Burnout. We’ve all heard the word, and we probably have some general understanding of it—it’s what happens when a person works too hard or too much—but unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you probably don’t fully get it. And if you have experienced it yourself, well, odds are that you waited too long to recognize the symptoms. After all, if you had noticed them, you likely would have taken actions to correct the problems before they amassed into a big ol’ pile of burnout.
For me, burnout reminded me of when I quit smoking cigarettes. I smoked for 7 years, and like most smokers, I had come to depend on them. I depended on them to wake up, to calm down, to get ready for bed; heck, I even needed a cigarette to enjoy a cup of coffee. It’s the calming thing that really got to me, though. When I quit, I realized just how agitated I had become whenever I was not smoking. My already short fuse had become non-existent, as I’d get angry and flustered about the smallest thing. My cynicism meter shot through the roof. It was like I was a different person—I had to try hard to remember a time when I didn’t get so upset so easily. I remembered it was there, somewhere in the back of me, but I didn’t know how to get it back. And so in the meantime, when trying to quit smoking, I was trying to find the real me, and taking everyone down with me along the way in a wave of angered frustration. I was such a jerk, so snappy, so judgmental, so impatient. For no reason at all. Except that for the past seven years I had chosen to poison myself at a cost of a few dollars a day, and was trying to quit.
The experience I had when quitting smoking was a clear analogue to the feeling of burnout—basically, I felt like I didn’t have control over myself and my actions, and I didn’t like what I saw. When I’ve approached burnout in my life—it’s happened twice—I knew it was happening. I mean, I sort of did. Working hard and compromising on yourself is fine, until it isn’t. I saw myself becoming short-tempered. I saw my treatment of others change. I saw my reactions spike off the charts when things went wrong, when in the past they were nothing more than a momentary blip. I was constantly agitated and had no way to fix it. In writing out these symptoms, I’m shocked by how similar they are to how I felt when I was quitting smoking.
In wildlife rehab, this translated to a few ways of acting out. I grew short with my staff, to the point of ashamedly openly rolling my eyes if they had an excuse for why they couldn’t come in one day or needed time off. I didn’t press the public for donations like I had in the past when they came in to drop off an animal. I didn’t go above and beyond as is my typical M.O., instead I just did what needed to be done. Worst of all, and this stays with me to this day, I wasn’t as patient with the animals.
Wildlife rehab is often chaotic, with screams and trauma patients and sickness and death just being part of the program. That’s why it takes a special type of person to work in that field. But for those of us who do it (or have done it), we don’t let those things bother us. Or, at least, we try to let them bother us as little as possible, because we have to. We instead focus on the joy of animal care, of rehabilitating a struggling animal and releasing them back into the wild. It’s a wonderful experience, one that helps give back to nature when so often we just take and take and take. So you know things are going wrong when you’re reckless with the animals, when you’re letting those frustrations and screams bother you. I remember a time when I roughly put a raccoon back into his crate—he was being difficult about feeding—and I looked around with concern to see if anyone had seen me do it. Because I knew it was wrong, and I felt such shame. It’s not like it was rare to experience difficultly with a feeding. I mean, as a wildlife rehabilitator, we’re some kind of weird giant human monster stuffing a syringe in their tiny little mouths—it’s not surprising that sometimes the animals resist. But at that point for whatever reason I was letting his resistance bother me, to the point of acting out like a whiny little child.
Sadly I didn’t recognize the signs of burnout, and stuck with the job for another 4-5 months. I really should have left when I could, but I didn’t understand what was happening, and I felt an obligation to continue the work that I was doing. For the animals, but also for the center and its staff. For my wildlife director, who really was more like a parent or friend to me than a boss.
It’s easy to beat yourself up over something like that. I should have known better. I knew I worked for too long. I wasn’t making any money and I hadn’t gone anywhere on vacation for 7 full years. I self-medicated my depression with cheap alcohol and weed. I should have known that a crash was coming, right?
