Three years ago, most people thought I was living The Dream.
I had a big role at a prestigious company. A great paycheck. My own apartment in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Barcelona. I was invited to speak at events, teach classes, and share insights on leadership. I looked sharp. I was fit. I traveled often. On paper, everything was in place.
And yet—I was quietly falling apart.
The Life That Looked Perfect
The truth is, I knew I was living the dream. I could list every single reason why I should have felt proud and fulfilled. But somehow, I couldn’t actually feel it.
It was like looking at my own life through a window—watching all these incredible things that filled my days, yet not being able to truly touch them. I was observing a life I had built with care and effort, but from a strange emotional distance, as if it belonged to someone else.
And naturally, the symptoms followed.
I cried often. At first just on the rough days, then once a week, then nearly every day. I began having panic attacks, one of them lasted three hours and ended with a friend taking me to the hospital because I physically couldn’t bring myself back down. My body was constantly in pain. My social life disappeared. My romantic life went silent. I was drinking more than I care to admit now, just to get through the evenings.
And yet, I kept showing up. I kept delivering. I kept being the version of me that people expected. But the truth is, I was holding it all together from a place of fear—of not being enough, of not being valuable unless I was producing, impressing, achieving.
My body was pleading for rest, but my mind refused to listen. I had all the markers of success, but none of the inner safety to hold them. And as I began to talk about it, I realized: I wasn’t alone.
When We Look Like We’re Thriving
When I started opening up about what had happened, I began hearing the same story over and over again. Different voices, different jobs, same undercurrent.
People in senior roles who felt their work had taken over their lives. People working for great companies, but who hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in months. People who loved what they did, but couldn’t remember the last time they spent a weekend truly disconnected. People who seemed to have made it—and yet, felt exhausted, depleted, and constantly on the edge of burnout.
They talked about the symptoms they’d come to accept as normal: the 3 a.m. thoughts about work. The skipped lunches and cold dinners eaten in front of a laptop. The constant pressure in their chests. The body pain that had become background noise. The way they brushed off anxiety as just “a busy season.”
A busy season that never really ended.
Rest had become something to earn, not something to need. And suddenly, years had passed, and rest was still waiting to be deserved.
And suddenly, each and every one of them (different people, different jobs, different backgrounds) was living on empty.
When you hear the same stories enough times, you start realizing it’s not just coincidence. It’s not about poor boundaries or bad habits. It’s something bigger. Something systemic.
We Learn Worth Must Be Earned
Because this isn’t new. We live in a system that teaches us, from a very young age, that worth must be earned.
That to deserve love, rest, or peace, we first need to prove ourselves.
To achieve. To produce. To show that we can belong.
We learn to perform. We learn to be what’s expected. We learn that exhaustion is a badge of honor and that slowing down means you’re falling behind.
We start defining success by how much we do, not how we feel. And we start defining our value by how others see us, not how we see ourselves.
When your value depends on being seen as valuable, you can never win. Because there’s always one more thing to prove, one more person to impress, one more reason to keep going even when you’re running on empty.
And slowly, we build lives that look great from the outside—but feel like a store display when you get close. Polished, admired, but somehow not quite ours.
And if we stay in them long enough… we open the door to burnout.
What Burnout Taught Me
We tend to think of burnout as something that suddenly arrives, as if one day we simply break. In truth, it’s a slow build; a long accumulation of ignored signals, quiet compromises, and unmet needs that eventually come to collect.
We separate the body from the mind, treating stress as something we can think our way out of. We normalize tension, sleeplessness, and anxiety because everyone else seems to be doing the same. We call it ambition. We call it resilience. We tell ourselves it’s just part of being an adult.
But it’s not.
Looking back, I can see how clearly my body had been asking for attention. I had normalized things that weren’t normal: tiredness that no weekend could fix, pain that no posture could explain, and a quiet sadness that lingered even when everything looked fine.
When it all finally fell apart, I had to rebuild slowly. I started therapy, first to survive, then to understand. I learned to rest, to feed myself properly, to ask for help. I tried things that once made me uncomfortable—meditation, long walks without headphones, saying no to opportunities I would have once chased. It wasn’t fast, and it definitely wasn’t easy.
It took months before I felt safe in my own skin again. And when I did, it wasn’t a dramatic moment of clarity. It felt more like coming home after being gone for too long.
And then, I began to measure progress differently: not by what I accomplished, but by how I felt waking up. How long I could go without rushing. How often I laughed.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was real. It was me.
Redefining What Success Means
After everything I’ve lived through, I’ve come to see that burnout isn’t really about overwork or lack of rest. It runs deeper than that. It’s what happens when you spend too long building a life that looks perfect from the outside but isn’t truly fit to be lived. A life shaped by what others define as success, rather than what your body, mind, and soul actually needs.
We tell ourselves it’s just part of the journey—that exhaustion, pressure, and constant striving are signs we’re doing well. But when the life you’re building keeps taking more than it gives back, something isn’t working.
This is where we need to pause and start asking some honest questions
- What kind of life do I want to live?
- When it comes to success, what does that actually mean for me?
- What place does work have in it?
- How do I make sure I’m advancing in a way that feels healthy, balanced, and sustainable?
There’s no single answer to these questions. What matters is the intention you put behind them—to move from achievement toward alignment, from chasing an ideal to listening to yourself. Redefining success isn’t about letting go of ambition, but about making sure ambition and well-being coexist.
Because the life you build should never come at the cost of yourself.
A Life Beyond the Hustle
In a culture that celebrates doing more, reaching higher, and staying busy, it’s easy to lose sight of what actually matters. We learn to measure our worth by how much we achieve, how productive we are, and how visible our efforts are.
It’s no wonder so many of us end up building lives that look impressive but feel exhausting.
Real success has less to do with how things look and more to do with how they feel. It’s the quiet satisfaction of knowing your work aligns with the life you build. It’s having space for rest, connection and health—not as rewards, but as parts of life itself.
But this kind of balance doesn’t happen overnight. It takes awareness, patience, and a willingness to slow down long enough to listen to what your life is asking of you. Over time, though, it is possible to build a life that feels like your own.
A life where you feel at home in.
And if you’re somewhere along that path (questioning, slowing down, rebuilding) just remember: you don’t have to do it alone.
I’m here.
Love, Caro
Caroline Erize 
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