Nadia kept a list of everything she needed to do. She kept it in her phone, in a notebook, and in her head. The list never got shorter. Items completed were replaced immediately by items remembered. She went on holiday in August and worked from the hotel room every morning. She told her partner it was just a few emails. She told herself the same thing. By September, she was back at the office and already exhausted. By November, she was sitting in her car in the car park after work, unable to get out. She recognised, finally, what had happened. She had burned out so completely that even stopping felt like something she no longer knew how to do.

Nadia's partner took her phone one Saturday morning and put it in a drawer. Not as a punishment — as an experiment. They went to the market. They cooked lunch slowly. They sat in the garden and did nothing in particular. Nadia felt restless for the first two hours, then uncomfortable, then — gradually, unexpectedly — calm. The world had not ended. Nobody had needed her urgently. And she had been, for the first time in months, fully present in a single afternoon. She started building it in deliberately: drawers, walks, books, meals without screens. She called it her practice of learning to switch off. What she was really learning, she later understood, was how to be a person outside of her work.