First-aid: learn to fight the first burnout flames

It’s been a few that you feel tired and that work is weighting on your shoulders and mind. You keep on delaying projects, you don’t show up at the usual Friday drinks anymore, you stopped going for your weekly running session. All your joints are painful, you catch every single virus in the air and have nightmares about your job where everything falls apart…

Our generation of workers is assaulted by an army of tiny worries more or less related to work. Sometimes, those worries become mountains and we don’t know where to start to tackle them. You may feel that some symptoms are innocuous and that some others pile up and soon become impossible to deal with. In any case, let’s react quickly before the situation gets worse.

This post gathers the 5 short-term actions that Goulven CHAMPENOIS and I listed through the conference “Burnout can be cured”, from our personal experience, research and reading. Those actions are aimed at being pragmatic and helping to bring a little relief to someone in pain, whatever level of exhaustion she is in.

Say something !

Burnout very often brings a lot of denial, whether people are in a critical state or not. It is hard to face the truth of the pain. But pain is here and when symptoms hit a climax, we experience a lot of trouble to try and keep them in. In saying something, you may find some relieving triggers:

• you may not feel alone anymore with your symptoms and pain,
• the people around you may realise your pain, especially if it was invisible to them before,
• you may be able to access a realisation that you are in pain,
• you may then be able to talk about it around you.

Whether you write or speak, be it to anyone, say what you feel. Don’t let pain isolate you. We can even welcome your testimony in our community.

Burnout brings isolation through its many painful aspects. But it also hides all the resourceful people around us who might be able to help. We very often forbid ourselves to talk to them: peer pressure for perfection and mental strength are huge obstacles to ourselves admitting and accepting our own vulnerability. We consider vulnerability to be a sign of weakness, although it is absolutely wrong. Start by talking to your manager / boss: they might show empathy towards your situation and support you in a way you’ve not even dared to imagine! Your doctor can help you too if she is aware of the burnout syndrome and/or work-related distress. If you feel okay with the idea, you might even want to open up to your family or friends. Sometimes, the mere fact of uttering out loud “I am not good at the moment, I need support” can trigger a whole rescue procedure around you and make you some great good.
Acknowledge that your distress is weighting on your life: surrender to asking for help and accept the help coming towards you.

Breathe, step back, move away.

Burnout isolates people in an infernal spiral with no end. Within what is possible for you, you will have to act swiftly to extract yourself from the toxic environment that harms you and relieve yourself from the tension that cripples you everyday.

Stepping back can be done in very simple and little steps: give yourself a break for just one evening by cancelling something that was planned, try to cancel all your duties for a week or two, just to free up some “me-time”, be it meetings, nights out, travels, minor duties. Sometimes the mere fact of freeing a bit of time in one’s calendar can considerably help to relieve the stress and the sensation to be constantly overloaded.

If you can, ask for a few days off, maybe just a long weekend where you will make sure you have nothing planned. Very often when we are deep down into work, we forget how it feels to just stay idle. In a burnout situation, we are constantly up to 150% of our energy and our brain is in “survival mode”, avoiding us to acknowledge that we need rest and inactivity. It might also mean that you will need to force yourself to do NOTHING: it’s not impossible that a good old Star Wars Marathon heals your body and mind! Think about it :)

Your doctor can help you: sometimes, people need to be away from work and they can make that happen. Don’t feel guilty or blame yourself for giving up on your colleagues. Sick leaves are here to allow sick people to recover in a preservative environement, away from their workplace, be it toxic or not.

Stepping away can give you the necessary hindsight that you need to come back to taking care of yourself. This is instrumental in this very short term fight against burnout.

Listen to your body.

When people talk about their burning out peers, they often point out their behaviours and comment on them like “oh, she should take some yoga lessons, seriously…” “did he miss his meditation today to be in such a terrible mood?” Yoga, meditation, dance and relaxation are often showed off as miracle remedies when it comes to pretty much everything. They are clearly not, even if they can sometimes bring a little relief to some of us.

One component of burning out is emotional detachment. We distance ourselves from things that hurt us or emotions we can’t handle in a protective gesture. But we also detach from a lot of signals that our body sends towards us. Yeah, you know, this persistent back pain that you’ve been trying to ignore for the past weeks, well it’s a message that your body screams at your brain but it is too tired to even consider listening.

You can listen to your body in many ways. The easiest is to lie down or sit somewhere where you feel good and warm, you can wrap yourself up in a scarf or a plaid if needed, you can listen to music or not, up to you. You may want to close your eyes, still up to you, and proceed to make some nice breathes in and out, long and calm, trying to let every muscle of your body go, very slowly. Then you can start “scanning” your body from the top of your head, very slowly, to the toes. “Oh, I didn’t notice that my shoulders were so tense.” Don’t try to change anything, just listen to whatever is happening in your body right now and acknowledge it. This 5-minute exercise can be performed anywhere, anytime and is a very precious tool to learn to listen to your body again and connect to your sensations and emotions. Well, you may not have noticed, but you just performed a meditation session! Well done :-)

If you want to go deeper on this topic, you can start a regular meditation practice, if this technique suits you of course. We know that some people can feel a lot of anxiety at the idea of sitting in silence, in which case meditation is not for them.

Physiotherapists and osteopaths can help you deepen the conscience you have of your body and the pain you feel, as well as help you unlock tensions. The most important is to do what you want, and what you can afford, as long as you connect to your body and listen to what it has to say. Don’t ignore what your body is trying to tell you!

