The Quiet Exhaustion At Work
It’s 2:47 PM on a Tuesday and I’m sitting in the bathroom stall on the third floor of our office building, headphones in, music off, just staring at the tile grout. The fluorescent light is buzzing. My Slack status has been “in a meeting” for forty-five minutes. I’m not in a meeting. I’m just tired in a way I can’t really explain to anyone who hasn’t felt it.
You know what I mean?
The kind of tired that doesn’t fix with sleep. The kind where you slept eight hours and still feel like you got hit by a truck. The kind where you sit down at your desk and your chest already feels tight. I think people call it quiet exhaustion at work, but the word “quiet” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because it’s not quiet in my head. It’s loud. It’s screaming.
I’m 31. I have a job that pays decent. I work from home three days a week. On paper, I should be fine. I’m fine. I’m great. I’m “doing well.”
Right.
Last Thursday, my manager pinged me at 9:12 AM with a “quick question” that turned into an hour-long revision of a deck I’d already revised twice. I closed my laptop, walked to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and just stood there. Staring at the sink. I didn’t even drink the water. I just stood there.
My roommate peeked in and asked if I was okay. I said yeah, just getting water. I dumped the water out. I went back to my desk and pretended to be on fire.
That’s quiet exhaustion work life, baby. The kind where you perform being fine, on loop, for people who will never ask a second time.
I don’t know when it started. Maybe it was the reorg in March. Maybe it was the year of back-to-back layoffs on my LinkedIn feed. Maybe it was the day I realized I’d been answering “hey, how are you?” with “hanging in there” for so long that I forgot what “hanging in there” actually meant.
Hold on. Let me back up.
I used to be the person who actually liked work. Not in a toxic-positivity way. I just liked figuring things out. I liked the small win of a clean spreadsheet. I liked my coworkers. I liked the coffee machine that ground beans too aggressively at 8 AM. I was the one who stayed late to finish a project because I wanted to, not because I had to.
When did that change?
I can’t point to a single moment. It’s more like the volume got turned up so slowly I didn’t notice until my ears were ringing. Every sprint felt slightly worse. Every Monday morning felt slightly heavier. Every “thanks for jumping on that!” email felt slightly more like a small cut, paper-cut style, over and over.
And the thing nobody tells you about quiet exhaustion at work is that it’s not dramatic. Nobody’s yelling. Nobody’s doing anything wrong. The work is fine. The pay is fine. The team is fine. Everything is fine. That’s the whole problem. Everything is fine, and I am somehow still curled up on the bathroom floor at 3 PM on a Wednesday texting my therapist “can we move our session up?”
I’m not kidding. That was last week.
You ever sit in a meeting and someone says “let’s take this offline” and you want to scream? Not because of the meeting. Because of the word “offline.” Because there’s only so many offlines a person can take. Because the online is already too much. The offline is supposed to be the relief. But the offline is just another inbox.
I think that’s the thing. There’s no off anymore. The Slack notification follows me to the bathroom. The email follows me to the grocery store. The “quick favor” follows me to bed. I have literally answered work messages at 11:47 PM while brushing my teeth, and I hated myself for it, and I did it again the next night.
That’s the loop. That’s the whole thing.
My body has started doing things I can’t control. My jaw clenches. My shoulders live somewhere near my ears. My stomach gets this weird tight feeling every Sunday around 4 PM, like my body knows the week is about to start and it’s already bracing. I had a chiropractor appointment three weeks ago and she looked at me and said, “How old are you?” I said 31. She said, “Your traps are like cement.”
I laughed. She didn’t.
That’s quiet exhaustion work in 2026, I guess. Cement traps and a jaw that won’t let go and a Sunday at 4 PM that hits different now.
I tried telling my coworker. Her name is Jess. I said, “I think I’m burning out,” and she looked at me and said, “Same, dude. Same.” Then we both laughed. Then we went back to work.
That’s it. That’s the whole conversation. No plan. No fix. Just two people admitting they’re drowning and then opening their laptops again.
I don’t think this is a sad story. I don’t think I’m in crisis. I just think this is what being a working person feels like right now, and nobody’s saying it out loud enough. Or maybe they are. Maybe that’s why every newsletter I read is about “the great exhaustion” or “the workforce is cooked” or “why are we all so tired.”
But those articles are still written like essays. With neat paragraphs. With recommendations. With a “5 Ways to Recover” at the end.
I don’t want 5 ways. I want to sit in this for a second.
I want to say out loud that I am tired in a way I don’t know how to fix. I want to say that I cried in a Whole Foods parking lot last Tuesday because I couldn’t pick a salad and I was late for a call and the woman in front of me had 14 items in the 12-items-or-less lane. I want to say that I watched my friend get laid off last month and felt both horrified and jealous, and I hated myself for the jealous part.
I want to say that I have a degree and a salary and a great health plan and I am somehow more exhausted than I was when I was 22 and working double shifts at a coffee shop.
How is that possible?
I don’t know. I just know that this is the shape of things now. I show up. I smile. I do the work. I close my laptop. I open it again. I scroll my phone. I sleep. I don’t sleep. I lie in bed at 2 AM and think about a Jira ticket I closed in October.
Quiet exhaustion at work doesn’t announce itself. It just sits there.
It sits in the small things. The way my partner asks me how my day was and I say “fine” before she’s even finished the question. The way I no longer have patience for the things I used to love. The way my hobbies feel like another line on a to-do list. The way I say “let’s hang soon” to people I genuinely love and I mean it, and I still don’t do it.
