Burnout
What is burnout?
I define burnout as a feeling of exhaustion, it affects your mood negatively and makes it difficult to make progress with your work or your goals.
There are 3 types of burnout:
- External
- Overwhelmed
- Internal
External (aka. disengaged)
You’re working in an environment where you have little agency and control over what you’re working on.
Your leader is not someone you respect, they make questionable decisions and they do not delegate or hand off responsibility to you.
Something feels off about the team, they aren’t making great progress, which seems to align with your gut instinct about something being wrong.
You try to make a difference, but the suggestions and actions you take tend to fall on deaf ears.
You are criticized and your suggestions are taken as being uncooperative. Your team leader does not respect you.
This lack of agency, acknowledgement and progress eventually leads to feeling disengaged.
This can cause you to feel helpless, depressed and burned out.
Overwhelmed (aka. overengaged)
You’re working on an important project with a deadline looming, you enjoy the work but the amount of work assigned to you is overwhelming. You stretch and attempt to deliver the project.
You work every day and night, I don’t need a break, I love this work!
And against all odds, you deliver!
It is cause for celebration, but you also start to feel a little nagging of tiredness. You are in dire need of a break away from work.
Internal (aka. should’s)
You have internal goals that you would like to meet, you have a goal and you know how much you should be working each day in order to reach that goal.
You also know that you can’t rely on yourself so you invent and enlist a cornucopia of strategies to cajole yourself into completing work.
You use external social pressure, internal pressure, guilt, deadlines, GTD, Tim Ferriss’s productivity hacks, pomodoro, mantras and whatever else you can find to get yourself to do work.
There is a lot of “should” language.
This works! You complete your work!
You show up to the gym, the piano recital and you get your 1 important task done for the day. Amazing!
You keep this up for weeks, months! progress!
Occasionally you miss a day or make a mistake, no matter, get back on the horse and double down!....
But then one day you get this weird feeling. You realize you are starting to resent the thing you should be doing.
Doesn’t matter, I should do it every day if I want to succeed.
I should do this and I should do that.
This internal struggle starts to make you feel exhausted.
The tight grip you had starts to slip, results are not coming as quickly as they were before, so you tighten further.
Eventually, at some point, something breaks!
Not only do you not want to do that thing anymore, you absolutely detest it!
You take a complete break from it and subsidize it with computer games, TV, your phone, social media, pornography, alcohol, travel, drugs or any other activity that will take your mind off things.
You travel and take time off, eventually you come back and you realize how much you’ve slacked off!
Time to get back into action! I should be working!
You dredge up all the prior strategies you were using to get yourself to do work and restart the cycle from the beginning, but this time you can’t work as long as you used to without getting exhausted and feeling like you resent the activity, what is wrong with me?
So what to do about this? The next blog post will outline how to address burnout for these 3 types.