research broadly defines burnout as emotional exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. But stress from what, exactly? Because I've seen people work brutal hours in physically demanding jobs and not burn out. And I've seen people in comfortable, well-paid office roles completely fall apart. The hours alone don't explain it. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived Nazi concentration camps and went on to write one of the most important books of the 20th century, argued that human beings can endure almost any suffering if they have a reason for it. His observation wasn't about working conditions. It was about meaning. Remove the meaning, and even comfort becomes unbearable.

I've been hearing the same thing over and over lately — in casual conversations, in my own head. "I can't believe it's already [month]. Where is the year going? Life feels like it's on fast forward." If you've felt this way since around 2020, you're not imagining it. And you're definitely not alone. The COVID Clock Something shifted after the pandemic, and it wasn't just the world around us — it was our relationship with time itself. Lockdown was its own strange paradox: the days dragged endlessly while the months evaporated. And now, years later, many of us look back and struggle to account for where that time actually went. There's a real reason for that, and understanding it has helped me — and I think it might help you too. Why Time Feels Like It's Slipping Our brains measure time in memories, not minutes. The way we perceive time looking back depends on how many distinct, novel moments we can recall. Lockdown stripped our lives of variety — no travel, no gatherings, no spontaneous adventures. Without those landmarks, whole stretches of time blur into one undifferentiated smear. The year didn't disappear. It just left very few footprints. A lot changed, faster than we were ready for. Even though it felt slow in the moment, the world restructured at a pace we rarely see. Remote work. Economic upheaval. The AI revolution. Political turbulence. A housing crisis. When the backdrop of ordinary life keeps shifting, your internal sense of where you are keeps getting reset — and that creates a deep feeling of velocity, like you're moving without choosing to. We learned to defer living. This one sits with me. COVID taught many of us to put life on hold. "We'll do that when things go back to normal." For some people, that waiting mode stretched on for years. And time spent waiting — not fully inhabiting your life — has a way of vanishing quietly. The older we get, the faster it goes. There's a timeless psychological phenomenon at play here too. Each year we live is a smaller fraction of our total life experience. A year at age ten feels like forever. At forty, it barely registers. Post-2020, we're all simply older — and this effect, which was already at work, has become harder to ignore.

READ PART 1 HERE You finish work. Close the laptop. Tell yourself it's time to rest. But your brain did not get the memo. You lie in bed replaying conversations, running tomorrow's to-do list, heart ticking faster than it should be at 11pm. You are exhausted, but wired. And no matter how long you stay there staring at the ceiling, sleep will not come. This is what a nervous system stuck in fight or flight actually feels like. Your sympathetic nervous system is designed to protect you. When it senses a threat, it floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol, raises your heart rate, tightens your muscles and sharpens your focus. That response is supposed to be short. Sprint from danger, threat passes, body calms down. The problem is that the modern brain does not separate a charging predator from a full inbox. It treats them the same. And when you spend 8 to 10 hours a day in a state of low-grade pressure, meetings, deadlines, notifications, your sympathetic nervous system stays switched on long after the workday ends. Harvard Health research confirms that chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system keeps stress hormones elevated, making it physically difficult for your body to shift into the calm state required for sleep. Research published in a 2019 study on insomnia found that poor sleepers show significantly higher sympathetic activity and lower parasympathetic activity throughout the night, which disrupts both sleep onset and sleep quality. The body cannot fall asleep in fight or flight. It is biologically designed not to. You cannot logic your way out of it, because the sympathetic response bypasses rational thought. But you can breathe your way out of it. When you slow your exhale and extend it longer than your inhale, you directly stimulate the vagus nerve, which is the main pathway between your brain and your parasympathetic system. Slow, controlled breathing with longer exhales is one of the most effective evidence-based ways to lower heart rate and reduce sympathetic activation.

You sit down at 9am. By 2pm you feel like you've been sedated. No motivation. Brain fog. A heaviness in your body that coffee doesn't fix. And if you've noticed your clothes fitting a little differently lately, that's not your imagination either. Here's what's actually happening inside your body. Your autonomic nervous system has two gears. The sympathetic system, which is your gas pedal, gets you alert, energised and moving. Then there's the parasympathetic system, the brake. It slows your heart rate, drops your metabolism and ramps up digestion. It is literally called "rest and digest" by scientists, and for good reason. When you sit still for hours, barely moving, breathing shallow breaths into your chest, your body reads that as a signal to conserve energy. Your metabolism drops. Your body starts prioritising fat storage. Your digestive system takes over. And your brain goes foggy because it is simply not getting the stimulation it needs to stay sharp. Research published in Neurology Research International confirms that sedentary individuals have lower resting energy expenditure compared to active people, and that autonomic nervous system activity plays a direct role in how many calories your body burns at rest. In plain terms, the less you move, the less your body bothers burning. Breathing makes this worse or better depending on how you do it. Most desk workers breathe shallow, slow and through the chest all day. This type of breathing actually reinforces the parasympathetic state. It signals your brain that everything is calm and still. Your nervous system takes that as permission to power down further. A 2019 study published in Frontiers in Immunology found that specific breathing techniques can upregulate genes involved in energy metabolism. Research from Stanford University also showed that breathing patterns directly influence neural activity, meaning the way you breathe is actively shaping your brain state, not just your lungs. The fix is not complicated.