Do I need to quit, or is four weeks off enough when the same manager will still be there? Back At Work

Went back into the same conditions and crashed again in five months. What I'd do differently: I treated the return as a personal resilience project — better boundaries, better sleep, better me — when the actual variables were headcount and one manager's behaviour, neither of which I controlled. Rest fixes you. It does not fix the job. If nothing about the job is changing, plan the return as a bridge to leaving rather than as the solution.

Get the return conditions agreed before you go back, in writing, with someone above your manager or HR in the room. Reduced hours for a defined period, no reassignment after 4pm, and an actual answer about the two vacancies. Not because all of it will be honoured, but because when it isn't you have a document to point at instead of a feeling. I skipped this and spent four months arguing about what had supposedly been said.

Job hunting while exhausted: two applications a week, maximum, and only for things you'd genuinely take. I tried twenty a week and produced nothing usable for a month. Two good ones a week is twenty-six over a quarter, which is a real search, and it's a search you can actually sustain in the state you're in.

The 6pm reassignment is a specific fixable behaviour and worth naming as one. Vague conversations about 'workload' go nowhere. 'Work is being reassigned to me after 6pm and I need that to stop' is something a manager's manager has to actually respond to, and it's the only one of your problems that doesn't need budget to fix.

Whatever you decide, don't decide it in week one of the leave. I made a dramatic decision on day four of mine and un-made it on day twenty. For the first ten days you are not the person who should be choosing anything permanent.

Whether those two vacancies get filled is the actual answer to your question, and you should ask directly for a date. If nobody will give you one, that's an answer too, and it's the one you needed before you booked the return.