I burned out a month ago.
I wasn’t able to get out of bed one day. Then another. Then I had to fight rivers of tears every time I attempted to get up the energy to read emails. Or any time I had to do something for anyone else, including the cat. I was furious at everyone and everything, and at the same time too tired to care or do anything about it. I couldn’t remember the ONE task I would set myself to do per day unless I wrote it down as soon as I thought of it.
I was burned out and I knew it, because I have managed people who have burned out before (I’m not proud of this). As a result of that, I am intensely engaged in learning about burnout and its prevention and management, both for myself and others.
And yes, I still burned out.
And I STILL HAD NO IDEA WHAT TO DO.
And GOOGLE COULDN’T HELP ME.
Lacking the brainpower to do much else, I repeatedly searched for “Burnout 101”, “Burnout SOS”, “What to do if I have burnout”…
… And I came up with nothing.
All I found were articles that said “how to spot signs of burnout & what to do about it” < but I already KNEW I was burned out, so that was kind of salt in the wound. I read the articles anyway. They told me to take walks (I have a dog, so I was doing this daily anyway), meditate & do yoga (have been doing this for years, next) and get a hobby (um, no, knitting was not helping me have the energy to lift my head from the pillow).
After crashing for another day or so about this inadequacy of the internet, I did a callout on my Instagram feed. That was scary. I posted this:
Most of the responses I got were well-meaning but not super helpful (“Sorry to hear that, I’m here if you want to talk”). Side note: I’m going to do a follow up post on how to help someone with burnout…
But I was able to connect with a couple of people who had gone through it recently and come out on the other side. And thanks to them I managed to form a plan of attack that helped me climb out of the worst of it (I think).
A word of warning: You are going to feel selfish, weak, useless, and guilty. You’re going to have to push through this because until you do things will only get worse.
So here goes, my list of
SOS Burnout Steps to take immediately:
Step 0. Tell your boss and HR
Set up a 30 minute 1:1 with your boss and a separate one with your HR representative for today.
Yeah. I know it’s uncomfortable. Maybe even feels impossible.
Just do it. Write out what you are going to say beforehand. Something like: “I wanted to let you know that I am experiencing symptoms of workplace burnout that are interfering with my ability to do my work and I may have to go on sick leave to recuperate.”
A word of caution: do not expect them to respond like adequate human beings. Burnout and any kind of medical leave when the employer can be implicated are fraught with legal, regulatory, and other scary stuff, so in my experience managers and HR reps tend to be extremely uncommunicative and/or unhelpful, even if they feel for you and want to be supportive.
Our goal here is not to get them to help you. It is for you to document that you have informed them. Which means you can go on to the next step.
Step 1. Call in sick.
I really didn’t want to do this. I avoided this for 2 full weeks while being unable to function. I took some vacation days. But the nature of working today means that people on vacation are expected to check their emails and Slacks, even if this is never explicitly relayed to you. So my vacation days were really just days of laying in bed refreshing my inbox and responding to “just one more” “urgent” task. It wasn’t until I called in sick that I could actually, truly, shut off.
Therapists, friends, friends in HR, and the internet were all telling me to call in sick and I still refused to do it.
Listen to me. Do it, and do it now.
I finally caved when I found myself on a 2-hour Zoom meeting where my only task was to listen, and I started crying because it was too hard. I know this sounds ridiculous. The ridicule of it shocked me into doing it.
Again, don't expect compassion from your work. Our goal here is to remove yourself from the traumatic situation, not to get the place that’s actively causing the trauma to suddenly change its ways.
Listen to this, too: your mental health will not recover if you don’t do this. And if your mental health doesn’t recover, you will never be able to perform at your job to the level that you expect. You can not push through. Your body will not let you. You are only going to keep failing.
Trust me on this. Call. In. Sick. Take longer than you think you need.
Step 2. Get rid of as many responsibilities as you can.
This is where you might start to feel guilty. But this is fatigue management 101, and burnout is nothing if not extreme fatigue. This is not optional.
If you are able to not do normal adult stuff, then please, please, make it so. Literally any responsibility you can think of that you can conceivably get rid of, do it.
For example:
- get help (paid or friendly) feeding, watering, and walking your pets
- stop cleaning your house, or get help
- get help cooking or order food
- per above, obviously, do not answer any emails, Slacks, or work calls, no matter how “urgent” or “easy”
Make it so that if you want to not get out of bed except to pee for several days on end, you can.
Step 3. Get into your body.
Now listen. I am not a woo person. I have been in normal, traditional therapy for many years. I do yoga because it helps with flexibility. I am not in the least bit “spiritual”.
So when I tell you that you need to get into your body, don’t take this as another “do yoga to clear your mind” category of advice.
Burnout is your body screaming at you to pay attention.
If you’ve found yourself unable to get out of bed and face the terror of the work inbox; flying off the handle at an innocent Slack from a crappy coworker; or feeling that it is literally and truly impossible for you to face your next Zoom meeting — and I mean all of this in the real sense, not the “haha I’m so anxious in the corporate world” meme-sense — if you know that you are burned out and can no longer function properly, you are at the mercy of your body already. You have to listen to it, now.
So do exactly what it demands from you for a while. This will probably take longer than you think. I thought I would be fine within two days. In reality it was more like 4 weeks before I could function enough to walk the dog on time and read emails (and I’m still struggling).
This could look like:
- Sleeping whenever you feel like it, even if it’s 11am and you woke up an hour ago.
- Eating a McFlurry for dinner (or with dinner) 3 nights in a row.
