Burnout Hits Differently When Your Brain Is Running on a Different OS
By, Naina
There are a lot of former HR professionals who burned out and now talk about burnout. What's missing from that conversation, according to today's guest, is the clinical lens — someone who can name what's actually happening, not just what it looks like from a policy standpoint.
Megan Rees holds a master's in drama therapy and brings nearly 20 years of experience across clinical care, learning and development, and organizational consulting. She works with therapy and coaching clients, conducts ADHD assessments, and consults with organizations on psychological safety and neuroaffirming workplaces. And she's direct about something the burnout conversation in tech tends to skip over: not all burnout has the same root cause, and not all brains experience it the same way.
There's More Than One Kind of Burnout
Most people recognize the version where demands exceed capacity — too much work, not enough time, resources running out. But Megan names two others that get far less attention.
The first is values misalignment burnout: the exhaustion that comes from spending your time in ways that conflict with what you believe is right. She describes working in behavioral health settings where she believed the system was sometimes causing more harm than good. Being part of that, she said, burned her out in a way that had nothing to do with workload.
The second is neurodivergent burnout, and this is where the conversation gets specific. For someone with an undiagnosed or unsupported neurodivergent brain, the ordinary demands of a workday — estimating time, meeting deadlines, staying organized, appearing neurotypical in meetings — require significantly more effort than they do for a neurotypical colleague. "Just the normal day-to-day work is sort of double the work," she said. Add masking on top of that — the effort of performing normalcy, managing eye contact, modulating vocal tone, staying quiet when your instinct is to raise a concern — and the cost compounds in ways that never show up in a performance review.
What Undiagnosed ADHD Actually Looks Like in High Performers
Megan sees a consistent pattern: people who got by on intelligence and work ethic until something shifted and the old strategies stopped working. For women, that shift often comes with perimenopause, when hormonal changes affect focus and organization in ways that amplify underlying ADHD. For people of color, particularly Black and brown boys who were misdiagnosed as conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder in childhood, the cost has been lifelong — shaping not just the support they received but how they learned to see themselves.
The other common trigger she named: moving from individual contributor to manager. The role requires divided attention, emotional availability for direct reports, and an identity shift that can be genuinely destabilizing. For someone whose executive functioning was already working overtime to keep up, that transition can be the thing that finally breaks the system.
What all of these people tend to have in common, she said, is a story they've been telling themselves for years about what's wrong with them. "They've had a lifetime of being told they're lazy." The clinical work, before anything else, is helping people unlearn that.
Psychological Safety Is Not the Same as Niceness
Megan conducts psychological safety assessments with organizations, and she's clear that most people misunderstand the concept. Psychological safety isn't about everyone being pleasant. Niceness, she said, is usually a cover for what's happening underneath.
The real measure is whether people feel safe enough to take risks — to contribute new ideas, poke holes in proposals, and raise concerns before something fails. She described a product launch at a tech company where someone noticed an accessibility issue that would affect users with sensory challenges. They didn't feel safe raising it. The product launched, customers couldn't use it, and months of work had to be scrapped.
"If you're so afraid of failure that you don't raise your voice," she said, "you're doomed to fail."
She also pushes back on organizations that want a burnout workshop without any willingness to examine what's driving the burnout. She turns that work down. "Your employees will be insulted. You're telling them this is what burnout looks like and here's how you manage it as an individual, but we're not going to change anything." A workshop that checks a box while leaving the system intact isn't a solution — it's a signal to employees that the organization already knows and doesn't care.
Where Recovery Actually Starts
When Megan sees a client who has lost access to joy, that's where she starts. Not with productivity tools. Not with time management. With finding small sparks of what used to feel good, and rebuilding from there.
For neurodivergent clients, that often means reconnecting with the interests and hobbies their brain genuinely lights up around — the things they've been suppressing or deprioritizing because work took everything. It also means separating identity from output. Your job is something you do. It is not who you are. And in a moment when companies are laying people off in ways she describes as disrespectful, she's direct about what that means: "Your labor and your time and your talents are something that can be rented, but they belong to you."
Rest, she's careful to clarify, is not laziness. Being a potato on the couch is restoration. But real recovery also means doing things that actually fill you back up — spending time with people who matter, following the rabbit holes your brain wants to go down, letting yourself enjoy the things that make you feel like yourself again.
That's not a soft suggestion. For a nervous system that's been running on overdrive, it's the work.
Listen to the full episode
To learn more about Megan's therapy, coaching, and consulting work, visit meganlrees.com, find her on LinkedIn, or follow her on Instagram at @work_shrink.
If you're navigating burnout, ADHD, or chronic workplace stress, I work with clients one-on-one at Peakworks Counseling. Learn more at peakworkscounseling.com/services.
I'm Naina. This has been Systems Check. Please take care of your system.