I burned out and nearly left. Here's How I'm Recovering.
So, I have a confession for you. A few months ago, I was planning on leaving everything. I was planning on deleting my YouTube channels, leaving my flat, Scotland, and possibly changing my name completely. I was going to keep my number and keep in contact with friends, but I wasn’t planning on telling anyone where I was going. I was going to pack up my belongings, leave the country, and vanish. I would create a whole new identity, complete my PhD under a new name and start life from scratch.
This wouldn’t have been completely out of the realm of reality for me; I mean, it’s the reason I first moved to Scotland and changed my surname on a whim, again, without telling anyone.
Life can be really overwhelming, and sometimes, you want to run away from it all and start from scratch.
I was tired of doing everything alone and working non-stop, seven days a week, without the ability to afford help. I missed reading books and graphic design; I didn’t have time to exercise any more or the willpower to eat healthily because the haunting weight of my workload and the pressure I had on myself to survive and do well crushed my autonomy. I was desperate to shed the weight from me; I wanted to destroy and leave everything I had built up over the years and sacrificed so much for with the click of a button because the pressure was too much. I was too ashamed that I couldn’t maintain the basic sandcastle I had built.
I resented it all because I’d lost my personality to it: I had no life, I wasn’t doing what I loved, which was reading, writing my stories and studying. I wasn’t living or laughing anymore or drawing and painting. My life revolved around the fear of not doing enough, not being enough, not earning enough, not achieving enough, and that was when I knew I’d become a shell of who I was, and shells are easy to discard and abandon.
This is the story of my burnout and the story of how I’m trying to overcome it.
Burnout is not a trend. Too many people are burned out.
Burnout has become one of those irritatingly trendy terms thrown around nowadays. Everyone is claiming they’re burned out, and when you hear your favourite multi-million dollar celebrity share on TikTok or Instagram their tales of burnout, you likely feel the urge to throw your phone against a wall and scream into a pillow. But saying a multimillionaire can’t be burned out would be the equivalent of saying they can’t possibly have depression and anxiety — mental health and life doesn’t work that way. Rich and privileged people can experience burnout as much as an overworked nurse on the NHS can because burnout is the byproduct of capitalism, and we’re the products of capitalism.
‘Burnout’ has been recognised as a medical diagnosis by the World Health Organisation as an ‘occupational phenomenon’. Burnout is diagnosed by four symptoms:
Feelings of energy depletion, exhaustion and fatigue
Increased mental distance from your job
Feelings of negativism or cynicism related to your job
Reduced professional efficacy
The demands of modern life have drastically affected our work-life balance and stressors, and the lines between work and home life have become increasingly blurred. A recent survey from Slack found that burnout is on the rise globally, most significantly in the U.S., where 43% of middle managers reported burnout — more than any other worker group, and over four million American workers quit their jobs each month in 2022.
That sounds like a good move, doesn’t it? When I discussed with people my feelings surrounding my workload, those who cared about me suggested I quit my job, but that didn’t seem to be the answer. Research from Gallup in 2020 revealed that 76% of employees experience burnout on the job at least sometimes, but working less wasn’t enough to reduce stress, improve well-being or prevent burnout. That’s because burnout is not the same as stress: burnout is related to how people experience their work, not always the work itself. So, whilst you can use certain techniques to manage stress or take a break, burnout is the result of cumulative unmanaged stress and a sense of feeling resentful of the impact your work is having on your quality of life.
What Causes Burnout?
Research by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter of the University of California at Berkeley and Acadia University, respectively, identified six factors that lead to burnout:
Workload
Perceived lack of control
Reward
Community
Fairness
Values mismatch
Whenever there is a discrepancy between you and these six factors related to your work, there is a chance for burnout. Looking at my case study, it’s easy to see what happened. I was overworked doing everything alone; I didn’t have a team, so I had no sense of community. I felt like I couldn’t control how well I did at work because no matter how hard I worked, I was always battling against the fluctuating YouTube algorithm and attempting to capture the attention of a changing, unpredictable audience every week, resulting in me not feeling rewarded for the amount of effort I put in, and then not feeling rewarded by my lifestyle as a whole because I was no longer doing any hobbies or even reading books, my biggest passion in life, or studying.
How I’m Trying to Recover from Burnout
Recovery from burnout will depend on your relationship to any of those six factors. You may feel burned out because your workplace isn’t fair and your boss is overwhelming you with responsibilities or deadlines, or your values may not align with those of your boss, company or colleagues. Only you can identify the specifics of your circumstances and act to mitigate their impact on you.
We can’t always change our circumstances, but we can change our approach. I know I can’t afford to take time off work or hire help. Still, I can adjust my workload by making my projects smaller and more frequent, changing the medium in which I publish my work, and forcing myself to stop working at a particular time at night so I can make more time for studying or reading for fun and getting up earlier in the day to carve out more time for work.
Have I overcome my burnout? Absolutely not. I’m still in a stage where I dread facing my computer every morning, and there are nights when I wake up at 3 a.m. and start working because I can’t sleep due to the anxiety of the undone work. But it’s getting better; the other night, I read 50 pages of a book, something which I haven’t done in one sitting for over two years. I’m seeing a therapist again and keeping in contact with friends. I even started planning out a short story for the first time in three years and began learning about D&D with the hopes of joining my first campaign.
They’re not impressive accomplishments, but they’re far more colourful facets of my life than doing the same thing day in and out. Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, so this is my attempt to break the insanity loop I was in and overcome my burnout.
