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Burnout is something that I was aware of for years without truly appreciating what it meant for my health and my happiness.
Burnout can be sneaky, slowly building up until it takes over everything all at once, shrouding my brain in fog and skewing my view of the past, present, and future.
Burnout can make it hard to care, introducing apathy (lack of emotional connection) towards many things, stifling change and making it hard to break away. It can also be hard to recover from.
In reality, burnout likely goes deeper than most people think. What we consider “recovery” typically means we have had some rest and have had a small amount of energy restored. That minor rest period is not the same as actually recovering from burnout.
To understand burnout recovery, we need to begin at the beginning. Remember, burnout affects everyone differently. Below is my journey with burnout and what has worked for me to put me on the path to recovery.
My Story With Burnout
The Traditional Path
I have done what I “should” do for most of my life. I worked hard to get into a good university for mechanical engineering, finishing second in my class, got into law school, got a job as a lawyer, and passed the exams to become a patent agent in Canada and the US, winning multiple awards for the highest score. Now what?
This traditional path, what I was supposed to do, has left me feeling burnt out. I know that there must be a better way to live, a better path to follow. One that is true to myself and the full potential of where I could be.
My burnout journey began with articling (an internship) for law. I burnt out in my first year and never fully recovered.
After this internship, I had to get away. I spent almost 3 months in Africa, hiking, exploring, and finding wildlife. I also developed my photography and astrophotography into life-long passions. They have since provided outlets for my mental health and creativity.
I then came back to Canada and worked for the next 5 years as an intellectual property lawyer and patent agent. While this work was interesting for a while, I knew my passions and values lay elsewhere.
Over the years, I felt more and more sapped of energy. Each vacation I took provided a minor restoration, but never led to full recovery from the burnout I experienced early on.
That is why I decided to quit my job and pursue a more fulfilling life, one that aligned with my values and beliefs for where I can see the future is headed. I knew I needed to take a step back and recalibrate.
Recalibrating
If you would like to hear more about my journey, I would love for you to read my Recalibrating Newsletter. The newsletter begins with me quitting my 9-5 job at the end of June 2023 to pursue a life of creativity, without burnout. More detail on why I quit and what I plan to build can be found in Entry #1: What Recalibrating Means To Me.
As I explore this new world, I am building a sustainable creation system that enables me to pursue the life of my dreams while monetizing my hobbies with passive income. The newsletter is meant to be read from the beginning to help guide you on your journey out of burnout and into the best version you can be (but of course join in by reading whichever entry resonates with you).
I invite you to join me on this journey by subscribing to my Recalibrating newsletter ✨
What is Burnout?
Definition
Burnout was first used in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger in the book: Burnout – The High Cost of High Achievement. Burnout was defined as “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results”.
But what does that actually mean?
Symptoms
Verywell Mind has a full list of signs you’re burning out here. I recommend reading the full article to see what resonates with you. Remember, burnout is going to affect each of us differently.
For me, burnout involved:
- fatigue
- sleep issues
- concentration issues
- depressed moods
- anxiety
- apathy (losing emotional connection)
The step to burnout recovery begins with recognizing the symptoms. Once you realize you are in a burnout state, you can move forward to begin treatment and prevent additional burnout.
How Can I recover from Burnout?
Burnout may feel as though it is unsolvable, but it can be treated. The best way to recover from burnout will vary from person to person, but there is one treatment that will help everyone: change.
Change can be frightening. It is related to our deepest primal fear of uncertainty and the unknown. However, change is necessary if we want to move out of a burnout state and into a healthy state. We cannot take the same actions every day and expect to recover. We need to take positive steps to improve our situations.
The journey of burnout recovery is a slow one, taken day by day. Each day we can assess what worked and what didn’t from the day before, and recalibrate as needed to continue on a positive trajectory.
