Do I Need to Quit My Job to Recover From Burnout?
If you’re a high-achieving woman who’s feeling the weight of burnout and seriously considering giving it all up to move to an island, you’re not alone.
I see you. I was you. I help women like you every day inside my 6-month private coaching program, THRIVE.
One of the most common concerns women bring to me sounds like this:
“I don’t think this will work for me because the real problem is my job. I think I need to quit or step into an easier role in order to recover.”
If that’s how you feel right now, I want you to know two things. First, this is a completely normal thought- I used to believe it myself! And second, there’s another, better way forward.
If you’ve worked very hard for your career- if it required years of training, advanced education, and climbing your way to the top- then you don’t want to throw everything away. Dropping it probably doesn’t feel “freeing” or exciting.
It may even feel like failure.
Because you’re not the kind of woman to just give up. And besides, you always had big dreams for yourself- you want to change the world!
That was definitely how I felt when I was a sociology professor and debating leaving the academy. I eventually did choose to pivot, and today I feel good about that decision. (I love coaching women!)
But at the time, I felt ashamed. And a little like I failed.
And sometimes I wonder: if I’d known back then how to deal with all my work stress in a healthy way, instead of letting it consume me, could I have found a way to stay in academia? Or could I have at least made the choice to leave from a more grounded and confident place?
I’ll never know, of course. But for you, things can be different.
So before you quit your job to open up a sourdough bakery or become a scuba instructor, keep reading…
This blog post will help you explore whether quitting your job right now is really the solution to your burnout- or whether there’s another, more empowering, way forward.
It’s so tempting to blame your job - but let’s get a few things straight…
I already told you that you’re definitely NOT alone if you’re worried you can’t get “unstuck” from burnout or revive your energy or fix your health or get back your mojo without quitting your job.
And there’s reasons for that.
First, It’s easy to buy into the myth that your job is the culprit. Burnout is usually framed as a work-related problem - in fact the World Health Organization specifically defines it as an “occupational phenomenon”.
Plus, when you’re examining what’s going on in your day-to-day life, work is likely your number one source of stress, so it’s natural to conclude that the ultimate solution is to eliminate that stress by quitting your job (or at least taking a leave of absence).
A second reason it’s so easy to blame your job is that stories of people burning out at work and moving onto a “passion” career are all over the media.
In fact, this trope of the burnt out exec leaving Wall Street to move to a beach in Costa Rica is so common (and, let’s be honest, alluring) that it’s EASY to believe that’s what you need to do!
Or that it’s what most normal, rational people do (if they can).
But here’s what’s actually true: Yes, sometimes a radical career pivot is the right answer. But in most cases, burnout runs much deeper than your job.
💡 It’s about your boundaries, your habits, your beliefs & mindset, and how you care for yourself in the middle of it all. And it’s about the central, sometimes all-consuming place work occupies in your life.
That’s why quitting isn’t usually the magic fix it seems.
Let’s explore this further…
Burnout Isn’t Just About Your Job
On the surface, it probably feels like your job is the reason you’re exhausted. The hours are long, the demands too high, you lack support, your boss is toxic… And all of that may be true.
But what I’ve seen over and over again- and even experienced myself- is that burnout has less to do with your job itself, and much more to do with the way you’re approaching your work.
Let’s look at this common scenario:
Imagine we’ve got two women in the same role, same work environment, exposed to the same pressures, and maybe even with similar lives in other respects.
But one is doing well, even thriving, while the other is on the verge of burnout.
What explains the difference? Why is one person drowning in stress while the other manages it with more ease?
The answer is found in the way each woman is approaching her work.
→ And by “approach” I mean the mindsets, habits, and behavioral patterns that each woman brings to her work.
Consider this: most high-achieving women are excellent at their jobs. We’re smart, great at fixing things.
❌ But we’re often not that great at dealing with stress in a healthy way.
❌ And we even create more of it for ourselves in the way we approach our work.
Perfectionism, people pleasing, and overachieving- just to name a few of those mindsets and patterns that frame how we approach work- have usually helped us achieve our current level of success.
But sooner or later, we reach a tipping point where all that perfectionism, people-pleasing, and overachieving starts to burn us out by leading us to do things like:
Overwork - and let work spill into your nights and weekends
Take responsibility for problems at work that aren’t yours to solve
Worry excessively about work - with a constant inner dialogue whispering “You’re not good enough. Do more!”
