Burn Bright Not Out - Part 1: Befriending Burnout
Burnout sucks. It’s the worst, I know. Therapists burn out a lot. When I am in a period of burnout, I lose all of my vital energy, the things that once brought me joy no longer work. Often I feel trapped and stuck in a routine of my own design. The dominant feeling is knowing something is deeply wrong while at the same time not knowing what to do about it.
When you’re in a season of burnout, you often know something is deeply wrong by the physical symptoms. Your diet is probably out of whack. Digestion off. Sleep is fucked. Maybe your mind is racing and you’re unable to slow it down. Often, you just feel overwhelmed while being exhausted. Some people just shut down completely.
Often the things that used to feel manageable can become panic inducing, and you typically start relying on more destructive coping mechanisms to manage the burnout (more caffeine, more numbing-out after work, more impulsivity to blow off steam, more addictive patterns or even more control to manage). Unfortunately, all of these strategies compound to intensify the experience of burnout.
Often we like to think of burnout as the bottoming-out place, the place where you are able to say with clarity “I’m burnt out”. But burnout is not bottoming out. Burnout is the whole sequence of events leading up to the moment when you started identifying what you are going through as burning out. Burn out is really who you are. It is how your system manages overload. Not the overload itself. The overload is real and how we manage it is our unique burnout cycle.
Burn out is really the first sign something is off. The beginning of your struggle that grows until it becomes an “official” burnout. Maybe it started with the sleep, maybe the anxiety started to flare or even the heavy feeling of sadness or flatness started to take over. These are often the early indicators that something is off, something about your life, your relationship to your self, to work, to your daily routines is out of balance. The early signs of burnout, the impact on sleep, mood and productivity are early attempts from your body to let you know you have to make a course correction.
Yet with the culture of hustle, “at any cost” we often ignore our bodies' signs of being out of balance. Some of us even take pride in our ability to ignore or push through our initial signs of burnout.
We often move through our burnout cycles, but we don’t always hit full-on burnout. Full on burn-out is system collapse. It is our body's way of definitely telling us “your life is not working anymore”.
This makes burnout such an opportunity, because when we are at our peak struggle in the final stages of burnout we are better able to see the areas in our life needing attention. Our human system is more transparent to us. Couple the transparency with the motivation to alleviate suffering and you have a recipe for potent transformation. You can finally start to make the life changes that have been put on the backburner. No one really wants to change, unless they have to. And suffering is often how we make ourselves change.
If burnout is a cycle and there exists a progression to full-on burnout, then you are not going to get anywhere in addressing your burnout cycle by simply hoping it doesn’t happen again. This is the ostrich approach: you weather the burnout (maybe make some small changes to get things in better alignment), but then you go back to living life how you lived it before - the same life that led you to full-on burnout. When you do this, you are avoiding addressing the deeply needed changes which will allow you to step off the cycle of burnout - or at least significantly alter it.
If any of this resonates with you, I’m going to suggest something absurd: It’s time to make friends with your burnout. Whatever is going on for you, this really shitty, horrible experience of burnout will not go away unless you learn to relate to it. You have to start to understand your burnout, and by doing so you may begin to learn how to transform your life. So, stop fighting it. Stop trying to fix it. Stop being upset that you are still in it and stop being ashamed of burning out. Instead, become curious about your burnout.
Let's say a component of your burnout is anxiety. You’re feeling a near constant buzzing of anxiety fundamentally impacting your ability to concentrate or enjoy moments of your day. It’s probably focused in the chest or even a buzzing feeling through your hands and arms. And you don’t know what to do about it other than work more, fight it, numb it, or try to avoid it.
The first thing you need to ask yourself is, what is this anxiety really like? What’s happening right now when I am anxious? More technically, what are the component experiences happening in my body, thinking, and mood allowing me to apply the conceptual concept of anxiety to what is happening within my visceral somatic experience right now?
“Your body and mind do not distinguish between real threat and internally created threat generated by thinking. It is the same chemicals and the same nervous system response, whether you are imagining a worst case scenario or you are living in one.”
Here is the deal: Whenever you try to fix a problem in your experience - in this case fixing your burnout - you are sending signals to your body that the experience you are having is not safe. Like a warning system or an alarm, your body will react as if your burnout is an immediate danger. Your body and mind do not distinguish between real threat and internally created threat generated by thinking. It is the same chemicals and the same nervous system response, whether you are imagining a worst case scenario or you are living in one. This is why we befriend burnout. We apply one of the primary anecdotes to threat, curiosity. When you are curious you are signaling to your body it is okay to relax the fire alarm signals.
By sending these threat signals, you are perpetuating whatever state you are in. If your burnout is primarily expressed through anxiety, you often desperately try to fix the burnout with the same anxiety that got you where you are. It is a positive feedback loop on overdrive, wreaking havoc on your life.
Let’s consider the benefit of curiosity here. By becoming curious about your experience - whether it is anxiety or however your burnout expresses itself - through non-judgmentally accepting what is happening in the moment, you can step off the cycle of fighting your experience. When you become curious, you are telling your body you are safe and letting your body know you do not need to be anxious. When you are openly curious about what is happening, you are supporting your body in settling from your anxious state.
In this way, you are getting to know the real burnout you are experiencing, not your perpetual way of responding to your burnout. We are trying to decouple what is often called your primary experience from your secondary experience, with the primary being the burnout and the secondary being your reaction to your burnout.
The world is full of practices to help this now. There are apps, YouTube videos, coaches, therapists, workshops, and more, all to assist you in learning how to befriend your burnout (or at least not fight it) and remove yourself from the cycle you’ve been fighting for months if not years. Bring your creativity and your resources together to meet you where you are and to learn how to make the adjustments in your life needed to get off the cycle. This isn’t food, exercise, sleep and self care. All that is great. Necessary. Burn out is an expression of your identity, it is the way you manage yourself to accomplish your goals. If you are burning out, odds are the management system you developed to navigate life is in need of an update. This is burn out great gift, showing the cracks in our system in need of updating. With curiosity we can feel into the needed changes and do the difficult work of becoming someone able to carry out our vision for our life and the world.
Brandon is a Gestalt-informed coach and somatic psychotherapist. He specializes in helping folks cultivate and work with their inner worlds so they can more fully show up to the demands of their lives and companies. With his clients, Brandon focuses on promoting increased ease, self-compassion, and the willingness to be with one's ongoing experience, no matter how difficult.