When Burnout Comes Back

Almost everyone recovering from burnout mentions their sleep, usually quietly.This episode brings it into the main conversation. Chris Wilson sits down with Kathryn Pinkham, founder of The Insomnia Clinic and one of the UK's leading sleep specialists, on why you can't sleep and what actually fixes it: what insomnia really is, why burnout leaves you exhausted but wide awake, why sleep hygiene falls short, and how CBT-I helps people sleep again without relying on medication. Kathryn also talks through what coming off sleep medication involves.- What insomnia actually is, by clinical definition, and how the circadian rhythm shapes it- Why burnout leaves you exhausted but wide awake, and what is happening physiologically- Why standard sleep hygiene falls short, and what CBT-I does differentlySeason 2, Episode 10This episode is educational and not medical advice. Please speak to your own doctor before changing any medication.Connect with Kathryn Pinkham: https://www.theinsomniaclinic.co.ukKathryn's Sleep Well, Live Better course: code CHRIS30 for £30 off (a community discount, Where I'm At receives no commission).Watch the companion vlog: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFAtdhFZHkKAShare. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

People pleasing rarely looks like a problem. It looks like being dependable, reliable, the one who always says yes.Content note: this episode contains a personal account of burnout including a period of intense despair. If you're struggling, please reach out to someone you trust. If you feel unsafe or unable to cope right now, please contact local emergency services or a crisis support line. Crisis lines by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_linesChris Wilson sits down with Vienna based psychosocial counsellor, trainer and author Iris Muche to look at how people pleasing quietly drives burnout. The link between being productive and being likeable, where the pattern is learned, and what the first honest no actually feels like. Drawing on her own burnout and years of psychosocial training, Iris treats people pleasing as a learned pattern rather than a character flaw, which makes it something you can work with.The productivity and lovability link, and how early it gets wired inWhere the pattern comes from, and why it is so well rewardedWhat the first honest no feels like, and what happens after itSeason 2, Episode 9Find Iris Muche: https://www.irismuche.com and on Instagram at @irismucheShare. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout does not only live in the mind. It shows up in the face: the jaw you clench, the brow you hold, the tension you stopped noticing years ago.Chris Wilson sits down with Vienna based face yoga teacher and presence work practitioner Nathalie Romina Marktler to talk about what faces hold and why we so rarely notice. Nathalie describes her work as presence rather than cosmetics, and guides Chris through a live jaw release you can follow along with. If burnout has left you tense and unable to switch off, this is a gentle place to start rather than a technique to master.What the face holds, and why the tension stops registeringFace yoga framed as presence work rather than appearanceA live jaw release you can follow along withSeason 2, Episode 8Find Nathalie Romina Marktler: https://mirrorencounters.com and on Instagram at @mirrorencountersShare. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

