Is Past Burnout Keeping You From Realizing Your Dreams?


I’ve been thinking about this idea that past burnout, from giving everything to a relationship, a job, a career, or a business, and then ultimately failing (or getting really burned out), is what keeps us from working hard toward our own dreams.

We develop this illusion that we need balance (aka, not working too hard), and we start believing the story that “going all in isn’t worth it.”

But first, nothing is promised or guaranteed. Second, you know a day full of intentional work, especially toward your dream, is more fulfilling than a day of mindless consumption.

I heard this quote years ago, and it’s still one of my favorites.

Get to work for yourself because when it’s your dream, it doesn’t drain you, it drives you. There’s an energy you can stand on.

And I know the fear, that if you work too hard you’ll miss life, miss presence, miss the people you love. But I also know this, most of us aren’t losing life to work, we’re losing it to distraction and numbing.

We lose time through:

• Eating poorly, then having to spend time recovering or tending to our sick bodies

• Staying up late, then being depleted the next day

• Mindlessly scrolling social media or binge watching shows, staying absorbed in a veg state for hours on end

• Not exercising, so we are slow to move or require time to do things because everything exhausts us

• Not meditating, praying, spending time in stillness, so our days are hijacked from anxious, compulsive energy that’s not grounded 

So yeah, if you went all in once and it didn’t work, or it burned you out: Grieve it! Forgive it! But don’t let that be the reason you never go all in for yourself.

Now onto the market!

SPX Review and Outlook

Even though we’ve seen roughly a 500-point advance since late November, most of the trade-to-trade behavior after 6,820 has been range-bound rather than trending.

From a daily perspective, price has spent the majority of the last few months oscillating within a wide but defined zone, rather than cleanly expanding higher. Excluding a handful of brief outliers above and below, most of the price action has lived between roughly 6,820 and 6,950.

Price has repeatedly rotated down into the 6,820 area and found buyers, even with the pullbacks in December, and twice in January. Each time, price undercut briefly or tested the zone, buyers stepped in, and price rotated back higher rather than accelerating lower.

So while the market has felt volatile and unsmooth, the uptrend structure still remains intact. The range has held, buyers have defended the same general area.

Now let’s drop down to the hourly to see if we can pick up any nuance for this coming week.

Since Thursday, January 22, price behavior has compressed into a tighter working range of 6,900 to 6,985. Within this zone, price has been ping-ponging with pushes higher that have stalled near the upper end, with pullbacks holding higher.

My Thoughts for the Coming Week

Midday Friday was the best entry to the upside if we are rotating back toward the top of the range. But there may still be some opportunities to the upside if we dip but hold around 6,920.

If price does rotate higher into the 6,980–7,000 zone, that area becomes an assessment point, not an automatic short. What matters there is behavior:

• Does price accept above the range and start to build?

• Or do we see rejection, upper wicks, and an inability to hold gains?

If acceptance shows up, continuation beyond the range remains possible. If rejection shows up, rotation back toward the lower end of the box stays in play.

On the downside, the range framework only starts to weaken if 6,900–6,920 fails cleanly and cannot be reclaimed. In that case, risk opens back up toward the broader daily supports, including the weekly uptrend and potentially the 6,820 area again.

Until that happens, the chart supports the idea that we’re dealing with range behavior inside a larger bullish structure, not a market that’s ready to trend aggressively in either direction.

For this week, the job isn’t to predict a breakout or breakdown, it’s to trade the edges, watch for acceptance or rejection, and stay flexible as price tells us which side of the range it wants to resolve from. For me, long ideas still make sense as range trades, but not yet as bets on immediate trend expansion.

Structure > Feelings

Stay focused, remain patient.

Emanuela