Burnout Is Not a Time Management Problem
Eight Day from Hildegard of Bingen ((Twelve Days of Christmas Gift Series)
Today, on Day 8 of the 12 Gifts of Christian Theology, we arrive at a voice that speaks directly to modern exhaustion. Most people think burnout is a modern problem. Hildegard of Bingen would disagree. Nearly nine hundred years ago, she wrote about exhaustion, numbness, and what happens when life stops flowing inside a person.
Hildegard spent much of her life exhausted and in pain. She would collapse for days, unable to move, overwhelmed by strange light and pressure in her body. Yet from that weakness, she kept writing. She believed something real was pressing in on her, and if she ignored it, she would wither inside.
Hildegard’s core insight is easy to miss but hard to forget. She says life dries out when it gets disconnected. She believed God did not live far away in ideas or rules but moved through the world like breath through lungs. When people lose touch with that flow, they feel it first in their bodies — fatigue, restlessness, numbness, anxiety. She called true spiritual life viriditas, which simply means vitality or greenness. Life that is still alive.
This is the gift Hildegard gives us. A way to understand burnout before we had a word for it. She didn’t separate faith from the body or thought from feeling. If your work drains you, your beliefs feel hollow, and your days blur together, she will say that something essential is blocked. Faith, for her, was not about having better arguments. It was about restoring circulation inside a person, and between people and the world.
Before we continue on to why it matters, leave a comment: have you tried fixing burnout with time and still felt empty?
