Experiencing burnout is not that bad, in the larger scheme of things. On the contrary, it might be the only thing that pushes you in a new direction.
If you’re experiencing burnout right now, the following might be a bit difficult to digest. You just want a way out and get rid of it, be the ‘old you’ again. But I hope you’ll stick with me through this post, and you might just have a bit more clarity and energy to turn things around.
Burnout is not a medical diagnosis, but it’s still a serious and debilitating condition. It is like a medical condition that if left unattended can result in other complications: apathy, actual physical illness, sleeping problems, relationship problems. It’s persistent and can feel like a dark hole.
Everyone has been stressed at work, but if you’re experiencing very intense and prolonged stress, combined with physical or emotional exhaustion, then that’s burnout.
The worst thing though is not the exhaustion – you can be totally exhausted and at the end of your strength but feel fulfilled and accomplished, knowing you’ve done what you wanted to do.
What makes burnout unbearable is the feeling of ‘reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity’. And that’s what makes it feel as though you’re working hard for nothing.
Your boss and colleagues might think highly of you, but you feel that you either haven’t accomplished enough or have not accomplished the things that matter to you.
You might also feel disconnected from yourself, you’ve come to a point where you have an intuition that you’re not doing the things you want to do.
The first thing you need to do when experiencing burnout is to pull the brakes. And that can be hard to do when you’re busy at work.
Yes, you want to stop burning out, but you also want to keep delivering, meeting deadlines at work, especially if you’re of the very conscientious type.
But by forcing yourself to operate on the same level that led you to burnout, you’re not doing anyone a favor. At this point, you’re likely high-strung and not performing at your best. And the longer you keep running at this pace, the worse you’ll perform in your job.
It’s time to acknowledge to yourself that you need a break. A time-out. Take off a few days, or even better a week. Spend the first 1-2 days relaxing and try to center yourself. Then, start processing the burnout.
There are a number of imbalances that you need to identify. It could be a work-life imbalance, it could be an imbalance between your workload and your capacity or between the resources you have at work and the tasks you have to do.
On a deeper level, it might be a severe misalignment between what you’re doing at work on a daily basis, versus what is important to you.
You might find your work extremely dull, or for whatever reason immensely annoying, or even face ethical dilemmas at work.
That is the worst combination possible: Being extremely exhausted working on things you find pointless.
Take some time off and try to find out what the real sources for your burnout are. Don’t just stop at surface issues, like ‘I have too much work’. Everyone has too much work, except for very few people. Rather, find out what bothers you specifically.
Get to the bottom of it. It could for example be ‘I’m doing a really good job but my boss is piling on more and more projects on me so that there’s never an end in sight.’
Then, after you’ve identified the core sources of your burnout, think about whether these are things worth working on, or not.
Look at your job and career overall. Are you in the right career, and is this issue something worth working out? Perhaps it’s an inevitable part of the industry or the profession. In that case, you can start figuring out solutions that make working in your job more sustainable.
If your workload is too high, but you actually love your work, it’s a good time to have a talk with your boss who might be more understanding than you’d expected.
And if your boss is not willing to compromise on your workload, then perhaps it’s time to look for another job. Perhaps you’re in the right career, but just don’t have the right job. You’re not at the right company with the right working conditions.
On the other hand, after investigating your burnout, you might find that you’re not just in the wrong company and job, but you’re also in the wrong career.
This sort of revelation might only come to you after you’ve experienced burnout.
You’re pushed to the limit of your patience and energy, and that’s when you finally take a moment and find that you’ve been in the wrong place the whole time.
It’s as though you’ve been wearing blinders all this time and couldn’t recognize the situation you’re in. Then, those blinders suddenly fell off and you see the reality.
That realization may only take a few seconds, but it feels like a big ‘aha’ moment, as in ‘Okay. Something has to change’.
What happens after this?
It depends much on what you do during these few days on your break. If you don’t do anything and just think ‘All I need is a break, some time at the beach, and some drinks, and when I go back to work, everything will be better’, then most likely you’ll be back at square one in a month.
But if you take this time to honestly pinpoint the things that have to change, you’ll move in a totally new direction. That might be a newfound conviction that you need to move companies in the next 2 months at the latest. Or the decision to change your career entirely.
The burnout will not suddenly disappear. But it will morph into something more benign.
Once you know and decided what you need to do next, you’ll get into a healing phase.
The burnout is still there, but the symptoms are less severe.
Burnout is no longer dominating you, instead, your new plan is. You have hopes for the near future and change is on the horizon.
Experiencing burnout is not that bad, as long as you don’t let it linger, and don’t let it become a recurring thing.
Experiencing burnout gives you the slap in the face needed to change your course.
Without this burnout, you might never change your life. You might hang in there and get used to living with burnout, but at some point in the future, it will come back to bite you.
Burnout that persists over years and decades will ultimately manifest in regret. The worst thing is not experiencing burnout, but letting it exist despite knowing it’s there.
Related videos:
3 signs you are experiencing a career crisis
2 reasons why you have a blah career
