When reaching for a book about burnout, we’re most often thinking about the most commonly known types: workplace burnout, caregiver burnout, chronic illness burnout, or even just cumulative stress and overall fatigue.

But Dr. Amy Shah’s 2022 release I'm So Effing Tired: A Proven Plan to Beat Burnout, Boost Your Energy, and Reclaim Your Life, takes a different approach, tackling persistent exhaustion through a medical lens to explore how disrupted hormones, gut health, inflammation, blood sugar regulation, and when you sleep and your exposure to sunlight can contribute to feeling perpetually drained.

In reframing chronic fatigue as burnout through physiological systems rather than psychological, situational, or values-driven friction, Dr. Shah — a double-board certified medical doctor and wellness expert — brings extensive clinical expertise and first-hand personal experience to this work, emphasizing approaches such as aligning with your circadian rhythm, incorporating periods of fasting, managing stress, especially through movement and mindset, and more.

The information presented alongside routines to follow and recipes to incorporate, is thorough and backed with both patient and personal anecdotes from the author. Ultimately, however, it raised a lingering question:

Which comes first?

Are disrupted hormones and compromised gut health causing burnout, or does burnout destabilize and exacerbate these systems? Can both be true simultaneously?

This chicken-and-egg consideration did get us thinking…

If you're burned out from caregiving, workplace pressure, or chronic illness management, will fixing your circadian rhythm help address the root cause? Or are you being tasked to optimize your biological systems while the conditions creating your burnout remain burdensome and unchanged?

Something else of note is that one of the book's greatest strengths is also its bittersweet limitation:

It's packed with information.

The first half walks readers through complex biological processes in accessible language, while the back half lays out Dr. Shah’s signature “WTF Plan” — including daily routines, meal plans, recipes, grocery lists, and more.

In all, the information is highly valuable, we just think the timing has to be right. If you’re in a pressing need for support, it’s worth considering starting with the WTF Plan to get started before circling back to the reference material and theory at the front. Otherwise, I'm So Effing Tired may land more if you're still early in your fatigue journey, in recovery with capacity to implement routine changes, or looking for preventative strategies.

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I'm So Effing Tired: A Proven Plan to Beat Burnout, Boost Your Energy, and Reclaim Your Life

by Dr. Amy Shah, MD

Published March 2021

via Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing