Burnout actually isn’t an illness. It’s not illness like you’d say rheumatoid arthritis is, is a disease. Burnout is actually a syndrome.
This is Dr Rachel Morris, former GP, and host of You Are Not a Frog, joining us one last time to help us understand burnout. And as Rachel explained to me, a syndrome is essentially a collection of symptoms. So if you have a bad back, it could caused by inflammatory arthritis, a fractured or collapsed vertebrae, by osteoporosis or a prolapsed disc. So before you go treating someone for back pain, unless you want your patient to end up with an opioid addiction – which I know is all the rage in some parts of the world – you actually want to understand what’s causing it. And the same goes for burnout. So what causes it? For that, we turn to the World Health Organisation.
The WHO say it’s caused by workplace stress. Fine, but workplace stress comes in so many different ways, shapes or forms, and then that produces different symptoms. So, I’m just starting to understand a little bit more about it through the interviews I’m doing with people on the podcast and through talking to some of our listeners and the people on our courses and realising that, gosh, it’s far more prevalent than we think, it is preventable, but we’re given totally the wrong advice about what to do.
OK, so before we get into what we can do about it, let’s first take a look at how it feels. This’ll help you get a grasp on whether you’re going through burnout, or if maybe you’re just a bit stressed out.
And listen, I’m an old man now but I came up listening to a lot of American standups in my bedroom, back when we used to use Winamp to tune into different radio stations run by other kids in their bedrooms. So I’m fighting every urge in my body to present this list like a Jeff Foxworthy bit. Y’know, “if you stare long and hard at a carton of orange juice because it says ‘concentrate’, you might be a redneck”.
So, if you find yourself getting tired in a way that isn’t made any better by sleep, you might be experiencing burnout.
If you’re getting the sense you’re not doing your job all that well, or you lose confidence in your work, you might be experiencing burnout.
If you get the sense you’re surrounded by morons who just won’t do the simplest of things for themselves, or people just keep sending you emails to wind you up, you might be experiencing burnout.
Some of this stuff can overlap with depression; stuff like low mood, anxiety, irritability, cynicism, a sense of numbness or detachment, or a loss of motivation. If you’re feeling one or more of any of these, it might be worth seeing if you can get some help. There’s a link to some resources in the show notes but the fact is, and you probably already know this, you’re far from alone.
Creative people, especially those of us who think and care deeply, are prone to burnout. Here are a few legends that spring to mind.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe was the mother of American modernism. Her painting of Pedernal, New Mexico is an epic study in perspective and shade, while Summer Days is a mix of foggy greys with snatches of floral colour. I’m not an art critic so I did my best with those descriptions and I didn’t even copy and paste them from Wikipedia or anything.
Anyway, she painted good, and she lived to the age of 98. But in her 40s she had a breakdown and was hospitalised after having abandoned a project to paint a mural in New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Quoting from a piece in the Guardian:
She couldn’t eat and wept for days on end. New York’s crowded streets were suddenly appalling, and she became agoraphobic. While her white flowers hung in Stieglitz’s gallery, she was hospitalised for psychoneurosis.
Stieglitz, y’see, was her husband, and a 24 carat piece of shit. Not only did he have a side piece who was 40 years his junior, he also demanded his wife be nicer to her, and then when he found out Georgia wasn’t going to be paid all that much for a piece of public art – something he detested – his mates and he set out to convince her otherwise.
She ended up pulling out of the project because the plaster of the powder room wouldn’t take the paint, but you can imagine what a strain that can put on someone… thinking, planning, coming up with ideas, and making a start only to find there’s no way to continue.
A year later, she returned to New Mexico, a place she’d fallen in love with. She found a house on a ranch, and the landscape inspired some of her most famous paintings.
David Bowie
Apparently, David Bowie didn’t remember much from his Thin White Duke era. For a time he subsisted on a diet of red peppers, milk, and cocaine… of which he took an astonishing amount. He became fascinated with satanic symbols and would stay awake for days.
This all came off the back of his Station to Station album release and the subsequent tour. Bowie began to feel like he could never give his audience enough of himself. I guess an immense talent creates immense internal pressure. And my God the man was talented. The list of instruments he plays reads like the end of the first side of Tubular Bells, and if you don’t get that reference, it’s probably because you were born in this century and God love you but ask your dad. Or probably your granddad at this point.
Anyway, his burnout didn’t see him stop entirely, he just took a back seat and only sang, co-produced, and mixed the tracks on the Let’s Dance album. It went off OK but his next effort was far more lacklustre, leading him to take a longer break and re-emerge in the 90s.
So we’re picking up a theme, here. Rest is clearly the key to dealing with burnout, and there is no “pushing through”.
But before we can look at what else we can do about it, and maybe how to catch stress before it turns to burnout, there’s one more stop I want us to make.
Arianna Huffington
Nowadays, Arianna Huffington is a sort-of professional rich person. She’s written some books and she sits on some boards, but back in the day she was the name and the face behind one of the first blogs to hit the mainstream.
