Why Your Burnout Isn't Being Healed by Self-Care
Nearly everyone I know is now dealing with some sort of ambition-related reckoning. We're looking at our professions with fresh eyes after experiencing the previous two years of pandemic worry, distant work upheaval, inflation, and home strife.
People seem to be rethinking their preconceived ideas about what work entails and how it fits into their lives, from the friend who recently declared her paid work to be "pointless" and her hobbies to be "the only thing I care about" to the relative who has all of a sudden started pinching pennies to manage an early retirement.
According to conventional thinking, persons who are overworked should take additional rest, care of themselves, and reflect on their lives as a way to prevent burnout. What transpires, then, when your period of self-care turns into a Salvador Dali-esque world of melting clocks and hazy boundaries?
Because I've observed that over time, extra rest frequently turns into prolonged midday naps, self-care increasingly manifests as an inability to even look at job listings much less apply for jobs, and self-reflection frequently changes into what feels like a constant state of angst and big-picture despair: As the globe reaches boiling point, what is worthwhile doing?
Maybe the actual issue is that we've always had a fundamental misunderstanding of ambition. We've surgically detached careerism from the larger picture of life instead of realizing how our desire for success is intrinsically related to our desire for a full, fulfilling life on every level.
It seems sensible that job goals might feel unstable when removed from the context of other desires. Who wants to become "someone" if they don't feel complete when they leave the workplace or are lost without the regimented environment of work?
We misinterpret burnout because we misunderstand labor. Burnout may occasionally indicate a yearning for more life, not less, rather than laziness. You may be far more ambitious than you realize due to your burnout, and not simply in terms of your profession.
One of the most pervasive misunderstandings about those who are sad is that they are pessimistic about life. However, the sad individual frequently conceals an underlying optimism since they feel that life should be joyous, interesting, and passionate.
Similarly, those who are severely burned out may place blame on themselves (e.g., "I'm lazy," "I can't focus," or "I detest this job") or their environment (e.g., "I despise this company"), yet the root of the issue is frequently that they like working extremely hard at a task that just feels right. And they become disappointed and perplexed when they are unable to receive that level of participation. It's not laziness driving their lack of interest; it's idealism, desire, hunger, and unbridled ambition.
It is simple to think that what you want is freedom from ambition while you are going through a burnout moment. More ambition, though, is frequently the long-term solution; an ambition that feels rewarding and natural and can be applied to anything you care about passionately.
Ensuring that employment remains meaningful is a problem. The more emotionally invested you are in what you create, the more significant it feels, sure. But you must continue excavating in new locations, which is challenging.
After finishing the manuscript, band tour, nonprofit hiring, or business creation, you frequently find yourself back at the beginning of the entire process. You risk losing focus, losing confidence in yourself, and interpreting these normal emotional responses to significant problems such as burnout.
You may be far more ambitious than you realize due to your burnout, and not simply in terms of your profession.
You reduce your effort. As soon as you move away from what matters, it becomes challenging to enter again.
When you've lost interest in doing meaningful work, it might be beneficial to continue working while substituting other endeavors that give various levels of engagement and fulfillment for the labor you're resenting. Sometimes it's better to find new methods to interact with your work and your larger life than to spend all your time relaxing.
Physically demanding employment is generally helpful for me with that. The feeling of finishing a tangible physical task after much sweat, heaving, and difficulty, and then being able to touch, take in, and be proud of what you've accomplished?
That kind of job works especially well when you're meant to be reflecting and relaxing, and you might be starting to feel a little flabby and neurotic as a result of all that rest.
You are propelled out of your head and into the physical world, where you are reminded of the functions of your muscles and return to an animal state of sensuous connection with the work at hand.
One of my earliest recollections is going into my mother's upstairs bathroom bathtub after spending hours removing ivy from her backyard, coated in mud, bugs, and cuts. A few weeks before, my father had tragically passed away from a heart attack, and I took two months off to grieve.
What I found was that even when I could hardly breathe, talk, or express my sadness, I was still able to enjoy music, battle obstinate vines, and feel intense satisfaction from clearing even a little area of ivy. The vines were like tree trunks and took a lot of backpower to pull out because this ivy had been growing in the same spot for years.
I was performing tasks that a machine was intended to accomplish. It was needlessly challenging and excruciatingly satisfying in a contemplative sense, giving me a level of involvement and happiness I wasn't able to achieve with my typical "important job." One of the most calming things accessible to someone who is unsure of what they want to accomplish with their lives is hard labor that ultimately has little worth in the world.
Why is it true that? Why do we instinctively take comfort in enormous, insurmountable challenges that we know we can never complete? And why do we occasionally find ourselves deeply attached to monotonous, pointless, absurdly stupid tasks that produce no useful results? Examples include sorting shells into piles despite not keeping any of them, going fishing and then returning every fish, or playing a dreadfully boring video game that makes you feel productive while you spend hours sitting still on the couch.
