There’s a moment burnout stops being background noise and becomes impossible to ignore.
For me, it came after 24 years in tech.
The hours. The expectations. The endless sprint. What had once been exciting had become relentless. Every day felt like drinking from a firehose – and I couldn’t see when it would stop.
My wife and I had a plan: “Work like crazy for 10 more years, then retire!”
But deep down, I wasn’t sure I’d last another 10 years.
There was always a reason to wait. One more project. One more milestone. One more quarter.
Then COVID hit. And something shifted.
I realized:
Every time I said, “It’s not the right time”, I was gambling with time I might never have.
So we made the leap.
Left our jobs. Sold everything. Packed up the kids. Moved halfway across the world to Portugal.
Life’s all rainbows and unicorns now, right? 🌈 🦄
Sort of.
As dramatic as the decision was, it turns out the most important lessons I learned didn’t require any of it.
What I Thought Would Fix It
When you’re burnt out, your instinct is to run.
Change jobs. Change cities. Change everything. The logic feels sound: if the environment is the problem, change the environment.
I took that logic to its extreme. New country, new culture, new life.
And it helped. But not for the reasons I expected.
The geography wasn’t the cure. The decision to stop tolerating something unsustainable – that was the cure.
Which means you don’t have to sell your furniture and apply for a visa to get there.
Here’s what I actually learned – and what you can take from it without uprooting your life.
3 Lessons That Don’t Require a One-Way Ticket
1. Life follows you wherever you go.
Moving to Portugal didn’t erase the habits that burned me out. Starting my own business? The same patterns showed up real fast – the overcommitment, the difficulty switching off, the compulsion to keep going.
External change can disrupt old patterns. But it doesn’t dissolve them.
If you want things to be different, the internal work is non-negotiable. That means getting honest about why you keep saying yes to everything, why rest feels like falling behind, and what you’re actually chasing.
You can do that work in the same city, the same job, even the same desk. The unlock is doing the work.
Continuing to push through isn’t strength, it’s avoidance.
2. A shift in perspective does more than a change of scenery.
What moving abroad really gave me was a forced break from the default.
New surroundings. New pace. New people. It broke me out of autopilot and gave me space to see myself – and my habits – more clearly.
But you don’t need to hop on a flight to get there.
Perspective shifts come from disruption – and disruption doesn’t have to be dramatic. A long weekend with no screens. A conversation with someone who thinks differently. A book that challenges a belief you’ve held for years. A coach who asks the question you’ve been avoiding.
The goal is to create space between stimulus and response. To stop reacting and start choosing.
3. Community is a performance lever, not a luxury.
Work can be deeply isolating – especially as you move into senior roles. The more responsibility you carry, the fewer people you feel like you can be vulnerable with. But the more you hold things inside, the faster your energy drains.
In Portugal, I found my people. Like-minded friends. Deeper connections. A sense of belonging I hadn’t felt in years.
But it wasn’t Portugal that gave me that. It was the decision to prioritize relationships – to actually invest in them, instead of treating them as something to get to “after things calm down”.
Things don’t calm down. You have to make the space.
Find your community. Build it intentionally. Whether that’s a mentor, a peer group, or just one honest friend who’s been where you are – it matters more than you think.
The Real Lesson
I thought I needed to blow up my life to fix it.
I didn’t.
What I needed was to stop tolerating something that wasn’t working, trust myself enough to make a change, and take the lessons I’d been too busy to learn.
The extreme version of change is an option. But it’s not the only option.
If you’re feeling the early signs of burnout right now – the fatigue that sleep doesn’t fix, the work that used to excite you now just drains you, the quiet sense that something has to give – don’t wait for a breaking point.
Start with these three questions: 1) What am I tolerating that I shouldn’t be? 2) Why? 3) What would I do if I weren’t afraid?
The answers might surprise you. And unlike me, you probably won’t need a one-way ticket to find them.