Burnout Recovery Pyramid
To help with burnout, I have been going to therapy over the last year. During therapy I was shown this burnout recovery pyramid, modelled on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The more burnt out you are, the further down the pyramid you should start in order to begin the recovery process.
It makes sense. If you are slightly burnt out, reconnecting with things you once enjoyed can engage and pull you out of burnout.
However, if you are completely fried, odds are you have let other areas in life slip, including physical and mental health. In this scenario, it’s best to start at the bottom. Given that my burnout phase has lasted well over a year, I recognized that the bottom is where I needed to start.
For me, starting at the bottom has meant letting go of the life I had built, one of stability and financial comfort with my job. Over time, I have realized that my values did not align with this life, leading to a dissonance (lack of harmony) that both drained and anchored me from being able to initiate change, from being able to grow.
Recognizing Burnout Through Mindfulness
To help deal with burnout, I have spent a lot of time researching different improvement methods, including mindfulness.
Mindfulness has been one of the greatest skills I have learned and I look forward to helping others explore it out as well.
Mindfulness helps develop self-awareness, an important skill to have in order to recognize burnout. How can we change if we do not know it is there? According to recent studies, 95% of people think that they are self-aware, while in reality, only 10-15% of people actually are. That means up to 85% of people think they are self-aware when they are not 🤯.
Remember, burnout is tricky to notice. The symptoms of lack of concentration and loss of interest/pleasure can make it hard to recognize that burnout is present at all. By practicing mindfulness, we can develop our self-awareness to recognize burnout as it arises, allowing us to deal with it sooner than later.
Journalling and Tracking Physical Health
Journalling can be a great way to continue the development of self-awareness. I have been journalling regularly over the past few years and it has helped me keep track of my moods, thoughts, emotions, and overall well-being. In other words, journalling has helped me track my mental health over time.
Journalling does not have to be complicated, the goal is to get thoughts out of your head and onto the page (digital or physical). By journalling regularly, you can improve your working memory on how you feel over longer periods of time. This long-term memory improves self-awareness and helps identify areas in your life that would benefit from change.
If you are interested in learning more about how to journal to improve your mental health, reduce overthinking, and generally get organized with your digital creations, I discuss these topics and how to structure your digital notes in my newsletter. In particular, I am developing a series on how I am building my own second brain.
Similarly, I have found it helpful to track my physical health over time. If you have a smart watch, you can get an app to help track the changes in your physical health, which may provide insights into which activities cause you the most stress (by analyzing your heartrate).
I recommend the Welltory app. This app provides a clear indication on key insights that contribute to burnout, even providing a “fuel tank” visual to help you understand where you are at. Click here to get a 10% discount off of the annual or life-time subscriptions.
Here are two examples of readings I have taken through the Welltory app:
The important thing to remember is that taking small actions each day to monitor your physical and mental health can have a drastic impact in the long run.
Rest, Self-Care, and Self-Compassion
In my experience, the single most important way to recover from burnout is to REST. Our jobs, family, friends, social media, etc. are constantly encouraging us to do more. If you are experiencing burnout, you likely need to do less.
Deliberately setting aside time to be away from screens and to just be is extremely restorative. Go outside, sit in a park, touch some grass, do something that is only for you and no-one else.
It’s shocking how beneficial taking even a few minutes each day to just breathe and be can have on my mental health.
In-line with resting and taking time for self-care, we can also recover from burnout by being kinder to ourselves. We face constant pressure from others all of the time, we don’t need to put that pressure on ourselves as well. Practicing self-compassion can be a great way to reduce internal pressures and help rest without guilt.
Dr. Kristin Neff has been doing incredible research in the area of self-compassion. Here is a resource of hers to help you get started with self-compassion (recommended to me by my therapist).
If you are looking to learn more about the benefits of rest and how that fits with our modern paradigm (worldview) of efficiency, I recommend the following books:
- Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee
- Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Sookung-Kim Pang
- Breath by James Nestor
Attention
A block many of us face when trying to take time for rest and self-care is that our attention spans are so fractured we find it hard to stay focused on those activities for long. Distraction is not restful, it is stimulating (the opposite of rest).
