If you've hit your 40s, 50s or 60s and feel constantly drained, the problem may not be your calendar — it could be the story you tell about yourself. That's the argument from Dr Anna Schaffner, a therapist and author of The Story Solution, who says most burnout in midlife traces back to a small handful of false beliefs we've been carrying around for decades.
According to Schaffner, her clients almost all run variations of the same inner scripts: "I'm stupid", "I'm ugly", "I'm a bad person", or the belief that other people won't ever like them. These ideas usually take root in childhood — a harsh teacher, school bullying, a critical ex-partner — and by midlife they quietly eat up most of our mental energy. As she puts it, all of it gets wasted in an inner psychological war, leaving nothing for actually engaging with the world. Even people who tell themselves the opposite story — that they're superior to everyone — end up burnt out, because living in constant contradiction with reality is exhausting too.
Her suggested fix starts with becoming an observer of your own mind: notice the story playing, without getting sucked into its content. Writing the narratives down helps, because on paper you can see how cherry-picked the evidence is and how harsh your interpretations really are. Next, trace each belief back to where it started. Our brains naturally confirm what we already believe — a well-documented negative bias — so it takes deliberate effort to recall the times you actually felt confident, capable or happy. Schaffner, a clinical hypnotherapist, uses hypnosis to reactivate those resourceful memories with clients, but says you can do a version yourself: picture in detail a moment when you were thriving.
The third step is reframing. Look at the rough patches of your life the way you'd help a friend make sense of them — not by pretending nothing went wrong, but by finding kinder, more accurate explanations than "I'm the villain" or "everyone's against me". From there, the focus shifts forward: not just what you want to escape, but a genuinely compelling picture of what you want instead. Schaffner says her clients often quit bad jobs or unfulfilling relationships, but most are really after something simpler — inner peace, where your own mind stops being your harshest critic.
So why is this on a travel site? Because for many people, the long-awaited holiday is exactly when burnout shows up most clearly. If you spend your trip unable to switch off, replaying failures or scanning for slights, rest alone won't fix it — the mental habit comes with you. Schaffner's core advice is to keep practising: catch the story in action daily, check it against the facts, and adjust. She calls it working your metacognitive muscle. The next time you take time off, an emptier, kinder inner monologue might be the difference between coming back refreshed and coming back just as tired.
Story via NZ Herald Travel.