Chase approval and validation - and allow your successes, productivity, and failures dictate your mood and self-worth
Sacrifice our health, relationships, and happiness in the name of career success
If you quit your job without addressing these mindsets and patterns, you haven’t ended burnout. You’ve just put it on hold.
Worse, you’ll end up carrying the same beliefs, mindsets, behaviors, and habits that contributed to your burnout with you into your next role- whether it’s at another company, in a consulting business, or even in a passion-driven venture of your own.
So What Actually Shifts Burnout?
If quitting your job doesn’t magically solve burnout, what does?
The answer is shifting the way you a) approach your work and b) deal with stress.
This can look like:
Setting clearer boundaries at work- where you’re intentionally deciding how to spend your time and energy, and protecting those choices even if it means upsetting someone. One of the most obvious- but most impactful- boundaries that you can set are your work hours- not just for when you’ll be at your desk, but also when you’re available for meetings and answering emails.
Setting boundaries at home and in your personal relationships. That means finding ways to protect your time and energy so that your home feels like a sanctuary rather than an additional source of stress, and your personal life fuels you instead of further draining your energy. Practically, this could mean saying ‘no’ more often and finding ways to delegate and ask for help with household chores.
Learning to regulate your nervous system. When you’ve been living in fight-or-flight mode for months or years, even small challenges at work can feel like crises. Regulating your nervous system through tools like breathwork, grounding exercises, or somatic practices helps you create more calm in your body. And when your body feels calmer, your mind follows. You make better decisions, you respond rather than react, and you feel more in-control (even when your day is filled with unexpected chaos).
Shifting the role work plays in your life. Too often, high-achieving women place work at the very center of their lives, so that their entire identity and everything they do comes to revolve around work (read more about how to deal this HERE). This can become an enormous source of stress. So we need to work on putting work in proper perspective and cultivating a rich life outside of work.
These shifts don’t happen overnight. But you can develop and strengthen them with time. And soon you’ll realize something powerful: you don’t need to burn your career to the ground to feel better. You can create a healthier, more sustainable way to thrive in the role you already have.
That said…
If you do pivot, Why not Do It From a Place of Clarity and Strength?
Let’s be clear: sometimes a pivot really is in order. Maybe to another role at your organization, to another job in your industry, or to an entirely new career path.
But unless you’re being harassed or abused at work, you’ll want to make such a big decision from a place of confidence and strength, with a calm and clear mind, not from a place of exhaustion, overwhelm, and anxiety
When you’re burned out, everything at work and in your personal life feels heavier. Small problems feel insurmountable. You increasingly doubt yourself. And in this state of depletion, it’s easy to convince yourself that quitting is the only way out, when in reality, it’s just the quickest way to escape the discomfort (and temporarily, at that).
If you make a major decision like walking away from your career while you’re in this state, you may end up regretting it later—or even recreating the same problems in a new environment.
That’s why I encourage my clients to first focus on regaining their energy, peace of mind, and sense of balance.
—> When you’re feeling more energized, calm, and grounded, you can evaluate your career options with a clear head.
You can ask: Is this really the wrong job for me, or is it just the wrong way I’ve been approaching it? You can consider your choices not from fear, but from confidence.
Take my client, Alice, as an example:
She was constantly stressed and overworked. She didn’t “hate” her job. In fact, she felt quite passionate about it! But she’d been allowing it to encroach on her home life at nights and on weekends. With two small children, she needed to make some changes.
So she began setting boundaries. She had some honest conversations with her boss that stretched her out of her comfort zone. She started truly prioritizing her wellbeing- especially with nutrition, exercise, and stress management.
And through all this work, Alice discovered that the role she was in was more like the job she felt she “should” be doing- but not the one that she wanted or would truly excel in.
From that more empowered place, she made the brave decision to step into a different role within her current organization- one that fit her much better.
This is the difference between quitting out of exhaustion and desperation and choosing your path from strength. One is a reaction. The other is a decision to take control of your future. I know which one I want for you!
THRIVE Helps You Break Free From Burnout (Without Quitting)
Inside THRIVE, my 6-month private coaching program, you learn how to leave burnout behind without giving up everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
The truth is, you have more tools available to you than you realize. And when you learn what they are and how to use them, you’ll get back your energy and your peace of mind, and set yourself up for success whether you ultimately choose to stay in your current role or to move onto a new path.
Here’s how we do that together:
1. Build Awareness of Your Beliefs, Habits, and Patterns
The first step to changing anything is awareness. And in the realm of work, the most important thing you must bring to light is the thing you have the most power to change:
You. Your mindsets, your habits, and your behavioral patterns.
