We all (mostly) have jobs. We all have the same (imperfect) legislation that protects our work-life balance. But some of us struggle with burnout and others do not.
Burnout is thought of clinically as a product of excess workload, a lack of autonomy, a sense of unfairness, insufficient reward or recognition, and a values mismatch. We conceptualise burnout as a workplace phenomenon. And that’s not wrong. Too many people work in toxic workplaces.
But focusing on workplaces is only half the story, and potentially demotivating. (You cannot always just quit.) There’s more going on than just your work environment.
Burnout is a cultural phenomenon. And it is also deeply personal. Understanding your burnout can therefore be transformational.
What is burnout
Burnout isn’t tiredness or stress or both. Burnout is what happens when you’re always on. It’s when you are always using the battery but never recharging it. It’s when you have lost yourself. You’ll experience this as exhaustion, sure. But also cynicism — a belief that nothing you do matters, that you don’t matter. And an inability to do. Something that used to take an hour takes a day. Something that takes longer never gets done.
A warning sign might be when your boss’s priorities become more important than your own. You might be able to refuse your boss’s requests when you have “plans”. But that night in? With a pizza and a glass of red wine and your favourite show? Or the new game you wanted to play on your PlayStation? That night in with your partner? Those go to the bottom of the pile. Your boss gets to override those, no pushback.
Burnout as a cultural phenomenon
I wonder how often you have had to cancel plans because of work. Or indeed, not made any in the first place. I wonder how often your friends, partners or loved ones have pushed back on that.
I’ve worked with a great many people who don’t make plans, or cancel them, because of work. I’m yet to work with anyone who has been called out on it.
In the UK, we have a strong work culture. I might go as far as to say that we have a work problem.
What I mean by that is, for many of us, work has become a non-negotiable — what we prioritise above almost all else. That is, on one level, objectively true. We spend more waking hours working than we do anything else. But I suspect you’ve also seen it in the culture. Those dinner plans cancelled, the time you don’t get to see your friends — those are often (not always) quietly shrugged off. Work is just, always, work.
There’s a wider cultural point here, of course. The UK is very unequal. The gap between rich and poor creates cultural pressure on all of us to be status-obsessed and consumerist. Many of us feel an intense pressure to be “successful”, so we work (too?) hard. That is often reinforced, and rarely challenged, by the people around us. And the same status obsession affects our bosses too. They might be keen to reinforce the workplace hierarchy in an attempt to quell their anxiety about their status. Perhaps they are accommodating and generous to their own bosses, but punitive and patronising towards you.
Or perhaps that status obsession is yours too. Perhaps you always work because you value the money, status and security that work brings.
This wider culture around work impacts some more than others. Our cultural language around race and gender doesn’t afford everyone the same opportunities to say no, to slack off, or to be difficult.
But independent of that, there are people, I suspect, like you. People who often say yes when they mean no, who find it incredibly hard to centre their own needs, especially when they are in conflict with someone else’s.
For people like you, perhaps our culture around work is singularly unhelpful. The push to work harder comes passively from wider society and actively (perhaps) from your boss, or your clients, or your bank balance. And it is met by someone who struggles to say no. The result is you often say yes to your boss, but rarely to yourself.
No wonder you’re burning out.
Your relationship to burnout
Burnout is an invitation. It doesn’t come on embossed paper, and it’s perhaps not the invitation that you thought you wanted. But it is an invitation that you’ll want to say yes to. Because it asks you something crucial: what is working in my life, and what isn’t?
Therapy for burnout is the process of answering this question. You might start with getting things off your chest. It will probably feel good to tell me what is going on at work — your boss, your colleagues. You might have told your friends a few details of this, but I suspect you hold back. It might have been going on for a while, and you might worry about becoming a burden. You don’t need to worry about that with me. Emotional labour is what you’re paying me for. Go for it.
You’ll do this for as long as you need to. There will be work problems that come up that you’ll want to talk through. That’s all good. But over time, as I am listening to you, you will also be listening to yourself. Together, we might spot patterns. There might be some clues as to why some things bother you and some things don’t. We might spot some dynamics from before you started work, or maybe even outside of work, that seem to turn the volume up on everything else. And above all, we’ll begin to understand you. What makes you tick. What makes you, you.
If any of this sounds like you, schedule a free 15-minute call, and we can start.