Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out

Sleep, sunlight, movement, and self-knowledge help professionals recharge before stress turns into burnout.

In accounting, exhaustion does not always look dramatic. 

Sometimes it looks like irritability. Sometimes it looks like staring at a spreadsheet that suddenly makes no sense. Sometimes it looks like mental fog, poor focus, a mild headache, or the sense that even small decisions take too much effort. 

In the latest episode of Accounting ARC, hosts Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP; and Liz Mason, CPA, take on a subject that lands close to home for many professionals, especially during demanding stretches of work: how to recharge when the pace is relentless and the pressure does not let up. 

Rather than offering generic wellness advice, the trio zeroes in on something more useful: self-awareness. Their core message is that recharging is not one-size-fits-all, and professionals need to learn how to recognize their own warning signs before ordinary fatigue becomes something harder to reverse. 

Mason, CEO of High Rock Accounting, frames the topic in terms many accountants understand immediately. The profession, she says, runs on cycles of intensity, and that makes it even more important to protect both physical and mental health along the way. 

Slowing down can be the fastest way forward. Ignore the signs too long, and a bad day turns into burnout.

What follows is less a list of hacks than a conversation about patterns: what drains people, what restores them, and how professionals can become better observers of their own minds and bodies. 

For Patrick, senior product manager for Karbon and founder and educator for TB Academy, recharging begins with giving the brain relief from constant cognitive load. A person can sit at a desk all day and still end it completely depleted, he says, because mental work is work. The challenge is finding ways to quiet the noise that builds when too many projects, deadlines, and decisions pile up at once. 

Shimamoto, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, says he once assumed rest meant disengaging in the most passive way possible. But over time, he learned that simply sitting on the couch or streaming a show often leaves him more tired, not less. 

Instead, he finds that certain kinds of activity restore his energy more effectively than passive downtime. Reading, for example, gives him a different kind of mental engagement than the workday does. Volunteering also becomes a source of renewal. He describes working with teens through the Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii on public speaking and networking skills, and finding that the experience, while still effortful, gives back more energy than it takes. 

That distinction becomes one of the episode’s most useful ideas: recharging is not always about stopping. Sometimes it is about shifting into an activity that creates energy rather than draining it. 

Mason pushes that idea further and gives it a deeply personal dimension. Because she is neurodivergent and highly ADHD, she says, the same activity can energize her one day and exhaust her the next. That variability means she cannot rely on a fixed formula. She has to pay close attention to what she is feeling in the moment and respond accordingly. 

Still, she says some baseline needs remain constant. Sleep, water, sunlight, and fresh air are nonnegotiable. If those are off, everything else gets harder. 

From there, she describes a system of rules she has built through trial and error. If she feels unusually angry, she often needs to move her body and get outside. If she feels like the world is against her, she may need healthy food. If productivity collapses, she often needs to stop forcing the task in front of her and do the complete opposite for a while, whether that means reading, calling a friend, or stepping away entirely. 

Her advice is simple and surprisingly rigorous: treat recharge like an experiment. Track what you feel, what you try, and what happens next. Over time, patterns emerge. 

That theme resonates strongly with Shimamoto, who says self-awareness is essential because each person has to figure out what works for them. He also notes that even enjoyable activities can stop being restorative when there are too many of them. At one point, he says, he keeps pushing through a period of heavy activity because he enjoys the work, only to find himself burned out anyway. The lesson is that enjoyment does not eliminate the body’s need for recovery. 

Not surprisingly, sleep becomes one of the biggest topics in the episode. 

All three hosts speak about it with the kind of conviction that usually comes from learning the hard way. Mason says she creates firm sleep rules for herself, including during the years when public accounting culture tends to reward long hours and minimal rest. Patrick says he used to dismiss sleep when he was younger, but now sees it as foundational to physical health, mental clarity, and problem-solving. He points to the familiar phrase “sleep on it” and argues that it reflects a real phenomenon: the brain continues to work while the body rests. 

Recharging is not a luxury, they determine, and it is not separate from productivity. In many cases, it is what makes productivity possible. Slowing down can be the fastest way forward. Ignore the signs too long, and a bad day turns into burnout. Pay attention early, and professionals can build systems that help them recover before they hit the wall. 

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