Burnout isn't always about overworking
Existential burnout is something different; it occurs when you begin to question the very foundations of your life and beliefs.
Today I’m re-sharing this article with you — one of my most popular posts from this year. It’s all about ‘existential burnout’, the idea that many of us are waking up to a new way of living/working and want to make big changes, but we aren’t given the tools to navigate it. It can be one of the hardest things to go through, a crumbling of identity and months of fighting against symptoms and signs that something’s a bit wrong. Below, I’ve written about my personal experience.
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When I told a friend that I was severely burned out (at the end of last year), she seemed surprised. She replied something along the lines of: “Oh gosh sorry to hear that! I thought you worked a four-day-week etc….”
I understood her confusion, how was I burned out when my time management looked so under control? She didn’t say it in a judgemental way; it was a fair observation. (She also has four kids, so I think she was genuinely confused at how I hit such an extreme wall, as a flexible child-free woman.) But that’s the thing about burnout: it hits us all differently. I don’t actually work that much. I am pretty good with my diary. I ring-fence days for certain things, I have a semi permanent out-of-office on. On my email signature, I let people know I only check my emails twice a day.
I wasn’t working crazily at all before my burnout breakdown happened. I know people who are round-the-clock lawyers, who travel constantly, who have a huge mortgage and family, who work 10 hour days, who eat dinner quickly at 9pm and are renovating their entire house and they’re not burnt out. It’s not a competition of course, of who is ‘worthy’ of burnout and who isn’t.
But it does beg the question: what on earth happened to me, to have reached such a level of extreme burnout leaving me unable to function for months? Was it because I had the privilege to be able to stop, breakdown and crumble? Or, is ‘burnout’ actually the wrong word to use altogether?
Read the full piece here:
Hope you enjoy! P.s. if you enjoyed this piece, I am pretty sure you will like my new book The Success Myth, out now. Thanks for being here!