I haven’t called my mom in three weeks. I texted her “happy birthday” on time and felt like I deserved a medal. I haven’t been to the gym in two months. I haven’t read a book. I just scroll. I scroll and scroll and scroll until my eyes hurt and then I scroll more.
Last weekend I tried to do something about it. I made a list. I called it “Things That Might Help.” It had stuff like “drink water” and “walk after lunch” and “no phone after 10 PM.” I did walk after lunch on Monday. I drank water. I picked up my phone at 10:47 PM and told myself that was basically 10 PM if you round down. I felt like a fraud.
I went to therapy. We did EMDR for the first time. She counted. I tapped my knees. I cried about something I thought I’d cried about already. She said, “Your body is holding onto this.” I said, “Yeah, I know.” She said, “We can’t keep doing the same thing every week and expecting different results.” I said, “Yeah, I know.” She said, “So what are we going to do?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “Okay.”
$40 copay for that one. Worth it, kind of.
The corporate wellness theater doesn’t help. We had a “Wellness Wednesday” last month. Free smoothies in the office kitchen. A meditation app subscription that nobody uses. A Slack channel called #balance where people post pictures of their hiking trips and never their crying. Our CEO sent an email that said, “We care about your wellbeing.” I read it at 11:30 PM on a Sunday prepping for a Monday standup. I did not feel cared for.
I tried to talk to my manager once. The real talk. I booked a 1:1, didn’t put an agenda, said I wanted to check in. He said, “Yeah, what’s going on?” I said, “I’m pretty burnt out. I think my workload is more than I can handle right now.” He nodded. He said, “I hear you. That’s tough. Let’s see what we can do.” Then we never talked about it again. He transferred two projects off my plate and added a new one the next week. He didn’t realize. Or he did. I don’t know.
A lot of people say “just quit.” I see it on Twitter. “Just quit lol.” As if quitting is just a thing you do. As if I don’t have rent. As if my parents didn’t help me through college. As if this isn’t the only job I’ve had for over four years and the only identity I have outside of “I work here.” I’m not quitting. I can’t quit. So I sit.
I sit and I take it and I tell myself this is just what work is now. I sit and I smile at the all-hands. I sit and I applaud the new PTO policy that gives us one extra day a year. I sit and I pretend the swag hoodie is a bonus and not a small acknowledgment of the fact that they overwork me.
I don’t even know who I am outside of work anymore. I used to play guitar. I used to run. I used to call my friends on Sundays just to talk. I don’t do any of that. I come home, I eat, I watch something, I sleep. On the weekends I do laundry and “catch up” which is just a polite word for “do the work I didn’t do during the week.”
I joined a yoga class last month. I went twice. The teacher said, “Notice your body. Be here now.” I was there now. I was also thinking about the email I forgot to send. I was also wondering if anyone noticed my Slack status was turned on. I was not relaxed. I did not “be here now.”
I told myself I was going to write this for a long time. I kept saying I would. I kept opening a doc and closing it. I think I was scared that if I wrote it down, it would be real. If I wrote it down, I’d have to do something about it. And I don’t want to do something about it. I want to keep doing what I’m doing and complain about it. That’s the energy.
But here I am. Writing it.
So I guess this is me doing something about it.
Not the practical thing. Not the “go for a walk” thing. The other thing. The “stop pretending” thing. The “say it out loud” thing. The “I’m not fine and I’m tired of saying I’m fine” thing.
I’m not fine. I’m tired. I’m tired at work. I’m tired at home. I’m tired in my sleep. I’m tired of being tired. I’m tired of the articles that tell me to take a bath. I’m tired of the LinkedIn posts that say “your job is not your worth” posted by people who have jobs. I’m tired of the friends who say “just take a vacation” like I haven’t calculated the cost of a vacation seventeen times this year.
I’m tired of pretending I’m okay. I’m tired of pretending I like the work. I’m tired of pretending the perks are good. I’m tired of pretending this is just a phase. I’m tired of pretending I’ll feel better next quarter.
I don’t feel better next quarter. I never feel better next quarter. I just feel more tired next quarter, with a slightly bigger salary and a slightly worse neck.
You know what I did last Sunday? I sat on my couch for four hours. I didn’t move. I didn’t watch anything. I didn’t scroll. I just sat. I stared at the wall. I thought about the week ahead. I thought about how I used to look forward to Sundays. I thought about how I now dread them. I thought about how a 31-year-old is dreading Sundays like she’s going to war. That’s not normal. That’s not okay. That’s quiet exhaustion at work and it’s everywhere.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a 5-step process. I have this. I have this stupid doc open at 1:14 AM on a Wednesday. I have a hoodie that smells like my office. I have a jaw that clicks. I have a therapist I see every other week. I have a salary that goes up but a soul that goes down.
I have a feeling that a lot of you reading this have the same thing.
And I don’t want to write “you’re not alone” because that sounds like a fortune cookie. I don’t want to write “it gets better” because I don’t know if it does. I just want to say: this is real. This is happening. I am in it. You might be in it too.
If you’re in it, I’m sorry. I don’t have a fix. I just have a place to put the words down so they don’t sit in my chest.
That’s all I’ve got.
I’m going to close this doc. I’m going to close my laptop. I’m going to not open Slack for the rest of the night. I’m going to make pasta. I’m going to put my phone in the other room. I’m going to try. Not in a hashtag-self-care way. In a “please let me feel one day that doesn’t feel like work” way.
If I can’t do it tonight, that’s okay too.
We’re all just trying.