There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with being the person everyone depends on. For many high-achieving women, burnout isn't simply about having too much to do. It's also about the emotional weight of being responsible for so much, the difficulty of setting boundaries, and the patterns that keep them functioning long after they've exceeded their capacity. And sometimes, those patterns have been there for much longer than we realize.

Burnout doesn’t show up overnight. It creeps in slowly...