Yes and no. Yes the signs are there, but to be fair to ourselves we also need to consider the type of person that we are. Recognizing that some of us feel a moral imperative to help others and the world, especially those who are underprivileged in some way, it’s understandable that we would deprioritize caring for ourselves. We’re the ones who are fortunate enough to live with food on the table and a roof over our heads, that don’t face constant unfair discrimination and hardships. And we see others that are not so lucky, so we feel it’s only fair that we exhaust ourselves in order to help those who are less fortunate. That’s why it’s so important that we look for the signs, and, even more important, that we act on them.
My second burnout experience came as I was wrapping up what I knew would be my final year at my last job as executive director of a growing international charity. As hard as it is to give myself credit, I was incredibly proud to have steered the helm as we rose from a single staff team (myself) to a $1.25M 20-person team. I’m sure that some of that pride helped me overlook caring for myself, and led to my burnout shortly after five years in the role.
Again, some of us have that personality where we just lean toward martyrdom, even if we’re aware of it and try to avoid over-committing. And for us, when we see issues arise, we feel compelled to take care of them ourselves whenever we can. It’s not that we necessarily have trouble delegating, it’s that we see others on the team burdened with other work and so we want to step in and lighten their load.
I knew almost a year in advance that it was time for me to leave. And right as I was close to announcing my departure, another key staff member announced their own. Yet again, with the idea of reducing the impact on the organization, I chose to stay around for another 6-10 months in order to avoid shifting too many key personnel at one time.
That seems like a reasonable enough decision, but when you’re burned out and ready to go, sometimes that means that you need to go—not next month, not next week, but now. And I was ready. Similar to my last burnout experience, much of my burnout manifested itself in simply losing the drive to excel, to go above and beyond. Instead I played it safer, let things ride for a while, and avoided major decisions when I could.
What was much worse is that I saw myself getting overly frustrated about issues that would arise, issues that in the grand scheme of things were just not that big of a deal. This led to some irritated exchanges, but in particular it led to a damaged relationship with one of my staff when I let my irritation show in full force. In the past, when people were not able to meet deadlines, I reacted rationally. I dealt with each situation on a case-by-case basis, considered reasons for delays, and set up improvement guidelines if needed. But this time, I was annoyed, and I let them know. And since that was not my typical manner of communication, my frustration was received poorly, severing what had previously been a good relationship with someone I counted as a colleague and as a friend.
I tried to make that person see my side, why I was upset…but even there, my reasoning was not ideal. I’ve always defined my career and management with trying to understand the needs and perspectives of my staff, but this time, just this time, I insisted that it be about me. Why couldn’t they just understand and appreciate my position for once, I thought.
This thinking wasn’t entirely unreasonable, to be fair to myself. Good leaders are selfless, and always put the needs of the team first. Leaders eat last, and all that. But what those well-meaning concepts fail to appreciate is that caring for yourself is caring for your team. If you’re not 100% then you can’t possibly give 100% to your team. And because I had been so selfless for so long, I finally reached a point where I couldn’t stand it any longer, where I demanded that things be about me for a change, at a time when it really didn’t need to be about me.
The effects of burnout can be felt in a multitude of ways. Obviously, you won’t be performing your work at a high level, and that means your work product will suffer. Your colleagues, donors, customers; in fact, all stakeholders will suffer. You can even lose friends and colleagues—for example, I apologized for ways that I failed in the previous example, but the connection was already broken. Perhaps most lasting is that the effects of burnout may be felt for many months or even years after you’ve taken steps to correct the problem, leading to stalled careers, insufficient income, and strained relationships. It can affect your ability to get excited about new ventures, and can just in general pump the brakes on your life.
It’s important to recognize that burnout can occur in a wide variety of areas in your life—it’s not just feeling worn out from your job. It can happen with seemingly innocuous activities, such as becoming burned out on watching tv, playing video games, or cooking a certain food. We don’t tend to stress out too much about burning out on any of these, though, because ultimately they’re not that important, and we usually interpret our burnout as just a sign that we need to take a break. And more often than not, after just taking a break, we’ll return to said activity, none the worse for wear.