Meditating, reading, and going for walks are all great ways to improve our attention spans so that we can focus better. Improving our focus also has the added benefit of improving our productivity so we can get more done in less time, saving that extra time for rest and self-care.
If you are interested in learning more about what is causing our attention to decrease and how to improve it, I highly recommend reading Stolen Focus (Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again) by Johann Hari. I could elaborate for hours on why decreasing attention spans is one of the worst problems the world is facing, but this book does an excellent job summarizing it.
I also recommend:
- The One Thing by Gary Keller
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
Creative Outlets
Along the same lines as resting (doing something only for ourselves), creativity can be an excellent source of restoration. “But I don’t have the time for creative pursuits” is a common response I get when suggesting creativity as a treatment for burnout. That may be true! However, in most cases, the issue is not having enough time, but rather not making enough time for creativity.
Self-expression through creativity is an outlet for our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Kind of like visual or audible journalling.
To be more creative, we merely need to be able to pay attention long enough to start and then hold that focus for long enough to make some headway in our creative pursuits. Self-expression through creativity is a great way to improve our attention spans. When was the last time you focused on creation for an hour?
When I create, I enter what is called a flow state. A state of concentration where the task is slightly too difficult, providing a challenge for me to complete it. During this state, time loses meaning and I am able to lose myself in my art. This flow state can be extremely restorative for burnout, especially if that burnout is caused by a lack of fulfillment in life.
I also experience flow states while reading, participating in conversations, travelling, or any other activity that maintains my psychological engagement for longer durations of time.
If you would like to learn more about the psychology of creation and how to improve your attention and motivation, I recommend Finding Flow (The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly was one of the original psychologists who began studying what goes right in the human brain instead of the traditional approach of looking at what goes wrong. Learning more about Flow has forever changed how I look at life.
Therapy
Depending on where you are with burnout, you may benefit from talking with a professional psychotherapist. I found therapy to be extremely beneficial for helping me come to terms with my burnout and my discontent with my job.
We are overwhelmed with what we should do all of the time. Sometimes, it is helpful to just have a safe place to chat without judgement. For me, I also learned a lot about psychology that I had guessed at but didn’t know the proper words for until I had talked about the concepts in therapy.
If you are uncomfortable with the thought of therapy, I recommend starting with journaling to at least begin putting your thoughts into words.
Summarizing Thoughts
I hope that this article helped piece together the bigger picture that is burnout. It can be a tough topic to talk about because it makes many people feel dysregulated (threatened), leading to lashing out and defensive behaviour.
Everyone is at a different point on their own journey. Only you can know what works best for you. Tracking your experiences through journaling and resting with meditation are great ways to get started on your path to burnout recovery.
If you found this article helpful, you would probably enjoy following along with my journey in my Recalibrating newsletter. As part of my sustainable creation system, I am using my newsletter as a single point of creation to educate others and keep myself accountable with my own burnout.
If you know someone struggling with burnout, please feel free to share this article with them. The more we talk about burnout, the more we normalize the discussion and can hopefully lead to a less burnt out future for all ✨😌
More Resources
My Mindfulness page includes an introduction on how to get started with mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness has been the single greatest recovery method for dealing with my burnout over the last few years. I also include a free month to the Waking Up app on this page (my favourite mindfulness/meditation app).
Verywell Mind has an excellent overview on How to Recognize Burnout Symptoms
Simply Psychology has a good overview of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Reviewing this hierarchy can help develop self-awareness and lead to a path of self-actualization.
Entry #2 of Recalibrating goes through more detail on how burnout relates to Maslow’s Hierarchy.
My NFTs are animated timelapses that are timed to be breathing guides for reducing anxiety and increasing mindfulness. Here is the first chapter: Begin, Again.
I also create calming and mindful YouTube videos from my travels 😌