How to Recover From Burnout
Looking for more posts on creativity by Behance? We’ve moved our blog over to behance.net/blog.
Burnout, unfortunately, is everywhere. If you haven’t experienced it personally, you probably know someone who has self-diagnosed. Defined by the World Health Organization as a syndrome that results from “chronic workplace stress,” it causes exhaustion, “feelings of negativism or cynicism,” and reduced efficacy. That’s a big umbrella, and the condition has become something of a catch-all for chronic, modern-day stress.
“The internal atmosphere of burnout is always, ‘I should be doing something but I’m not,’” says Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst and the author of the book Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. “It’s the feeling you are always a step or two behind where you should be and yet you feel you’ve come to the end of your capacity to do anything.” Given the continuous demands of modern life, it’s no wonder burnout has become so commonplace. We’re simultaneously exhausted and plagued by the idea that we’re not trying hard enough, a phenomenon Anne Helen Petersen explores in her viral essay on millennial burnout. “I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months,” she writes.
“I think it’s very hard to find someone who has not felt burnt out,” says Terri Bogue, who co-authored Extinguish Burnout: A Practical Guide to Prevention and Recovery with her husband, Rob. The condition is frequently associated with work, but it can just as easily arise from issues outside the office. Terri last experienced burnout over concerns about the path one of her children was heading down. “I felt completely out of control, like I had no impact,” she says. “That lack of ability to feel effective turned into burnout quickly for me.” She was flooded with feelings of inadequacy that bled into virtually every other aspect of her life.
“At the root of it are exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy,” adds Rob. “If I feel ineffective, I am going to be exhausted because I don’t feel anything I’m doing is enough. You become cynical because you feel like you can’t change things.” It’s a vicious cycle that is easy to enter and hard to emerge from.
With that in mind, experts and creatives share strategies for how to recognize the signs and develop strategies for recovery.
1. Avoid comparison
Frustratingly, comparisons can be hard to avoid. “We live in a culture that’s inundated with everyone’s updates,” Bogue says. In real life and on social media, we’re exposed to curated versions of friends, acquaintances, and strangers’ existences. Epic vacations, prestigious jobs, elaborate wellness routines, homemade meals, and picture-perfect families flood by in a well-staged blur.
It’s a ripe environment for inadequacy to thrive. “You feel ineffective because your expectation is built on the aggregation of everyone else’s highlight reel,” says Bogue. Recognizing this is a good first step, as is dialing back the modes by which you make comparisons in your daily-life. (Yes, this likely means reducing your social media consumption.)
2. Reframe your relationship with productivity and achievement
Along with endless forms of comparison, our modern-day life is built on the concept of continual productivity. No matter how much we’ve achieved, there’s always more to be done. This, unsurprisingly, fuels burnout. Recovering from an episode or, better yet, avoiding the condition altogether often requires a reset. “It’s about developing a different internal relationship to that voice in your head that says, ‘You have to push on, you have to achieve more,’” Cohen says.
For the vast majority of people, continuous striving is unsustainable. Recovery from burnout, then, requires a more understanding, realistic, and less demanding internal motivator, one that allows for moments of rest and doesn’t view life as something to be optimized.
For those who are feeling early signs of burnout, often the first step is to pause, Rob says. A day off or a vacation is rarely a long-term solution, “but it can be self-care in the moment to give yourself the ability to pause and just sit.” Ask yourself what you’d want to do — not what you feel you should do — if you had an hour of free time. “And then give it to yourself without feeling bad about it,” Rob says.
