I am not a robot - burnout and recovery

Rosie Oldham
Jul 9
12 min read

“Guess what, I'm not a robot”

Marina Diamandis, I Am Not A Robot

Lots of people more expert than me have studied and written about burnout. I’m writing entirely from my own personal experience, and I really wanted to share this because I think talking about it is one part of the battle to deconstruct the unhealthy systems we survive in.

I was also worried about writing this, partly because it’s very self-indulgent, I don’t really have any breakthroughs or solutions to share, and it feels quite vulnerable at a time when I’ve started out on my own and want people to have confidence in me! But I feel it’s useful to be real, and as wise Moominpappa says: "If you’re not afraid how can you really be brave?"

I hope it’s of interest. And I hope that if you recognise any of this in how you’re feeling, that’s useful for you in being able to name it, know you aren’t alone and that it can get better.

Thanks for reading 😊

Meanings

We hear the term burnout so often recently that sometimes I feel it’s almost lost its meaning, so am including this as a reminder. The original Oxford Dictionary definition of burnout, before we started using the term to relate to people, is ‘the reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use or combustion.’

Mental Health UK calls burnout ‘a state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion’ – not a mental health condition in it itself, but a state that can cause mental ill health.

Obviously one meaning comes from the other, but I kind of feel ‘the reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing’ is more accurate.

What burnout looked like for me

I experienced burnout in early 2025 but I think it was probably quite a long time coming. I’d just started a new role back in the climate and environmental space – I’d really wanted this job and was so looking forward to starting it. But almost as soon as I started, I noticed things were feeling weird and wrong.

For me, burnout looked like some of these things: brain fog so bad I couldn’t read or understand documents, or information being conveyed in meetings. As someone who has always taken in information, especially written information, easily, this was incredibly disconcerting and confusing. It looked like opening my laptop in the morning and crying but without being able to say exactly why, having zero motivation to work or to learn anything new as it felt too much to cope with, and I think worst of all, some kind of non-stop inner voice saying I was a complete failure at this job, and therefore at my career, which I felt very closely tied to as part of my identity.

I’ve always really valued clarity and found vagueness difficult, and this was amplified x100 when I wasn’t thinking straight. I remember logging off a meeting trying not to cry in the office because I literally felt like I couldn’t process what was being discussed or what was being asked of me – it felt like a big vague, unclear cloud around my head.

My frustration tolerance was so low that the tiniest thing I didn’t understand or feel confident doing would derail me for the whole day. I didn’t have the energy to do a ‘full day’ of work and frequently ended up sitting under a blanket on the sofa for hours in the afternoon feeling terrible and guilty about not working, and then trying to make up the time, and the work that I actually needed to do, later that evening.

I usually thrive under pressure, and I think a lot of people might work more when they’re feeling like this, but I did the opposite. I worked my hours but nothing else, and at about 50% of my usual speed (not to blow my own trumpet but I’m usually pretty speedy). I don’t know if anyone noticed but if they did, they didn’t say anything about it. I then felt guilty for not doing the job that was needed – so guilt piled on top of guilt, failure piled on top of failure.

During this period my confidence completely reduced to zero, and I felt like everything good I’d done before was some kind of fluke – or that I was simply in the right place at the right time. I didn’t engage in much sector stuff outside my work, like events or courses, which I’d previously enjoyed. Lack of motivation and lack of confidence bubbled over and outside of work to me feeling generally miserable and like I somehow didn’t recognise myself.

How I think burnout happened

I had always thought that burnout would be caused by too much work, or a wild amount of competing deadlines creating unmanageable pressure. But actually, the work wasn’t too difficult, and there wasn’t too much of it. And although I cared about the causes I worked for, it also wasn’t that I ‘cared too much’. What was happening to me didn’t have some easy thing to point to as causing it.

I’m absolutely not negating that these things can be the cause of stress and even burnout for lots of people, but this wasn’t the case for me. On paper there was nothing wrong, and in fact I’d just left a role I wasn’t particularly happy in, to return to a sector I loved. But when I got there, I just was not enjoying it. And not only was I not enjoying day-to-day work, I wasn’t enjoying anything.

I had this thought that if I could just find the right role, the right organisation, it would get better. I applied for some new roles, which was a terrible idea – I was in the worst possible place for this and being truly honest with myself, the main reason I applied was because I wanted the break between jobs. I needed some proper time off and being able to leave somewhere and have a gap in between was like a small, flickering light at the end of the tunnel.