But burnout can also apply to more serious situations in your life, such as with family. In particular, marriage partners can fall victim to burnout. It makes sense; marriages are a form of work, and we are dealing with them 24/7 with little to no respite. In that environment, even smaller, seemingly inconsequential issues can eventually swell to the point of being overwhelming. Thus it’s important to consider burnout in all aspects of our lives, and not just in the context of a particular career or task.
A key step to avoiding burnout is recognizing the signs that you’re approaching it. But we can start much sooner than that; in fact ideally we start so early that we don’t see the symptoms because they’re not there. We need to spend time caring for ourselves—especially those of us who are empaths that spend far too long thinking about how everything affects everyone else. We need to take time away from work, time that is completely away, no phone calls, no emails, no anything—especially those of us who work from home. We need to maintain friendships outside of work, ones that allow us to truly disconnect. We need to eat healthy, we need to get exercise, we need to get proper sleep, we need to be mindful, we need to promote mental health.
If you start to see signs of burnout emerge, then it’s time to take action. Are there work relationships—or at-home relationships—that are causing you unrest? Take steps to alleviate that stress by discussing relevant issues with whatever parties are involved. Is there a work project that seems like it will never end? Create concrete steps and goals so that you can feel a sense of accomplishment, and build in break periods where you can focus on something else. Finding yourself bored and apathetic about your life and the things that you fill it with? Explore some new ideas and mix things up a bit. Whatever the situation, address it; don’t just assume that things will eventually work out, or that because a situation isn’t critical that it doesn’t need to be dealt with because it’s not a big deal. Yes, of course you need to use some discretion, but you also need to recognize that things add up over time, and we need to be mindful of what we do and how it is affecting us.
If all this sounds like a lot, it is. But you’re worth it. I once saw a vegan workout team instructional video where one of the trainers walked through a grocery store and coached the viewer on their buying habits. As she put some organic greens in her cart and noted the price, she said, well, I don’t have a lot of money, but this ain’t a bargain bin body. I’ve thought about that expression often. What constitutes “bargain bin” is different for every one of us—not everyone can afford organic, even if they choose to prioritize the food that they eat—but the core message is sound. Stop treating ourselves, stop treating our physical bodies, stop treating our mental states, as some kind of afterthought. Look, I shop sales all the time, so it’s not like you should only buy things if they’re expensive, but nowadays I’m doing my best to treat my body like the temple that it is, and that’s possible regardless of income level. We only get one shot in this life. Make it count. Take care of yourself. Enjoy work. Love life. And avoid burnout.
One final note: Not to tie everything back into race—although it seems more and more like so many things are, for one reason or another, intertwined with race—but I’ve been thinking more about how much one’s skin color can contribute to burnout. Or, should I say, how it contributes to burnout for non-white people in the US. Being constantly profiled is no doubt exhausting, and it occurs on countless levels, from individual interactions person to person, to industry-wide discrimination. How must it feel to always watch over your shoulder, to question if what happened to you was a result of your race, to wonder if you do in fact deserve equal consideration when society treats you like you’re a bottom class. I don’t really have any wise reflections on this. I’m just bringing it up because it’s yet another example of racial injustice that most white folks probably don’t appreciate. But we should. Because we do need to see color, to understand and appreciate each other’s experiences, to learn from one another, and to give each other full consideration of what it is like to walk a mile in their shoes. So, in this discussion of burnout, let’s extend our consideration past ourselves—which, don’t mistake what I’m saying here, it’s super important to focus on yourself as well—and think about how the challenges of being a black or brown person in a country or company that washes in waves of white. About how even the much greater amount of attention given to the challenges that are faced by women—attention that is deserved, surely—has still failed to come close to actually creating some sort of equality in the workplace and in society. In other words, think about your history and your privileges alongside the experiences of those around you, and act accordingly.