Most women don’t even realize that they’re carrying mindsets or patterns that are draining their energy, burning them out, and keeping them stuck - especially since these are the same mindsets and habits that fueled your early successes.
““Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate””
So in THRIVE, I’ll guide you to uncover exactly which mindsets, habits, and behaviors are the culprits in your case.
Here’s two ways we’ll do this:
First, I’ve designed structured exercises to walk you through this deep work.
Through my “High-Achiever Shadow Sides” exercise, you’ll get clarity on the mindsets and behaviors that may have helped you quite a bit in your career- and that you may even feel proud of- but that are now dragging you down.
⭐️ For example, perfectionism is a common shadow side of high-achieving women. Women with this shadow side have a deep fear of failure and need for approval, especially when it comes to their work performance and accomplishments. It leads them to be overly critical of their own work, worry excessively about small mistakes, stretch out projects and tasks much longer than needed, and avoid sharing their best work with the world.
This process is about becoming honest and self-aware, not about self-blame. And often, just having this knowledge about yourself can feel very empowering! Suddenly, it’s not that you’re weak or failing. It’s just that you’ve been holding onto mindsets and habits that no longer serve you, and you can now choose different.
A second way we’ll uncover what mindsets or behaviors might be contributing to your burnout is through somatic (body-based) exercises.
My belief is that usually the body knows better than our mind does- we’ve just lost our connection with it, especially if we’ve been in a state of fight-or-flight for a long time. We create stories in our mind that help us make sense of our reality, and we act based on those stories, even if they aren’t accurate.
But the truth of what’s holding you back, what stories or beliefs about yourself are harming you, and even what actions you should take to move forward, is often better accessed through listening to your body.
One tool I love to share with clients (and that’s helped me a great deal) is somatic breathwork- a controlled breathing practice that helps you to reconnect with your body’s intelligence and clear your mind. Many of my clients have had breakthroughs during these breathwork sessions that radically shift how they see themselves and their burnout.
2. Create Healthy Boundaries with work
Awareness is powerful, but without action, nothing changes.
That’s why the second thing we do in THRIVE to change how you approach your work is to look at your current mindsets, behaviors, and habits and ask:
What needs to shift? What can you do to better protect your time and energy, treating it like the ✨expensive luxury good✨ it truly is? (in the words of Taylor Swift)
The place we start is with boundaries.
Most of my clients lack strong boundaries at work, especially when it comes to things like their work hours, when they check email, when they make themselves available for meetings, what tasks and projects they agree to take on, and how much they work (or think about working) on nights and weekends,
That said, boundaries can’t be cookie-cutter. They need to be specific to the context of your life, and they need to push you out of your comfort zone just a bit (but not too much).
In your private coaching sessions in THRIVE, we’ll strategize together to identify what boundaries you need to create that will have the biggest impact on your life, your wellbeing, and your productivity.
Sometimes opportunities for boundaries can be hard to see - maybe because you’re so used to saying ‘yes’ to everything, believing you need to do everything, or ignoring your own needs- so you resist setting them. That’s why having a second, objective but supportive perspective in this process can be so helpful. My role as your coach is to help you spot where your energy is leaking, call out your blind spots, and help you figure this all out much faster and easier than you can on your own.
Setting boundaries can also feel uncomfortable or scary at times. Maybe you’re worried about how people will react. Or if you’ll be judged. Or, maybe your mind is turning straight to the worst case scenario (however unlikely it is to happen).
For example, some women worry that if they stop answering emails after work hours, they’ll miss something important. Or if they say ‘no’ to being on the committee, they won’t be liked.
It’s normal to have these feelings of fear and discomfort, but we DON’T want that to prevent you from taking action!
That’s why in THRIVE we pair boundary setting with nervous system work. You’ll learn simple techniques to regulate your nervous system and feel safe when discomfort comes up, so that you can uphold those boundaries- and stick to them long enough to see their effect.
And since THRIVE is a private 1:1 program, you'll never have to navigate these challenges alone. Whether you’re drafting an email, practicing a conversation, or celebrating upholding a tough boundary, I’ll be there when you need me- whether through our coaching sessions on Zoom or via text between sessions, supporting you every step of the way.
3. Regulate your nervous system to better manage stressors
I just touched on this a bit, but a big part of learning to approach work differently means learning how to deal with stress more effectively.
Remember that semi-fictional scenario I shared above? Two women, living identical work lives, but one’s burning out and the other is thriving?
Guess what? The one who’s thriving was not born being great at managing stress. She learned it.
And you can learn it, too.
