“I blamed my workload”: but it was my routine doing the damage

The first time my left eye twitched, I was standing in the queue of a coffee shop, staring at the pastry display like it held the answers to my life. The hum of the espresso machine, the hiss of steaming milk, the low murmur of people having conversations they’d probably forget by next week—everything felt sharp, too loud, too bright. My phone buzzed in my pocket for the fifth time in three minutes. My chest tightened, my jaw clenched, and under the fluorescent light, my reflection in the glass cabinet looked like someone I didn’t quite know: tired, tense, brittle at the edges.

I blamed my workload. Of course I did. That was the story I knew how to tell. “It’s just this busy week.” “It’s this project.” “It’s the client.” “It’s temporary.” Those phrases became a kind of spell I repeated, a way to soothe the gnawing suspicion that something deeper was wrong. I held onto that story for a long time, until the day my own routine quietly called my bluff.

The Story I Told Myself: “It’s Just a Busy Season”

On paper, my life looked ordinary. I worked a full-time job, answered a lot of emails, joined more meetings than made sense, and tried to be the kind of responsible adult who paid bills on time and remembered to text people “Happy Birthday!” with just the right amount of exclamation points.

My days followed a script so familiar I could have narrated it in my sleep: wake up already behind, scroll through my phone before my first step out of bed, skip breakfast, grab coffee like a lifeline, and sit down at my desk with my shoulders already near my ears. I lived in fast-forward, but my body felt like it was wading through wet concrete.

Whenever my head pounded or my back felt like a slab of wood, I pointed to my workload. When I snapped at people I cared about, I blamed my inbox. When I lay awake at 2 a.m., eyes wide, replaying the day’s conversations, the culprit was always the same invisible monster: “work.” It was an easy villain, big and vague enough to hold all my discomfort, all my unease.

But there was a different truth unfolding quietly underneath, like roots spreading in the dark while I stared at the branches. It wasn’t just the tasks on my to-do list. It was the shape of my days. It was the way I moved through time. It was the tiny rituals I never questioned. My workload wasn’t the only thing stealing my energy. My routine was picking my pockets, one habit at a time.

When the Cracks Showed Up in My Body

The realization didn’t arrive like a revelation. It arrived like a series of small, inconvenient malfunctions. My body started sending up flares before my mind was willing to read them.

Mornings felt like jet lag, even though I hadn’t gone anywhere. My alarm would jolt me awake, and instead of feeling refreshed, I felt like someone had dragged me out of a lake. My eyes burned. My head rang with the echo of yesterday’s notifications. I told myself, “I just need a vacation.” But somehow, after each rare holiday, the exhaustion came back faster.

Afternoons became a fog. I’d stare at my screen, cursor blinking like a tiny, impatient heartbeat, and feel my focus dissolve. My mind hopped from task to task like a nervous bird, never landing long enough to settle. Coffee stopped working; it just made my hands shake and my thoughts race. I’d eat whatever was closest—usually something in a crinkly wrapper—and promise myself I’d “do better next week.”

The nights were the worst. That was when my body, having been ignored all day, decided to have its say. I’d collapse into bed, but my brain would spin like a ceiling fan on high: conversations, mistakes, what-ifs, to-dos. The glow of my phone became a lighthouse I couldn’t look away from. And then, just when I’d finally drift off, my alarm would drag me back out of the water and onto the same shore.

I blamed my deadlines, my boss, the industry, the economy—everything except the rhythms I was choosing every single day. But slowly, sensation by sensation, crack by crack, I began to suspect my routine was less of a neutral backdrop and more of an accomplice.

The Invisible Architecture of My Days

If you’d asked me back then what my “routine” was, I probably would have shrugged. I imagined routines as something tidy and intentional: morning yoga, writing journals, green smoothies, color-coded calendars. I didn’t think of mine as a routine because it felt messy and unplanned. But of course, it was a routine. Chaos is still a pattern if you repeat it every day.

One Sunday, exhausted and strangely curious about how my days actually looked, I sat down and wrote out, hour by hour, what I usually did. No editing, no idealizing—just the unfiltered truth of my time. It felt like turning on a harsh overhead light in a room I’d kept dim on purpose.

Seeing it laid out like that was like overhearing an honest conversation about myself when I’d only ever heard the polite version. There it was, in black and white: my days weren’t just busy. They were brittle. They had no real rest in them, only collapse. No real nourishment, just refueling. No rhythm, just reaction.

My routine was quietly teaching my nervous system that we were never safe, never done, never allowed to truly power down. Of course I was exhausted. Of course my body was protesting. I had built an invisible architecture of constant alertness and then blamed the furniture.

Small Experiments: Rewriting the Script of a Day

I didn’t overhaul everything overnight. There was no dramatic “I quit my job and moved to a cabin in the woods” moment. Instead, I approached my life like a curious naturalist watching a landscape recover after a long drought: gently, slowly, with a notebook in hand.

And I started small. Almost embarrassingly small.

The first experiment was with mornings. I decided—not forever, just for one week—not to touch my phone for the first 30 minutes after waking. The first day, it felt like walking past a room where a party was happening and forcing myself not to peek in. My fingers twitched. My brain invented reasons: What if there was an emergency? What if I’d missed something crucial? But beneath the noise was a quieter question: What if I could start my day on my own terms?

So I replaced the scroll with something almost comically gentle: water, a stretch, a few breaths by the window, watching the light change on the buildings across the street. It felt trivial, almost silly, like putting a flower in a crack of concrete. But something subtle shifted—I arrived at my desk feeling slightly less hunted.