High performers are often the worst at resting, and it is not because they do not know how. It is because rest has to be earned first.Simone Arlits spent more than fifteen years in corporate leadership before her body told her what her calendar never had. She talks with Chris Wilson about why rest gets treated as a reward rather than a strategy, about the giver pattern that keeps people available past the point of usefulness, and about the practical changes that make slowing down possible without guilt attached. They also get into hustle culture, and what she found helped her own recovery.Why rest gets framed as something you earn, and who that servesThe giver pattern, and how it outlives the job that created itSmall practical changes that make slowing down survivableSeason 2, Episode 7Find Simone Arlits on LinkedIn, and on Instagram at for.rest.mentoringShare. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Heather Simco built a career, a business and a polished public life while privately struggling with addiction, and almost nobody around her could see it.Content note: this episode includes a personal account of addiction and references to suicidal thoughts. If you're struggling, please reach out to someone you trust. If you feel unsafe or unable to cope right now, please contact local emergency services or a crisis support line. Crisis lines by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_linesHeather talks with Chris Wilson about how ordinary coping, from overworking to alcohol, slowly took over, why the people closest to her did not notice, and the turning point that led to more than twelve years of sobriety. It is an honest look at high functioning addiction and at what we reach for when we stop looking directly at it.How high functioning addiction stays invisible, including to the person in itWhy the people around her could not see what was happeningThe turning point, and what twelve years of sobriety were built onSeason 2, Episode 6More from Heather Simco: https://linktr.ee/heathersimcoShare. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Overworking. Endless scrolling. A drink to take the edge off. The things we reach for when burnout sets in start as survival and do not always stay that way.Chris Wilson sits down again with resilience coach and addiction counsellor Alina Meyer-Riad to look at coping mechanisms honestly. Alina explains why these patterns tend to stay hidden at work and surface hardest at home, where the line sits between a coping tool and a dependency, and what the early part of breaking the cycle actually involves. Nothing dramatic, and nothing that requires hitting a bottom first.Why the coping stays invisible at work and comes out at homeHow a tool that helps tips over into something that holds you backThe small honest steps that start to interrupt the patternSeason 2, Episode 5Content note: this episode discusses addiction and dependency.Connect with Alina Meyer-Riad: https://www.amr-resilienz-staerken.de/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrresilienzstaerken/Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Chronic stress is not just in your head. It shows up in your DNA, your inflammation levels and how much energy your cells can actually make.Dr Andreia Luis is a biomedical scientist with a PhD from the Medical University of Vienna, and her research examined how the body responds to extreme physical stress, the same process that plays out slowly in burnout. She walks through what is measurably happening inside the body, and she also talks about burning out during her own PhD, and the signs she did not recognise until years afterwards, despite studying exactly this.What chronic stress does inside the body, from DNA to cellular energyMissing her own burnout while researching how cells respond to stressWhy recovery turned rest into prevention rather than repairSeason 2, Episode 4Dr Andreia is building Longevity Hub Austria, a community focused on science, innovation and lifestyle for long term health.Connect with Dr Andreia Luis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreiavluis/ and https://longevityhub.at/Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Rest is necessary. For most people in burnout recovery it is also not enough on its own.Organisational psychologist Dr Ben Searle explains what positive psychology adds to burnout recovery, and why reconnecting with your values and strengths is the part that actually brings you back. Ben spent twenty years researching burnout before going through it himself, which gives the conversation a particular honesty. We get into why the first sign is usually a fading of good experiences rather than exhaustion, and how to tell a fear decision from a values decision when you are deciding whether to go back.Why the earliest sign is positive experience draining away, not tirednessUsing values and strengths to rebuild confidence after burnoutTelling a fear decision from a values decision on the way back to workSeason 2, Episode 3Connect with Dr Ben Searle: https://mindonthejob.com/ben-j-searle/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-searle-3a0a1b1/Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Katrin Tschürtz had five jobs on one contract. She asked for help. Nothing changed. So she kept going, until she couldn't.Katrin shares the full arc of her burnout: the years of overwork in the film industry, the panic attacks that arrived without warning, the moment she told a therapist she no longer wanted to be here, and the five weeks in a therapy hotel in the mountains that she says saved her life. It is an honest account, and it carries one idea worth sitting with. Burnout gave Katrin her life back. Not in spite of the collapse. Because of it.Five jobs on one contract, and what asking for help actually achievedPanic attacks with no warning, and how long they went unexplainedWhat five weeks of proper treatment did, and what she took from itSeason 2, Episode 2This episode contains a personal account of burnout including a period of intense despair. If you're struggling, please reach out to someone you trust. If you feel unsafe or unable to cope right now, please contact local emergency services or a crisis support line. Crisis lines by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_linesConnect with Katrin Tschürtz: https://kindfulness.at and https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrin-tschuertz-personal-corporate-kindfulness/Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout can come back. Even when you have been through it before. Even when the work you are doing is work you built for yourself.In this Season 2 opener I give the honest account of what happened between seasons. A second burnout, with significant circumstances outside my control, and a part that was genuinely mine to own. The podcast had become an escape. The work addiction found a new vehicle and dressed it up as purpose. This one is about treating burnout as terrain that keeps demanding respect rather than a thing you survive once and file away.Why burnout can return even when you love the workThe part that was outside my control, and the part that was notNine months writing my own story, and the relief when it finally went outSeason 2, Episode 1Season 2 runs to May 2027. Twenty-nine episodes. Recognise. Reset. Reinvent.Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.comWhere I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.