I am a child of the 80s, which means that years of Saturday morning cartoons left an indelible mental impression of the classic scenario where a mustachioed villain ties a damsel in distress to a track only for her to be rescued by the hero just before she’s struck by a train. That’s what burnout feels like to me, except it’s all in slow motion, I’m the damsel, villain, and hero, the ropes are all of the expectations and responsibilities I can’t let go, and sometimes the train hits me.
I watched the worst of my burnouts chugging toward me for years before it finally knocked me out. It was as hard to miss as a train barreling down the track, but I couldn’t figure out how to escape the responsibilities that tied me down until it was too late. That was over a year and a half ago, and today I’d say I’ve finally moved from burnout recovery to burnout prevention. I never could have anticipated the lessons I’ve learned along the way, some I’m still not sure how to articulate, but here are five that have defined my personal experience so far.
Actually resting is harder than it seems
Burnout happens when your output exceeds your resources, and that generally means your mental and psychological resources — your energy, insight, compassion, skills. Those resources — and your energy in particular — are finite. There’s only so much you can expend at any point in time, and once spent, they need replenishing, which comes from rest. If you’re overextended, and rest from using one resource is actually burning through another (like shifting from work mode to parenting mode), you’re still depleting your resources. Turns out that’s not really resting, and your body will begin to call bullshit on your brain for trying to act like it is.
Those headaches, the back pain, tummy issues, and that feeling like you’re trying to walk through cement — that’s a part of burnout, too. And those symptoms aren’t necessarily treatable just by changing your job or your mindset. I recognized that my own physical symptoms were likely part stress hormone-induced, part being too stressed to actually take care of myself. I realized that as my resources ran down, I was more likely to drink Diet Coke to wake up and wine to wind down, and eat chips because the crunchiness made me feel more alive, and forget to have whole meals, so it was no wonder everything hurt inside and out.
Rest, I learned, didn’t just mean lying down for a few minutes. It meant lovingly tending to and repairing each and every one of my operational systems until everything was back to baseline functioning, and also lying down. A restful workload, restful parenting, restful hygiene and housekeeping, a restful diet, restful self-reflection — all harder than it seems, and I think that’s because we’re much more complicated machinery than we can even imagine, and sometimes we just end up going past our limits (for all kinds of reasons).
“Normal” is what burned you out, you can’t go back there
I’ve had this conversation with a lot of burned out people who would agree that pre-burnout “normal” meant being the best, most enthusiastic, helpful, socially acceptable, reliable, high-functioning, accommodating person you can be. It meant trying hard and not complaining about it. And the reason that felt normal was because we didn’t know about any other way. Everyone else seemed to be doing it. We sometimes got more money for it (but not always, or even often). And, we were taught that people who weren’t doing it were lazy losers who deserved whatever hardship came upon them.
As my recovery progressed, and I got closer and closer to feeling “normal,” it felt like I was at a crossroads. Do I go back toward normal and possibly also get sick again, or do I risk looking like a lazy loser and increase my chances of being healthy? In my case, a divorce, layoff, and pandemic had already made normal feel pretty out of reach, so I started down the alternative path. This wasn’t my first experience with burnout, and I’d always tried to get back to normal before, so it’s hard to say if it was entirely a choice this time, but whether it came from wisdom or happenstance, it was the right path, no matter how difficult to navigate.
Everything feels like an experiment as you try to figure out what might burn you out again
When burnout breaks you down, recovery can be a very humbling experience. You don’t even realize what all the potential threats are until you come back from your first work conference since you burned out and need a whole week to recover, even though you loved seeing everyone and feeling useful again. And, as you lie there resting, wondering what you might be able to do differently next time, you realize that it wasn’t just one thing, it was everything — the people, the talking, the learning, the adapting to a new environment, the smiling, the gossiping, the traveling. When literally everything is potentially contributing to your burnout, even the good things, where do you begin to make the changes that will keep you healthy?
Experiences begin to be broken down into parts. Every new endeavor becomes an energy equation. A new project means a certain type of work, plus relationship management with a specific group of people, plus a set timeframe, which together will require a sum total of energy to be compared to your available recovery time to see if you will be overextended or not. And the math happens over and over again, one person, one activity at a time, because you never really paid attention to how draining things were before, and it turns out there are a lot of ways to be drained, which is how you got burned out in the first place.
Learning to tune out the people shaming you for being cautious with your energy is a real emotional mixed bag, but it helps
During my burnout recovery, I was also trying to figure out how to work for myself. Ironically, this notoriously stressful endeavor felt so much less stressful than the idea of returning to a corporate workplace, I leaned into it cautiously, occasionally bringing on consultants or coaches to help me plot the way. But whenever I brought up wanting to make sure I wasn’t taking on too much too quickly, they inevitably accused me of having a “fear mindset” about success that could be fixed with different thinking. I understood they were parroting the talking points of business coaches and positive thinking influencers who definitely did not take trauma, chronic stress and illness, or neurodivergence into account when crafting their soundbites. And I knew it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with what they needed to tell themselves, but it was still annoying.
More complicated than that are the social and societal expectations you might be dialing back on to conserve your precious and finite energy — holiday gatherings and dinner parties, dating, vacationing, and doing yard work. It’s hard to describe the weird amount other people care about your yard when you stop caring about their opinions about your own dang yard. You quickly learn who considers your health over their own pleasure, reputation, and comfort with each invitation you decline. In fact, anything you do that indicates you’re no longer prioritizing appearing “normal” might trigger someone who is still living that life. And so you have to decide if worrying about any of that is worth your energy, too.
Burnout recovery is a spiritual practice, whether you like it or not
Burnout mostly happens quietly and in private. We don’t talk about it because we don’t want to risk the shame of not being able to handle things, or to have to deal with awkward pity, or disbelief that we — the people everyone else relies on — won’t be quite so reliable anymore. Talking about it helps, but the way through it will be unique to each person.
Whether taken on alone or in community, however, recovery is inevitably a spiritual thing. Just the recognition, acceptance, and call to live differently is an awakening of your spirit, the essence of who you are. Learning how to live without burning out again is the practice that shapes your spiritual journey. You won’t be able to avoid it. It won’t always be pretty. But, in order to recover, you will learn and change and grow, and fail and learn some more along your path.
In my own journey, I’ve learned how to recognize the signs of burnout, how to hold back and how to heal, but I’m still figuring out what it means to live without burnout being the center of every decision. Coming out of survival mode, I’m realizing that it’s also my responsibility to define comfort and success for myself without a lot of examples that speak to my experience and needs. But now, when I feel that familiar wave of anxiety that I’m not doing enough, that I need to hustle more, or give into “normal” expectations, I let it go as easily as it appeared instead of holding onto it tighter than any other feeling. In this all-consuming process, not being driven by anxiety but by self-acceptance and love is a big part of the point.
There’s so much more to this: community care, societal and systemic change, and medical and social models of disability, for example, but all of those conversations become richer when we start with admitting normal doesn’t work for us, and we’re okay with that.