My client Julia* confided recently how tired and irritable she’s feeling all the time. Her toddler’s sleep schedule is disrupted thanks to a recent cold, and combined with the demands of hockey and gymnastics from her two older children, she “just can’t catch my breath.”

In addition to working full time, in her downtime, she’s on childcare, cooking, and cleaning duties, and her husband’s shift schedule means that she’s on her own much of the time with her children. She’s doing far too much, and on the rare evenings when she can give herself a solid six hours of sleep, she still wakes up tired.

It’s a tough time of year. It’s cold and dreary. Many of us have gone weeks without sunlight. We wake up in the dark, and before when know it, it’s dark again. It’s common to feel the nudge of the all too familiar winter blahs: that feeling of lethargy, fatigue, and the strong desire to cancel plans and stay under a blanket until we feel the sweet relief of March.

For Julia, it’s more than that. She’s in the midst of burnout, a type of fatigue that results from extreme emotional, physical, and mental stress over a prolonged period of time. Burnout is not yet a medical term, and it is not listed on the DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the authoritative handbook of mental illnesses used by practitioners), but it is very, very real.

Burnout is often associated with our workplace and job, and many recognize it as a productivity industry risk. Employees may become withdrawn, negative, tired, and may not be able to perform their jobs. Employers are starting to recognize the importance of managing burnout, with wellness programs and a focus on mental health, which is an encouraging sign.

However, Julia’s burnout isn’t from her workplace. Her burnout is much more difficult to treat, as her constant stressors come from every aspect of her life. It seems, with the demands of her three children and lack of support from her husband, she needs to do everything. Worst of all, she doesn’t know a way out.

Psychologist and author Dr. Jacinta Jimenez’s book, The Burnout Fix, discusses this very issue. Burnout is not relegated to work only, and many of us – women, not surprisingly, are particularly susceptible – do not understand what’s happening until it’s too late. Awareness is the first step and one of her suggestions involves scaling our stress on a barometer from 1 to 10, where 1 to 3 is our low-stress zone, 8 to 10 is high stress, and our sweet spot is between 4 and 7 (what she describes as a stretch zone). It is here where resilience is built – striving, but not too hard, keeping our health in mind, so we can metaphorically run a marathon, not a sprint.

When asked, the idea of scaling back to 4 to 7 seems impossible for Julia. She’s been giving 100 percent to so many people in her life, giving only 70 percent feels like failing. To her credit though, she’s listening and will try to implement some balance into her overstretched life.