I went to a talk recently by Paula Davis Lack about resilience in the legal profession. Part of her talk focused on burnout (a common occurrence in the profession). She demonstrated stress and it’s relationship to burnout using a bell curve. Picture boredom on one end and burnout on the other. Our productivity peaks in the middle. In other words, we want some stress for maximum productivity…but need to create a lifestyle that curbs it so that it isn’t too high for our own personal tolerance too much of the time.

As with symptoms of overtraining physically, one of the first steps on the path to burnout; when productivity begins to decrease; is fatigue. The constant, nagging, sense of fatigue and lack of desire for activities that used to bring joy.