Tag: burnout

You’ve been hit by, you’ve been struck by… 

Stress — a smooth criminal

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

stress

/strɛs/ — noun

– pressure or tension exerted on a material object.
– a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances.

This weekend I was driving to Germany for a well-needed (one can debate on it being well-deserved since I’m still taking things easy at work, but hell yeah, having three kids and a lot of stuff going on, I tend to claim it is well-deserved too) holiday. 

I was looking forward to the drive, as Germany doesn’t have any speed limits on most highways. As usual, the hope for a speedy drive was soon replaced by mild disappointment, realizing that I had again suppressed the memories of never-ending roadworks in that same country. 

Nevertheless, we got over it and were enjoying a relatively nice drive at moderate speed, when all of a sudden the panoramic sunroof scattered in thousands of pieces. There was no impact, perhaps a minor bump in the road, and no rock falling on the roof. It just scattered, even though it looked perfectly ok when I last washed the car — some months ago admittedly.

As I duly respect my loyal followers, I won’t explain the analogy between the panoramic roof and people breaking down for too long, but none of my colleagues expected me to crack. 

I looked ok, and my performance reviews were fine, but for years, probably decades, there was chronic stress building up, which gradually degraded my — not to be underestimated — resilience. Even though I survived heavy bumps along the road and always bounced back.  

The ignorant manager

Anyway, I didn’t intend to talk about my own experience, nor about my car (a VW Tiguan by the way & also had a colleague with a VW Passat, having experienced the same, rather dangerous problem. I will never learn… now for sure I won’t ever become a key member of the VW affiliate program, making the road to financial independence again a bit harder — but let’s be honest: Volkswagen should by now know their panoramic roof is under tension no?). 

Burnout in general is an energy problem. It is often a result of years and years of ignoring signals your body is screaming out. A result of chronic looting of your own body, unconsciously or knowingly — not caring or not being able to change.

Photo by Carrie Borden on Unsplash

Let’s take a step back. I’m not a doctor (and as you will very soon notice I’m also not an artist), so I use existing information to explain known mechanisms in my way. 

I’m trying to advise people in doubt to take care of themselves, to help people that are currently hitting rock bottom, and finally trying to explain how it all feels before, during, and after to people like my manager who said: “I probably also had a burnout 5 years ago…” and then try to minimize what you’re feeling and say you shouldn’t have stress. 

For the latter group: a sneak preview —  there is no “I probably had” or “I might have had”. You know when you got struck! It hits you like the hammer of Thor. And at the moment you’re giving the advice not to stress, it already became a problem way beyond just the mental stress. 

You’re talking to someone with a body that was conditioned in a very wrong way for a very long time. Don’t get discouraged by the quality of some homemade drawings, but hang in there and continue reading for your colleagues, friends, and family members. You should try to understand to be able to help them.

When Cortisol goes crazy

Known performance-stress curve — avoiding copyright

Apologies for the above. Anyway: theory says a certain amount of stress is ideal to perform and be the best version of yourself. However, every one of these Gaussian curves I’ve seen has a top. The top of this performance graph is a thin cord to balance on and if the top performer is not careful, fatigue is there waiting for him like a sly fox. 

I’m also kicking in open doors, stating that unattended fatigue has a fair chance of leading to exhaustion, panic, anxiety, and anger in later stages. All signs that burnout is in the making.

Behind the scenes of this stress versus performance curve, the stress hormone Cortisol is having a party. I’ll leave the technical details for the specialists, but in short: acute stress situations cause the adrenal glands to produce the steroid hormone cortisol, which in subtle interaction with adrenaline causes some response in the body:

  • Increased heart rate
  • Faster breathing
  • Sweat production goes up
  • and a lot of internal things, you might prefer to look up 

Promised to keep it short, so this is as far as I go on the metabolic mechanism. The biggest problems start surfacing when a second partner steps into the dance: time. 

Having heavy stress for too long, causes your cortisol levels to be up all the time, whereas in ideal circumstances they’re only up at the beginning of the day (when our ancestors needed to be chary and wary of predators during their hunts). 

Anything seems to trigger high heart rates, and all the other party parameters, eventually exhausting your body. It can be a long and weary process before your resistance breaks (you could compare it with an elastic band that is constantly stretched and overstretched too many times and snaps… if you want to forget about sunroof debacles as much as I do). 

Chronic stress symptoms — source: McKinsey&Co (link to full article)

Avoid breaking at all costs— recognize & act

The best cure for burnout is avoidance and getting back to productive stress levels while you still can. This requires both awareness of all the signals listed in the McKinsey article linked above (or on one of the thousands of other sites repeating the same) and swift action. 