The Huffington Post – or HuffPo if you’re nasty – began its life in 2005 as a reaction to right-wing rags like the Drudge Report. Her former husband, Michael Huffington, was a Republication politician and later became an LGBT activist, back in the days when you could be on a different side of the aisle and not be labeled as a monster if you didn’t do monstrous things.
Arianna obviously went pretty hard in those first two years, ‘cos in 2007 she collapsed at her desk from exhaustion, smashing a cheekbone in the process.
But even though much of my life has changed, what’s amazing as I look back over these ten years is how much the world has also changed. Burnout – and awareness about its dangers – is now a front-burner topic, both collectively and individually. It’s a part of our everyday conversation and, collectively, it’s finally coming to be regarded as the public health issue it is.
Arianna’s burnout led her to leave the Huffington Post – which is now owned by BuzzFeed and has become borderline unusable as a website – and in 2016 she formed Thrive, a consultancy working with big companies to try and improve the health and wellbeing of its employees.
Rest, reset, recover
So, here are three people who’ve thrown themselves headlong into their work, hit the wall and found a way to make something from it.
And as we’ve seen, the key – or at least the starting point – is rest. But that’s not the whole story, as Dr Rachel Morris can tell us.
Not only do you need to just take time off from rest, you need to recover with some sort of, I would say, therapy. You know, some talking therapies. There’s lots of group therapies around as well. You need to really talk about what’s been going on. So some counselling.
But then you need to reset. You need to actually change something in your life or your work. ‘Cause if you go back into exactly the same situation, well guess what’s gonna happen? It’s gonna happen again. And I think as medical professionals we are quite good at telling people to rest and recover, but we’re not very good at telling people how to reset.
What we saw with Bowie is that you can’t just push through burnout. Now he was someone who constantly reinvented himself, so sloughing off one skin and adopting another wasn’t new… and of course, you don’t have to go to that extreme to change something.
Georgia O’Keefe moved from New York to New Mexico, swapping the tall buildings for wide vistas. And Huffington – much like Rachel, in fact – swapped her busy and demanding day-to-day with something that would prevent other people from experiencing what she did.
Burnout for normal people
What O’Keefe, Bowie, and Huffington have in common is their public personas. O’Keefe wasn’t exactly an Instagram influencer but her work has sold for millions. Arianna wasn’t on stage every night playing in front of thousands, but her writing and her platform were at the forefront of a new era in Internet publishing.
So if you’re listening to this thinking “Yeah that’s all well and good and congrats to them”, you and I are thinking along similar lines.
But the thing is, burnout isn’t really about how much pressure you’re under. You can burn out on writing, you can burn out on caring for a sick relative, and you can definitely burn out on bullshit work.
Be honest… how often has a scenario like that played out in your head? Now, for Tim in the Office, things played out a little differently… it is a half-hour sitcom, at the end of the day.
Burnout is not the same as boredom, but if you find yourself getting cynical and maybe a bit bitter, and you still feel like that after coming back from holiday, it might be worth thinking about what’s next for you… if you feel like options exist.
And I get it, options don’t exist for many of us. Work is not easy to come by, and I’m meeting more people right now who are either in-between jobs or just can’t get back in, so I’m not out here saying you should quit your job and become an alpaca farmer.
When I think of burnout, I think of an empty kettle. If you boil a kettle without water, you’re going to break the heating element and maybe damage other parts of the kettle beyond repair.
Now, some kettles have a mechanism to detect when the element’s heating up but there’s no water inside. They can automatically turn off the kettle and keep the element from overheating.
Imagine you’re boiling a kettle, not because you want the water as such, but you want the steam. You still need to put something in to the kettle in order to get something out.
When you’re in burnout, you’re trying to get steam out of an empty kettle. You turn the thing on, it hisses for a bit, and then if you’re lucky, it shuts off automatically. If not, you could end up picking bits of kettle out of your kitchen cabinets.
I think that’s why rest isn’t enough on its own. If you had a job you felt called to, you probably had enough water to fill that kettle for years. But over time, that water has boiled away and no-one’s stopped to refill the kettle. But you’re thinking “This is the job I’ve always wanted” or “This is the job I’m supposed to be doing”, as if that alone will top the water back up.
It won’t, so it’s time to look at what will. If you can’t leave your job, then think about ways you can change your environment so you can top up the water supply. If you’ve got an understanding boss, now might be the time to have a chat, to say “Listen, if I have to spend one more day sitting opposite the hobbit from IT then I’m not going to be responsible for my actions”.
Now, if your boss is a piece of shit, the trick is to reframe your needs as the company’s needs, as ways to “boost productivity” or even better, ways to make your boss look amazing. Some people just don’t want to hear about the needs of others, probably because they’re burned out themselves and haven’t had the wherewithal to listen to this podcast, so presenting your idea in a way that makes it look like theirs will probably yield better results.
The key is you’ve got to take responsibility and advocate for yourself. You’ve got to make the change you want, rather than wait for an undesirable change to happen to you. Easier said than done I know, but it’s way better than fantasising about whose head you’re going to flush down the toilet at the next company away day.