How to Spot, and Reverse, the Signs of Burnout

According to the World Health Organization, "burnout" means emotional exhaustion, plus depersonalization, and a reduced sense of efficacy. But chances are, we don’t need that formal definition. All of us have experienced it, especially over the last year. 

But what can be done about it?

First, we can get to know and recognize it better. While we may associate burnout with the workplace, it actually can show up anywhere. For example, it might arise in parenting, as an arms race for having the most hardcore agendas for our kids, in which busyness is seen as a badge of honor. 

Burnout is also a spectrum, not a binary. At the early stages, it might just show up as having an excessive drive and pushing yourself to work harder and harder until you start neglecting personal care and needs. We might depersonalize others, seeing work colleagues purely in terms of their roles, for example, or we might depersonalize ourselves, seeing ourselves as to-do list ninjas rather than human beings.

At later phases, many people experience inner emptiness, depression or collapse. It can look like intensive depression or like anxiety, depending on the person. Burnout can contribute to substance abuse and even, in extreme cases, to suicidal ideation.

As anyone who has experienced it knows, severe burnout is also a full-body experience. Recent research on burnout has focused on how burnout impacts our bodies, from enlarged amygdalas to changes in hormones and gastrointestinal problems. Other physical symptoms include hair loss, hormonal changes, even changes in one's speaking voice.

Lastly, as we emerge from the pandemic, it's also worth emphasizing that burnout takes a long time to recover from, like trauma. Burnout has a real impact on our self-worth and our ability to function even at basic levels. 

So, if you've seen that burnout has arisen in your life, what can be done about it?

The answer to that question has two parts, each of which needs the other.

First, especially for readers of Ten Percent Weekly, mindfulness can help us recharge and stay grounded. It can help us see the mindsets we may have that increase the likelihood of burnout, like having a hero complex, believing burnout won't happen to us or internalizing a framing that sees busyness as a badge of honor.

Or, to take another example, are we very high on purpose and inclined toward self-sacrifice? Or are we low on purpose, and falling into a rut is more of a risk? Meditation can provide a sense of space and understanding of what's happening within you. 

Meditation can also help us explore our coping strategies for feeling stressed about work or anxious about life. We can see if we sometimes throw ourselves back into our work over and over and over again. We can pay attention to the glass of wine that turns into four. We can try substituting fulfilling self-care activities for less productive ones. We can pay closer attention to health and sleep. If we notice these things, we become less likely to be the frog in the pot.

At the same time, there's a particular trap that those of us who meditate can be susceptible to. In my life, when I ended the phase of doing six-month meditation retreats and entered the stage of being a working mom trying to support a family in the most expensive region of our country, I believed that I should be able to cope. After all, I know how to meditate!

At one point, I had three babies under five. I had gained about 80 pounds. My husband and I had moved across the country, and he was trying to commute up to San Francisco from Palo Alto. I was working around the clock, and I had a strong sense of mission behind my work. And my dad had just died the year before. 

And then, after the failure that I experienced in managing pretty much everything, I just blamed myself even more. If my meditation didn't solve the problem, then that was on me. 

So, for me, it was constructive to stop believing that I could meditate my way out of burnout and start looking at other solutions, like changing my work environment, changing my approach to boundaries, learning new skills and putting myself in new professional contexts. Even though it was terrifying at the time, it was vital for me to recognize that I had a problem and that the tools I was working with might not be the complete set of tools I needed to solve it.

Those tools might include discussions about caregiving and housework – not just who's doing what, but who's feeling drained by what they're doing – as well performance reviews in the workplace, access to childcare, and how to reenter the workforce if you stepped out of it during the pandemic. And it might include having "diving buddies" – people in your workplace or your life who are keeping an eye on you. I like this metaphor because burnout is so hard to self-diagnose, especially in its early phases.

Ultimately, we all have to make decisions within the framework of what's in front of us, and that can be hard. Sometimes that means changing things externally, and sometimes it's about what we're going to work on internally to make the best of a situation. All of us are both individuals and parts of a system, and preventing burnout requires both perspectives.