Reading the alarm signs on a slide makes it all look really simple, but when it comes to your own body, a lot of other factors come into play: pride, guilt, stubbornness, underestimation of the red flags(“it’ll pass” or “not me”), ignorance, society-/job-/financial pressure, fear, etc. It takes a lot to be proactive. 

You need a healthy cocktail of gut, self-knowledge, and perspective to take health-related decisions before your body takes them for you.

Acknowledging chronic stress is a strength, not a weakness

When it comes down to your health, there is no employer in the world worth making sacrifices for. No revenue target, no paycheck, no CEO, no manager, customer, or deadline is worthy of jeopardizing your health. No matter how important they all might seem at the time (here the perspective-ingredient needs to be added to the cocktail). 

There is only one (1) you. You have one life. Let’s assume our lives are finite and there is no after-life (leaving religious and philosophical discussions aside here — but I can only recommend the series: A subtle mix of dark humor and emotions), it makes a lot of sense to act on it when our body is screaming for help. 

Avoid/reduce stressors, reduce workload, don’t push yourself to physical limits, and take some time off. Pull the handbrake before hitting the wall. 

Try to share how you’re feeling with people you trust. Talk to your general practitioner about anxiety, panic attacks, and/or sleepless nights, about your body reacting to things it shouldn’t react to. Your doctor might first check your physical condition, and examine your heart and blood… 

But when these tests are all negative, you might get some different insights on your mental health state (and the physical power hereof) and potentially the extra push you needed to look after yourself. 

I’m saying so because everybody is worth it and as long as you didn’t break, the way back is easier to find and, the path is so much shorter and clearer. Maybe one or two weeks off can do the job in this phase. I’m also saying so because I didn’t for a long time. And I regret it. 

No more bouncing back 

So it happened. Your bungee snapped and people don’t recognize you anymore (those with vivid imagination could compare it with a true bungee accident, but somewhat less fatal and with less obvious damage). Your energy is gone, but you’re still at the very right -hence wrong- side of the stress curve shown above. 

Your body is empty, but still anxiety is there, sleepless nights are the new standard, and hormonal imbalance kicks in (members of your LGBTQ target group excite you as much as the average kitchen table. That is disregarding people with a fetish for kitchen tables, no pun intended). 

Your physical energy level is that low you are more or less limited to lying down, even though you would like to do more. Your mental energy level is the same. 

Now the question is: how to bounce back from this one? The answer is simple: you don’t. There is no sudden bounce. It took you years to arrive here and there’s a good chance it will take an equally decent amount of time to reach your new potential “no-worry”-level, which is very likely to be lower than what you were used to and also more hypothetical, as your life-phase changed and “no worries”-zone perhaps doesn’t exist anymore. 

Home Made Energy vs. Time graph pre-during-post burnout — feel free to reach out to contact@waba48.com for feedback on graphic skills, or questions on the contents.

The cure

There is no bouncing back, but for sure you can and will get out if you decide to invest in yourself. You lost yourself along the way, so it’ll require some of the Kübler-Ross phases to accept your condition first. 

The same feelings that perhaps withheld you from pacing down in the chronic-stress phase will for sure still be there when you’re at home recovering. At first, you will feel worse. 

Acceptance is the first step. As written in “The post-burnout balance”, you need to feel your body, listen to it, and don’t try to go faster than your body allows. 

Building up after burnout is delicate. Your mind and body need to become partners… truly best friends. And sometimes best friends clash, but they will always find each other again. 

Try to always listen to your body. Don’t let anyone or anything convince you to go faster than your body allows you to, or the balance is lost. Don’t allow any pressure.

Once accepted and once decided you are going to invest in yourself, you’ll review your lifestyle, sleeping and eating patterns, and perhaps take supplements. All are needed, but they cannot replace the signals your body is giving you. They complement and help to answer those signals. 

If you don’t yet feel all the signals, you might consider buying one of the many watches out there that measure heart rate, heart rate variance, and stress. They are quite accurate and could help you to understand what you’re feeling. 

One of the most positive things about going through all this is that you go next level in understanding what your body is trying to tell you. You become the best health monitor you could wish for.

You got used to overreacting to the smallest triggers. Now it’s time to recondition. Build in active rest moments after a walk or eventually jog-session, to tell your body you weren’t fleeing. Learn how to do nothing, just breathe and get distracted by a book or series. 

Show your new best friend it is ok to do nothing and there is no need to raise its heart rate and breathing rhythm. Find things that empty your head and give a safe feeling (for me at some point, the only thing that worked was being underwater, cooling down my body, hearing nothing… everything slowed down).

