Marie Asberg, professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, describes burnout as an “exhaustion funnel” we slip down as we give up things we don’t think are important. “Often, the very first things we give up are those that nourish us the most but seem ‘optional,’ ” write Mark Williams and Danny Penman in Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. “The result is that we are increasingly left with only work or other stressors that often deplete our resources, and nothing to replenish or nourish us—and exhaustion is the result.”
