I missed the memo. My body sent it months before I finally paid attention.
It started with headaches. Not dramatic migraines. The dull, persistent kind, setting in around 2pm and not leaving. I told myself it was dehydration. Or too much screen time. I bought a new monitor stand and adjusted my chair.
Then came the sleep changes. I'd drop off fine, wake at 3am, and lie there with my mind already running meetings. Not anxious thoughts. Actual work thoughts. My brain had decided sleep was optional.
The coffee stopped working. I don't mean it lost its kick. I mean I'd finish a second cup and feel... nothing. The same flat. The same tired.
My appetite went strange. Some days I forgot to eat until 3pm. Other days I ate without being hungry, almost compulsively, as if food were a comfort I hadn't consciously decided I needed.
None of this felt dramatic. I wasn't lying on the floor unable to move. I was functioning. I was shipping. I was in meetings, writing proposals, managing teams. I was doing the job.
What I was not doing was reading the signals my body had been sending for months.
The Body Starts Talking Early
The Cleveland Clinic describes burnout as progressing through five distinct stages. The earliest isn't obvious. Motivation is high, you're optimistic, you're overcommitted but you don't notice it yet.
By stage two, the body starts to send signals. Not loud ones. Subtle ones. Fatigue not lifting after a good night's sleep. Small changes in how food tastes or whether you want it at all. Tension in the shoulders. Recurring headaches.
Most people I know in tech are good at rationalizing these things away.
"I'm tired. It was a big quarter." "My back always does this when I sit too long." "I've always been a bad sleeper."
These aren't purely psychological rationalizations. They're physically plausible. Which is exactly why we get away with ignoring them for so long.
The signals keep arriving. We keep filing them away.
Why We Miss It
According to Forbes in 2025, 66% of workers are experiencing job burnout. Two thirds. And yet the dominant culture in most workplaces, especially in tech and leadership, still treats exhaustion as a credential.
We wear the late nights. We wear the skipped lunches. We compete, sometimes without realising it, on who is most sacrificed to the work.
In this environment, the physical warning signs get reframed. Headaches become "it's a tough week." Sleep disruption becomes "I've always been like this." Loss of appetite becomes "I've been too busy to think about eating," which somehow reads as dedication rather than a red flag.
I did this for years. I am not proud of it.
The American Psychological Association defines burnout as "physical, emotional or mental exhaustion, accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance and negative attitudes." Not existential crisis. Not dramatic collapse. Exhaustion. Decreased motivation. Negative attitudes.
These sneak up so slowly you don't notice the change.
What the Body Says
Here are the physical signals I've learned to pay attention to, in myself and in people I manage.
Sleep changes. Not necessarily insomnia. It's sleep not restoring. You sleep eight hours and wake feeling like you slept four. Or you wake early with your mind already at full speed. The body has stopped recovering during sleep.
The afternoon headache. A persistent, low-grade pressure arriving in the early afternoon, reliably, day after day. Your body is reporting something about your cortisol levels and stress load. Not dehydration.
Appetite shifts. Forgetting to eat, or eating more than usual without hunger, or craving food purely for comfort. Stress disrupts the hormones regulating hunger. What reads as "I've been busy" or "I've been stress-eating" is worth taking seriously.
Frequent illness. Getting sick more often than usual. Colds taking longer to clear. A body under chronic stress has a compromised immune response. Three colds in six months is data.
Persistent tension. Shoulders staying raised. A jaw tight when you wake in the morning. A back aching for weeks. Chronic stress lives in the muscles.
None of these are one-off symptoms. The keyword is chronic. A single bad week doesn't mean burnout. The same headache for three weeks in a row means something.
Why the Mind Lies and the Body Doesn't
Here's the thing I've come to believe: my mental state will lie to me.
I'll convince myself I'm fine because I'm still performing. I'll tell myself the work is important and I'm needed and this is what the job requires. The psychological defence mechanisms are sophisticated. I've watched myself do this, and I've watched others do it, and it's genuinely hard to break through.
My body is less sophisticated. It doesn't have a narrative. It's not trying to protect my ego or keep me employed. It's reporting what's happening.
There's a reason the Cleveland Clinic model has physical symptoms showing up at stage two and three, while full conscious acknowledgement of burnout often doesn't arrive until stage four or five. The body is always ahead. The mind is catching up.
When I finally paid attention to those afternoon headaches, the sleep problems, the appetite changes, I went back and counted. They'd been present for about four months. I'd been explaining them away for four months.
What I Do Differently Now
I take physical symptoms seriously before I take my mental state seriously. Not instead of. Before.
When the afternoon headaches come back, I treat them as a signal, not a nuisance. When sleep goes wrong for more than a few days, I stop looking for external causes and start asking what's going on at work.
I also track it. I keep a note on my phone. When a physical symptom appears, I log it. Headache Monday. Poor sleep Tuesday through Thursday. Left shoulder tight all week. When I look back at the note after two weeks, patterns appear I would otherwise rationalise away in real time.
It's not glamorous. It doesn't scale to a leadership framework. It's paying attention to data your body is already generating, and taking it seriously.
I've also learned to ask the people around me. Not "are you okay?" which gets a reflexive "yes, fine." I ask "how's your sleep been?" or "are you getting proper lunch breaks?" Those questions get real answers.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If you've had a headache three days this week... when did those start? And what was happening at work around then?
If your sleep has been off for a month, same question.
If you keep getting sick, same question.
You don't need a diagnosis. You need to take the question seriously rather than filing the symptoms away as normal.
Your body has been sending the memo. The question is whether you're reading it.
I write about leadership and what makes workplaces better or worse at Step It Up HR. If this topic connects with something you're seeing in your team, the conversation continues there.