10 Essential Books About Burnout And Exhaustion

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“We must believe we are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright. It is one of our most ancient and primal needs.”

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Burnout can creep up on you slowly. One day you’re managing everything, and the next, even the smallest task feels exhausting. Whether it’s caused by work, stress, toxic productivity or simply trying to keep up with the demands of modern life, burnout can leave you feeling emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed, and desperate for a break. Thankfully, books can sometimes help us make sense of those feelings. The best books about burnout and exhaustion don’t always present easy answers, but they can provide recognition, perspective, and the comforting reminder that you’re not the only person struggling to keep going. From novels about characters being overwhelmed by modern life to insightful non-fiction books about workplace burnout, stress, and recovery, these books explore what happens when we push ourselves too far. Here are some of the best books about burnout and exhaustion to read when you’re feeling totally worn out. 

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Burnout – Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski

Sisters Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski are here to help end the cycle of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. Rather than asking us to ignore the very real obstacles and societal pressures that stand between women and well-being, they explain with compassion and optimism what women are up against – and show us how to fight back. 

With the help of eye-opening science, prescriptive advice, and helpful worksheets and exercises, all women will find something transformative in these pages – and will be empowered to create positive change. Emily and Amelia aren’t here to preach the broad platitudes of expensive self-care or insist that we strive for the impossible goal of “having it all.” Instead, they tell us that we are enough, just as we are – and that wellness is within reach. 

The New Me – Halle Butler

Thirty-year-old Millie just can’t pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates wildly between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again.

When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she’s envisioning – one that involves nicer clothes, fresh produce, maybe even financial independence – within reach. But with it also comes the paralysing realisation, lurking just beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become. 

Rest And Be Thankful – Emma Glass

Laura is a nurse in a paediatric unit. On long, quiet shifts, she and her colleagues, clad in their different shades of blue, care for sick babies, handling their exquisitely fragile bodies, carefully calibrating the mysterious machines that keep them alive. 

Laura may be burned out. Her hands have been raw from washing as long as she can remember. When she sleeps, she dreams of water; when she wakes, she finds herself lying next to a man who doesn’t love her any more. And there is a strange figure dancing in the corner her vision, always just beyond her reach. Dark yet luminous, sensual yet chilling, ringing with strange music and laced with dread, Rest and Be Thankful is an unforgettable novel that confirms Emma Glass as a visionary new voice. 

Can’t Even – Anne Helen Petersen

While burnout may seem like the default setting for the modern era, in Can’t Even, BuzzFeed culture writer and former academic Anne Helen Petersen argues that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation, born out of distrust in the institutions that have failed us, the unrealistic expectations of the modern workplace, and a sharp uptick in anxiety and hopelessness exacerbated by the constant pressure to “perform” our lives online. 

Can’t Even examines how millennials have arrived at this point of burnout, including how burnout affects the way we work, parent and socialise. Utilising a blend of sociohistorical framework, original interviews, and detailed analysis, this book about burnout offers a look at the lives of this much-maligned generation and the people trying to understand them. 

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The Burnout – Sophie Kinsella

Sasha has had it. She has hit a wall. Armed with good intentions, she heads to the seaside resort she loved as a child. But it’s the off-season, the hotel is in a dilapidated shambles, and she has to share the beach with the only other customer, a grumpy guy named Finn, who seems as stressed as Sasha. How can she commune with nature when he’s sitting on her favourite rock, watching her? Nor can they agree on how best to alleviate their burnout. 

When curious messages, seemingly addressed to Sasha and Finn, begin to appear on the beach, the two are forced to talk – about everything. How did they get so burned out? Can either of them remember something they used to love? And the question they try and fail to ignore: what does the energy between them – flaring even in the face of their bone-deep exhaustion – signify? 

Rest Is Resistance – Tricia Hersey

Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine-level pace of work. Our worth does not need to reside in how much we produce, especially for a system that exploits and dehumanises us. Rest becomes an act of resistance and reclaiming of power because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism. 

From the founder and creator of The Nap Ministry, Rest Is Resistance is a battle cry, a guidebook, a map for a movement, and a field guide for the weary and hopeful. It is rooted in spiritual energy and centred in black liberation, womanism, somatics and Afroturism. One of the best books about burnout, this is an empowering call to action and manifesto for those looking to be liberated from the grip of Grind Culture. 

This Is Going To Hurt – Adam Kay

Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking metre earns more than you do. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends. 

Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying, and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn’t – about life on and off the hospital ward. 

Severance – Ling Ma

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger, NY Ghost. 

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re travelling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

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Help Wanted – Adelle Waldman

At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. 

A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human depiction of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living. 

Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkeman

No one needs reminding there isn’t enough time. The sense of anxiety and hurry has grown more and more intense in recent times, but still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks, the equivalent of living for eighty years. 

Drawing on insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachings, Oliver Burkeman delivers a funny, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Four Thousand Weeks teaches us how to embrace finitude and how to change the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time. 

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