What If Burnout Isn’t Emotional — But Physics?

No, you are not too sensitive. You are a thermodynamic overachiever.

It’s a fact that empathetic people burn out much faster in social situations, not because they’re weak or too sensitive, but because they’re thermodynamic overachievers, radiating sense into messy systems without pausing to recharge and refuel.

What if caring deeply is just applied physics?

When you worry, or replay conversations over and over, or overthink a minor inconvenience, you’re running high-energy mental simulations. Those fun movie in your head situations. No closure. You burn fuel, create tension, and generate literal heat.

Which would mean that burnout isn’t emotional. It’s an energetic depletion issue. Which would also mean that your boundaries aren’t just emotional walls or emotional safeguards. They’re conservation laws.

If caring deeply is a continuous, high-energy organizational process, then feeling depletion makes just sense.

So, how can I fix my own thermodynamics, you might ask. (You probably didn't’ ask that, but you get my point.)

Boundaries aren’t selfish. Let’s look at it differently. At its core, boundaries are how physics keep love sustainable.

Any boundaries you draw, like the ones I personally draw in relationships, in work, in my social life, aren’t emotional walls. My boundaries preserve the energy that I need to be able to extend my deeply felt care, my love, for what matters to me the most, without disintegrating. Figuratively speaking.

I imagine it’s the same for you.

Caring is Literal Energetic Work

When you care, and I mean genuinely care, your whole system shifts. Your chemistry changes, your heartbeat picks up a new rhythm, your neurons light up. You burn calories, release heat, send tiny electromagnetic ripples through the air.

Caring isn’t invisible work. It’s costly, measurable, beautifully inefficient energy at play.

The brain is actually a light-weight, just about two percent of my body weight, but it demands roughly twenty percent of my body’s total energy budget. When I focus, when I sustain caring, I’m basically running a high-powered, energy-consuming operation.

Caring isn’t abstract. It’s physics in motion, very small, invisible work with very real energetic consequences.

And I cannot indefinitely export my energy to everything and everyone else.

I have to hold some for myself.

And so do you.

Caring as Order in a Disordered World

In physics, entropy is the natural slide toward chaos, the tendency of everything to unravel, slowly but surely, without input.

You caring deeply is the interruption of that slide. When you care, you push back against disorder, against chaos. You impose shape on your surroundings, on your thoughts and relationships.

That small, human act of caring mirrors the universe’s own creative logic, the same force that pulls stars out of clouds of randomness.

You are an entropy-defying field in motion, a small, coherent knot of energy and awareness making the improbable possible.

Caring is how the universe briefly remembers what order feels like.

The Field Beyond Your Skin

If the information in your brain is physical, and if energy naturally radiates outward, then you caring deeply probably doesn’t end at your skin.

I suggest that focused attention produces really, really, really small, low-entropy fields, coherent energetic patterns, that might subtly interact with the informational reality around you.

Which would mean that your internal order might ripple outward. I’ve seen a calm person mellow out a room with tense people. I know people, who are incredibly kind, whose voices can settle the chaos surrounding them. Caring feels contagious at time. Because it is.

The Cost of Indifference

Let’s look at the other side of the coin. If attention organizes information, distraction disorganizes it.

Many of us, myself included, are sometimes too busy to care. We do want to care. But we’re busy doing stuff, not right now, we say. So we put caring off for when we think that we have the time and space and peace, which naturally rarely materializes. We’re running around, looking at screens, watching, talking, doing, proudly multi-tasking whatever needs tasking.

And, to double-down on cellphone use, every time I scatter my focus across the screen, my notifications, and fun doom scrolling, I create tiny fractures in coherence.

Individually, that’s very tiring.

Collectively, it’s chaos.

And I’ll get into our collective awareness and its results some other time…

Burnout as not just social or mental issues, but a thermodynamic one.

Too many messy situations, too little focus. Too much noise, not enough care. So once you reclaim your attention and pull back back your energy, then it becomes much more than self-care.

If you remember anything, that remember that to care wisely, is to use your energy cleanly. You can run on clean energy so to speak, which is a fun concept to focus on for just 10 seconds when you wake up.

A Practice of Coherent Caring

Before you respond, react, or try to solve someone’s problems, pause for just ten seconds.

Breathe. Let your energy gather into one spot. Then spend it to what actually matters. That small pause is physics in motion, energy organizing information. Less chaos, more intentional.

Start Paying Attention to what You Pay Attention to

Every time you think, talk, or worry, you’re spending energy.
It’s easy to forget that, I know.

So ask yourself, Is this worth my energy right now?

Your attention is like a battery, it drains faster than you think.

Check it often so you don’t run out.

If you do that long enough, caring becomes regenerative. Order feeds on itself. Coherence is the art of caring without falling apart, and it’s the calm, practiced way of staying in love with the world around you without disintegrating.

Back in 1961, physicist Rolf Landauer made a claim that information is physical. Even erasing a single bit of data releases heat, proof that information has a cost. Every small act of processing information requires energy.

Does the same law applies to us? Every thought or choice, every moment of emotional investment that we feel in our minds rearranges information and burns fuel.

The Energetic Information Hypothesis (EIH) says that attention isn’t just energy spent, it’s energy directed.

When you focus on something, a loved one, an assignment or project, a treasured memory, you don’t just use energy, you organize it.

You create patterns.

You create order out of noise.

If energy and information are two sides of the same coin, YOUR attention is the hand that flips it, over and over, turning possibility into patterns.

You’re not just observing reality, you’re helping to structure it.

Caring is the universe experiencing itself as awareness. Every focused act tightens the knot between energy, information, and consciousness.

That’s what I mean by the energetic cost of caring.

The universe invests energy in awareness because awareness is how it learns to evolve. So yes, your caring should sometimes exhaust you. You are doing cosmic work, turning chaos into pattern, randomness into meaningful outcomes. Into information.

Your exhaustion isn’t weakness. It’s proof that you’ve been participating in reality at full wattage. Never dim your light, but learn to focus it.

Rest isn’t escape.

It’s how your energy regathers to create again.

So I say care consciously and with awareness.

And remember to recharge liberally and deliberately.

Because giving something or someone attention is more than just symbolic, it’s physics.

It costs energy because it matters, and the cost itself is proof that I’m alive.

Reality Isn’t Real Until You Look at It

Why the universe might be waiting for you to notice it before it decides what to be.

The Focused HumanA. Karacay

Stay curious!