- Somatic therapies. I found it really helpful to work with a somatic bodyworker (here is mine). You can look into practices like haptotherapy as well or simply somatic therapy. Essentially, somatic therapies teach you to release trauma that is stored in the body, bypassing the brain’s (over)processing of it and going directly to the physical response. Burnout is an acute trauma response, and while working through it with your brain is also crucially important (see step 5), your SOS first-aid response should be to start to heal the body which is why I list somatic work first.
This also means nourishing your body, which probably looks like:
- Limit caffeine (if you’re like me, you will pound the coffee just to feel an ounce of energy again, but it won’t work, so just stick to your usual-on-the-low-side)
- Limit alcohol (if you’re like me, you will need to get wine-smashed and cry in the bath a couple of nights, but the rest of the time, trust me and limit it, or you will only feel so much worse)
- Vitamins & supplements: This was recommended to me by a naturopathic-leaning friend, so I don’t personally vouch for any of it, but it did make me feel better. I took vitamin C (because apparently, stress-induced cortisol eats up vit C in the system), magnesium (for easing the stress tension in my muscles), 5-htp and L-Tyrosine (they are supposed to be precursors to serotonin and dopamine, respectively; Reddit recommends to pair them for heart health reasons), plus B-12 and B complex (energy related).
Step 4. Do what feels good or necessary.
After a while of lying there like a lump, you will start to feel like doing something. I encourage you to follow this instinct, because it will help you to train listening to yourself, and re-learn what gives you energy and motivation, and also how to have boundaries (with yourself) and take adequate rest.
- Self-compassionate movement. I’m a runner, and on a particularly sunny day, I laced up my shoes and went out. But I didn’t do my usual “I’m running for 10K without stopping come hell or high water” routine. I ran for a bit, grabbing those endorphins. Then I sat down in the sun for a full 20 minutes listening to birds. Then I walked. Then I danced to some Shakira. Then I ran a little again. Whether running, walking, or biking, don’t do sport to get fit right now. Do movement that helps you to listen to your body and learn to give it what it needs.
- Creative work, or whatever is your favorite way to use your mind. For me, that was working on a podcast that I’m trying to launch. I suddenly got a burst of creative energy and I went with it, and that helped me to feel hopeful that I could actually function again someday.
- Yoga & meditation because you want to. I can’t explain it but for some reason my body was actually craving for me to do certain yin yoga poses (mainly hip & leg stuff like pigeon, but also neck releasing poses and a lot of child’s pose). Meditation was helpful for the gloomy hours, nothing strenuous, even sitting or lying still and breathing or trying to listen with ease to sounds around me.
When something starts to feel like a chore, stop it immediately, even if you’re halfway through a set of yoga poses and have only done the right side.
Step 5. Seek professional help.
Burnout is a dark and hopeless place that feels truly impossible to climb out of. Getting out without professional help is extremely difficult. So if you are able to, get some. Some employers sponsor workplace coaches or even therapists, so find out if yours will. Mine didn’t, and I worried about the financial impact of seeking help. However, I found that while there are many “burnout coaches” shilling $1500+ session bundles online, there are also specialists who will work with you on a session-by-session basis, which means your investment could be as little as $100 (or whatever their hourly rate), and even one session can be immensely helpful in getting you out of the dark place.
Having experienced many different kinds of therapies in my lifetime, I actually chose to work with two types of specialists:
- A more traditional talk therapist that I found through a friend’s recommendation, for helping me sort through the guilt, shame, worthlessness, and denial; and
- A workplace coach, who specialized in a “systems” approach, which looks at the environment as a significant part of career functioning, to help me put (productive) words to what was wearing me down and figure out if I even wanted to, or if it was worthwhile to try to, continue working there.
I had 3 total sessions with these two, coming to a total cost of €300 / $365. Not nothing, but it wasn’t as ruinous as I had feared.
They helped me to get an objective view of my situation, including accepting ways I had failed, but also the way my workplace had failed me. This laid the foundation for deciding what I wanted to do and where I would draw my boundaries going forward. Which leads me to…
Step 6. Identify your boundaries
In my experience, work will take from you everything that you give it. And a lot of the time, you are giving more than you need to — or than anyone really expects from you. When I started dissecting my work with my coach, I realized that a lot of the unclear tasks that I was struggling with, I had inserted myself into or placed responsibility on myself that really didn’t need to be there.
Some ways to ID your boundaries:
- Write your own job description. What lights you up?
- Get clear on your “won’t do” list. What tasks don’t belong to you?
- Get clear on your “won’t take it” list. What behaviors will you no longer accept or react to? Can you set your working hours in a way that’s more favorable to you?
Communicating, enforcing and acting on these boundaries is a whole other can of worms, but for me, even knowing them was already a massive relief. When I got back to my inbox I could safely ignore 95% of it (where I never would have before) because I realized I simply wasn’t needed in those conversations and they would be sorted without me.
A final note
I am not claiming to have all the answers — I’m not even sure I am out of the woods myself. But one thing I do know is that had I not prioritized my mental health (for once in my life), I wouldn’t even be functional enough to write this now, 4 weeks down the line. I also know that everyone said it to me and I didn’t listen, but it’s true: there is nothing more important than protecting your mental health. The cruel irony is people who get burned out are the least likely to accept this truth because they ended up burned out by sacrificing their mental wellness for everyone and everything in the first place. But you won’t get out of it unless you do, and once you take that first step, you’ll feel so much better. Please try it.
Take care of yourself.
— Varia
