The Downward Spiral: How Burnout Accumulates

I once worked in a prison.

Not as an inmate—as an instructor. I taught a design and development course to offenders, believing I could give even one of them a skill that might let them escape the caste system of being an ex-convict. A skill that was portable, valuable, independent. Something that didn't require checking that box on job applications.

I was there for six months. In that time, I had many conversations with the prison guards—the corrections officers who spent their careers inside those walls. And what they described, openly and without drama, was the clearest illustration of burnout I've ever witnessed.

The Clearest Picture of Burnout I've Ever Seen

They talked about the toll of the job. How the time between shifts was never enough to recover from the last shift. The things they saw. The things they dealt with. The environment itself. There was never enough time to fully recover.

And they described what happened over time. It was almost predictable. A pattern that everyone knew.

And the consequences rippled outward. Divorces were common. Health issues. Problems that extended far beyond the prison walls into their actual lives.

The old-timers talked about it openly. They wore it as a kind of badge of honor, but also as a warning. This is where this path leads, they seemed to say. There be monsters here.

What I Saw in Myself

I was only there for six months, but I could feel it happening to me.

The job aligned with my values. I believed in what I was trying to do. But the reality of working in a prison is exactly what it sounds like—you're working in a prison. A dangerous, scary place full of dangerous, scary people.

My class had about 50 inmates. The average education level was eighth grade. A couple of them had been incarcerated so long they'd never even seen the internet. In a lot of ways, I was naive. I was foolish. I had idealistic goals that ran headlong into brutal realities.

But I did my best. And as the weeks passed, I started noticing things.

At the end of my shift, I had to pass through three security gates to get out to the parking lot. At each gate, I'd retrieve something—my phone, my keys—things you couldn't bring inside. And I noticed that as I moved through each gate, I was walking faster. Not consciously. It was involuntary. By the time I reached my car, I was practically fleeing. Escaping.

The Mechanism

This is how burnout works. Not as a single event, but as an accumulation.

Each day takes something out of you. You recover what you can. You return to something like baseline. And then the next day happens. And the next.

When recovery keeps pace with depletion, you're okay. Tired, maybe. But sustainable.

But when depletion outpaces recovery—when each day takes a little more than you can replenish—you start sliding down. Each hit knocks you down. You find your legs. You attempt to return to baseline. But before you get there, the next hit comes.

And the insidious part is that you get good at coping with it. You adapt. You find ways to manage. You tell yourself this is temporary, this is just a hard stretch, this will pass.

Your coping becomes a skill. And that skill lets you survive on a trend line that's heading in the wrong direction.

Riding the Downward Trend

Here's what I've observed about burnout: we rarely notice we're on a downward trend until we're far down it.

It's not like the movies, where there's a dramatic breaking point. It's more like a slow fade. The color drains out of things gradually. Your energy decreases incrementally. Your capacity shrinks in ways you don't register because they're small enough to accommodate.

You get good at coping. You learn workarounds. You develop survival strategies.

And all of these adaptations—which feel like solutions—are actually allowing you to ride the trend further down than you should.

It's Not Just Prison Guards

The prison guards are a dramatic example. The physical danger, the psychological toll, the institutional despair—it's extreme. Obviously burnout in that environment looks severe.

But the mechanism is the same everywhere.

The accountant who, if they have to create another PowerPoint deck, feels like stabbing themselves in the eye with their pencil? Same math. Different numbers.

The nurse who got into healthcare to help people but spends all their time fighting insurance companies? Same equation. Different variables.

The teacher who loves students but drowns in administrative requirements that have nothing to do with teaching? Same spiral. Different context.

The startup founder who believed in their mission but built something that slowly consumed them? Same trend line. Different story.

The intensity varies. The speed varies. But the mechanism is universal: energy out exceeds energy in, and over time, the deficit accumulates.

The Signals Get Louder

In Part 1, I mentioned how burnout tends to progress from cognitive to emotional to physical. It's worth expanding on that here, because the progression is how we miss it.

The early signals are easy to ignore.

You're a little irritable. You're not as sharp as usual. Things that used to energize you feel flat. You catch yourself going through the motions. These are cognitive signals—your mind trying to tell you something is off.

But they're subtle. They're easy to explain away. You're just tired. It's been a long week. You need a vacation.

So you push through. And the signals escalate.

Now you're emotionally depleted. Not just tired—drained. You feel fragile in a way you don't like to admit. Small things set you off. You're short-tempered with people who don't deserve it. Your baseline mood has shifted, and you're spending more time below it than above it.

Still, you cope. You manage. You've developed skills for this.

And then your body gets involved.

What Keeps Us There

Why do we ride the trend down so far?

Sometimes it's financial necessity—we need the income, and there's no obvious alternative.

Sometimes it's identity—we've built our sense of self around this work, and walking away feels like losing ourselves.

Sometimes it's investment—we've put so much into this that quitting feels like wasting everything we've already sacrificed.

Sometimes it's fear—we don't know what else we'd do, and the unknown feels more dangerous than the known decline.

And sometimes it's simply not seeing it. The frog in the slowly boiling water. Each degree is tolerable. It's only the cumulative temperature that kills you.

Where Is the Trend Going?

This is the question I think we have to ask ourselves honestly:

Where is the trend actually going?

Not where do you hope it's going. Not where do you tell yourself it's going. Where is it actually pointing?

Are you recovering better than you were six months ago? Or worse?

Is your capacity increasing? Or shrinking?

Are you moving toward something sustainable? Or away from it?

It's easy to lie to ourselves here. To point to a good week and pretend that's the trend. To blame external factors for what's actually an internal depletion.

The Way Out Begins with Seeing

I'm not going to tell you to quit your job in this post. That's too simplistic, and it might not even be the right answer.

But I will say this: the first step out of the spiral is seeing that you're in one.

Not coping with it. Not managing it. Not developing better survival skills to ride it further down.

Just seeing it. Clearly. Honestly.

Because as long as you're telling yourself a story about how this is temporary, how it'll get better on its own, how you just need to push through—you're not seeing the trend. You're hoping it away.

In the next part, we'll look at what we're holding onto—the death grip that keeps us in situations past their expiration date. Because often, the thing that's burning us out is something we don't want to let go of. Something tied to our identity, our purpose, our sense of who we are.

And that makes it harder. But that's where the real work is.