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Reinvent8 September 2026

Rest is not something you can aim at

By Chris Wilson

Most burnout advice describes a subtraction: less exhaustion, less dread, less of whatever is currently happening to you. In a conversation on the podcast, Dr Ben Searle put a name to why that stalls. He calls it "an absence of something goal, which we know from a lot of research on motivation is not really very effective at motivating behavior because you don't know how to achieve less of something."

Rest still matters, and he is not arguing against it. His point is narrower and more useful: by the time most people recognise they are burned out, he does not think they are "going to get a solution from resting" alone. At some stage you need something to move towards, and "I want to stop feeling like this" does not tell you what to do on Tuesday.

Dr Searle is an organisational psychologist from Sydney. He spent twenty years as an academic researching stress and burnout in organisations, and then burned out himself. As I put it when I introduced him, he is "not here today as a medical doctor, but to share 20 years of insights from his work as a stress and burnout researcher."

The first thing to go is not the bad stuff

One finding from his own 2025 work reframes what an early warning sign looks like.

"Often some of the earliest warning signs are not the emergence of negative experiences," he said. "There's a fading of positive experiences that tends to happen very early on. Loss of enthusiasm for things that you used to enjoy tends to be one of the things that people notice first."

That is the opposite of how most of us check on ourselves. We watch for the arrival of something bad. The earlier signal, on his account, is the quiet departure of something good, which is far easier to explain away as being busy, or tired, or a bit older.

For me it was football. I have supported Liverpool since I was nine, and it was never really about the results. It was escapism from the ordinary week, and it was belonging: something to argue about with friends and with the rival supporters in my family.

Then it went quiet. I still sat down for the games, because that is what I did, but I was not there in the way I had been. Work and whatever project I was carrying took up the whole of my attention, including the ninety minutes that had never belonged to it. Nothing bad had arrived. Something ordinary had just stopped mattering, and that is very easy to file under being busy.

I only see it clearly now because some of it has come back. Not at the old intensity, and I think that is a good thing. Looking at it honestly, the obsession had been doing a job for me. It was somewhere to put frustration that did not have anywhere else to go, at the screen or occasionally at a match. Losing it was the signal. Getting it back in a smaller form might be the better outcome.

The value doing the damage might be one you are proud of

Where Dr Searle gets most practical is on why self-assessment goes wrong. People build a values list out of what sounds respectable and quietly edit out the rest.

He is blunt about what that costs you. Talking about someone who says they place no stock in status or wealth: "that is great if it is true. But if you genuinely value those things, it is not healthy. It's certainly not helpful to pretend that you don't, just as it would be pointless to put protecting the environment at the top of your list of values, if you're doing that because you think that's the respectable thing to do."

A flattering list is useless for making decisions, because you cannot use it to work out why a job you were good at was quietly grinding you down.

He also notes that whole cultures push particular values on us, and that this has a specific consequence for burnout. He writes about "how a lot of societies have this strong value of hope, that you need to be able to persist in the face of hardship, which is one of the reasons why burnout can seem so very shameful."

When I first sat down with a values list, I noticed I was still being pulled towards the ones that had been driving me before. Brainstorming what to do next, I kept dancing around the same roles, or a variant of the one I had just left. The list was not neutral. It had been shaped by the thing I was trying to get out of.

The one I took off was perseverance. Not because I stopped believing in it, but because of how I had been holding it. It had been a hard rule, applied regardless of what it cost, and in practice that meant pushing through and putting myself behind the project every time. A value like that does not look like a problem. It looks like a strength, and everyone around you will agree with you about it.

So the value I had to look at was not one I was hiding. It was one I was proud of.

It is back on the list now, with a condition attached. The one that has taken its place at the top is self-respect, which is not a word I could have used about myself a few years ago without wincing.

The pay-off he describes is not complicated: "when those things, the things that you do are consistent with your values, you're likely to feel more engaged. You're likely to feel happier. You're likely to feel that life is more meaningful."

Working from strength is not self-improvement, it is arithmetic

His case for strengths is not motivational, which is what makes it land. It is about a resource you are short of.

"Applying your strengths is so much easier," he said, "because it is something that doesn't feel as hard. It doesn't feel as unpleasant. It requires less of that self-regulation energy, the thing that we do to keep ourselves focused on a task that we hate."

Read that as an energy calculation rather than a personal development plan. Grinding away at your weakest areas is the most expensive thing you can do with capacity you do not have. He points to the VIA Institute on Character as one framework for thinking about this, and mentions they have "an online strengths assessment tool that is free for a very limited set of feedback." No affiliation or endorsement is implied. If you use any online tool of this kind, it is worth checking the privacy policy before you hand over personal data.

There is a version of this I had to be careful with, because I nearly took the wrong thing from it.

My habit was to default to what I already knew. Given something unfamiliar I would put it off and fill the time with work I felt safe in. That looks like playing to your strengths, and it is not the same thing. The familiar work was not costing me less. The avoidance underneath it ran the whole time, and that is expensive in a way that never shows up on a list of what you did that day.

