Louise set herself two New Year’s resolutions for 2019: to start yoga, and to keep a journal. She did better than most people, sticking to both for five months. About six weeks ago, however, she recognised something was off. “During May, I noticed all I kept writing was how lethargic, below average or ill I was feeling.”

Writing in her journal in the first week of June, the 30-year-old from Nottinghamshire wondered if hitting the six-month mark and “the downwards slope to winter” was taking its toll. “I was ready to brush it off as irrational,” she said, “until I saw this.”

“This” was a Guardian callout on “mid-year burnout”, asking readers to assess their moods and energy levels at this point in 2019 – were they tracking upwards with the mercury? Or were the longer, warmer days not having the positive impact they usually did?

It was undeniably, as one reader said, “a self-selecting sample answering a leading question” – but many more saw the words: “Could you be suffering from mid-year burnout?” and responded with an unequivocal yes. Their responses, mostly submitted on condition of anonymity, told of sleep disrupted by lighter evenings, of unusually bad hay fever, of illnesses still lingering after months.

Readers wrote of feeling as if they could fall asleep standing up, of waking with a racing heart or clouded mind, of having lost their energy, appetite or libido. They felt stretched too thin, in and out of work. They would go on holiday and spend all day in bed – or come back from holiday and find the positive effects gone after a couple of days. They were regularly surprised to find themselves irritable or tearful. Many said it was as if the joy had been sucked from life.

There is some psychological significance to the midway point of the year, as a logical opportunity to take stock

Some were people whose existence was threatened – by debt, poor physical and mental health, underemployment, austerity, hate crimes or insecure work and housing. But even those who should have been thriving, or at least broadly fine, reported an apparent groundswell of malaise.

For every reader who scoffed at the premise of mid-year burnout (“a trendy tag for tiredness. What the hell has the calendar got to do with this?”), there were many like Charlotte, a 47-year-old from East Sussex. “I wake up in the morning and think, did I get drunk last night?” she wrote. “And then I remember, no, this is just what normal feels like now. I’m just tired and moody all the time.”

I understood, because I felt the same way. Summer was typically the season when everything just flowed, when longer days and warmer nights seemed to make it easier to balance life and work, while making the life part effortlessly more fun.

Not this year, though. This year Lana Del Rey’s seven-year-old Summertime Sadness re-entered the US iTunes chart (“Is everyone OK?” fretted a viral tweet). Though I love my job, have no children or mortgage, am in good health and have taken regular holidays, by June it felt as if I was already out of fuel when I thought I’d only just stopped to fill up. The thought of another six months of running on empty seemed both impossible and inevitable.

Gina, 33, from Kent, knew just how I felt. “The weekends don’t seem to bring respite at the moment,” she wrote. She and her husband were both “unusually tired and in need of a holiday this year”, despite a good work-life balance and holiday allowance. “I don’t think you would know from looking at us that we feel burned out – we are very active, busy people, with wholesome leisure activities and an active social life. But it all feels like too much.”

There were obvious, numerous and very real reasons why people might be struggling. This was different (and, of course, incomparable, in terms of stakes or urgency): fatigue, felt both at a gut and bodily level, and in the atmosphere. Rob, 53, from The Hague, described himself standing in the shower each morning, yawning. He ached to take some time off, “to do nothing but just be”. “It’s like I lifted my head and it’s June already – how did that happen? It was Christmas a few weeks ago, wasn’t it?”

There is some psychological significance to the midway point of the year, as a logical opportunity to take stock. People may be reminded of the optimism that they felt in the new year, or the goals that they set and are now no closer to achieving. “I think all the prospects of possible change die down, and it just becomes a slog towards the end so you can start afresh,” said Louise.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Some readers attributed their low mood and energy levels to the news cycle.’ Photograph: Klubovy/Getty Images

Parents (and teachers) find themselves beset with demands for end-of-term events such as sports days and performances. “It is like a race to get to the finish line at home and work,” said a 42-year-old mother of two working in higher education in Worcester. “It is worse than December by some distance as there is only a long summer of juggling childcare and work commitments as a reward.”

As in the runup to Christmas, social calendars also tend to fill up in summer – and the assumption of a lighter workload and a break is not always borne out. “It seems that it’s not only the onslaught of work, with various people off on holidays and clients wanting everything, even on a Sunday, but the birthdays, parties, gigs, all at once,” said Robert, 35, from Manchester. “It sounds like I’m being ungrateful. I’m not – I’m just utterly drained.”

Chris, 53, from Hampshire, had been “alarmed and a bit puzzled” by his lack of energy, even though he ate well and liked his job. He had been thinking of going to see his GP. Many readers did reach for a medical explanation. An early start to pollen season (confirmed by the Met Office) had caused hay fever sufferers – thought to number up to 30% of adults in the UK – to experience symptoms earlier in the year than usual. The greater light, heat and humidity could also disrupt sleep and body clocks, increasing tiredness and irritability.

Some readers floated the possibility of seasonal affective disorder, said to affect around 6% of the UK population. Though it is typically associated with autumn and winter, there is a summertime variant with similar depressive symptoms, when too much sunlight results in reduced melatonin production, affecting the body’s circadian rhythm. Joanne, 37, from Surrey, likened it to “walking through treacle … like a low-level flu that only goes away mid-September”.