Nearly everything we do in THRIVE is designed to help you regulate your nervous system so that instead of living in a constant state of fight-or-flight, you’re able to:
Identify when you’re starting to feel stressed (i.e. starting to go into fight-or-flight response)
Pause
Use simple tools to regulate your nervous system and bring your body and mind back to a state of calm
Respond to the situation with clear head
You’ll also learn daily practices that you can use to build up your natural resilience to stress- so that situations that normally send you careening off a cliff eventually don’t phase you.
Some of these practices you’ll learn directly from me in our 1:1 coaching and somatic sessions. Others, I’ll share with you to practice on your own, through video or written tutorials.
And you’ll also regulate your nervous system through simple practices that tell your body and brain “I’m safe.” That includes good nutrition, daily movement, and quality sleep- or what I call foundational self-care.
4. Redefine Success On Your Own Terms
Finally, none of this will truly extract you from burnout and bring you a sense of purpose and fulfillment if you’ve been chasing a vision of success that doesn’t belong to you.
How we define success tends to change over time, as our life changes. But many of us don’t realize or acknowledge it, often out of a deep fear that we’ll be judged or fail. So we stay on our old path, even while it eats away at us and burns us out.
Similarly, many women pursue a definition of success that was handed to us by someone else- parents, teachers, or society in general. We do this usually out of a core desire to feel accepted and worthy, which makes us go through the motions and check the boxes even though we have this creeping feeling inside that something’s “missing”.
Eventually that burns us out - because there are few things more stressful than putting on a mask every day and trying to live out someone else’s dreams, all in the name of proving something- to yourself or others.
In short, if you’re climbing the wrong ladder of success, then no matter how many boundaries you put in place, or how much nervous system work you do, you’ll never feel fulfilled.
That’s why in THRIVE we spend time reconnecting with your true definition of success. We’ll explore what success means to you in the realm of:
Career impact
Relationships
Family
Hobbies
Health
In THRIVE you’ll do this work in 4 ways:
You’ll explore your ideas about success, purpose, and fulfillment through deep coaching conversations.
You’ll continue this work on your own between coaching sessions, with reflective tools like journaling prompts that bring your hidden desires to the surface. Often, my clients are surprised by what comes up—things they didn’t even realize they wanted until they wrote it down.
You’ll go a layer deeper still with somatic practices. You’ll learn ways to better listen to your body’s innate intelligence, and this will tell you so much more about what you like and dislike, what’s draining versus fueling you, and what feels “successful” and meaningful and purposeful to you than thinking or talking about it ever could.
You’ll take action in your daily life, experimenting to find what feels successful and meaningful to you.
When you clarify your vision of success, and then take action to create it, you don’t just escape the symptoms of burnout. You achieve a sense of purpose.
Career-wise, this might look like staying in your current role but with a healthier approach to work and better work-life balance. Or, it might mean shifting to a different position or even a bigger career pivot.
But whatever decision you ultimately make, you’ll be making it from a place of clarity and confidence, knowing that you are walking on a path of your own design.
What’s Possible When You Stop Believing that Quitting is your only option
Quick story.
When my client Deanna came to me, work stress and overwhelm had gotten so severe that it triggered shingles. Her doctor recommended anti-anxiety meds, but Deanna didn’t want to rely on medication. She also didn’t want to leave her job..
She wanted another way.
Through her six months in THRIVE, Deanna learned to calm her nervous system, respond to work pressures more calmly, and quiet the inner critic in her mind that had been causing her so much turmoil over the years.
She regained the energy to hang with friends and nurture her closest relationships. She found joy again in her life.
In her words: “I was able to find myself again.”
She did all of this without quitting or taking a step back at work. In fact, nothing about her “stressful” work environment changed. If anything, things at work got MORE stressful as her organization went through some major restructuring and left Deanna unsure about the future of her position.
But DEANNA changed from within. And that made all the difference.
She learned to thrive despite the pressures and uncertainty.
You can do the same!
Your Next Step
If you’ve been telling yourself, “Maybe I just need to quit my job,” I want to invite you to pause.
You have so much more power than you think.
In THRIVE, you’ll learn to harness that power. So if the approach I described here feels right to you, then click below to learn even more about THRIVE:
And when you’re ready, book in a free Burnout Breakthrough Assessment with me. We’ll talk about what’s going on for you and where you want to go, and we’ll create a gameplan to move you forward.
👉 Book your free Burnout Breakthrough Assessment here.
You don’t have to burn it all down to feel better. You can THRIVE - right where you are.
