What Kills You, Saves You!
Burnout for beginners: a tested model to conquer it
Mental and emotional exhaustion go hand in hand. One breaks your cognition and affects your short term memory. The other one fails to identify the root of the related feelings and process them accordingly.
Raise your hand if you still believe the restrictions during the pandemic were absolute hell.
I don’t, but my 2021 was worse:
covid (when there was no vaccine) — a 6 month long covid when no doctor knew about its symptoms. 3 other chronic conditions involving 4 different specializations: inhuman pains, hospitalization for several weeks (and the cherry on top: they all happened overnight, for no particular or obvious reason).
In short: a year full of lessons!
Self-diagnosis: mental breakdown, emotional drainage, and exhaustion
Very late AHA moment: the medical term of it is burnout
The problem with burnout is that it is like a chameleon. You can easily confuse it with stress, with just being tired or with any other kind of daily burden.
And I am sure anyone can easily find a daily burden to use as an excuse whenever they need to save their “image”, even if only from themselves.
I already have an entire list and I have not even finished my first coffee yet.
The other thing about burndown is that in the collective mentality it is often associated with work related factors, which makes it even harder to acknowledge that you are experiencing it for any other reason.
Real feel:
Imagine a marsh filled with mud. You make the first step and your foot gets stuck. With every breath, the mud swallows it more and more. Would you struggle to take your foot out as fast as possible? What if the branches of a tree fell unexpectedly on the highway, just a couple of meters in front of you? Would you move your hands fast enough on the wheel to avoid scratching your car? Would you stop watching over and over again the scenes of a movie that you already knew were disgusting?
If you just heard “Duh, of course!” in your head while also rolling your eyes, then “Congratulations!” You do not suffer from burnout, or at least not in the way I have experienced it.
Just to make it clear, those exact scenes did not happen to me either. I just wanted to draw a picture of how I was feeling when I finally realized my general state had a name (burndown) and that it was time to do something about it.
When I realized I had no mental bandwidth left, not even to deal with simple daily tasks, it was already too late. I had experienced everything that I thought was the worst possible. My head was getting lava hot for no reason every day, especially after I was eating. I had moments of a blank mind, not being able to combine the words in order to put them into a sentence. I was “playing” Sherlock Holmes with my doctors, trying to figure out a diagnosis for the constant devil pains I had on my face that lasted for a month (it took 6 different CTs, 2 RMNs, some other random scans, and 3 specializations to find out where the infection was located).
The danger was that after finishing such a painful marathon, I started to feel like a survivor. I was coming from hell, so nothing else in life would scare me anymore. I thought to myself that no other experience could possibly be so bad. So, I just stopped caring for anything else. I lost the wish to save myself from anything that looked bad… because the bad was still looking good in comparison to hell.
Watching your life being ruined and not reacting —
that is how burnout feels!
Mitigation plan:
I think the trap when dealing with burnout is to try to find solutions for the symptoms. For instance, if you feel exhausted, the tendency is to sleep more. Or if you feel psychically drained, you will probably avoid taking on new responsibilities or dealing with old ones.
What I did instead, was to apply the lessons learned from the doctors that worked on my case for more than 8 months:
The final objective is to treat the disease,
not just comfort the symptoms.
To paint a more clear picture: let’s say your blood tests show a lack of iron.
Of course, you can take pills and increase the level of iron. But the lack of iron is not a disease itself, but a symptom. The objective of a hematologist would be to find the real cause /disease that triggered the lack of iron, even if the level grows back into the parameters.
I tried to apply the same mentality to conquering the burndown and came up with the following strategy:
- identifying the real cause of the burndown — what experience had truly exhausted me
not understanding the medical process / having no clear diagnosis and no treatment for so many months /spending all my savings on the investigations and not being able to take some gap month to recover from the pain / all that long-term, inhuman pain - why was the burden of it so intense
trauma: I was scared that I might go through the same hell again
The fact that it happened once was by change, but if it would happen again and I would go through the same difficulties, then it would be my fault. - how could I have avoided developing this trauma
if I had medical insurance (all costs would have been covered),
if I had more savings or some passive income streams in order to have the possibility to afford some gap months when I needed them the most,
if I would have found a sense/meaning / purpose in going through so much pain
Once I started to plan concrete and clear actions for the how I also started to slowly get my perspective back.
All that remains is to ACT!
