For the past two weeks I have had a rising sense of dread. Last night it spilled over. Listening to the government announcements of ‘support’ for self-employed people I started crying and couldn’t stop. Their measures have meant next to nothing for me and my work so far, meanwhile everyone has been so scared and so fearful that spending on all but essentials has stopped.
I realised this morning why that has me so fearful.
Because so many people think mental health, stress, resilience, is a nice to have, rather than realising how vital it is.
I’m crushed because we had just started turning the corner on mental health.
It was becoming understood.
Even the people who could never understand why other people struggled had begun to understand that they did and that it wasn’t just the individual’s responsibility to sort it out.
Individuals and businesses were beginning to realise that stress, resilience, tenacity, burnout, exhaustion weren’t self-actualisation needs to be attended to when everyone else was ok. They were beginning to realise that they were absolutely basic physiological needs.
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I’m on the floor this morning.
By that I mean, I’ve woken up tired and grumpy, overwhelmed with near-constant frustrations and irritants. My inbox seems full of messages destined to mess with my feelings of safety, security and happiness. I’m struggling to communicate effectively with anyone, it’s all cross words and misunderstandings.
You know those days.
Nothing goes right, everything goes wrong and it’s all you can do not to cry.
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We are so concerned with ‘getting it right’ that we’ve forgotten to get it done.
That’s the only thing I can think when, time and again, action gets postponed in favour of another meeting, another approach, another way of trying to get at the problem. It’s the thing that comes to mind when clients tell me that they are going to resolve other problems first, before dealing with a core issue.
Like worrying about the edges of a pie when you’ve forgotten to put the filling in.
And I get why this is a problem. By the time someone speaks to me they have been dealing with imposter syndrome, or burnout or exhaustion for longer than either of us would care of mention. The monster has seemingly become so large that they have no idea where to start to conquer it, so run around it in circles trying to find the perfect place to start, until they exhaust themselves and need a nap.
There is a saying that I love, that perfectly encapsulates my approach to burnout issues.
‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time’
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‘I don’t understand why I’m struggling so much, there’s nothing wrong’
’Well I understand why YOU burned out, but I haven’t had to deal with half the stuff you have’
’I have a nice life, why am I so exhausted and unhappy?’
Ahh those comments make me smile every single time. They really are the ‘if I had a penny’ comments.
This is one of the big misunderstandings about burnout, that it’s some kind of reaction to a crisis, or that is comes about as part of some kind of singular event.
Let me be clear.
It isn’t.
Burnout is about the slow and steady erosion of your energy, your resilience, your confidence, your sense of self, your hopes and aspirations, until you are left feeling flat and empty, living a boring groundhog day of an existence just trying to keep going until the end of the day, the end of the week, getting to the weekend, to the next holiday.
Burnout is like one of those cross sections of an iceberg, with all the shit you haven’t fully appreciated lying below the surface of the water.
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Before I dive into this one, can we just marvel for a moment at how long I have resisted the listed blog format and yet how fully I’m leaning into it right now?
For years I held off for fear of sounding like some kind of shite n trite women’s magazine, and maybe the blogs still sound a little bit like that, but right now when I’m all kinds of busy and am aware of just how many people have the attention span of a flea thanks to overwork and overwhelm… well the list format seems to work. Makes it bite size. Makes it accessible. And really, that’s what we all need when we are tired, right?
I’m on a big mission right now to open up the conversation about burnout, to destigmatise the effects of what is essentially caring and working too much, and to help create the language that we all need to talk about this. No language = no conversation = no change. Hell, I might write a book on the glossary of burnout!
By increasing our understanding we can identify, manage and reverse burnout. Really, isn’t that we all want?
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