Only by a hard reset, you can start climbing the energy curve again from the “easy” side. Low performance, low stress. Not eliminating stressors and trying to run up that hill will put you eye to eye with anxiety and sleepless nights again (guess I’m also writing this note to myself, as a reminder).

Always remember: there’s only 1 you. Only 1 life. And you’re worth it.

The paradoxical society

We’re all part of the “fast forward”

Five years ago, I was part of a meeting where future electronics-applications were being discussed. Sitting there with all these enthusiastic managers, tech-geeks and nerds with an enormous ego, I truly got scared (to some extent of the size of their ego’s, but mostly of how they want the future to look like).

Our intelligent fridges would be equipped with camera’s and gas-sensors, perfectly able to tell just how much inventory you still have, if something is about to go bad (and of course sending you recipes for dinner with those ingredients), sending shopping-lists to the grocery-store to auto-fill itself. We were discussing self-driving cars (so people can work while commuting) that would be able to analyse our emotions by face recognition, so they could already adapt the music at home to the way we feel or inform our spouses trouble is on its way.

Artificial intelligence will become part of our lives, whether we want it or not… all in order to increase the productivity of us, the working ants (See We Are But Ants).

All of us are part of it. The constant urge for more. Fast needs to become faster at an exponentially increasing and scary pace. Enough doesn’t exist.

It’s only sixty years ago people were not used to have a tv at home and they gathered together with their neighbors to watch one of the rare shows that were broadcasted. Till 30 years ago, we had the patience to rewind a VHS tape or our commodore 64 cassette to find the right game (always that magic when typing “load”). Only twenty years ago smart phones started to find their ways into our lives. Today we can’t live without them anymore, they’re part of our lives, extensions of our body. Screens are everywhere. Shows are on demand. We’re reachable any time of day and when we’re not standby, people start to wonder what’s wrong. We get lured into the world of social media, where people show the best of themselves, raising the bar for their ‘friends’ (even the ones you know for a fact are unhappy or depressed, often still manage to make you feel you need to step up just a bit, with their fake online-happiness… :))

We’re victims of the society’s unstoppable need for speed. And yet all of us contribute to it. Of course the above sounds negative. Evolution is nice, gadgets and technology are amazing exponents of what human beings can achieve…

… and yet we all scream for “pause”

Compared to only 20–30 years ago, there’s a tsunami of inputs coming at us every day. It’s amazing how human beings adapted to this threatening avalanche in a couple of decades, however we weren’t taught how to deal with this continuously and rapidly changing world.

People pay money to do some breathing exercises — inhaaaaale, hold, exhaaaaale… — Not ridiculizing meditation, I also did so — but it is just creating time for ourselves and pressing that pause button. We pay hundreds of dollars/euros to be in an offline yurt out of reach of any cellular network. Thousands of euros even to go to to places like this (nope, not an affiliate link, just fyi 🙂 Now that I think about it, not too wise for someone who’s writing about passive income models).

Evolution of burn-out leading to inability to work in one of the smaller EU-countries — https://www.brusselstimes.com/251162/alarming-figures-burnouts-at-work-increased-by-66-in-three-years

We seem to be in a fast forward-pause loop where the balance is disturbingly tilting towards the speedy side. Many people don’t realize this causes a constant energy-drain, until some( )thing(s) goes wrong. There’s an alarming increase of burn-outs worldwide, there’s more anxiety-attacks and depressions. We might just not all be made for this pace. Humanity might not be intended for this (what is in the end the purpose of life? I know, too big of a question for too small of an article). Maybe we evolved too much to be happy?

Commodore 64, joystick and an even older calculator on top

So what to do?

We can’t turn back time. But restoring a healthy balance is what we can have in control. If mowing the lawn makes you relax (I admit — I’m a lawn-guy), take the time to do so and don’t buy one of those fancy robots. Say no to some evolutions, say no to your boss, so no to the fast-forward of the movie called your life. Slow down and enjoy disconnected moments. Dig up that old commodore 64 and take the time to “load”.

The post-burn-out-balance

As I described in “The burn-out clichés”, I went through the dark caverns of burn-out hell. I stayed home for months, after my body refused any further co-operation. I tried to find rest by doing “nothing”, which made me even more restless. I wanted to get energy by trying to sport, but it depleted me even more. And then suddenly, after frustrating months of sliding further down, while expecting to go up, there’s that little spark of energy. A sign that your body is up for something more… and then it happens!

