If you run a venue and something feels off, you're not the only one. Maybe you're not sleeping. Maybe you're short with the people closest to you, and you can hear yourself doing it.
I ran a restaurant and cocktail bar for ten years. We were named one of the UK's Top 50 Cocktail Bars three years running. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I burned out.
My burnout recovery didn't come from one big change. It came from five small, boring ones, done every day. This is what they were, the order I did them in, and the one realisation underneath all five that changed how I run a business.
First, how I got there. The way in tells you a lot about the way out.
## How I burned out running a bar
I came into hospitality from the outside. Before Ojo Rojo, I worked in music and events. I sketched the concept on an iPad in a hostel in Mexico, came home, and spent two years in a call centre to make it happen. So when it finally opened, and it worked, I held on to it with everything I had.
Every decision came through me. Every standard lived in my instinct. Staff with problems, suppliers with issues, customers with expectations: all of it landed on me. And I never asked for help. Asking wasn't something I even considered.
I also got very good at moving from one win to the next without letting anything land. An award, a brilliant service, a great review, and I'd already be three problems ahead before the good feeling had a chance to exist. Do that for long enough and you train yourself out of feeling good about anything.
It built quietly. At night, my brain would come alive with everything I'd pushed aside during the day. I started drinking more in the evenings to quieten it, which only made the sleep worse. I was short-tempered at home with my wife, Siobhan, and I could hear a voice saying, this isn't you.
Then came the panic attacks. The first one I kept to myself. The one that changed everything happened in the car in 2025, on the way to see friends, with Siobhan beside me. We turned around and went home, and somewhere on that drive I made the decision I should have made years earlier.
I can't do this anymore. Not tomorrow, not when things quieten down. Now.
## Where my burnout recovery started: asking for help
The first step was the hardest one for someone like me. I asked for help.
I contacted my local NHS Talking Therapies service, Steps2Wellbeing, which is free where I live. I was given a practitioner who introduced me to some CBT tools and checked in with me regularly.
If you're in the UK, your GP or your local NHS Talking Therapies service is a good place to start. If you're in the thick of it right now, that's the first thing I'd say to you. It doesn't fix everything on its own. It means you stop carrying it alone.
From there, I started making changes. None of them dramatic. All of them small enough to do on a bad day. These are the five that made the biggest difference.
## 1. Give your brain somewhere else to go
For me, that was 3D printing and painting models. Two or three hours at a time, a few times a week. Something with no connection to the business, no pressure, and no identity tied up in it.
For years my brain had been running the venue on a loop, day and night. It needed somewhere else to go, and this gave it one. It's very hard to catastrophise about Saturday's rota while you're painting the eye on a tiny figure. My nervous system finally had some space to settle.
Siobhan didn't really know what to do with the growing army of painted models appearing around the house. But she could see what it was doing for me, so they stayed.
Start this week: pick something you loved before the venue, or something you've always meant to try, that has nothing to do with the business. Put two hours in the diary for it, the same way you'd book a supplier meeting. It doesn't need to be useful. That's the point.
## 2. Take the morning back
I used to wake up and reach straight for the phone. Emails, group chats, whatever had gone wrong overnight. The day had started on everyone else's terms before I'd got out of bed.
So I protected the first part of it. Breathwork. Time with the dog. A proper cup of tea. No phone until all of that was done.
It sounds simple, and it is. But the statement it made to myself every morning, that I was in control of how my day began, was more powerful than I expected. The morning is the one time of day the business hasn't yet reached into. Most of us hand it over without noticing.
Start this week: tonight, leave your phone charging in another room. Tomorrow, do one thing for yourself before you pick it up. Ten minutes is enough to start.
## 3. Get it out of your head at night
Nights were the hardest part. So I kept a small notebook next to the bed. When I lay down and my brain kicked into overdrive, I'd roll over and write down whatever was going round in there.
Sometimes it was just the worry. Other times I followed a simple structure based on the CBT tools I'd been shown:
- The facts. What actually happened.
- The feeling. What I was feeling about it.
- The story. What my brain was attaching to it, and whether that story was catastrophising.
- In my control? What was, and what wasn't.
- One next step.
The point wasn't to solve anything at midnight. It was to show my brain that the thing had been considered and would be picked up tomorrow. Some nights I'd add to it several times before I fell asleep. But the spiral got quieter. Not straight away, and not completely, but enough.
Start tonight: put a notebook and pen by your bed. When the thoughts arrive, write the worry down and add one line underneath: picked up tomorrow.
## 4. Give the voice a name
The journal got the thoughts out of my head. The next step was getting some distance from the voice producing them. So I named it Frank, after the Punisher, because I'm a big Marvel comics fan.
When my brain started running the worst-case scenarios on a loop, I'd say: not now, Frank. It's time to rest.
I know how that sounds. But naming it did something nothing else had managed. It put a gap between me and the voice. It wasn't me thinking those things anymore. It was Frank, and Frank could wait until morning.
