‘A break restores you; a pause rewires you’: Ex Zomato exec’s burnout post goes viral

A Gurugram-based professional’s thoughts on burnout have resonated widely online after he shared how years of overwork taught him that true healing comes not from a ‘break’ but from a ‘pause’.

In his now-viral LinkedIn post, Mridul Anand, a former Zomato employee and IIM Calcutta alumnus, wrote, “Eight years ago, I took a year off to fix my burnout. But six months after I came back, I found myself again. It turns out I was fixing the wrong thing.”

Anand said his burnout had been “build-up for years,” driven by the belief that effort always equals growth. “If I just tried a little harder, I would get over it. But the overflowing calendar, the fog in my head, and the tension in my relationships finally flared up,” he wrote.

When he finally took time off, he called it a “pause” rather than a break — a decision he thought would turn things around. “At the time, ‘breaks’ were viewed with suspicion, so I found my own word for it – ‘hiatus’,” he said. During that period, he traveled, read, meditated and focused on health, but the fatigue returned within months.

“This crash restored me to factory settings, but the operating system remained the same,” Anand admitted. “A break gives you distance from the experience. A pause gives you perspective within it. One relaxes you, the other redirects you.”

He noted that many professionals today deal with downtime with the pressure to make it count. “Breaks work beautifully if what you’re looking for is to recharge your batteries,” he said. “But if you are going through a deeper transition in your career or life, you may need to ‘pause’.”

Anand defined pausing as a process of self-reflection rather than escape. “The cessation in solitude, in silence, in sincere attention occurs when you stop changing the scene and begin to change your relationship to it,” he wrote, crediting meditation with helping him “befriend the mind” rather than trying to control it.

The post attracted hundreds of responses from professionals who resonated with its message. One user wrote: “This distinction between a break and a pause is nice. Most people try to ‘fix’ burnout by walking away, not realizing they are carrying the same operating system with them again.” Another said: “A break restores energy, but a pause reconnects perspective.”

A third user said, “So relatable! In the last 2 years I’ve taken a 6 month break. Reading this, I can seriously claim, the second was definitely a pause. Thanks for sharing this, same lineage kinda makes it even more relatable 😅”