Living My Dream, Losing Myself.

In the previous post, I left things on the impression that my professional life had finally fallen into place. I was doing well. My entrepreneurial journey was moving in the right direction. I was living independently, I had my own workspace, the beach was just a short walk away where I would go every day to clear my mind, there were beautiful cafés nearby, I was working out, and from the outside everything looked like it was going exactly as planned.

But then something strange happened.

The same symptoms I had experienced months before started coming back.

Back then, I was frustrated with agency life. I was working endlessly without getting paid fairly, so I assumed those symptoms were simply the result of overwork and frustration. This time, though, I was finally living the life I had dreamed about. So why were they coming back?

One day I was watching YouTube. I always enjoyed those "Day in the Life of an Entrepreneur" videos. They inspired me, and I often picked up useful ideas that I could apply to my own journey.

Then one creator started talking about a condition he had gone through.

As he described the symptoms, it felt like he was describing me.

Wanting to isolate yourself.

Not wanting to talk to anyone.

Not wanting to do anything at all.

Even the work you genuinely enjoy starts feeling forced because the inspiration is gone. You keep telling yourself that maybe you just need some rest. Then you rest. You rest some more. Yet no matter how much you rest, nothing improves. Somehow, the problem only gets worse.

Then he explained what was causing all of it.

He called it burnout.

I immediately stopped everything.

I needed to understand what burnout actually was.

That was the beginning of a deep rabbit hole. I spent weeks reading scientific articles, books, and research papers. The more I read, the more everything started making sense. Every list of symptoms I came across described exactly what I had been living through. Every burnout assessment I took showed a very high likelihood.

I even tried finding specialists in Morocco who focused on burnout because I wanted to understand it properly, but I couldn't find anyone whose work inspired confidence. Personally, I have never had much trust in Morocco's psychiatric system, so I continued researching it on my own.

So what exactly is burnout?

Burnout is a state of severe physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion caused by prolonged and unmanaged stress. It develops when someone spends too much time under constant pressure without enough recovery. Eventually, you become emotionally drained, lose motivation, and begin feeling disconnected from the things that once mattered to you.

Stress is often described as having too much on your plate.

Burnout feels like your plate is completely empty.

You no longer have anything left to give.

The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon with 3 main dimensions.

The first is exhaustion. You feel emotionally and physically depleted, as if you no longer have the energy to face another day.

The second is cynicism or depersonalization. You become mentally distant from your work. You feel detached, apathetic, and increasingly negative toward responsibilities that once excited you.

The third is reduced efficacy. You begin feeling ineffective. Your productivity drops, your confidence declines, and you no longer feel capable of accomplishing what used to come naturally.

Burnout is not simply the result of working long hours. It often develops because of a lack of control over your work, unclear expectations, unhealthy work environments, or carrying responsibilities for too long without enough support.

Looking back, I realized something important.

The first time this happened to me was back in 2019.

At the time, I blamed it on exhaustion and unpaid work.

But it was never just that.

It was burnout.

And burnout requires its own recovery process.

Because I never recognized it for what it was, I never treated it properly. The problem simply stayed buried beneath the surface until it returned months later in a much more severe form.

Ironically, working too much was not even the biggest reason behind my burnout.

Yes, I worked hard, but I also tried to rest whenever I could.

The real cause was something much deeper.

It was the expectations I constantly placed on myself.

Those expectations go back to many stories from my childhood that I will probably write about in future posts.

Because of experiences I had while I was still developing my sense of self, I grew up believing that I always had to perform. I always had to achieve more. My goals became bigger. My expectations became bigger. I kept chasing the next milestone without asking whether my mind was actually ready for that pace.

Deep down, I was constantly trying to prove to myself that I could accomplish anything I wanted.

Eventually, years of carrying that mindset accumulated into severe burnout.

The past five years have been a battle between me and my own mental health.

Whenever I found a recovery protocol or a treatment method that seemed promising, I committed to it completely.

But as time passed and I matured, I realized something.

The real problem was never the treatment.

The real problem was the root cause itself.

As long as I continued placing unrealistic expectations on myself, I was rebuilding the very thing I was trying to recover from.

That became one of the biggest lessons I learned, especially during Ramadan 2026, which I wrote about in another article on this blog.

There is probably no worse feeling than knowing you are capable of achieving incredible things.

You know you have potential.

You have already proven it to yourself many times.

Whenever you imagine something, you genuinely believe you can reach it because you have done difficult things before.

Yet there is one obstacle standing in your way.

You have to accept that everything has limits.

Our bodies have limits.

Our minds have limits.

Our psychological capacity has limits.

The more unrealistic our expectations become, the more our mental health pays the price.

Personally, I believe this is one of the biggest silent pandemics of our time.

We keep demanding more from ourselves than our minds were ever designed to carry.

The encouraging part is that almost every biography I have read about remarkable people throughout history mentions a period where they experienced something very similar to burnout.

In a strange way, that gave me hope.

It reminded me that even extraordinary people eventually reached their limits.

Alhamdulillah for everything.

This is simply the nature of life.

We learn through hardship far more than we ever learn through comfort.

I am grateful for every lesson.

Alhamdulillah.

May Allah grant success to all of us.