The Core-Functions Red Alarm (Burnout Triage)
Sleep, diet, exercise, play, socialisation: when the fundamentals break, your body is the scoreboard
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
A diagnostic for telling ordinary work stress apart from the burnout that requires deep intervention. Johns borrows from animal welfare: when an animal's core behaviours (diet, exercise, playfulness, socialisation, sleep) get disrupted, something is fundamentally wrong. The same test applies to humans, and it is observable and measurable, which removes the 'I didn't know' excuse.
Origin
Andy Johns' own framing, drawn from animal behaviour and from clinical literature; he explicitly points to Bessel van der Kolk's 'The Body Keeps the Score' as the underlying evidence base — the body registers what the mind is suppressing, and eventually breaks in the form of chronic disease.
Core principles
- 01Day-to-day stress is normal and survivable; disrupted core functions are a flashing red alarm
- 02The signal lives in the body, not in your self-report — you will have a good poker face long after things are bad
- 03Burnout accumulates slowly and then hits quickly (the boiling-frog dynamic), so periodic instrument checks beat introspection
- 04Physical symptoms (grinding teeth, cardiac events, chronic bad sleep) are not separate from mental health — they are its readout
How to run it
- 1
Audit the five core functions honestly
Score, for the last 90 days: sleep quality, diet, exercise, playfulness, and socialisation. These are observable and measurable — no interpretation needed.
Pro tip Use hard instruments where you have them (sleep tracker, resting heart rate, dentist visits) rather than your own sense of how you're doing.
Watch out Sustained achievers are the worst reporters of their own state. Ask a partner or close friend to score you independently.
- 2
Check the relational and physical scoreboard
Are your relationships constantly or frequently strained? Is your physical health failing you — chronic poor sleep, teeth grinding, cardiac warnings, unexplained illness? Treat each as a data point the body is reporting on your behalf.
Pro tip Read 'The Body Keeps the Score' by Bessel van der Kolk. The whole message is: when mental health presents itself, look to the body.
Watch out The temptation is to fix the symptom (dental work, sleep meds) and keep going. Johns had to have his molars and most front teeth completely redone twice from grinding and still kept running.
- 3
Classify: normal stress vs undeniable signal
If the fundamentals are intact and the stress is episodic, it is the normal tax of hard work. If two or more core functions are chronically out of whack, treat it as undeniable evidence that something detrimental to your well-being is happening right now, and stop.
Pro tip Look for the involuntary tells too: walking out of the office at 10am with your laptop in a bag, bowing out of an all-hands you were meant to lead. Those are not scheduling problems.
Watch out A single dramatic event (a health scare) is easy to sweep under the carpet and rationalise. Johns did exactly that after his heart scare at 35 and joined another startup six months later.
- 4
Act on the alarm before the body forces you to
If the alarm is red, change something structurally — do not wait for the chronic disease that van der Kolk's patients present with. This is the entry point into the truth-seeking work, not a signal to optimise your morning routine.
Watch out Waiting for the body to make the decision for you means the decision gets made under emergency conditions, at maximum cost.
In the wild
At 35, at the peak of his career, Johns had a heart scare. The cardiologist told him he was on track to be 'just another 40-some year old CEO with a broken heart.' At the same time he had years of terrible sleep behind him and had twice had to completely rebuild his teeth from stress grinding.
→ He stepped away from the Wealthfront CEO track — then swept the warning under the carpet and joined a VC firm six months later, which delayed the real reckoning by three more years and a 45-day hospitalisation.
In his late 20s at Twitter, with his career visibly ascending, Johns was hit with near-constant panic attacks, depression and severe insomnia. On multiple occasions he grabbed his laptop and quietly walked out of the office at 10am after an hour of work, and once had to invent an excuse to bow out of an all-hands he was meant to present at.
→ Nobody around him could see it — 'I had a really good poker face.' The core functions were broken years before he acted, which is exactly the failure mode this diagnostic is designed to catch.
Common mistakes
Treating the poker face as evidence you're fine
High performers are trained to present competence. That your colleagues cannot tell is a fact about your performance skill, not about your state.
Fixing the symptom and continuing
Dental reconstruction, sleep aids, a two-week holiday — each buys enough relief to keep the underlying pattern running, which is why burnout creeps up slowly and then hits all at once.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone five to seven years into a demanding tech career who wants a non-negotiable, observable test for whether their stress has crossed from normal into pathological
Not ideal for
Acute mental health crises, where the correct action is immediate professional help rather than self-triage
From the transcript
“there are day-to-day stresses that are normal and we just have to put up with you know but then there's the other stuff that's kind…”
“when their core behaviors of diet exercise playfulness socialization sleep when those things get disrupted like it's a sign that there is something going on…”
“look to the body because it's the body that is keeping the score”
From the episode
When enough is enough
Andy Johns (ex-FB, Twitter, Quora)