In the moment, when we’re frazzled, worn out, depleted and still must get our work done, burnout doesn’t feel like a gift in any way. It’s typically once we have some distance – after we’ve rested, when we’re in the flow again – that we can reflect and see how burnout was giving red flags and signs of warning all along, and how we grew in response.
Hindsight is 20-20, right?
It’s useful to note that we don’t go from vibrant and resourced to burned out in a day. It happens over time, usually from a combination of stressors and coping strategies that feel helpful in the moment, yet further deplete us:
Multiple late nights in a row, eating crappy food that tastes good but has no nutritional value, drinking one more glass of wine on top of the other two, scrolling in social media in the late night hours, and working all day in a stressful “gotta get it all done” mode that would make Mary Poppins’ head spin.
Most of us know what comes next – the crash-and-burn that is unique to all of us, yet have commonalities that are the hallmarks of burnout:
- Health challenges, whether extreme cases that put us in hospital care or continually on the verge of anxiety, depression, dissociation, anger or rage, isolation, mania, and more.
- Lifestyle changes like rage-quitting our careers, spiraling into debt from trying to find comfort through purchases or gambling, and some divorces (we’ve all heard of the midlife crisis).
- Dark nights of the soul, where who we are and what we believe in, value, and care about are all thrown into tumultuous questioning and sometimes isolation, with grievous inner suffering.
Diane McIntosh, MD, [1] shares her indicators of burnout,
“I was slowly drowning under a tsunami of patient needs. I was arguing with heartless and disinterested government agencies, insurance companies, HR departments, and referral sources that were determined not to accept anyone. It all wore me down. After a couple of years of visualizing myself as an empty bucket, feeling I had nothing left at the end of the day for my family or myself, I realized I had to take a break from patient care.”
Perhaps we initially resist or deny the concept of burnout – “It couldn’t happen to me! I’m fine!” – because of what it socially implies: weakness, inability to get our work done, lack of skills to manage everything, vulnerability and at the top of the list (and potentially most scary to our psyche)… change.
What if we accepted it, instead?
When we accept we are on the path of burnout, or already “an empty bucket” as McIntosh describes, we must change. Change is the only pathway forward. Something must intentionally shift in order to alter our course.
For McIntosh, she needed to shift her career focus. Some people need to change careers altogether to align more with what is truly in their best interests. Others realize the need to learn how to set better boundaries around time and what they are willing to do within their current careers.
Whatever form our challenge is coming in, making a conscious shift is how we survive. And then, even thrive.
When we get to the other side of our burnout, we often find that the new coping mechanisms we had to learn to survive our challenges are now gifts for our newly-formed life forward. They have been fiercely earned. Yes, for most of us the gifts of burnout come through in hindsight; however, if you can practice these gifts now – look deeply at where you can make one small change in your life today, then one more, and one more – you might just find that you’ve taken yourself off the track heading toward burnout and chosen the path of rejuvenation and vitality, before the choice is chosen for you.
“In dealing with those who are undergoing great suffering, if you feel ‘burnout’ setting in, if you feel demoralized and exhausted, it is best, for the sake of everyone, to withdraw and restore yourself. The point is to have a long-term perspective.” — Dalai Lama
When we’re pushed to the edge of our capacity, and then pushed beyond it, we are gifted with these challenges and learnings that would not appear as obvious for us without the situation at hand. We learn, we grow, and find new choices to keep us from needing to re-learn the lesson of burnout at that level again.
We find what we will not tolerate, what we actually enjoy, what soothing mechanisms work for us and what activities bring us into rest-and-digest mode instead of fight-or-flight. We learn how to slow down. Sometimes burnout forces us to come into contact with our spiritual selves, especially if it’s our first burnout ever.
We become closer with ourselves, more wise, more available to the experiences of others and more often than not, kinder and more understanding. We learn how to take care of ourselves. We learn who we are.
We thrive.
These are the gifts of burnout.
Resources:
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched-up/201908/the-gift-of-professional-burnout
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Marla Mattenson
With a 25+ year career, Mattenson is a trailblazer in transforming sales paradigms from transactional to relational for professionals who prioritize the integrity & fulfillment of their services. She is a champion of consent-based sales.
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