Other readers attributed their low mood and energy levels to the news cycle. Jan, 38, from Edinburgh, said the expectations of picnics, barbecues and socialising were “emotionally incongruous” with the climate emergency, Trump, the possibility of a no-deal Brexit and “the Tory leadership nonsense”: “This year more than ever, I want to hide from the world.”

Many readers were holding out for autumn, winter, September, November, Christmas – a point in the not-too-distant future when this low ebb would pass, like bad weather. I thought I understood why. It was the same reason that I’d classified my own desperation as being of the mid-year. It was that the alternative was too grim to consider: that this threadbare feeling wasn’t seasonal, tied to longer, warmer days – but our new basal temperature.

But Dr Natasha Bijlani, a consultant psychiatrist at the Priory hospital in Roehampton, south-west London, says that is exactly right. “I am sceptical about there being such a thing as mid-year burnout. We do know that there are high levels of burnout in our society in general; I think it’s reaching epidemic levels. If you asked people the question in April or September, you could say it was the three-quarter-year burnout.”

That doesn’t dismiss the issue; rather, it casts it as catastrophic. Any discussion of burnout is valuable when so many people are suffering in silence, says Bijlani. “It allows people to be aware of all the time, not just in the middle of the year.”

How burnout became a sinister and insidious epidemic Read more

The World Health Organization clarified in May that it does not consider burnout a medical issue; rather, it understands it to be an “occupational phenomenon” resulting from chronic and unmanaged workplace stress. It “should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life”.

Definitions serve a purpose – especially when classification as a medical condition paves the way for treatment by medication. But for many, the suggestion that feelings about work can be restricted to “the occupational context” will provoke hollow laughter.

Readers wrote, with no small desperation, of the impossibility of keeping their job separate from other areas of their life. A 38-year-old public servant said her husband was supportive, their jobs were rewarding and meaningful, their four children “thriving” – but she was hanging on by a thread. “My husband is exhausted with work too, and every day we say, ‘We can do this – just keep swimming.’ Some days it feels like everything is in its place and this is working; other days – like today – it feels like the wheels are coming off.”

The fix is not as straightforward as taking time off when that can create more work in the leadup, and another pile on your return (while those who remain take up the slack). Londoner Claire, 35, used to work 60-hour weeks, only able to catch up on sleep and laundry at the weekend. “It always got worse in summer – the bosses would take the full six weeks off work and come back all refreshed, while my ‘holiday’ was the August bank holiday weekend, when I’d go to visit family and I’d crash out from exhaustion.”

Bijlani sees only the most severe cases of burnout at the Priory, but she lays the blame with a culture that frames overwork as the norm, and the technology that facilitates it. She urges people to observe strict limits on work, and to put themselves first: if that sounds indulgent, she says, it’s only more evidence of the ridiculous state we’re in. Work-life balance should be for everyone, not just those at the tops of their fields. “I’ve had people come in and say, ‘It’s all right for the CEO to do that, but I can’t,’” says Bijlani. “It needs to filter down.”

Siobhan Murray, a resilience coach, psychotherapist and author of The Burnout Solution, says the pressure is built into society – from millennials who have had their worth eroded by competitive but unpaid internships and unstable work (“By the time they’re into their late 20s, they’re already burned out”) to thirtysomethings racing to achieve the “bizarre goal” of retiring by 40.

Others took on more obligations, such as caring for their elderly parents, without thinking to let go of others, only realising they were overcommitted when they reached breaking point. Of Murray’s 12 current clients, more than half had been signed off work with burnout on their doctors’ orders – some for as long as two months. “There are degrees of burnout,” she says, “and the average Guardian reader isn’t necessarily at that high end where they’re being signed off or going to the Priory – but they could fast be approaching it.”

The discovery that a long-awaited getaway may not be as restorative as you had hoped can be a dismal wake-up call. Shorter, more regular holidays throughout the year can help – she suggests taking a week off every three months.

We can dream of the introduction of a universal basic income or four-day working week – but for as long as burnout is the baseline of society, Murray says individuals must be realistic about the demands on their time. She recommends a regular “life audit”, reassessing commitments or goals to prioritise those that matter. “You can’t hit a gym class in the morning and be a parent and travel with your job and see your friends because there are not enough hours in the day. We spring clean our houses; we have to get into the habit of doing that with our selves and our lives.”

A more balanced schedule – grounded in individual priorities and realistic expectations, and protected against every attempt to undermine it – may enable us to feel more in control of our lives, says Murray. “It’s about being able to get into bed every night and say: ‘OK, this didn’t work, but this did, so you know what, I did a good job today.’” More openness about the pressures that many of us are under can help us realise that we are not alone, and seek help when we reach breaking point. “There’s a sense of personal failing to burnout, but it’s not,” says Murray. “Sometimes we just need to be able to say: ‘I’m not coping.’”

The people who have successfully safeguarded themselves against burnout have learned to go easy on themselves, and they have defined personal boundaries that they defend against everything the world is going to throw at them. “I can guarantee that those are not people who are never going to get burned out and who just have it all sorted,” says Murray. “They’re the ones who have actually experienced it, and know what they have to pull back on in order to be able to live.” And not just until the autumn.

All names except Murray and Bijlani have been changed