Burnout: A Dying of Your Light

You know that feeling when you wake up and it feels like you haven’t had enough sleep – no matter how many hours ago you went to bed?

Or that experience of being less articulate than usual: you know that you know the words you are looking for but you just can’t seem to find them?

Or that seemingly insatiable craving you have for sugar, carbohydrates, caffeine and salty foods?

Or the total and alarming lack of interest you have in doing anything that isn’t critical to your day to day functioning – and you’d rather not have to do any of those things either?

If any (or all) of those experiences sound familiar, you are in the company of many, many good people just like yourself who are on the road to, or have arrived at, destination Burnout.

Ongoing fatigue, craving sugar, caffeine and carbs, brain fog, social withdrawal and a sense of ennui and lack of interest in your world are some of the most easily recognized symptoms of Burnout.

Just as a slow puncture in a wheel on your car affects the fuel consumption, road-holding, safety rating and other aspects of your car’s health, Burnout affects every area of your life. When we have Burnout we feel compromised physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and spiritually.

Burnout can be tricky to identify until it is severe. Individually, the symptoms can appear to be related to specific events (a tough deadline, the aftermath of a demanding work project, recovering from an illness) but together, and over time, these ongoing experiences add up to burnout.

One of the things making Burnout so difficult to recognize and treat is the attachment to the idea that it only affects high-powered men and women who work in the corporate world.

It is very hard for a woman who has been at home raising children and supporting her husband’s career by hosting dinner parties and charity events to believe that she may be burnt out. It is confusing for someone who has recently retired to accept that they may be suffering from residual Burnout. It is unthinkable that a young professional, just starting out in their career, may be so overwhelmed and under-supported that they, too, experience the symptoms of Burnout.

Burnout is an equal-opportunity condition and does not discriminate against whom it chooses.

I have coached Burnout sufferers who are high-flying executives, retired folk, university students, entrepreneurs, full-time stay-at-home moms, and people who are out of work. Those affected by burnout are as diverse as any population. But what they all have in common is an inability to prioritise their own needs and desires.

I call the tendency to do things for others at our own expense being ‘others-centred’ and I believe it is at the root of much of the burnout I see all around me.

We are others-centred when we feel responsible for everyone else’s happiness first, and our own happiness second (or third, or fourth, or last).  We are others-centred when we feel we have to say yes when we really mean no. We are others-centred when we don’t ask for help because we don’t want to be a bother. We are others-centred when we sign up to things that we think will make other people happy – even when, deep down inside, we know it isn’t what we want to do.

We are others-centred when we put everyone else in the centre of our lives, and ourselves on the periphery.  We are the afterword in our own stories.

In my observation and experience, Burnout affects anybody who tries to do too much and, more importantly, tries to do too much of the wrong thing.  When you consistently, and over some time, persuade yourself into doing something (or some things) that are not good for you, and that do not make you happy, OR out of doing those things that are good for you and do make you happy, you open yourself up to burnout.

This may be true of staying in a job that you do not like, or a relationship that isn’t good for you. It may be true of drinking and eating things that don’t agree with you, but you tell yourself you need to do in order to fit in, or make other people happy.

When you do the wrong thing (and by that I mean the things that are wrong for you) be it at home, at work, in love or in the world, you create an ongoing tension between what you want to do and what you tell yourself to do. And it is exhausting.

Burnout is a progressive illness. It starts off slowly and relatively benignly but, unchecked, it will develop into something that is harder and harder to reverse. Once you have experienced severe burnout, your body is scarred by it and will always be vulnerable to repeat attacks.

To return to the puncture analogy, Burnout starts as a slow and gentle leaking of your energy. For a while you will be able to get away with topping up your energy (by going on short holidays, by taking vitamins and supplements, by having the odd massage) but, left untreated, that tyre  – that wheel on your life journey – is going to get more and more dangerous and put you at greater risk of having a major blowout and accident. Act now to safeguard your health and happiness…

Tags: asking for help | avoid crisis | burnout | burnout recovery | energy | exhausted | others-centred. | overwhelm | tired