The Quiet Exhaustion At Work
It’s Tuesday, 9:14 AM, and I’m standing in the office kitchen pretending to make tea I don’t want. The kettle clicks off. I don’t move. My coworker Jess walks in, sees me just standing there staring at the wall, and goes “you okay?” I snap back like a jumpscare, laugh too loud, say “yeah just zoned out haha.” She laughs too and grabs her oat milk. We’re both pretending.
That right there is what I mean by quiet exhaustion at work.
Not the loud kind. Not the kind where you snap at someone or cry in the bathroom or quit dramatically on a Wednesday afternoon. The kind where everything looks fine from the outside. You’re answering emails. You’re making small talk. You’re showing up. But inside your chest feels like someone slowly pressing a flat palm down on it and you can’t remember the last time you actually felt rested.
I’ve been dealing with this for about six months now. Maybe longer. Hard to tell because the line between “normal tired” and “something is genuinely wrong with me” got blurry somewhere around March.
Let me give you the specific scene, because I think this is what a lot of people are living through.
I wake up at 6:50. Alarm goes off, I snooze once. Snooze twice. Third alarm at 7:10 I actually open my eyes. Lay there for maybe four minutes doing that thing where you stare at the ceiling and your brain is already running through the day before your body agrees to participate. I drag myself to the shower. The water is too hot because I want to feel something. I get dressed. I take the 7:48 train like always.
On the train I don’t look at my phone. I just sit there. There’s a guy across from me eating a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich and reading something on his phone and smiling. I hate him a little. Or I hate that he can smile on a train at 7:48 in the morning. Or I’m just jealous. I don’t know which.
Get to the office at 8:30. Say hi to Jess. Say hi to Marcus. Say hi to the new guy whose name I keep forgetting. Sit at my desk. Open laptop. The Slack messages are already piling up. Someone tagged me in a channel I don’t even remember joining. I reply. Then I reply to another one. Then I open the doc I’ve been putting off.
By 9:14 I’m in the kitchen staring at a kettle I never turned on.
Stop for a second. I want to name what this actually feels like, because I spent months trying to explain it to my partner and could never get the words right.
It’s not sleepy. Sleep doesn’t fix it. I sleep 8 hours and wake up tired in a way that’s deeper than physical.
It’s not burnout exactly, or at least not the burnout I read about in those Medium articles with the little illustrations of candles. Those always made it sound noble somehow. “I burned so bright.” No. It’s not bright. It’s dim. I feel dim.
It’s this weird fog where you go through all the motions but you’re not really there. Like you’re watching yourself from one step to the left. You type things. You nod in meetings. You eat lunch at your desk because going outside feels like a lot. You laugh at the right moments. But the actual you? Somewhere in the back, sitting cross-legged on the floor, going “hey, are we doing this again today?”
That’s the quiet exhaustion at work thing nobody talks about because from the outside you look completely fine.
I told my mom about it in April. Phone call, Sunday afternoon, she was peeling potatoes. I said “I think I’m tired in a way that’s not normal.” She went silent for a second, then said “well you sit at a desk all day that’s the problem, you should walk more.” And then she told me about her friend Linda’s daughter who quit her corporate job to become a yoga instructor and now she “looks so alive.”
Thanks mom. Very helpful.
I didn’t push it. I just said “yeah maybe” and changed the subject to my brother’s new apartment. But I remember putting the phone down after and sitting on the kitchen floor for like ten minutes just breathing. Because I didn’t have the language for what was happening. I didn’t want to use words like depressed or anxious because those felt too big, too clinical. And I didn’t want to use words like stressed because people hear that and think you’re being dramatic about deadlines.
So I just called it nothing. Just kept going.
Here’s the thing about quiet exhaustion at work that makes it so sneaky. There’s no incident. There’s no moment where you can point and say “that, right there, that’s when it started.” It’s just a slow bleed. Like a tire with a nail in it you don’t notice for weeks. You keep driving. The car handles fine. Then one morning you look at it and it’s completely flat and you have no idea when it actually went.
Three months ago I used to be someone who made weekend plans. I’d text friends, suggest a bar, pick a movie. Now I get invitations and feel this little dread in my chest. Not because I don’t like them. Because the idea of putting on real clothes and being “on” for three hours sounds impossible. So I cancel. I say “rain check.” I say “this weekend’s rough, next one for sure.” I say it every weekend.
Last Saturday my friend Priya texted me at 2 PM. “Hey drinks tonight? Just us, nowhere loud, I miss you.” I typed out “yes absolutely” and then deleted it. Typed “can’t this weekend sorry.” Deleted that. Typed “yeah let’s do it.” Sat on it for forty minutes. Finally just said “this week was brutal, next week?”
