What I've learned about burnout

When a good friend, who is also a therapist, recommends to you a book about burnout, it probably means you need to read it. In my case, I really did. 

I don’t think I’m currently burnt out. But I have reached burnout a number of times over my career. Or perhaps it was only one or two times that I never fully recovered from…?

Anywayyyyy…

I recall a colleague once telling me that I sighed a lot. I was aware that I did it. I felt massively overworked, undervalued, and stressed. I would do breathing exercises to try to de-stress, but they never helped. 

I went to a psychologist and mentioned the sighing, the ongoing fatigue, and the stress. She said it made sense I was sighing. I was experiencing ongoing high levels of stress and anxiety, and sighing was my body’s way of trying to regulate itself. It was a light bulb moment for me because it made me realize how often I felt like I hadn’t really been breathing properly. And how badly burnt out I was.

Unfortunately, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle hadn’t been written at that time. Otherwise, I might have had a better way to help myself work through the burnout and to understand the depths of what I had been experiencing. 

The stress that exists on repeat

Sometimes when things are baked into your day-to-day experiences, they almost become invisible to you. Not that you forget about them or aren’t aware that they are happening, but at a certain level, they might not even seem worth noting anymore. Or perhaps they can’t all be worth noting because how else could you get through the day? 

Being a woman in this world comes with societal and cultural expectations: about beauty/appearance, acceptable emotions to show, prioritizing the needs of others, and on and on. While I’m very much aware of these expectations, I never thought much about the physical impact on me of continuously experiencing them. 

Frustration happens when our progress toward a goal feels more effortful than we expect it to be. - Emily Nagoski, PhD and Amelia Nagoski, DMA

Burnout highlighted that impact, and in doing so, validated something I didn’t know I needed to have validated. It crystallized for me that sometimes it wasn’t about the number of hours I was working that brought me to burnout. It was also a result of the build up of stress and frustration. 

Being put in situations at work where I was set up to fail. Having to fight the message that if I didn’t succeed it was my fault for not working hard enough. Not being able to meet performance criteria that were illusory at best. Not coming to work with an apparently sunny enough disposition. It often wasn’t about me or my work at all. Frankly, it was about bullshit expectations rooted in bias.

Stress stays in the body

What I also never thought much about before reading the book is that all of that frustration and stress don’t go away just because we try to convince ourselves that we shouldn’t let it get to us. That stress stays in our bodies. 

We can’t think away the physical response our bodies have to stress. Even if we process the experience mentally, our bodies are still swimming around in all of those neurotransmitters that are saying we are under some kind of attack. 

Burnout heavily emphasizes the need to help our bodies understand the attack is over by doing something to physically signal to our body that it can now relax. Sing, dance, laugh, move - do something to "complete the stress cycle." 

Since reading Burnout, I’ve tried to make a habit of ending each work day with some kind of movement. I jump on my bike, queue up a playlist to sing or dance to while making dinner, or find some way to move in a way that feels good to me that day. Even on days when I don’t particularly want to do it, I tell myself - just for 5 minutes. Most of the time, I go for more than 5 minutes and I end up feeling more relaxed and more energetic. 

When we’re struggling, we may reach a point of oscillating between frustrated rage and helpless despair. Solution: Choose the right time to give up, which might be now or might be never; either way, the choice puts you back in the driver’s seat. - Emily Nagoski, PhD and Amelia Nagoski, DMA

Burnout also helped me recognize that there are times when we can get so used to pushing uphill, so used to the frustration it involves, that we forget to stop and evaluate if it’s worth it. This can be especially hard to do when so often the messages we receive are that we should not prioritize ourselves or our needs. But it is something we need to do. For this, Burnout offers practical questions to help you decide if it is worth it, and if so, how to continue on in a way that protects you from the path to burnout.

The overall takeaway message from Burnout for me is perhaps more of a reminder for my future self - that stress can be and is caused by things that we cannot control and cannot avoid. That stress is real and valid and can stay in our bodies. We may or may not be able to change the cause of the stress, but we can give ourselves the tools to deal with the stress itself and to help us avoid burnout.