The Energy Radar: how to spot burnout before it consumes you
3 min read
Date: August 31, 2025
Author: Alexandro Trujillo
A year ago I hit a breaking point.
I had been living in Madrid for two years, trying to make my way in Europe. And even though I had studied at a well-known private university, the reality here was very different from what I had imagined.
My job barely covered the basics, while my student debt was still there, like a shadow that wouldn’t go away, taking at least a quarter of my income.
Every month was a reminder that no matter how much I worked, the money always slipped away.
My routine had become an endless loop:
- Wake up, think about everything pending
- Rush to work
- Come back tired
- Go to sleep with my mind racing
Even exercise, which should have given me energy, became another way of demanding more from myself.
The hardest part is that in the middle of all that I thought it was “normal”.
- Normal to live with a tight chest
- Normal to accept overtime
- Normal to swallow the anxiety in silence because I didn’t know how to say what was happening to me
But the truth is it wasn’t normal.
That was my biggest fear: having gotten used to a lifestyle that was burning me out and that was definitely not the path I wanted to follow.
I understood it thanks to a very simple habit: tracking my mood every day.
At first I did it without giving it much thought, just logging it in the iPhone app. After a few weeks, the pattern was brutally clear:
- From Tuesday to Friday I felt miserable
- Only on Saturdays and Sundays did I get a bit of energy back
That’s where I learned the lesson: when you don’t measure what you feel, your mind normalizes it and ignores it, even while it’s eating you up inside.
With that clarity I couldn’t fool myself anymore.
- It wasn’t laziness
- It wasn’t that I wasn’t good at what I do
- It wasn’t weakness
It was burnout.
And then came the transformation: I quit.
I decided that:
- If I wanted to earn more, I had to stop applying for junior roles
- If I wanted a change, I had to take action as soon as possible
- Rest couldn’t be a luxury at the end of the road, but the foundation of my daily life
It was the first time I understood that resting is also moving forward.
The resource: the Energy Radar
That experience is where what I now call the Energy Radar came from.
A simple tool that turns your emotional state into clear data, so you don’t ignore what you feel until it’s too late.
👉 It has three steps:
- Every day, rate your mood
- Write down one single emotion that represents how you felt
- At the end of the week, review the pattern:
- Which days did your energy crash?
- Which moments really lifted you up?
That simple log makes the invisible visible: it shows you what drains you and what recharges you, and you also get to see patterns that might be invisible day to day.
Resources
I had to hit rock bottom to realize it. You can do it sooner.
👉 Download the full Energy Radar guide here (in Spanish) and start understanding your own pattern today, before tiredness turns into burnout.
I hope it works for you. :)
