Sarah Oelschig is the author of the new book Unburned: A Slightly Messy, Mostly Honest Guide to Life After Burnout. She is also a coach and a HR director, and she lives in Tennessee.
Q: What inspired you to write Unburned?
A: Honestly, survival instinct. Midway through 2022, I found myself sitting in a Zoom meeting after everyone else had left, hands hovering over the keyboard, completely unable to remember what I was supposed to do next. My lunch that day was Diet Coke, popcorn, and Junior Mints, and I'd been snapping at my daughters and communicating with my husband exclusively in logistics.
I didn't recognize myself anymore. I'd spent my career helping other people navigate burnout (I'm a People Operations leader, it's literally my job), and I still managed to miss it in myself until I was well past the point of no return.
I wrote Unburned because I couldn't find the book I actually needed when I was in it. Most burnout content told me to do yoga and drink more water. I needed someone to tell me the truth about what was happening and what might actually help.
Q: How was the title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The title came from thinking about what recovery actually is and what it isn't. Most people assume that healing from burnout means becoming a new, optimized, better-rested version of yourself.
What I found, and what the research supports, is that recovery is less about transformation and more about reclamation. You're not building something new from the ashes. You're finding out what didn't burn and what's still there underneath everything that got scorched.
Unburned is about that. The parts of you that survived. The things that were always yours, waiting quietly while you were too depleted to reach for them.
Q: What are some of the major causes of burnout today?
A: The World Health Organization defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon – chronic workplace stress that hasn't been successfully managed. I think that's true and incomplete.
As of 2024, 44 percent of U.S. employees report feeling burned out, but so do 50 percent of K-12 teachers, 65 percent of working parents, and 42 percent of healthcare workers.
These aren't people who failed at self-care. They're people living under compounding demands: professional, caregiving, relational, financial, without adequate recovery time, support, or the permission to say no before things get critical.
The bigger cultural culprit is the conflation of availability with value. We've built workplaces and lives that treat exhaustion as a credential, and then we're surprised when people run out of road.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Writing it was its own form of recovery, which I did not anticipate. There's something clarifying about having to put language to something you lived through. It forces you to see the shape of it.
I also had to reckon with the fact that I wasn't entirely on the other side of burnout while I was writing it. I took the self-assessment I developed for Chapter 1 and scored a 35 out of 50. That was humbling in a useful way.
As for what I hope readers take away: I want them to finish it and feel less alone, and more importantly, less broken. Burnout makes you forget yourself. The book is an invitation to look again. Not to become someone new, but to reclaim the person who was always in there, buried under a few too many years of putting everything else first.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm running workshops based on the book: a one-hour virtual session for the general public, and a separate workshop for coaches on recognizing and working with burnout in their clients.
I'm also developing articles for publications like Wellbeing Magazine, pulling content from the book's chapters and making it accessible to people who might not know yet that they need it.
The writing continues on Substack, where the newsletter has become a real conversation with readers about what burnout recovery looks like in practice, not just in theory.
The short version: I'm finding out what a book becomes after it exists in the world, which is different and stranger and more interesting than writing it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just that burnout is not a productivity problem. It's not fixed by a better morning routine or a journaling practice or, with the greatest respect, yoga. It's what happens when a person has been running at full capacity for too long without enough recovery, recognition, or permission to be human.
The research on what actually helps is quieter and smaller than the wellness industry would like: one honest conversation, one thing reclaimed, one week where you take something off your plate instead of adding to it.
I wrote Unburned because I think people deserve the honest version, not the optimized one, and because "you're not broken, you're just buried" is something I needed someone to say to me, and nobody did.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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