What I have found since is that the unfamiliar task, once I have actually started it, tends to give energy back rather than take it. I would not have believed that while I was depleted, and I am not sure it generalises. But the two ideas are worth keeping apart, because "work from your strengths" is very easy to hear as "stay where it is comfortable", and for me those pointed in opposite directions.

He is also careful about failure, which is the belief most likely to be sitting underneath all of this: "it is not true that you have failed, that you are a failure. That's a very common and very misleading experience in burnout."

Whose problem is this, actually

There is a part of the conversation I want to pull out, because it moves the weight off the reader.

Dr Searle's work now is advising organisations on the psychosocial hazards that cause burnout in the first place. So when the subject of fixing it comes up, his position is not that the individual should try harder. Managing those conditions, he says, is "in a lot of countries, not every country, but in a lot of countries, that's a responsibility that organizations need to meet." In many cases, on his account, it is not really the individual's responsibility at all. It is the employer's.

That matters for how you read everything above. Understanding your values is useful. It is not a substitute for conditions changing, and it was never meant to carry that weight.

His assessment of going back into an unchanged environment follows from the same logic, and it is blunt. Where the same stressors and the same contributing factors are still in place, he expects the same result. I want to be careful how I put that, because it is a statement about environments rather than a prediction about you or your situation. But it is worth hearing before anyone tells you that you simply need better boundaries.

Telling fear from misalignment

I asked him the question I could not answer for myself: when you dread going back, how do you tell the fear talking from the values talking?

His answer was that knowing your values narrows it, because it lets you separate two different things that feel identical from the inside. Some of that dread is a genuine mismatch, or a workplace problem that has not gone anywhere. Some of it is that you have been through something unpleasant and your reaction to the work has been shaped by that.

His own route through it was gradual. "There is an element to which gradually re-exposing yourself to some of those things can help you to draw a distinction between systemic problems, including value misalignment on the one hand," he said, and the aftermath of a bad experience on the other.

He also put that question straight back to the professionals, which I think is the right instinct. It is a hard distinction to draw about your own life, and not one to settle alone from a blog post.

The timing question, where I pushed back

This is the part of the conversation that was most useful to me, because my instinct ran against his.

When I was in burnout, alongside wanting to recover there was a burning desire to understand what had happened and who I actually was. But looking back, if I had taken a values test at that point, I think "the answers would be conditioned to the person I was pretending to be before that." It seemed to me this work belongs later, once the clouds have dispersed and you are clearer in your thoughts.

Dr Searle broadly agreed on sequencing, while noting the early phase still needs more than rest alone: deliberately re-contacting things you used to enjoy, rather than only subtracting load.

I want to be straight about one other thing, because it matters more than any exercise here. What helped me reframe things was not something I did on my own. It was part of a wider ecosystem that included medical and professional support. Doing that part alone would have been unwise.

The specific piece was a systemic coaching programme, which I started once I was well enough for it to be worth anything. The work was mostly a change of direction: away from an inventory of what had gone wrong and towards what I had actually achieved and enjoyed. That sounds small written down. It was not. Going back over childhood, working life and what I wanted next, and looking for the thread running through all three, was the first time in a long while I had been asked what I was good at rather than what had happened to me.

Where I'm At came out of that. Three years on it is still the thing I am most interested in, which is its own kind of answer.

That is also Dr Searle's own position. He returns repeatedly to getting a professional involved, on the grounds that "we can get so deep in the minutiae of our day-to-day lives" that we cannot see the pattern we are inside.

What it is actually for

One thing he is firm about is what positive psychology is not. Asked where it backfires, he had no patience for the wellness end of it, the version that tells you to force gratitude and keep your vibes up. He described people going "further and further into nonsense like all medications are harmful and everything can be cured with exercise and sunlight and positive affirmations", and was unambiguous about it: "I hope that your listeners understand that those are nonsense and very unhealthy beliefs."

His alternative is not relentless brightness. It is that difficult feelings are information rather than defects. "It is not a flaw of your brain that you sometimes feel sad. It is not a flaw that you sometimes feel anxious. It is not a flaw that you sometimes feel frustrated."

He is also refreshingly unbothered about whether any particular exercise works for you. "Not all of these things are going to work for you at any time," he said. "Some might be unhelpful right now. In a year's time, they might be just what you need. Ultimately, you have to experiment."

And his closing line was the most direct thing in the episode: "It is useful to understand yourself and try to align what you do with who you are."

That is a smaller claim than most of what gets written about reinvention, and a more honest one. Knowing your values is not the destination. Spending your days in a way that does not constantly contradict them is.

There is a larger question sitting underneath all of this, the one about who you are once the job has stopped telling you. In my experience that one does not get answered so much as it gets smaller. What is on this page is the more practical half of it. Not who am I, but what did I actually care about, and where does it show.

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

If this topic brought something up for you, consider speaking with a licensed clinician or a trusted mental health professional. Practices like these are a complement to professional care, not a replacement for it. If you are in immediate distress or thinking about harming yourself, please contact local emergency services or your country's crisis line right away.

The REINVENT phase in Where I'm At Community is where this ground gets covered, at whatever pace suits where you actually are. It is currently free to join, and you are welcome to read for as long as you like before saying anything.

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