She replied “of course, no worries, rest up ❤️” with a little heart emoji and I felt so guilty I almost cried. She didn’t push. She never pushes. But I could feel her pulling back a little, like she’s starting to believe the rain checks.
The worst part? Work itself isn’t even terrible.
I want to make that clear. My job is fine. The pay is fine. The people are fine. My manager is fine. The project is fine. Nothing is wrong in any specific way that I can complain about to HR or to my therapist (I started one in May, more on that later). It’s just… every day blurs into the next one. Monday feels like Wednesday. Friday feels like Tuesday. I look up and it’s been three weeks since I actually did something for fun that wasn’t scrolling on my phone in bed.
My therapist — her name is Dana, she’s got this very calm voice and she always has a mug of something herbal — she asked me in our second session “what does rest look like for you?” And I just stared at her. Because I genuinely didn’t know. I could describe work. I could describe obligation. I could describe the weekend cycle of trying to catch up on life admin so Monday doesn’t feel worse. But rest? I couldn’t even picture it.
She didn’t say anything for a bit. Then she said “okay, that’s where we start.”
Workday afternoons are the worst. Like 2 PM to 5 PM is this dead zone where my brain is mush and I’m doing tasks but I’m not really doing them. I’m doing them the way you chew gum after the flavor’s gone. Same motion, nothing happening.
Last Thursday I had a 3 PM call. Standup with the product team. I’m on camera. I was presenting my part. Someone asked me a question about a metric I’d literally pulled that morning. I blanked. Not big blank. Just… nothing came. I looked at the screen, scrolled back through the doc, found the number, said it out loud. The call ended. I closed the tab and put my head down on the keyboard for maybe ninety seconds. Then Jess pinged me about something else and I snapped back up and kept going.
Nobody saw it. That’s the point.
I started keeping a tiny note on my phone in June. Just dates and one word about how I felt that day. Not a journal, that sounds intense. Just a list. Here’s a real chunk of it, copy-pasted:
6/3 - flat 6/4 - flat 6/5 - okay I guess? 6/6 - flat 6/7 - cried in car (didn’t tell anyone) 6/8 - fine 6/9 - flat 6/10 - flat 6/11 - couldn’t sleep 6/12 - fine but tired 6/13 - flat 6/14 - actually laughed for real first time in weeks 6/15 - flat
You see the pattern. Most days are flat. “Flat” became my default. I didn’t even pick it on purpose. It just felt accurate. Not sad. Not anxious. Not angry. Just flat. Like a TV that’s on but showing static.
When I showed Dana this she got very quiet. Then she said “how long has it been like this?” and I said “I don’t know, months?” and she said “before March?” and I thought about it and said “probably longer.” And she nodded like that was the answer she expected.
I don’t love that.
I’m not writing this for advice. I’m not looking for a comment section full of “have you tried meditation!” and “you should go for walks!” Please don’t. I know you mean well but that’s not what I need right now.
I’m writing this because I think a lot of people are living this exact thing and not saying it out loud. Because saying it out loud feels ungrateful when nothing is technically wrong. Because you’re worried if you name it people will say you’re being dramatic, or you’ll have to admit something bigger that you’re not ready to admit yet.
So we just keep going. We keep going to the kitchen. We keep staring at kettles. We keep saying “yeah just zoned out haha.” We keep typing “next week for sure” to people we love. We keep looking at ceilings at 7:10 in the morning. We keep answering Slacks. We keep being fine.
One small thing I will say, not as advice but just as a fact:
I texted Priya back. Not next week. Last week. The Friday after she sent the heart emoji. I just said “okay I lied, I’m free tonight, can we just sit somewhere quiet?” And she said “obviously yes, you pick the place.”
I picked this dumpling place near my apartment that doesn’t play music. We sat there for two and a half hours. I didn’t even explain anything. She just talked about her own stuff and I ate soup and listened. It wasn’t a fix. It wasn’t some big breakthrough. But for two and a half hours I wasn’t performing okay. I was just sitting there. And I drove home and actually fell asleep before 11 for the first time in maybe a month.
That’s not a cure. I still feel flat today. I’m writing this on a Sunday and tomorrow is Monday and I already felt my chest tighten a little when I thought about opening my laptop tomorrow morning.
But it’s something.
If you’re reading this and you’re in it, the quiet exhaustion at work thing, I’m not going to tell you it’ll get better or that you’re brave or any of that stuff. I don’t know if it’ll get better. I don’t know what I am.
I just know you’re not crazy for feeling fine and not feeling fine at the same time. I know the kettle thing. I know the train thing. I know the “yeah just zoned out haha” thing. I know the typing and deleting and retyping thing. I know the ceiling thing.
And I know that saying it out loud, even just into a comment section or a Notes app or to a friend who won’t make it a big deal, makes it slightly less of a thing you carry alone.
Anyway. Monday’s coming. I gotta go figure out what to wear.