Coping with exhaustion and burnout in F&B
There was a time when I could read a dining room the way some people read a clock — tracking its rhythms instinctively, staying in motion long after my body was asking me to stop.
I came up in restaurants the way so many of us do: in intensity, in constant movement and with the belief that if I just worked harder, stayed sharper and cared more deeply, I could outrun exhaustion. Some of my happiest memories live in New York City dining rooms.
I was part of the opening team at L’Artusi in the West Village. It was here that I first believed I could do this work professionally and still feel joy. I moved on to Blue Hill and then to Blue Hill at Stone Barns. From the warmth of neighborhood Italian to world-class fine dining, where beauty lived in restraint and discipline. The shift was profound. You had to be fully present — attuned to nuance and intention. It taught me humility, endurance, and an unwavering attention to detail. Stone Barns became my first full-time wine role. The education was immense — a list that demanded curiosity and care.
Not long after, I found myself curating my own wine lists and serving one of the most coveted clienteles in the city — first at Carbone, then in other high-profile rooms where power, access and discretion shaped the rhythm of the work. I learned how to move with confidence without drawing attention and how to hold intensity without absorbing it.
From the outside, it looked like success. But that period also marked my first real exposure to the industry’s darker undercurrents — ego, hierarchy and the quiet normalization of intensity at any cost. Something in me began to tighten.
A few years later, that shift fully collapsed on itself. I entered a leadership role that, on paper, looked like growth, but in practice became psychologically and emotionally destabilizing. I started waking up already exhausted and bracing for conversations before they happened. What had once felt like ambition slowly turned into survival. I was operating far beyond my limits during a time when I was already unraveling personally. At the time, I didn’t have language for what was happening. Now I do: high-achieving burnout.
I was working at a pace that was completely unsustainable, caught in conflict between how I saw myself — capable, intuitive, trustworthy — and how my nervous system was actually functioning. That kind of conflict breeds self-doubt. And when self-doubt goes unnamed, it turns inward.
I also came to understand something fundamental about myself. I live with ADHD — something that brings real gifts like intuition, pattern recognition, creativity and the ability to perform under pressure. These qualities are often celebrated in hospitality, especially in women who are expected to hold many things at once and make it look effortless.
They also come with real challenges. Suggestibility. Over-functioning. Burning out quietly while still producing. These traits made me successful and invisible to my own limits.
Being a woman in food and beverage layered another truth on top of that. I’ve been mistaken for the hostess when I was the boss. I’ve carried enormous emotional labor. In hospitality, women are often rewarded for endurance rather than sustainability and for holding everything together at the expense of themselves. I believed that if I could just be more resilient, more available and more composed, I would earn safety, as if exhaustion were a kind of merit badge.
This past year dismantled that belief entirely. I lost my father and didn’t give myself time to grieve. I stayed in survival mode, trying to be a steady presence in a turbulent environment, believing that transparency, instinct, vulnerability and care would be enough. When it wasn’t, something cracked open in me — not in failure, but in truth.
I am a good person. I am trustworthy. I am intuitive. I am deeply relational. And still, that was not enough to sustain me in a system that doesn’t yet know how to care for the people inside it.
What cracked me open most wasn’t work.
It was love.
Stress eroded my capacity for connection and my relationship became a mirror reflecting where I was abandoning myself, where fear was driving my choices and where exhaustion had replaced joy. I realized something both simple and radical: I want to be happy. I want energy.
Presence. An environment where care flows both ways. Output without input is not leadership, it’s depletion.
My nervous system needed a reset. I am redesigning from the inside out, learning how to step out of constant overdrive and into something steadier. More honest. More whole. I’m learning to trust timing. To release fear around money. To sit with the discomfort of not knowing what’s next and to discover that there is freedom there.
Hospitality has always been about people. About relationships. About attunement. I’m still very good at those things. And now, finally, I’m learning how to include myself in the care I’ve so freely offered to others.
Meg Mina is a hospitality professional and certified sommelier.
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