Burnout

In this episode, we explore one of the most challenging occupational-hazards for anyone working in change

The fire burns bright into the night, flames rising to the stars; everyone can feel the energy, even from a distance! Changing the world, even; excitement, everywhere!

But there’s a cost; and in the cold light of day, nothing left but ashes.

Burnout…

Yeah, burnout. It’s a constant risk for just about everyone involved in change - an occupational hazard, really. Over-responsible, over-committed, drowning in urgency - we’re wide open to it.

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I get up at 4:30 to write this. I can’t focus. Everything I write is wrong. I go over and over the same piece, rewriting, rewriting. After an hour or so, I’ve only written the text above. Too exhausted to think any more. I fall back into bed. Fast asleep for at least another three hours.

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If we fall into the full-on version of burnout, it can be devastating: there’s a description somewhere - I think it’s in Tracy Kidder’s 1981 documentary The Soul Of A New Machine, about a race to develop a new type of computer - about a guy so hyper-focussed on slicing out microseconds and less from the inner processes of the core that eventually he cracks and leaves the whole project and runs away to a remote island, where the smallest unit of time he’ll have to deal with will be the seasons of the year. A career-killer: we don’t recover from that.

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I’ve been lucky: I’ve only hit that level of full-on burnout just once so far, back in the days when I had a one-man-band business creating much of the core for what later evolved into desktop-publishing. Tight deadlines, huge business stress, inventing everything from scratch, too many all-nighters writing code that had to be working by the start of the next business day; all the usual stuff. And then one morning, without any real warning, I just broke. Not quite hospital-level of breakdown, but close. Took a long time to recover. I never worked in that industry again.

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But yeah, it’s an occupational hazard for all of us - and we need to acknowledge it as such, and learned how to avoid it, work around it. Full-on burnout is relatively rare, we’d hope, but there’s a kind of proto-burnout that’s every bit as debilitating as long-COVID or chronic-fatigue syndrome, and that can hang around for years or even near-forever, crippling our productivity, our ability to create change. And yeah, we need to recognise the symptoms before we get too deep into it.

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Coffee, I need coffee. More coffee! Except I’m not allowed coffee any more. Or not more than one cup a day, anyway. Not the five litres a day I was drinking before. Doctor’s orders.

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Symptoms. I was talking about symptoms, wasn’t I? Or maybe it’s those bad habits again - or not so much bad habits as bad attitudes, bad approaches to the work, ‘bad’ in the sense of ‘dangerous to self’ more than anything else. Over-responsible, is one of the more obvious ones: sometimes because we get over-passionate about the work, sometimes because of a lifetime of blame or self-blame from when others haven’t been responsible and we were left to clean up those others’ mess. Try to do too much, maybe to try to avoid that crippling sense of failure. Whatever. But it has consequences.

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Back about six months ago. It felt like a mild heart-attack; I went to the emergency-room to get it checked out. After a two-hour wait in the aptly-named waiting-room, I finally get to see an equally-overstressed doctor. My heart is fine, he tells me, but it may not be that way for long, because my blood-pressure is way way up at 217 - it’s not safe at much above 140. Yeah, needed to get that blood-pressure down fast, before it kills me. Literally.

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Another bad burnout-risk habit, one that kind of parallels that over-responsibility, is trying to do too much, all at once. There’s so much to do, and so little time to do it in. And some of us are really bad at delegating, at sharing the work around with others; or else we work alone anyone, so it never occurs to us that we even could share the work. The obvious result, though, is that for all of that effort, actually less and less gets done. Not A Good Idea…?

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Okay, I have to face it: I really do have seventeen different book-projects all on the go right now. Plus a whole bunch of other tasks that all have to be completed by yesterday or even sooner. No wonder I’m exhausted all the time, I can’t keep focus on anything, and nothing seems to get finished…

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Something else we’ll often see here is boredom - or rather, something that might look like boredom but is actually a warning-symptom of proto-burnout. To give a real-world example, a colleague the other day was saying that he was bored of the technical field he’d worked in for most of his professional life, and wanted to move on to something else. But the conversation made it clear that it wasn’t just an ordinary boredom, but something much deeper, bringing him right to the edge of a real collapse. This is frequently described as a ‘mental-health’ issue, but it would be more accurate to address it instead as a spiritual-health issue: a breakdown of that ‘sense of meaning and purpose, the sense of self and of relationship with that which is greater than self’. For him, those technical fields had lost their meaning and purpose, and he no longer felt that he had any meaningful relationship with that kind of work, either. Yet because his professional identity had been tied up with that for so many years, his sense of self was at genuine risk: he needed to address those issues as a matter of urgency, because there was a real danger that he might fall into full-on burnout. We spent several long phone-calls walking through how to find a new direction, reinventing, identifying allies and companions; I’d say he’s getting closer to that new direction now, though there’s still some way to go, and the risk is still there if he’s not careful.

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And yeah, I’m just as much at risk of that myself, of course. Bored bored bored, so much of the time - but in reality it’s not so much boredom as avoidance, hiding away from the world, watching anime on YouTube, endlessly doomscrolling through social-media, all the usual mistakes. Definitely a struggle to evade falling any further down that rabbithole; and likewise when I’m stuck in that kind of loop it’ll feel a real struggle to get anything done at all. And then the backlog builds up and up, which leads to yet more avoidance. Not A Good Idea…

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The real danger with proto-burnout, as in that anecdote of mine just above, is that we can limp along like that for months, or even for years, and keep pretending that there’s nothing wrong. But while we’re in that state, our productivity is down like a brick, and there’s a huge risk that even the slightest shift could tip us all the way over the edge. So yes, as I know all too well, it’s hard to change habits when we’re lost in limbo like that; but we need to find a way to make those changes anyway, somehow, because of the dangers of not doing so are all too real, for all of us.

One of the most useful ways to avoid that kind of trap, perhaps, is to remember that old Latin proverb festina lente, ‘make haste slowly’. Don’t get caught up in all that urgency of change, but don’t avoid the change, either; instead, slow down, slow down, ‘make haste slowly’. Keep the focus, keep on going, yet remember always that there is time enough to get it all done if let it take its own natural pace. Small changes, always small changes, one at a time, one at a time. Yes, the changes we face are huge, no doubting that: yet this is how we can get the all change-work done, in time, without falling into that debilitating trap of burnout.

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