There’s a kind of tiredness that no amount of sleep can fix. You’ve probably felt it. You wake up groggy, despite having had eight hours of sleep. You stare at your laptop for 45 minutes, write two lines, delete them, and give up. You miss deadlines, avoid calls, and feel too exhausted even to reply “I’m fine” to someone asking how you’re doing. Somewhere between work stress, family obligations, power outages, and the sheer pressure to keep up appearances, something inside you has quietly short-circuited. You think, Maybe I’m just lazy. But you’re not. You’re burnt out.
The thing about burnout is that it rarely arrives loudly. It creeps in slowly, disguised as stress you can handle. First, you’re just a little tired. Then you start snapping at people, losing interest in things you used to enjoy. Your motivation evaporates. Your body begins to ache. You find yourself fantasising about quitting your job, disappearing, or maybe just staying in bed for a month. It doesn’t feel like a crisis—it feels like failure. And so, naturally, you assume the problem is you.
But it’s not laziness. Laziness doesn’t come with guilt, shame, and chronic exhaustion. Laziness doesn’t feel like grief. Burnout, on the other hand, is what happens when your body and mind can no longer carry the load you’ve been forcing them to lift. And for many Nigerians, that load is heavier than we admit.
We live in a country where productivity is worshipped. Where rest is seen as indulgence. Where doing the absolute most is the bare minimum. You’re expected to juggle your job, side hustle, family responsibilities, social obligations, and somehow still emerge well-dressed at your cousin’s wedding in Owerri without a hair out of place.
To admit burnout is to question all the structures that reward exhaustion. It means stepping off the hamster wheel and asking, Why am I like this? And if you sit with that question long enough, you start to hear the real answers: Because you’ve been in survival mode for too long. Because you equate your worth with your output. Because capitalism, hustle culture, and Nigerian respectability politics have convinced you that peace is earned, not inherent.
Pulling yourself out of burnout is not about becoming productive again. That’s the trap—thinking rest is only useful if it helps you return to work. No. Real recovery is about reclaiming yourself, piece by piece. It’s about learning to do nothing and not feel bad about it. It’s sitting with silence until your nervous system remembers what calm feels like. It’s choosing soft joy over forced ambition.
It may mean saying no to things you used to say yes to. It may mean unplugging from social media, taking a break from that WhatsApp group, or telling your loved ones, “I’m not available this week.” Not because you’re being selfish, but because you’re preserving what’s left of your peace. And slowly, it begins to return—your curiosity, your humour, your desire to engage. But it doesn’t come with a trumpet. It comes like a whisper: I feel like myself again.
The hardest part? Giving yourself permission. Permission to not be on top of everything. Permission to disappoint people. Permission to honour your limits. It sounds simple, but for a generation raised on “God helps those who help themselves,” it’s radical. Especially here, where being tired is a badge of honour and rest is mistaken for laziness.
But laziness isn’t what makes you want to shut out the world. Burnout is. And the sooner we start calling it what it is, the sooner we can begin to heal.
Rest is not a reward. It’s your right.
And when you finally take it, you may find the version of yourself you’ve been missing all along—still there, still whole, just waiting for permission to breathe.
