What I Learned From Burnout
I’ve burned out a ton of times. I’ve done it working jobs I loved, jobs I hated, jobs I did only for the money, and jobs I did because it would help people. And one thing that each burnout had in common was that when I became too busy, I stopped doing the things that I loved—especially the non-goal-oriented activities like yoga, meditation, and stream-of-consciousness writing.
And I’m not alone in this. I see it in my clients all the time. The first things that we sacrifice when we start getting overwhelmed are the self-care activities where we have no obligation to anyone else. And this makes sense.
The problem is that these types of activities aren’t only for ourselves. Because they actually process stress, without them feelings of exhaustion get compounded, and the accumulation of tension starts to affect our personal lives and relationships.
I remember back when I was working as a bartender and waiter in Norway the stress really took it’s toll on my life.
As a rule, service jobs pay well, but are extremely taxing. In order to succeed in the industry, you’ve got to set aside everything you’re feeling: pain, exhaustion, clients disrespecting you, injury, sickness; all of it has to be ignored.
I mean, I would work 10 hours straight with no food, no 5-minute breathers and barely enough time to take a bathroom break. Clearly, in this context, being able to push discomfort away was an indispensable skill.
But all that stress and pain didn’t disappear. It was just banked to be dealt with later. And every week, it would accumulate, and I’d have, what I call, a micro burnout.
On my first day off, I was useless to the world, and all I could do was recoup. On my second day, I’d feel a bit better, but I’d already start to count down the hours before I had to go back to work.
Fuck—I had a three-day weekend, and for most of it I was dreading my job.
My life was split between killing myself at work and regaining enough energy to go back to killing myself at work. I had no impetus to do anything in the way of self-care. Deep down, I knew I needed to do something to decompress and process that stress, but I was so tired…
What was worse was that I couldn’t even be comforted by my girlfriend of the time. I was saturated with the needs of other people. I needed to be alone! And my girlfriend was a person I could finally say ‘no’ to, ironically, the one person I didn’t want to push away.
There was this one time that comes to mind. It was my first day off after a long weekend. I was doing the dishes, and my girlfriend came over and tried to hug me. I was so burned out that I pulled away harshly and snapped at her. Understandably, she was hurt and removed herself. And I was left there, fluctuating between feeling like a shit, and angrily ruminating on how she should have known to leave me alone.
At that point, feeling even worse than before, I was too upset to just relax and watch T.V. I had to do something about the stress. So, I went into my yoga area and practiced. And as I actively released tension I calmed down, saw that I had been unnecessarily harsh, came back out, explained myself and we smoothed things over. But I was so exhausted after every weekend that I kept forgetting the lesson, until finally, we broke up.
But as with anything, I do my best to learn from my mistakes. And there were two main things I took from this experience.
One: burnout doesn’t only hurt ourselves, it also causes those we love, pain.
Two: in order to be a good partner, you need to process the stress you accumulate so that you can respond instead of reacting harshly like I had.
Yoga is just one way of doing so. Depending on my mood or energy, I also use kung fu, meditation, tai chi, and stream-of-consciousness writing. All of which are elements of my program Excellence Without the Burnout.
But maybe your way is slightly different. For some people it can be juggling a soccer ball or taking a walk. There are different paths, and with many of my clients, I teach them how to turn activities they love into meditative activities that process stress.
If you’re interested in learning how to use movement, meditation and writing to help you remove yourself from survival mode and start thriving in your life instead of just surviving, book your free intro session today. I’ll help you create a small yoga sequence that you can practice whenever you need to decompress and process that built-up tension.