Having done a LOT of reflecting, I think the three main causes of burnout for me were:

1. Toxic workplace culture

I think one organisation in particular really contributed to burnout for me. They do brilliant work, and I worked with a lot of amazing people there including my wonderful team, who were the reason I stayed. But in my first week, I was told the org didn’t ‘get’ fundraising, that I spent ‘too much time going to training’ (i.e. keeping myself up-to-date on the funding landscape), that I had to organise my team to be in the office on a set weekly rota, and that I had to do whatever the CEO said because he was the CEO. These might sound small, but they were symptomatic of a culture that went completely against what I enjoy and value about work.

Fundraising was treated with suspicion, even disdain. And I’d never worked anywhere with this attitude before so although I navigated it as best I could, it wore me down over the period I stayed there. Which was really far too long – when I was leaving, a trustee on the fundraising committee even told me they were surprised I’d stuck it out so long as ‘the org clearly doesn’t like fundraising’. And a couple of senior colleagues, my peers, acknowledged that they hadn’t made my team’s work easy. You’d think I’d have felt validated but actually all I heard was – we’ve known this has been impossible for you the whole time but we didn’t bother to do anything about it, bye!

I’ve heard very similar from others across the sector, in terms of the way fundraising is seen and treated internally, by the very people we are meant to be working with to get the work done. This sometimes stems from a lack of understanding of how fundraising works. But I’d argue that if you’re a leader in this sector, it is your responsibility to understand the environment you and your fundraising team are operating in – either by educating yourself or by listening to those whose job it is to know. I would go so far as to say: do NOT hire a senior fundraiser if you personally dislike fundraising, if you are going to be working with them. It will show, and your fundraiser will either be worn down to the point that they give up, or they’ll end up being forced to create a siloed team in order to create some semblance of structure and motivation, which will then probably not last once they’ve left – so you’ve wasted your investment either way. Fundraising cannot succeed in this culture.

There were other toxic patterns in this organisation. I once sat near a meeting room door through which I could hear a senior colleague shouting in the face of one of his direct reports. I was sworn at in a meeting, and not in a ‘we’re having a sweary conversation so this is fine’ way.

Sadly, I see toxic workplace culture and the impact of this discussed an awful lot in the charity sector. I don’t think anyone sets out to create a toxic culture, but in my experience it is absolutely created by those in positions of power. And this might mean hierarchical power – senior leaders or a CEO, or a board – or it might mean people who are not senior in a hierarchy but hold power nonetheless due to privileges, connections, tenure, etc. If people holding power in workplaces lack the awareness to see when their actions or behaviour are causing toxicity, or if they are aware others are causing it but lack the willingness or ability to do anything about it, then it persists. And even if there isn’t malicious intent behind words or actions, the negative impact is real.

2. Neurodivergence and a lifetime of masking for conformity

There’s probably enough white women writing about their late-diagnosed ADHD, but it needs a brief mention.

I guess I know no other kind, but I think I experienced a heavily ADHD-impacted burnout, partly because a loss of motivation crashing into an interest-based nervous system led to a total inability to work. In common with many people with ADHD, I need to be interested in something to start it. When I’m interested, I can sit and work at it for hours without noticing I’ve not even moved or eaten all day. Conversely when I’m not interested, I actually cannot start the thing. This has been coined an ‘interest-based nervous system’ as opposed to ‘importance-based’, which a more neurotypical brain might follow. It’s hard to explain, but it’s more than just procrastinating and it’s not laziness (although my inner voice was saying this constantly). Because during this period I’d lost interest in my work, it was so much harder than just ‘pushing through’, it was like a kind of task paralysis.

It was also caused, I think, by years of masking my ADHD traits because they have always felt like ‘problems’ in the workplace. Bridgette Hamstead writes in her blog ‘NeuroJustice’ that ‘there is increasing anecdotal evidence that late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD adults struggle with… a lifetime of conforming to what ‘reliable’ looks like and often being ‘high performing’ in the process’. For example, for many people with ADHD, the executive functioning skills that help with things like organisation and time management are really overworked because of all the strategies we’ve developed throughout our lives to meet societal expectations.

Masking isn’t a choice. Hamstead describes it exactly how I feel it; something that’s ‘less like wearing a costume and more like running a complex background process that never fully terminates.’ Suddenly it was like my brain or nervous system said ‘I’m not doing this anymore’. My strategies and systems, which I’d been using to mask ADHD struggles without realising this is what I was doing, got tired – they were uprooted and fell apart.

3. Our obsession with productivity

In capitalist and individualistic cultures, we are obsessed with rushing ourselves along or up. The career ladder, life milestones, moving ‘onward and upward’, the next level.

Sophie Willow in her blog ‘The Art of Feeling it All’ describes this hurrying as ‘a destructive coping mechanism pushed onto us by the bullish culture we swim in - where the expectation of continuous accomplishment is so deeply engrained that I frequently trip up’ and I totally feel this. It’s ingrained in us that we must constantly be journeying forward when sometimes we should just ‘be’. Work, and life don’t have to be constant progression. Nature is cyclical and it works. Or it works until we ruin it with our never-ending need for ‘progress’.

