Why Am I So Burnt Out? The Energy of Aliveness and What Midlife Burnout Is Really Telling You

I’m Sara, founder of The Sisters Enchanted, and I’ve spent years sitting with witchy women in midlife who are doing everything right and still feel completely fried. Here’s the thing almost nobody tells you about burnout: you can have a very full life and a very full calendar and still have all the energy in the world. And you can have a wide-open weekend and come home with nothing left in the tank. Same amount of time. Completely different experience of it.

So if you’re reading this at the end of a day where you crashed onto the sofa, started doom scrolling, and couldn’t find a single reason why you feel this wrung out when your life looks good on paper, you’re in the right place. We’re going to talk about why that happens, and what I’ve learned to actually do about it. Grab your coffee. Let’s dig in.

Why am I so burnt out when everything looks fine on paper?

Because burnout usually isn’t a time problem. It’s a misalignment between your inner world and your outer world, and that’s a lot harder to spot than a crowded calendar.

Burnout is a catch-all word, and that’s part of why it’s so slippery. We relate it to just about everything: work, caregiving, our bodies moving through perimenopause or menopause, marriage, anything at all. We can pin the word on any of it. But underneath all those versions is the same thing. The feeling comes from your inner world and your outer world being out of alignment.

Here’s what we do as women, especially when things feel bad. We don’t want to be disruptive and we don’t want to seem ungrateful. We know our lives are good. We have a roof over our heads, people who love us, our health, food on the table, all the things so many people don’t have. So when we’re frustrated with our own existence, we sit on it. We don’t do much about it, because who are we to complain. And a lot of the time we can’t even put a finger on what’s causing the badness, because logically, on paper, everything should be fine.

For most of us, the real culprit comes down to what we spend our time and energy on. And here’s the part worth sitting with: neither of those is infinite. You do not have infinite time in a day, and you do not have infinite energy. They’re finite resources, both of them, and they move together.

What’s the difference between generating aliveness and consuming aliveness?

Generating aliveness means a thing gives you energy back. Consuming aliveness means it takes energy you don’t get back. The clearest way to tell them apart isn’t how busy the thing makes you. It’s how you feel after.

You know you’re generating aliveness when you feel like you could stay up all night long doing something, then get up three hours later, completely sleep deprived, and happily chip away at it all over again. And you know something is consuming your aliveness when you finish it and all you want to do is bury your head in the sand. You can’t talk to anybody. You need to doom scroll. It just sucks the soul out of you.

Let me give you a real example from my own life. When I had my first kiddo, I felt like I could do anything. I had so much energy. I did the whole attachment parenting thing, and she was with me all the time until she was about four. Breastfed, baby-led weaning, the two of us were two peas in a pod. And at the same time I was running my own business and starting The Sisters Enchanted. I could go for miles-long walks carrying her in a baby carrier, feed her all day, take client meetings, then stay up half the night working on Sisters Enchanted, and do it all over again the next day. All of it was generating aliveness. I loved being with my kid, I loved my work, I loved building this. So when I got tired, I was just tired. I slept, I rested, I woke up recharged, and I went again.

How do I tell which things are generating and which are consuming?

You audit. You go through your actual calendar and your day-to-day life and ask one question of every single thing on it: is this generating my aliveness, or consuming it?

Before you start, one thing to hold onto, because this question tends to make us feel like we’re making mountains out of molehills. All of your life experience is essentially neutral. What makes an experience good or bad is the belief, the emotion, and the story you bring to it.

Here’s what I mean. Say you used to love getting takeout a few nights a week. It worked for your family, it was easy, it was fine. But now your body hurts and all you want is a simple home-cooked meal, chicken and broccoli, the only thing that doesn’t make you feel worse. You want the change, but you don’t know how to break the habit, so you keep ordering the takeout. Living in that state, continuing to do the thing you don’t love, that’s what consumes your aliveness. The wanting itself is neutral. The heaviness you feel around it, that your family will be upset, that you’re failing them, that you’re making everyone’s life harder, that nobody likes this change but you, those are stories and emotions. They are not facts about the situation.

And here’s the part that catches so many of us off guard: the same thing can flip. Something that generated aliveness for years can start consuming it. A couple of years after that season with my first kiddo, I had some work culture and team dynamics happening here at Sisters Enchanted that made me not even want to talk to anybody. A few of our offerings had kind of grown legs. Meanwhile I was overwhelmed with parenting choices I’d made. And when I pulled back and really looked, I realized I was actually doing less overall than I had been before. But what I was doing was consuming my aliveness. The same conversations over and over. The same things at home over and over. That friction, the frustration and the resentment of it, is what drains you. So I was tired and burnt out, I’d sit on the sofa wanting to be left alone, and I’d get up not refreshed, just more frustrated, unable to climb out of the tired. Because the aliveness was being consumed.

Why is rest always the first thing to go?

Because for a lot of us, rest doesn’t feel safe. Somewhere underneath the burnout is an old fear that if we slow down, we’ll stop mattering, and that fear has a place in the larger work we do here.

Look at the things that tend to consume your aliveness, and you’ll notice a lot of them come from not letting yourself stop. The over-giving. Saving people who could save themselves if you’d let them. Staying in the conversation long after it stopped serving you. Those aren’t random habits. They’re a pattern.

At The Sisters Enchanted we track seven patterns of self-sabotage that keep witchy women small, and one of them is Shadow Season Avoidance: refusing rest because deep down you’re afraid that if you’re not constantly producing, you’ll become irrelevant. Burnout is very often that pattern wearing a calendar. If you want to see where this one sits alongside the others, here are the seven self-sabotage patterns keeping you small. And the good news is the same as it always is with these patterns: once you can state the pattern, you can interrupt it.

What do I actually do about burnout once I can see it?

You can’t overhaul your whole life at once, and you don’t need to. You start by shifting toward what generates aliveness, and then you put boundaries around it to protect it.

Start by identifying everything. Go through the calendar, go through the ordinary day, and sort it: this generates, this consumes. Then shift your focus toward more of what generates that alive feeling for you, and put boundaries around it. And here’s where I have to be clear about what a boundary actually is, because we get this wrong all the time.

A boundary does not mean getting other people to do what you want. It does not mean forcing everyone to be like you. A boundary means you focus on what you’re protecting, and what you’re protecting is your sense of aliveness. That’s it.

In practice, it looks small. You’re in a conversation and you notice it’s up-leveling into something unhelpful, so you say, I’m going to get out of this one, let’s pick it up another time, and you end the call or walk away. That’s a boundary around your aliveness. Or you catch yourself about to over-give, about to micromanage, about to overstep, about to save somebody who could save themselves. And the boundary is with yourself: what do I do right now to protect my own energy and not break the promise I made to protect it? You identify the acts that bring more aliveness into your life, and then you protect them fiercely, because nobody else is going to.

If you’re a witchy woman who hasn’t had time for your own practice in weeks, who keeps forgetting herself and abandoning herself, start here. Not with a new productivity system. With one question, asked honestly across your week: where am I generating aliveness, and where am I letting it get consumed? That’s the whole beginning. Everything else grows from there.

Stay magic, Enchanted Sister.

You can find everything we’re making at The Sisters Enchanted, including the Stay Magic Podcast and our current offerings, over at our links hub.

Frequently Asked Questions

Answers below are from Sara Walka of The Sisters Enchanted.