Do You Believe in Love After Burnout?
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Working in tech is beautiful. You get to be part of the industry that’s changing the world and making an impact on people’s lives. But, if there’s one characteristic that unites everyone working in tech today — it’s definitely pressure. Respecting short deadlines while doing your work right is itself a pressure big enough. Working with many people, showing initiative, struggling with toxic workplaces, paying enough attention to every part of the task, the list is endless. And it will just continue to grow.
Pressure doesn’t come only from work. It comes from all aspects of your life. Your parents are pressuring you to get married, but you first need to show up to that Sunday lunch. Your partner is expecting you to be dedicated to your relationship, your home won’t clean up itself, you need to find time to work out, your friends expect you to show up at the Friday party… It keeps adding up.
Personally, I feel the most pressure of the next task coming up. While I’m working on something, I can’t even focus on the task, I keep thinking that I need to finish it fast so I can start working on the next task. And tasks don’t seem to stop coming.
When I’m done with work, I need to find time for everything else, when all I want is to just lay down. And that “everything else” time will soon stop existing because work is on my mind even when I’m not doing it. The worst part is the guilt feeling that is following me every time I sit down and take a break, thinking of everything that’s left to do.
Pretty happy with my awesome job and everything I’ve achieved so far, I started wearing workaholism like a badge of honor. It’s never enough. I constantly feel the need of doing more and better. Eventually, this need became bigger than everything I am, making me feel like a robot. Lying to myself that things have “just been busy” lately hasn’t really given any results.
The time came to embrace what was really going on — I was experiencing burnout. That awful condition that comes after you’ve ignored all the red flags. Frustration, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and disappointment, mixed with a lot of work, all at the same time.
When this happens, there’s no sight of work-life balance. Life is work and work is life. You have no desire to meet your friends or do something for yourself. Seeing a doctor is the last thing you can imagine.
What really is burnout?
The term “burnout” was coined in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger, in his book “Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement.”
Here, he identifies burnout as “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.”
Most recently, the World Health Organization has recognized burnout as a severe condition, defining it as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) reduced professional efficacy.”
David Ballard, PsyD, of the American Psychological Association describes it as “an extended period of time where someone experiences exhaustion and a lack of interest in things, resulting in a decline in their job performance.”
Basically, burnout is a state where job stress has drained you so much that working becomes harder and harder, making your focus weaker and your desire to work equal to nothing.
Burnout is not just a bad day or a bad week like we normally have. Burnout means not having any good days.
This is actually a pretty common condition with our unsustainable way of life. It’s even more characteristic for millennials. Anne Helen Petersen of BuzzFeed wrote an article, explaining that the work-life balance among millennials has been lost. Things we put on our to-do lists are haunting us, no matter if we’re at work or not. We don’t go offline anymore — we’re constantly available, answering to emails and messages. Holidays are no exception. All this stress makes it difficult to do even minor tasks that would take up a few minutes.
“None of these tasks were that hard: getting knives sharpened, taking boots to the cobbler, registering my dog for a new license, sending someone a signed copy of my book, scheduling an appointment with the dermatologist, donating books to the library, vacuuming my car. A handful of emails — one from a dear friend, one from a former student asking how my life was going — festered in my personal inbox, which I use as a sort of alternative to-do list, to the point that I started calling it the “inbox of shame.”
It’s not as if I were slacking in the rest of my life. I was publishing stories, writing two books, making meals, executing a move across the country, planning trips, paying my student loans, exercising on a regular basis. But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better, I avoided it.” she wrote in the article.
Eventually, it all comes to making lists. A shopping list, a list of appointments, a list of work tasks, a list of emails and messages to respond to, a list of stuff to clean, a list of some other bullshit you won’t even do half of. And when you don’t it overwhelms you even more.
Let’s face it, a little stress doesn’t harm anybody. What is more, it can be a motivator. But what we’re talking about here is an extreme condition that takes the wellbeing out of you.
This condition is even more common among millennial women. According to Captivate, men are 25% more likely to take breaks throughout the day for personal activities, 7% more likely to take a walk, 5% more likely to go out to lunch, and 35% more likely to take breaks “just to relax.” Millennial women are treating burnout as a sprint, setting their own expectations for themselves too high.
So, is there love after burnout?
The condition of burnout can last for years. Recovering can last even longer. Teri Thompson of Purdue University told Forbes that we need to redefine our goals after experiencing burnout.
“It often takes many years to really understand one’s strengths and where one finds happiness. In a sense, I do think it’s unrealistic to assume a long-sought-after job can bring one such happiness that one’s searching is done. We’re all a work in progress; new inputs — from new friends to new places visited — mean we’re constantly changing in our thoughts of what’s desired, what’s possible, what’s fun, what we want to do.” she argues.
Living with burnout is actually not living according to your priorities and values. The answer is out there, but it sounds too cliché to be true. It’s slowing down. But, slowing down has a different meaning for each person. I’m not going to tell you to meditate or take a vacation, because that might not work for you.
What I can suggest is to write a letter to who you want to be. List the things you care about and put the priority on them. This can be a huge step to gaining your motivation back. Slowly, you’ll start filtering things from your environment and accenting only the ones you truly care. Expressing your real self with your choices will avoid the next burning out.
So, the answer is yes. I do believe in love after burnout. The road to it is long, difficult, and exhausting. But, what awaits, in the end, is worth every step of it.
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