How can I tell if my tiredness is burnout or just needing more sleep?

There's a real difference, and your body knows. Burnout is exhaustion that sleep alone doesn't fix—it's a depletion that runs deeper, often tied to how you're living and what you're carrying. I've sat with thousands of people, and burnout has a particular quality: you wake tired, your body feels heavy even after rest, and there's often a subtle numbness underneath. True tiredness responds to sleep. Burnout responds to *how* you live. When I was teaching, I noticed burnout showed up as a kind of resignation—the body stops cooperating not because it's tired, but because it's protecting itself from unsustainable pace. Start noticing: After a full night's sleep, do you feel restored? Or do you feel the same weight? Does your body feel tight, resistant, numb? Do small tasks feel impossibly heavy? Those are signs your nervous system is asking for something deeper than rest—it's asking for a change in the rhythm itself. Burnout is your body's honest feedback that something in how you're living needs to shift. Not judgment. Not weakness. Just truth. Listen to that.