‘I don’t understand why I’m struggling so much, there’s nothing wrong’
’Well I understand why YOU burned out, but I haven’t had to deal with half the stuff you have’
’I have a nice life, why am I so exhausted and unhappy?’
Ahh those comments make me smile every single time. They really are the ‘if I had a penny’ comments.
This is one of the big misunderstandings about burnout, that it’s some kind of reaction to a crisis, or that is comes about as part of some kind of singular event.
Let me be clear.
It isn’t.
Burnout is about the slow and steady erosion of your energy, your resilience, your confidence, your sense of self, your hopes and aspirations, until you are left feeling flat and empty, living a boring groundhog day of an existence just trying to keep going until the end of the day, the end of the week, getting to the weekend, to the next holiday.
Burnout is like one of those cross sections of an iceberg, with all the shit you haven’t fully appreciated lying below the surface of the water.
What you see rising above the surface? It’s the accumulation of years, often decades, of struggles.
Let me give you an example.
By the time I was signed off sick with a heady combination of exhaustion, viral illness, sinusitis, anxiety and insomnia it was nearly 6 months after my mum had died suddenly, having been back at my desk 3 weeks afterwards, spending two months taking one day’s annual leave each week to clear out my childhood home… I had been ‘back to normal’ for a good 2 or 3 months, and that’s when the wheels started to come off.
You see, people like us, people who work to help and support others, to create outcomes and solutions, we are the kind of people you want in a crisis. We think quickly, act fast, do the job until it’s done and then some, we make sure everyone else is safe, and once that is the case, we start to wilt.
For many of us, our careers aren’t commonly seen as high drama and intrigue, but goddamn they are relentless. The dramas are many and often, whether it’s calming down the client who is losing her shit in the meeting room or the long hours of travel on commute or the low level hum of other people’s pain.
We work long hours.
We take it personally.
We care deeply.
We work hard for the outcomes.
And all of those, right there, are stressors.
We are the literal fuel for the fire, we work and negotiate and mediate and teach and heal and soothe and support, giving of ourselves for our work, for the KPIs and goals and end of year targets. Burnout means that we have burned out, that we have exhausted the fuel and the flames are dying.
It is therefore the height of irony that people come to me telling me how they don’t deserve to be feeling this awful because ‘nothing is happening’.
You’re right, it isn’t, right at this moment.
The crisis is over, the adrenaline and cortisol have stopped pumping around your body, you frenzied fear based need to push beyond all reasonable limits has waned… and now is when you’re burned out. When the fuel has been burned away. When you are safe and removed from the crisis but unable to recover, to bounce back, the way you would like.
Burnout isn’t about stumbling when the shit hits the fan.
It’s about collapsing with exhaustion once you’ve cleaned that mess up.
How do you know you’re starting to falter?
When the next crisis comes and you are slow to react?
Or when you never fully leave crisis mode and are hyper-vigilant for the next threat?
Sometimes it’s when the anxiety levels keep rising despite no apparent threat, and your mind clings on to ever more ridiculous things to try to control - because that’s what you are good at, making sense out of stress and calm out of chaos, but you never quite know when to stop or how to live without the dramas to react to.
Sometimes you simply stop reacting altogether. What shocks and appals other people barely even dents you, so used to the slings and arrows of doing business.
I’ve noticed this rising in me again lately - once I feel safe, once I know that everyone is taken care of, just for a moment, I feel like I’m sliding to the floor in tiredness. Not quite getting enough sleep or enough quality sleep. A low level of anxiety that keeps slowly rising. Doesn’t help that Coronavirus panic is abounding, every supermarket looks like a plague of locusts has cut through it and so many of the corporate bookings I had floating about have gone suspiciously quiet.
Grounding and centring works but more than anything, is the recognition that this is a small leftover of my big burnout days. In the past I would have been sick in bed with a virus by now or crying in the toilets at work despite everything apparently going well. Instead I’ve had a couple of hours of anxiety, not bad in the grand scheme of things hey?
We don’t crumble in a crisis. We wait until everyone else is happy and then dissolve into a puddle of fear and tears.
If you are feeling this way, you are so far from alone. You also aren’t crazy. You’ve waited until everyone else is safe before looking after yourself, again.
Maybe it’s time to do something about that?
PS This month in The Resilience Academy we are focusing on spring cleaning those areas of stress management and burnout that can, when left unattended, become festering piles of grot in our work and lives.
You know the ones.
The ones that have you waking up in a cold sweat at 4.33am.
The ones that leave you feeling sick about your situation.
The ones that have you working until the security guard kicks you out each night.
Sometimes they are practical.
Sometimes they are emotional.
Sometimes they are systemic.
We all have them in common.
So this month's focus in The Resilience Academy is spot cleaning them, you know, like a spring clean. We've actually already had our first training - I went live on Tuesday night talking about high volume and low control, so that video is there for you to listen to as soon as you join.
But, when you join this month, you will also have the ability to focus our upcoming training sessions on exactly what it is that you need, by voting on the topics that are coming up for you most. Pretty awesome hey?
Click here to find out more about The Resilience Academy and how to join us this month