It's one of the loneliest questions there is, because you can't safely ask it out loud at work and everyone outside work gives you the answer that fits their life, not yours. Quit, says the friend who quit. Stay, says the parent who stayed. Meanwhile you swing between drafting a resignation letter and talking yourself out of it, sometimes in the same hour.
The reason you can't settle it is that burnout and wrong-job feel the same from the inside: dread on Sunday night, a shorter fuse than you recognise, work following you home. But they need different responses — and getting it wrong is expensive in both directions.
"Should I quit?" is really asking: is the problem the load, or the fit? A load problem means the role could be survivable — even good — if the volume and boundaries changed. A fit problem means that even a well-run version of this job asks you to be someone you've stopped wanting to be.
Load problems respond to redesign: fewer swallowed asks, honest capacity conversations, dropping what was never yours. Fit problems don't. You can boundary a wrong job into being quieter, but not into being right.
Imagine — honestly — that you'd had three months of proper rest, and the job's worst excesses were fixed: reasonable volume, no covering for gaps, evenings your own. Would you want the work itself back?
If something in you says yes, or even maybe, you're likely looking at burnout of a role that could fit: the priority is recovery and redesign before any big move. If the honest answer is that even the repaired version leaves you cold — you're not broken, you're finished. That's not a failure of resilience. Chapters end.
Be careful with the timing of this test, though. Asked at your most depleted, everything answers no. Which is why the worst week of your life is the worst week to resign in.
Depletion narrows thinking — that's not a character flaw, it's how minds work under prolonged strain. Decisions made at the bottom of the tank optimise for escape, not direction. Plenty of women have swapped a burnout job for a different burnout job because "away" was the only compass they had.
The alternative isn't waiting forever. It's deciding on evidence gathered over weeks instead of a feeling sampled at midnight: what actually drains you day to day, what the money genuinely requires, what changed when you tried small edits, what stayed immovable. A decision built that way holds — because when the doubt comes back at 3am, you have your own receipts.
LifeEdit exists for exactly this decision. It's a 56-day programme — one small, timed session a day, five minutes, shaped to how you're arriving that day — that gathers your evidence, tests what's changeable, puts a real number on your options, and lands on stay, redesign, or leave with a plan attached. It starts with the Mirror: sixteen honest questions, free, that show which of these situations you're actually in. Most women find the result uncomfortably accurate.
Find out what you’re actually carrying — take the Mirror.
Take the free Mirror