WHY SLEEP? –
Mar. 5, 2026 – “I am burnt out. All the mental health deteriorating that I used to scoff at is real, miserable, scary, and dangerous.”
When OpenAI researcher Hieu Pham shared those words while stepping away, they struck a nerve across the tech world, not because burnout is rare, but because it’s widespread and often minimized … Burnout rarely begins with collapse, it starts subtly, with decision fatigue, detachment, and reduced clarity, early signs that your nervous system is overloaded. And burnout is not black and white – you have it or you don’t. There are degrees of burnout and thus many simply work harder when it impairs their performance. It’s not a character flaw but a misalignment between sustained demands and human capacity, and left unaddressed, it erodes both health and performance.
