This is what burnout looks and feels like.

Notes from recovery...

Good morning :)

It feels like a heavy topic for Sunday morning… or maybe it’s just the right time to pause and reflect… do you ever hear the word ‘burnout’ and wonder what it looks and feels like? Do you ever feel so exhausted that you question if you are ‘burned out’?

Whilst as far as I am aware burnout is not currently a medical diagnosis, it is widely understood to be a state of physical and mental exhaustion from long-term stress. In this letter I am sharing my lived experience of burnout over the last few months, and have linked a resource from Mental Health UK at the end that describes the common signs of burnout across the population in the UK in case you’d like to read further.

I can see now that I have experienced severe burnout at least 3 times in my adult life. Each time, I thought I was being weak. I blamed myself for not being able to cope and not being able to push through. I thought everyone felt this way and that it was just part of life. The sad thing is that I think many people feel this way, and it has been normalised by the capitalist society we live in which makes it hard for us as individuals to advocate for ourselves when we’re struggling.

Each time I pushed myself to a point where I had to abandon the main source of my stress: my work situation. I gave my whole heart and soul to make it work and when I couldn’t I eventually snapped. When I worked in private practice as a lawyer I pushed so hard that eventually I left and vowed never to go back to private practice. I’ve since done that with full-time to part-time work in my in-house role, and eventually quitting law all together.

This brings me to the present day - unemployed and so burned out that I no longer feel I can pursue corporate work, let alone the career in law I spent 10 years building.

For me, it’s clear that the source of my burnout is work-related stress. And, without realising it, by pushing through every time without listening to my body I was doing serious harm to my health. Here’s what that has looked like for me during recovery…

Just prior to snapping and quitting my job, and despite working part-time, I still felt like I was at my wits’ end. Each work day left me so tired and drained that I would spend most of my time off recovering. I felt defeated by the system of work and cynical about ever being able to find a balance. I was riddled with self-doubt about how I was performing at work and how people perceived me and as a result often procrastinated and took longer to actually do my job. It was a perpetual cycle of doubting, procrastinating and scrabbling to keep up whilst all the while feeling so overwhelmed that I felt at any moment I might combust.

Eventually, I did snap. I had a really bad panic attack at work which I now see was the beginning of a mental health crisis. I walked out of work that day and never went back. Which was a HUGE deal for me having spent so long and so much energy pushing myself to try to make it work. It was as if my body finally took over and refused to do it anymore.

For many weeks after I quit my job I didn’t leave my bed. I slept for 16 hours a day, feeling tired and drained when I was awake. I couldn’t think straight, let alone talk, which made me feel isolated from the world and trapped in my own body. My mind was running riot with negative thought spirals and my cynicism about my situation was through the roof. I was in a constant state of overwhelm and despair and couldn’t decipher up from down. It felt like I was never going to get better.

The thing is there is no ‘off’ switch once you’ve been conditioned to operate at maximum capacity your whole life. It takes energy you don’t have in burnout to retrain your brain that rest is good, that you’re not being ‘lazy’, and that your health is the priority. This is where the support I received from my husband made all the difference. Without his support I think my mental health would have slipped further than it did. He helped me retrain my brain every single day to speak kindly to myself, to value rest, and to give myself time.

People kept telling me that I’d feel better in a few days after some more rest. But I felt like there was a step-change in me as a person. A fundamental shift of energy that I would never be able to get back no matter how much I rested. It felt as though the sieve holes were too big and had let all of my energy, personality and enthusiasm for life drain through them. Recovery has been and is so much longer than I ever could have anticipated, and it was difficult to explain this to people when as a society we are not accepting of burnout being a serious issue.

Now, a few months later, I can see I was right. Whilst I no longer sleep 16 hours a day and I have started to get back to light activity (like doing the ironing and engaging in cognitive tasks like jigsaw puzzles) I am not the same as I was before. I still do not have the energy to see many people. I am not working. I can only do one activity a day, whether that be a social engagement or house chores or creating content. I don’t have the same energy, enthusiasm or mindset.

That’s not to say that those things will never come back but there has been a process of grieving who I was and the state she let me get myself into, and now that process is morphing into learning to operate within my own means to take care of myself from this moment on as a top priority. I am learning to accept that the old me is gone, and learning to live a life that accommodates a slower pace.

I am fortunate enough to be able to do this and regularly think how unfair it is that many people are trapped in jobs or stressful situations that they cannot simply quit. It makes me angry to think taking a break from the stressor that is ruining one’s health is not a universal right, especially when the system and society we operate within compounds the stress.

That said, and I want to address this topic delicately, I also felt trapped when I was in it even though I see now I had the means to quit. I felt like there was no way out, the financial risk was too great and I didn’t know who I’d be outside of the path I’d already chosen for myself… and what I’d like to say to that version of myself is that your health is worth it. If your body is telling you no, there is a reason; if you have the means, listen to it. You’re not being weak. You’re not just lazy. It is hard. And it is brave and heroic to listen to your body and honour its needs. Our health is the most important thing we have in our lives, and it is not fair that it is so hard to prioritise it but it is a blessing that you are looking after yourself in the ways you can.

I tell this story not to depress but to spread awareness about the danger of over-working and over-stressing your mind and body. our society trains an obsession with ‘pushing through’ that leads us away from ourselves and towards burnout. It’s like we turn off our internal warning system and put on our blinkers, letting nothing get in the way of our pursuit of success and keeping it all together.

I know we can’t always choose our circumstances, and I am fortunate to have had the means to change my circumstances, so I don’t have all the answers. But awareness was something I was completely lacking, and I think if I had known I would end up here I would have worked out how to make different choices sooner. If you are burned out, I see you and I know what a challenge it is. A challenge that doesn’t come with the social understanding or support that it needs.

Please keep pursuing yourself, putting yourself first and going easy on yourself when the days feel long.

Love,

Charlie xxx

P.s. this is the link to Mental Health UK: https://mentalhealth-uk.org/burnout/