Start this week: give your inner critic a name. A slightly ridiculous one helps. Next time it starts up, say not now, and notice the gap that opens.
## 5. Decide where your hours go
Once the mornings and nights were steadier, I could finally look at the whole week. I borrowed an idea from Steven Bartlett. There are 24 hours in a day. Take eight for sleep and you've got sixteen left. Think of those sixteen as a roulette wheel. Where are you putting your chips?
For years, almost every chip I had was on one number: the business. And putting everything on one number doesn't make the business stronger. It makes you more fragile, because when that number has a bad night, so do you.
So I set non-negotiables. Time for health and fitness. Time with Siobhan. Walking the dog. Painting. Time for the content and coaching work I'd started. And time at the venue, but bounded and intentional, so it stopped swallowing everything else.
This is where a lot of my work with founders starts. One of the founders I work with, Alex, described it as a constant sense of paddling just to stay still. When we looked at it properly, he wasn't giving himself or his team any space to grow or to rest. He was carrying all of it and assuming that was the only way. Once he could see where his time was actually going, and that training and delegating properly was far more achievable than he'd thought, it started to shift. He found ways to keep work in its own box, used some of the same tools you've just read about, and got space back for his life outside work.
Start this week: draw the wheel. Write down where your sixteen hours actually went last week. Then choose two non-negotiables that aren't the business and put them in the diary first.
## The grey zone after burnout
I'd love to tell you that after those five changes I woke up one day and felt amazing. That's not how it went.
There's a stage nobody really talks about. You're out of the worst of it, but you don't feel like yourself yet. You've been numb for so long that when the darkness lifts, the numbness stays. I call it the grey zone. Everything is flat.
The way through, for me, was to act as if. To ask: what would I do here if I was genuinely excited about my life? And then do that, before the feeling turned up. Slowly, the feeling started turning up.
It was about a year before I felt some degree of normal. I don't think anyone comes back from burnout completely untouched. But moving through the grey zone to a place where moments mean something again is a very special thing.
One of those moments came months into it, in a supermarket car park. I turned to Siobhan and said sorry. That I couldn't imagine what it had been like to be around me in those years, and that I'd seen what it had cost her. Nothing was fixed in that moment. But something was finally, properly acknowledged.
## The test: two weeks away
As I got steadier, I could finally do the thing I'd never been able to do: hand things over.
I put the training in first. I made sure my key staff knew what I wanted and, just as importantly, why. Then, gradually, I passed things on. Opening and closing the venue. The rota. Even how the team spoke to customers. Things I used to believe only I could get right, now sitting with management and the team.
The real test came when Siobhan and I went to Thailand, our first proper holiday in two or three years. Before I left, I made sure the team had everything they needed. Then I muted every group chat. My manager knew she could reach me directly if anything really needed me.
She didn't need to. Every few days I set aside an hour for emails, and either replied to say I'd deal with it when I got back or forwarded it to the manager. Two weeks, and the venue ran. I came home rested and genuinely looking forward to the season ahead.
## What burnout recovery really taught me: I'd become the system
Looking back, the burnout wasn't only about working too hard. That was the symptom. The real problem was that I'd become the system. Every standard lived in my head. Every decision came through me. The business didn't have a way of running. It had me. So of course I couldn't switch off. If I stopped, everything stopped.
When I finally told my general manager, Gemma, what I'd been going through, she said she already knew. She'd been with me since a year before we opened, and she'd been quietly covering the gaps without saying a word. That's what happens when you become the system. The people around you end up carrying the weight of it too.
No hobby, morning routine or journal can fix that on its own. Those five changes got me back to myself. They gave me enough ground under my feet to see clearly. Staying there meant taking myself out of the middle of the business and building something that could run without me. I've written up the six tools I used for that in [how to build a hospitality business that runs itself](https://www.trevorhill.uk/trevors-blog/how-to-build-a-hospitality-business-that-runs-itself).
Most founders never get to that part. Not because they can't, but because they're too tired to see it. That's why the five changes come first.
## Where to start this week
If you recognise yourself in any of this, start with one small thing. Put the notebook by the bed tonight.
And if it's more than work stress, speak to your GP or NHS Talking Therapies. I didn't ask for help until I was sitting in a car at the side of the road. You don't have to wait that long.
## Want help taking yourself out of the middle?
That's what the Hospitality Handover is for. It's 1:1 coaching for independent hospitality owners where nothing really happens without them. We work on your venue together, so the decisions stop coming through you, the standards get out of your head and into your team, and the business runs without you holding all of it.
It's by application, and the waitlist hears first. [Join the Hospitality Handover waitlist](https://thehandover.scoreapp.com/).
You can [watch the full video on YouTube](https://youtu.be/ToMHjCNFli4), and read more about how I got here in [my story](https://www.trevorhill.uk/my-story).
This article shares my own experience of running a hospitality business. It is not medical, legal or financial advice. If you are struggling with your mental health, speak to your GP or NHS Talking Therapies.