The bird, the burnout, and the app

Humo began as a project to support self-awareness around burnout and work-related stress — it started after my own long stretch of burnout: deep exhaustion, a growing distance from everything, and a complete loss of balance. Looking for a way back, I went to the research — how strain builds, how it shows up in a life, and how small daily shifts change the shape of a week. Three essays from that period are still here, in the journal.

Humo began with burnout, but the underlying problem proved broader: we lack any coherent view of how our time, our body, and our personal patterns interact. So today Humo is an iOS app. It reads the calendar and health data your phone already holds — on the device, never uploaded — and lays your weeks side by side across the three layers of a life: what you did, how your body answered, and the patterns underneath. At its heart is a reflection framework that draws on Freudenberger and North's twelve-phase model of burnout, enriched with behavioural science and lived experience — adapted for personal reflection, not clinical assessment. Reflections, not tests: they sketch the map, and you decide what's true.

The bird is the mark on the app — and the shape of the loop it was built around: notice, understand, act, recover, and begin the week again.

Everything here is offered with care — one step at a time. It's not medical advice or diagnosis. It's a space to check in with yourself, understand your patterns, and begin finding your way forward.