On the silent burnout very few dare to speak about

In the old coal mines, workers carried a small canary in a cage. The bird’s distress warned them when the air had turned poisonous. In today’s corporate mines, each of us is a miner — and we too carry a canary, though it is not in a cage. It lives within us. It speaks through our anxiety before logging in, through the fatigue that never lifts, through the growing silence in our relationships.

The tragedy is not that the inner canary does not cry out — it does. The tragedy is that most of us have stopped listening.

Toxicity at work does not always arrive as a storm. It seeps in quietly — in the email that comes just as you are about to switch off, in the meeting where your ideas are brushed aside, in the target that keeps moving further no matter how hard you run. Over time, the signs are unmistakable:

• A knot in your stomach every morning before logging in.
• Fatigue that no weekend of sleep can cure.
• Irritability with those you love, outside work.
• The vanishing of laughter with colleagues.
• Feeling invisible — unless you make a mistake.

These are not weaknesses. They are your canary calling out, “The air is not right.”

And yet, silence prevails. People fear losing their livelihood. Others convince themselves, “This must be the same everywhere.” Even leaders, trapped in their own race for results, often turn away rather than pause the treadmill. And so, the suffocation spreads, one unseen breath at a time.

But here is the truth: even if we cannot change the entire mine, we can still protect our own breath. The first step is to listen again to our inner canary. When your mind, body, or relationships are sending distress signals, do not brush them aside. Acknowledging them is not weakness — it is wisdom.

The second step is to examine what we carry. Too often, we become hosts for other people’s “monkeys” — responsibilities and expectations that do not belong to us but sit heavily on our shoulders. Learning to gently hand those monkeys back is not abandonment; it is survival.

The third step is to protect your inner compass. Toxic cultures will try to convince you that speed matters more than wisdom, that results matter more than people, that silence is safer than truth. Do not let that rewrite who you are. Your kindness, fairness, and ability to pause are not liabilities — they are your shield. The moment you abandon them to “fit in,” the toxicity has already won.

And finally, practice small acts of self-care — not as indulgence, but as quiet resistance:

• Begin or end the day with a grounding ritual — a walk, journaling, or a few minutes of silence.
• Nurture one or two trusted relationships. Even a single ally is oxygen.
• Keep perspective: you are not your performance review.
• Remember the life you are building outside office walls — that life is the real one.

Workplaces may take years to rediscover empathy. But until then, the miner’s safety lies in listening to the canary within. Protecting that fragile voice is not an act of weakness; it is an act of strength. For every time you listen, you remind yourself — and perhaps even others — that human beings were never meant to be reduced to targets alone.

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Letters for the Inner Journey by Pushkar

If something stayed with you from this letter, let me know in the comments below—and consider sharing it with a friend who might need the nudge today.