Burnt

You don't burn out from working too hard.

You burn out from working hard while your nervous system never gets the all-clear - when the off-switch stops responding, when every Sunday night your jaw is already tight before Monday has begun. The hours are downstream. The state is upstream.

Burnt is the field manual for the senior professional who has crashed - and still has to show up Monday. No thirty-day program. No wellness retreat. No glib advice to take a year off you don't have. Just the specific neurobiological mechanics of high-performance burnout and the practical sequence of subtractions that restores function inside a life you can't pause.

In sixteen short chapters and eight tactical protocols, Robert Smith maps what's actually broken - sympathetic dominance, the vagal brake, the cognitive tax, the identity collapse, the wired-tired sleep loop - and walks you through the unsexy mechanics of coming back. Subtract before adding. The ten-percent recovery day. The hard-no conversation you've been postponing. The minimum-viable-life floor of sleep, food, movement, and contact. The 25% rule for re-entry that prevents the second crash most high performers walk straight into.

This is the book for the executive who can't read a paragraph without losing the thread. The founder whose hands shake when she pours coffee. The senior manager who's been Googling "early dementia symptoms" at 3 a.m. for nine months. The reader who is too cooked to follow another framework and still has a mortgage to pay.

What you'll find inside:

• The three stages of burnout - and an honest diagnostic to locate where you actually are
• Why vacations, sleep apps, and morning routines have stopped working - and what to do instead
• Eight specific protocols you can run today, in 90 seconds to 45 minutes
• The four anchors - sleep, food, movement, contact - that hold a recovered life together
• Scripts for the hard conversations with your manager, your partner, and yourself
• The early-warning signs of re-collapse and how to intervene in week one, not month six

Recovery is not a feeling. It's a set of capacities that come back, slowly and in order, when you stop demanding of your body what your body can no longer give. The road is narrower than you think and slower than you want. Burnt is the map.

If you've crashed, or you can feel yourself about to, read this before you make the next decision about your life.