Adjust.

Burning out doesn’t necessarily means that you are overloaded by a gigantic task list. Some people even experience what is called “bore out”, when there is little to no work to be done. In most cases though, some extra stress can arise from a substantial quantity of work to be done. Too much work might even be the primary reason for a stress peak. Some burnouts are even caused by a long and difficult project spanning over several months. One of the first thing you can do is trying to influence on your workload. Lighten your burden by asking for help from your colleagues or your manager. As mentioned above, asking for help can trigger an immense relief as well as a precious acknowledgement not only from your team and peers, but also from yourself.

It is most likely that your team doesn’t realise the pain you’re going through and your loneliness in experiencing it. In fact, no one can guess what is happening in your mind if you don’t communicate about it. Is your manager aware that you were having difficulties to complete your task list these days? Probably not, furthermore if you didn’t tell her. Remember that it’s never too late to speak up and try to alleviate your burden and the stress coming from it.

You can start on your own by identifying the tasks that weight on your mind, because they keep on coming back or they just don’t make any sense. Try to see where other people can help you, even if they only help empty your current task list, even just one task. You need some time and space, and as quick as possible.

Now let’s say you have no team nor manager, because you are your own boss. Can you free a few minutes every day to reflect on your current workload and state of mind? Is there anywhere you can go to get out of your current work environment to lighten your mind just a bit? Is there any coworking space where you can meet similar professionals, and have a coffee and a chat with them?

Hunt down tensions and toxicity in your life and fly away from negativity.

People and specific situations can unfortunately increase an already heavy stress, even if not directly involved, or not intentionally weighting on your shoulders. It might be the case with your family or friends, for example.

Maybe the situation implies that you temporarily step away from some people or exhausting settings. Just ask yourself this question in all honesty towards yourself: are there, around you, people that contribute to making things worse? Do you have a very negative-talking colleague, a harrassing boss, a very nice but very demanding customer, someone who has strong influence over you, or just a demanding family that asks for a lot of energy from you? A frantic life, a cumbersome commuting or a place you don’t like but you must go to can substantially increase your daily dose of stress without you noticing. Stepping away is allowed and sometimes it’s easier than we think. Telling your colleague “Sorry, I am not feeling good at the moment, please don’t get offended if I don’t talk to you for a few.” is absolutely legit. If she doesn’t understand your claim (which is not even a request, you are just notifying her of your upcoming change of behaviour), then it may reveal her toxicity. Another good reason to step away for a few.

And sometimes it’s even inside of us, through our inner voice which throws a negative point of view over every aspect of our life: a deep exhaustion can lead our mind to a total inability to see anything through a positive lens. Even though you can’t do much about certain things right now, you can nevertheless start by identifying those pain points and slowly start to learn to let go of them. Take them one by one and ask yourself the question: “can I do something about it on the short term?” If the answer is “no”, it means that it’s not up to you to deal with it, or it’s not the right moment to do it, or it’s not on your mind that it should weight. This little trick can alleviate your mental burden.

Tl;dr

Yes, all these pieces of advice will ask for a lot of effort on your side. If you can’t handle them right now, please don’t feel guilty. Give yourself some time, and give time to those items to go through your mind.

I wouldn’t blame you if you read these 5 items and think “well it’s not that easy to ask a doctor for a sick leave, or to step away for a weekend. I have kids, people to care for, loans to pay for, the silent pressure of society, the not-so-silent pressure at work… Burnout takes us in its whirlpool and there is so much to do right now on this project, and if we abandon the team even 2 or 3 days, they will be put at risk by our selfish behaviour. But I can assure you that this obstinacy is counter-productive, especially for our colleagues. How can we offer the best of ourselves and be productive if we are not well rested and in good health? Do you really think that you offer the best of your abilities right now? Stress wipes your focus away and you are more likely to make mistakes, sometimes big ones, you will take poorer decisions and jeopardise your projects without even realising it. You can’t help people if you don’t help yourself first, trust me :-)

There is no compromise with burnout: it asks us to act quick and strong. It’s now up to you to walk towards accepting your own vulnerability, to surrender to kindness towards yourself and act to unload yourself from the weight of a guilt that has been eating your resources for so long. If you catch the flu, your doctor will put you off, and it is absolutely okay as well as accepted by society. It is time that we accept to also step away when our mental health is at risk. It is no less dangerous for us and for others. Off days and vacations are a legal requirement, and it’s not for nothing! You have the absolute time for some days off. Your superior can’t forbid you to take them, unless very rare situations driven by law. And it’s even her duty to ensure that her employees are well rested and cared for.

One step further!

Thanks to our “Twelve Signs” grid, you can assess your level of exhaustion. If you check more than 3 items on the list, don’t wait any longer to take action.

If you think that talking to someone would make you feel better, if you didn’t think that professional exhaustion and burnout were so widely spread right now, visit our community and read our testimonies: sometimes, just by having a glimpse of what other people feel like and being offered the ability to relate can relieve you from a little bit of tension.

If you feel like you need to go one gear faster, you can start writing your own testimony. Take your time, and when you feel you are ready, contact us so we publish it for you here. This testimony can be anonymised as much as you feel comfortable with! We can also help you write it, for instance in an interview-like format.

Last but not least, share this piece with everyone you think is likely to suffer from burnout. The sooner we can acknowledge our own pain, the better it is to fix as many things as possible. We are here to help each other!