Do the people you mentor also do Buddhism and meditation? What did they do that helped (or did they just never recover)?
One way to recover is to just do nothing. The resources will start to accumulate back but it'very slow.
One thing that worked for me was multivitamins. I could see a change in a week.
Not sure if it was proper burnout or something else (bad diet) though. The simptoms look the same.
My suggestion to most is to start with Gil as a teacher -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Fronsdal
He has an enormous amount of recorded teachings and does a daily mediation at 7am PST on YouTube. I would start with this:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq_lRuaNj50Nm-SRxYPFSTyTt...
Regarding recovery I think most people do, but it does require dramatically changing your lifestyle in some way. You’re there mostly due to how you view life and your situation, as well as the situation. I think no one is ever the same and their limits in life are closer than before. You have to be more gentle with yourself, and more aware of yourself. A lot of vipassana meditation is learning to detach your “self,” or awareness from your thoughts and feelings and sensations and being able to observe them without becoming entangled in them. For instance I feel anxiety in my chest. By letting my thoughts and feelings be as they are but holding the tightness in my chest in awareness without judgement, the tightness eventually dissipates because it never really existed somatically. Concurrently my anxiety does as well, and I can then let the thoughts go as well as they’ve lost their power. It’s taken me two years but at this point I am fully engaged in my life, learning and loving more than I ever have all that life has to offer. I’ve got a great job at a late stage startup and switched from senior leadership roles to distinguished engineer roles.
Good luck man. Find friends too, friends are hard to engage with when burned out, but it is helpful.
I also found a lot of help in meditation and developing and practicing mindfulness. Recognising thoughts and emotions as they arise and to not identify with them was a big eye opener and relief. Just letting thoughts be or talking about it with someone when I noticed a pattern really helped. I think part of it was also processing some buried away issues.
I thought it's not burn out, but just getting older and wiser :)
Very few people over say 40-45 year old are chipper and burst with energy and enthusiasm. On the contrary, most of them are in sort of "Aikido mode", when they try to deal with whatever threats and external demands come with minimum amount of energy expended. IMO, it's a combination of just having less energy at that age, and the acquired wisdom that most things that you could be doing, aren't really worth doing.
I’ve gone through burnout and mentored a few dozen people going through it. It’s nothing to do with relaxing, or is confined to work. It’s all encompassing, has strong parallels and likely includes depression and an anxiety disorder. It has more of a sense of the inability to initiate anything rather than the inability to do nothing. Everything feels too hard, you feel too old, you see no prosperous future, and you yearn to end everything - not suicide, but to quit work, quit life, and disappear. These sounds like the appropriate mental response to unrelenting and uneasing stress to which you see no way out of. Most people suffering burn out spend an awful lot of time simply doing nothing.
However myself and the folks I’ve worked with as a mentor at work on burnout share the trait we lose the ability to identify things we enjoy - video games, music, travel, etc, lose their redeeming value and they can’t identify what music they like any more or a game they want to play. When they relax, it’s spent ruminating. To that extent maybe the articles point is true.
For me the way out was vipassana meditation and Buddhism. It taught me to master my rumination, detach myself from the stress, and discover the value of simply being rather than being someone or something. I recommend it to most people but only one or two have actually tried it.