These activities are our favorite because they relieve the strain of achievement. In a way that our typical "job" sometimes can't, doing random, dumb s*** that seems like labor frees us from the prison of overachievement and reacquaints us with happiness.
When you observe someone playing Breath of the Wild on a couch for months at a time, you are witnessing an overachiever whose ideals and drives are so strong that they have chosen the only course of action that can recreate their extreme ambition without having to experience the intense pain of realizing how at odds their aspirations are with the structures and systems of our society.
Many people consider playing video games for hours on end to be useless labor that has no social or economic value, which is also why it seems like salvation.
It is work that has been liberated from the weight and strain of living your best life and striving to become some better, purer, more successful version of yourself — or, to put it another way, striving to become someone other than who you truly are.
Burnout refers to alienation from one's body and mind as well as from one's job. It entails being unfamiliar with the life-embracing, exertion-loving, energetic madness that resides at the core of your animal self.
This energy no longer manifests itself to you at all because it is simply too painful to experience because your animal self has been inundated with messages about what is valuable, impressive, and respectable.
This is why creating a life that feels more leisurely doesn't always help with burnout. Observing how much drive, ambition, and desire for life are hiding just below the surface of your disenchantment may sometimes help you deal with burnout.
I'm a person who loves hard work even more than I enjoy the completion of the task or the recognition that comes with performing the work properly, I've learned through the course of numerous life crises. Yes, I have grown to like the products I create.
However, what I really like doing is just giving a task my full attention, working through the challenging parts while believing that I'll eventually find a solution—or even just accepting that I won't and that all I should really be doing is slowly chipping away at something very difficult and perhaps even somewhat arbitrary.
I often find new types of gloom and unhappiness when I attempt to cram "leisure" into the area where all of that labor disappeared.
My approach to managing the workplace has changed as a result of realizing this about myself. I became a writer in part because it didn't compel me to work in environments that as a young person I found to be brutal and uninspired. But working from home for a long time has drawbacks, one of which is that it may unintentionally make life and work smaller.
I've occasionally been inclined to use my tendency toward overachievement to do progressively less work, which isn't a bad thing! But when I attempt to cram "leisure" into the empty space left by all of that labor, I frequently develop fresh cases of gloom and discontentment.
The solution to this situation isn't usually to take a break, unwind, and consider your current situation. Sometimes the solution is to try on a goal's more ambitious form to see if it feels more energizing.
You have to try new things. You need to be open to the possibility that you could truly like doing any type of work, regardless of what you've been telling yourself for years is pointless, irrelevant, or embarrassing.
Here's the paradox: if you're a natural overachiever, you can also find that you can't participate in any activity until you set either lofty or utterly unambitious goals for it. For instance, I ping pong between "I don't care whether anything comes of this" and "I want to be touring globally in two years" while I'm making music, which I love more than anything else. Actually, that is normal.
I find any halfway point, like "I will finish one terrible record and play it for people against their will," to be incredibly demotivating. My incredibly ambitious urge to compose music doesn't match with modest aims.
I don't want to produce anything that is subpar or meets some average objective. Even though I don't intend to base my entire existence on music if I act as if it's simply a dumb pastime that occupies my free time, I won't be as aggressive about my music-writing aspirations.
Sometimes what we mistake for lethargy is really simply disordered ambition: there are certain things we want so desperately we can't bear to feel how intensely and totally we desire them.
You might choose to train for a marathon than run. You might want to consider taking classical guitar classes rather than playing around with your instrument. Perhaps you want to figure out how to become the boss rather than taking the slow and steady route up the ladder in your sector. You could want to write something far more ambitious and challenging rather than a book that is somewhat similar to the excellent book you just finished reading.
Sometimes what you truly want is to take a risk and think you could shoot higher than you often aim, despite your anxieties and lack of expertise. Being realistic isn't always helpful or motivating. To reconnect with your deepest ambitions, you need to become a little bit unrealistic.
Some of the happiest individuals I know tend to begin with small goals and soon discover that they are investing a great deal of energy in them. Curiously, they often don't have high expectations for their principal employment, but they have high expectations for everything else they do, including gardening, rock climbing, volunteering, painting, weight lifting, composing poetry, political activism, and cooking.
When they believed that their primary source of income would bring them happiness, many of them experienced listlessness and depression. However, they are now more energized for their jobs and all of their other activities, in part because they have stopped feeling ashamed of how ambitious and exuberant they felt about their true interests and have begun to truly appreciate and respect even their most absurd desires.
They acquired an understanding of their thirst for arduous labor. They acquired the ability to recognize how intensely and completely involved, motivated, and concentrated they were. They came to realize just how intense their affection for their most prized interests was. And they discovered a way to incorporate all of those intense impulses into their lives as a whole.
We can't either concentrate only on relaxation or consider a life that is dominated by the professional aspiration to be complete in our restless effort to restructure our institutions to make them more compassionate and more responsible. We must acknowledge and appreciate the fundamental pleasures of being driven, such as waking up with a hunger for life itself and a desire to fill each precious day with all of our passions and the people we cherish most.
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