How long did it actually take you to come back from burnout, with real numbers? Recovery Timeline

Seven months, and the honest confounding variable is that I changed jobs at month four. I have no idea how long it would have taken going back to the same team, and everyone I know personally who went back into the same conditions relapsed inside a year. That's not a study, it's about six people, but it's six out of six.

Fourteen months, and it came in steps rather than a slope. Roughly: months one to three I couldn't read anything longer than a paragraph. Months four to seven I could read but couldn't decide anything, including what to eat. Month eight was the first week I noticed I'd been fine for four days in a row. Months nine to twelve were two forward, one back, and the back steps always followed something that looked small from outside. Part-time at month thirteen. The thing nobody warned me about: the dread about messages was the very last symptom to go, months after I otherwise felt fine.

Mine was shorter, around five months, and I'm fairly sure that's because I caught it earlier and had savings. Both of those are luck, not virtue. I get uncomfortable when recovery timelines start getting read as a measure of how hard someone is trying, because the biggest variables in mine were things I didn't control.

One flag rather than advice: if four months of genuine rest has changed nothing at all, that's worth taking to a doctor rather than waiting out. Not because something is necessarily wrong, but because several very ordinary things — thyroid, iron, sleep apnoea, depression — look exactly like this from the inside and are worth ruling out. I'm not telling you what you have. I'm saying get the blood test.

Eleven months. The step change came when I stopped trying to recover productively. I had a reading list about burnout, a sleep tracker and a morning routine. Binning all three and being genuinely useless for six weeks did more than the previous four months of managed recovery had.

Not a timeline answer but relevant: the occupational health referral was the single most useful thing I did and I nearly skipped it, because I assumed it was HR wearing a lab coat. Whether that exists depends entirely on where you work — but if it does, use it, and get whatever is agreed in writing before you plan any kind of return.