Next, I experimented with how I moved through my workday. Instead of treating it like one long, breathless sprint, I broke it into deliberate blocks: 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off. During those 10 minutes, I had only one rule: I had to step away from my screen. Sometimes I looked out the window. Sometimes I walked to refill my water. Sometimes I just did nothing at all, which, at first, felt illegal.

I paid attention to tiny sensory details I’d long stopped noticing: the stretch in my shoulders when I rolled them back, the creak of the floorboards, the faint smell of the neighbor’s cooking drifting through the window around noon. My world, which had shrunk to the size of my laptop, began to expand by millimeters.

The Moment I Stopped Worshiping “Busy”

One evening, months into these small adjustments, I closed my laptop at 6:15 p.m.—not midnight, not 10 p.m., but early enough that the sky still held color. The old script in my head crackled: You’re not done. Check one more email. Get ahead for tomorrow. Don’t fall behind.

But I was tired in a clean way, not the bone-deep, defeated exhaustion that had once been my default. I’d given my focus in defined pockets. I’d eaten away from my desk. I’d moved my body at least a little. It wasn’t a perfect day, but it was a different day. And for the first time in a long while, I felt something like… spaciousness.

I walked outside instead of collapsing onto the couch. Evening air slipped under my collar, cool and almost sweet, like the first sip of water after hours of thirst. The streetlights were just flickering on. A dog trotted past with a stick grander than its body. Somewhere, a window was open, spilling out the faint sound of a piano.

Standing there on the corner, listening to traffic roll by like a river, I realized how thoroughly I’d been worshiping “busy.” I’d treated exhaustion like a badge of honor, a sign that I was valuable, needed, important. My brutal routine had been my altar. The more tired I was, the more legitimate I felt.

But busy had never loved me back. It had only blurred the edges of my days until life became something I endured, not something I inhabited. The more I repeated the old routines, the more I allowed them to shape my sense of what was normal. It wasn’t my workload alone. It was the story I’d agreed to tell with every repetition of that rushed, frantic script.

Living at a Human Pace Again

I wish I could say that after that evening stroll, everything changed forever and I never slipped back into my old patterns. But routines are stubborn; they’ve worn grooves into our lives. The difference now is that I can feel it when I slide back into the old, jagged rhythm. My body raises its hand like a quiet, honest friend: the shallow breath, the twitching eye, the scattered focus. I hear it faster.

These days, when people talk about burnout, I listen for the story underneath their story. I hear the long nights, yes, and the heavy workloads. But I also hear the skipped lunches, the blue glow of late-night screens, the “just one more email,” the belief that rest must be earned after every last thing is done. I hear the routines running silently in the background, reprogramming their days without their consent.

I don’t have a perfect routine now; I have a living one. It shifts with the seasons, the projects, even my hormones. But it’s built on a different question than before. Not “How much can I get done?” but “What pace lets me be a human and not a machine?”

Sometimes that looks like fifteen unrushed minutes with my coffee and a real breakfast instead of a muffin inhaled over my keyboard. Sometimes it means blocking out an hour for work that actually matters and letting the non-urgent noise wait. Sometimes it means going to bed when my body first whispers that it’s tired, not when it’s already begging for mercy.

I still have busy days, overloaded weeks, seasons where work swells like a river after heavy rain. But I don’t automatically blame the river anymore. I look at the banks I’ve built. I ask what my daily choices are quietly teaching my body and mind. I ask what I’m rehearsing, day after day: depletion or dignity.

Because in the end, it wasn’t my workload that was slowly hollowing me out. It was the unexamined routine I wrapped around it—thin sleep, endless scrolling, skipped pauses, constant digital noise. It was the way I kept moving as if I had no body, no limits, no need for softness or slowness.

The damage didn’t happen in one dramatic moment; it happened in a thousand small, invisible repetitions. And the healing, it turns out, works exactly the same way.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if it’s my routine and not just my workload causing burnout?

Notice when you feel drained. If you’re exhausted even on lighter days, struggle to unwind at night, or feel wired and tired at the same time, your routine is likely part of the problem. Workload may spike occasionally, but routine is what shapes your baseline—how you sleep, eat, move, and rest between the spikes.

Where’s the easiest place to start changing my routine?

Start with the “bookends” of your day: mornings and evenings. A simple first step is 15–30 minutes without your phone after waking and before sleeping. Use that time for something gently grounding—stretching, drinking water, stepping outside, reading a few pages of a book. Tiny, consistent shifts here can change how your whole day feels.

What if my job really is demanding and I can’t reduce my workload?

You might not be able to change your workload immediately, but you can change how you move around it. Protect small, non-negotiable pockets of restoration: a real lunch away from your screen, brief breaks every hour, a cutoff time in the evening when you stop checking work messages. These boundaries create breathing room even when the work itself is heavy.

How long does it take to feel a difference once I change my routine?

Some people notice subtle shifts—better focus, less afternoon fog—within a week of small changes. Deeper changes, like improved sleep or a calmer nervous system, often take a few weeks of consistency. Think of it like turning a ship: the course changes gradually, but each small adjustment matters.

What if I fall back into my old habits?

You will, at least sometimes. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed; it means you’re human. When you notice you’ve slipped back into the old routine, treat it as information rather than evidence against yourself. Gently course-correct. Ask: “What’s one small thing I can do differently today?” You’re not aiming for perfection, just a kinder pattern, repeated often enough to become your new normal.