You go and grab that spark. Out for that long awaited run. You feel the oxygen filling your lungs up till the smallest capillaries. You’re alive again… Alive! For fifty f* meters, then realizing your heart rate is abnormally high, you’re feeling even worse than before and you need two days to recover from that poor attempt to run. Another setback. BUT the spark was there and it will come back more frequently. It just needs to be treated with care. It’s a fragile spark, one that will still fade easily if not cherished, one that will need to charge again for some time after every time it went out.

Building up after burn-out is delicate. Your mind and body need to become partners… truly best friends. And sometimes best friends clash, but they will always find each other again. I realized that for me the normal working life is never going to work (although still trapped in it 🙂 — Why Work Doesn’t Work) and while gaining energy in the past months, my mind wanted to bypass my body. I felt the urge to execute all the ideas I had to escape from my golden work-cage. My spark, that meanwhile became stronger and brighter, all of a sudden faded again. My balance was off and bam! I fell. Burn-out is ruthless.

For people struggling with the same, I can only recommend to listen to your body. Don’t let anyone or anything convince you to go faster than your body allows you to, or the balance is lost and the spark fades to only light up again when it gained enough confidence. Don’t allow any pressure. There is only 1 you, only 1 life to live (I don’t really believe in re-incarnation or any “after-life” — loved the series by the way :)). Invest in “you”. Make the handshake between mind and body, accept and go as slow as needed… enjoy the sparks, but protect them so they can grow stronger! (Also motivating myself here :)).

People that had a burn-out or depression probably recognize this feeling and the setbacks… I’m curious to see how others deal with it — I’m still struggling to find my balance, but step by step I’m learning more about myself, life, its relativity and the purpose of it all.

Thanks for reading!

Photo by moein moradi on Pexels.com

The burn-out clichés

Truth is I didn’t just start writing because Christmas decoration was in the stores even before my birthday… although it gave me the final push 😉

For years I’d been looting my body… first without knowing, then knowing but not caring and finally knowing and caring, but not being able to snap out of it.

I might elaborate on the above sentence if my loyal fanbase expands beyond the single follower I currently have (ok ok… I am that single follower – what can I say? I wanted to try out if wordpress was broken, since I didn’t get an audience. Still now, it makes me happy for a second when I see my blog-statistics. The duration of the disappointment – realizing again it’s me myself and I following myself – also shortens, so the balance is tilting towards happiness). So leaving the elaboration on the how/why for a later time.

I reached the point where I was on holiday with my kids (co-parenting 3 lovely monsters) and I couldn’t move anymore. I could only lie down. I could exceptionally drag myself to the pool (which looked 10 times bigger on picture and was actually an ennobled bathtub that made my son cry at arrival) and wanted to sleep. I was actually so restless I couldn’t sleep properly: my body felt like it was under permanent attack and needed to be on guard 24/7. Cortisol. It f***s up all other hormones by the way – the only focus of your body becomes survival.

Upon return I thought I’d go for a run with my daughter – back then ~11 years old and to put it euphemistically: not the fastest runner around. We barely ran 1km, my sports-watch started making a sound I never heard before and I was about to crash. I had to ask her to stop and face the facts: even a half dead cheetah is able to catch up with a turtle – so I was beyond half-dead. The 1km run resulted in 2 additional recovery days for my heart-rate (not kidding) and despite the fact that all blood- and heart-tests were negative, I had never felt so close to being dead as I did back then. Yup, feelings have the power to conquer your body. Feelings caused by work, divorce, break-ups, kids, covid and kids, losing my sister years ago, some luggage from the past… and the feeling I would always be strong enough to bounce back. In the end, it’s me 🙂 I always did!

So all clichés were there: I never expected to feel like this… not me?! I ignored signals I didn’t know of. I kept on working full-time while my job and fight for the people in the organization were a constant drain for me. Till I didn’t bounce anymore and I sat on my knees in front of my three kids, telling them how sorry I was, I couldn’t be a good dad to them at that moment. It needed change!

For the first time in my life I invested in me. In all possible ways (also financially, because my beloved multinational employer of course didn’t insure mental issues – those are for the weak… and the weak are not the winners… and my company only hires the best :)). I felt guilty doing so at first, but grew out of that. I felt pressured to go back to work, but let go of that eventually (I know I made it sound Ninja-tough and strong, but it took me months to accept). I was going to take as long as was needed.

During the process (lasted a year, still not 100% there), I realized 1 thing: I needed to change my life. I needed freedom. I wanted to do things I like doing. Writing is one of them.

I actually realized more things. You need to be strong to make the decision I took in this over-populated world with its society-rules and -pressure. And you need a person next to you that believes in you, despite cortisol-mess, fears, tears, fatigue and all emotions that come on your path. Thanks love x

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