I’m fascinated by the concept of time in different cultures and throughout history. I have time agnosia (often referred to as ‘time blindness’) and after saying to people my entire life that there must be ‘something wrong’ in my brain because I don’t experience time the same way everyone else seemed to, my ADHD diagnosis in 2022 made me realise this is common amongst people with neurodivergence. Generally, ‘Western’* cultures are obsessed with time as it relates to productivity, or basically, to money. The very language we use to talk about time is the same as money – wasting it, spending it, saving it. Non-Western cultures often perceive time as more cyclical, not a finite commodity to be monetised to the second. The capitalist concept of time has spread across the world in a way that has been described as ‘temporal colonialism’.

All this is to say, we are not born with an urgent need to be productive, but this way of living is so ingrained in us from childhood to workforce that it’s no wonder we think it’s the only way. At some point I started to ask myself: WHY do I feel so much pressure to always be on, and producing, and achieving? What are these invisible rules I have been abiding by, and who made them? They’re very real, as they govern most things we do. And yet they are made up.

Hamstead says: ‘The idea of the reliable worker has been treated as neutral and objective for more than a century, but it is neither. It is a social invention built around one kind of nervous system and one kind of relationship to time, attention, emotion, and consistency. It is a myth created to serve industrial systems that demanded predictability, uniformity, and constant output.’ She says, ‘When we stop accepting the myth, we stop accepting the harm. And we begin to imagine something better.’

These are all basically all the same thing

When writing this I realised the three above are all very much connected – people often behave in a toxic way because they’re so intent on achieving the next goal to the exclusion of all else, and ADHD masking is made necessary because of our cultural and societal expectations of time and productivity. It’s easy to say systems not individuals create these expectations, but it’s individuals who make the systems, so I think we do all have a role to play in changing and undoing them (if we want to – I definitely do).

Learnings

Anyway I could end this by saying, now it’s all completely great. It’s definitely a journey that I’m still on, but since I made the decision to claim back my time and autonomy, and remind myself that productivity is not the goal, I am so much happier. I enjoy my work again, and it's hard to even remember what it felt like to be that closed-off, miserable person from 18 months ago.

I have learned:

The pace at which we are taught life must be, is an absolute lie.
Everything is made up! ‘The rules’, the obsession with productivity, ‘normal working hours’, are all patriarchal constructs designed as if we are still working during the industrial revolution.
It is not my responsibility to muddle through or put up with a toxic culture, I don’t owe that to any organisation regardless of the cause.
We have to intentionally prioritise joy if we want to keep hold of it in this rushing, capitalist world.
Nothing is neutral – the norms of the working world benefit a very small proportion of people, they are not built for (for example) women or neurodivergent or disabled people so we have to retrofit healthier working practices into our lives by design.

The below are some things I am trying to build into my work-life now, as I look at it from a place of reflection and recovery from the difficult year that was 2025:

Being real – I can’t be bothered not to be real anymore. For example my brand and website is full of cute fox illustrations by amazing designer Amelia Fisher because 1. I love foxes and wish I was Beatrix Potter and 2. Why not. I also want to acknowledge how much privilege I have as a white, middle class, cisgender woman which means it is safe for me to be my real self in most spaces; a luxury which should be the standard but which is not afforded to many working in this sector.
Trying to unlearn our workplace culture’s obsession with growth and with productivity, deeply rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy and all the isms. I am finding this so hard! If anyone has any tips, please let me know.
Permission – to not be at 100% all the time, to work with my energy levels, to take longer breaks, to spend some time during what we all call ‘the working day’ doing things that are not work-related and have no ‘measurable’ benefit.

I really want to enjoy things, which means enjoying my work. I want to work with organisations doing good work that is needed in the world. I want to do things I’m good at and be paid for it. I want to work with people I like, admire and can learn from, and meet new people who I don’t know I like yet. It's ok to want these things! I want to have an impact and make things change, but how I do that might look different to what I’d previously thought.

This is a post about me and my experience. But I hope just hearing about someone else’s experience helps you feel less alone, if you are going through any of these things. I know that I found it helpful when others shared theirs.

"Anyway, if you're not afraid, I'm not either"

Snorkmaiden, Comet in Moominland

Thank you for reading!

*Using the terms ‘West’ and ‘East’ are huge simplifications and ignores the massive differences between countries in those regions, but I have used them here for want of a better way to describe what I mean.

I have directly referenced the writing below:

These are some other sector articles and resources not referenced but which I’d recommend:

I am not a robot - burnout and recovery

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