Latest / The Burnout Podcast with Fexingo: Workplace Exhaustion, Recovery, and Sustainable Careers / How Career Burnout Changes Your Sense of Time
Transcript
- Lucas: Let me start with something that happened to a software engineer I talked to last month. She told me that every morning, she'd sit down at her desk and the clock would read 9:15. She'd look up what felt like hours later, and it was 9:22. But somehow, by the time Friday came, she couldn't remember Monday at all. She said, quote, 'I'm living in a perpetual Monday.' Luna: That's such a specific and unsettling feeling. Like time is both crawling and sprinting. Lucas: Exactly. And it turns out that's not just a poetic description of burnout—it's a documented neurological phenomenon. A 2023 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that people with high burnout scores consistently overestimated how long a task took, but underestimated how many days had passed in a week. Their internal clock was literally broken. Luna: So burnout doesn't just make you tired—it rewires how you experience time itself. Lucas: Right. The researchers called it 'temporal compression.' When your brain is chronically stressed, the hippocampus—which is crucial for memory and time perception—starts to shrink. Less hippocampal volume means you lose the ability to anchor events in a timeline. Every day bleeds into the next. Luna: And that explains why people in burnout often say things like 'this year flew by but I can't recall a single thing I did.' Lucas: You just described the classic burnout time paradox. You feel like time is slipping away, but you're also desperate for it to pass. And here's the thing—this isn't just uncomfortable. It's dangerous for your career. If you can't accurately recall what you did last week, you can't plan effectively, you can't set boundaries, and you definitely can't advocate for yourself in a performance review. Luna: So what do you do if you're stuck in that perpetual Monday loop? Is there a way to reset your internal clock? Lucas: Yeah, and it starts with something I call 'time anchoring.' The idea is simple: you need to create small, deliberate markers in your day that your brain can use to segment time. The most effective one I've seen is a dedicated lunch break—not eating at your desk, but actually stepping away for 20 minutes. Luna: I can feel half our listeners rolling their eyes right now. 'I don't have time for a lunch break, Lucas.' But I know where you're going. Lucas: Exactly—the objection is built in. But here's the neuroscience: when you eat at your desk, your brain doesn't register a transition. Morning blends into afternoon. But if you physically move to a different room, even for 10 minutes, your hippocampus gets a spatial cue that says 'new segment starting.' It's like hitting a chapter break in a book. Luna: So the break itself is less about rest and more about giving your brain a temporal marker. Lucas: Right. And you can layer on other anchors. One technique from the study's authors is something they call the 'Monday morning review'—spending five minutes every Monday writing down three things you remember from the previous week. Even if you draw a blank at first, the act of trying forces your hippocampus to start rebuilding those connections. Luna: That's interesting because it reframes memory as a muscle you can exercise, not something that just happens or doesn't. Lucas: Exactly. And if today was actually useful to you—if this idea of time anchoring clicks—the way this show stays ad-free and independent is through listener support. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a simple way to keep these conversations going without any sponsor interruptions. Luna: Yeah, we really appreciate that. It makes a difference. Lucas: So back to the practical side—another powerful anchor is what I call 'commute recovery.' Even if you work from home, creating a deliberate transition—like a short walk around the block before you start and after you finish—signals to your brain that work time and personal time are separate. Without that, your temporal horizon stays flat. Luna: And a flat temporal horizon means you never fully leave work, which means you never fully recover. Lucas: Exactly. The study also found that people who practiced these anchoring techniques for just two weeks reported a 40 percent improvement in their ability to recall the previous day's events. That's not just feeling better—that's cognitive recovery. And when your brain can segment time again, you start to feel like you have agency over your schedule. Luna: I want to go back to the software engineer you mentioned. Did she try any of these techniques? Lucas: She did. She started taking a literal lunch break in her building's courtyard—just sitting on a bench for 15 minutes with no phone. She said the first few days felt like a waste of time. But by the end of week two, she noticed that her afternoons felt distinct from her mornings. She could remember what she'd done before lunch and after. That's the hippocampus starting to work again. Luna: So the break itself isn't the recovery—it's the cognitive boundary that the break creates. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the key insight: recovery from burnout isn't just about resting more. It's about giving your brain the structure it needs to process time properly. Without that structure, you can sleep ten hours and still feel like you're drowning in a gray blur. Luna: It reminds me of something I read about how prisoners in solitary confinement lose their sense of time. They start to report the same kind of temporal compression—days blending, no memory of recent events. Lucas: That's a dark but perfect analogy. The common thread is a lack of environmental cues for time segmentation. In solitary, there are no mealtimes, no activities, no social interactions to mark the passage of hours. In burnout, you're not physically isolated, but the monotony of stress creates the same effect—your brain stops recording because nothing novel is happening. Luna: So novelty itself is a kind of antidote. Even small novelty. Lucas: Right. And you don't need a vacation or a sabbatical. You just need to introduce one new variable into your day. Take a different route to the coffee machine. Listen to a podcast you've never heard before during lunch. Rearrange your desk. That tiny spike of novelty triggers the hippocampus to encode the moment, and suddenly your brain has a temporal bookmark. Luna: I love that it's so low-effort. It's almost counterintuitive because when you're burned out, you want to minimize change—you want everything to be predictable to conserve energy. But that predictability is actually making the time distortion worse. Lucas: Exactly. It's a trap. The more you cling to routine to feel safe, the more your brain stops marking time. And then you wake up six months later wondering where the year went. So the intervention is almost paradoxical: you need to disrupt your own routine just enough to give your brain something to latch onto. Luna: So if someone is listening right now and thinking 'okay, what's one thing I can do today?'—what would you say? Lucas: I'd say: at the end of your workday, before you close your laptop, write down one thing you accomplished today and one thing you're looking forward to tomorrow. That's it. That simple act forces your brain to bookend the day. You're creating a temporal anchor on both ends. Do that for five days, and I guarantee you'll start noticing that Tuesday feels different from Wednesday. Luna: And that feeling of difference—that's recovery. That's your brain starting to heal. Lucas: Exactly. Because burnout isn't just exhaustion. It's the loss of a coherent timeline. And if you can get that back, you get everything else back too—motivation, focus, even creativity. Because you can finally see where you've been and where you're going. Luna: I think that's a really hopeful note to end on. Thanks, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks, Luna. And to our listeners—try the bookend technique today. Let us know how it goes.