Rebuilding after burnout
So much depends on not being cruel to yourself.
Topic: burnout
Thesis: burnout is mostly a process of becoming ever more separated from your real desires. Recovery is like occupational therapy, rebuilding the loop between desire and action by working step-by-step.
Life begins at burnout.
The life-path I followed in my twenties has a kink in it. It’s situated somewhere between the moment where my output as a programmer started to decline and when my condition finally hit undeniable subjective awareness. I could not stir myself to work on anything. I let junk build up around my bed in sedimentary layers—a phenomenon maybe not new, but intensified. Even though all I did was scroll my feed and shoot zombies on my phone, nothing I did actually felt like play. I was burnt out.
I think of this as an inflection point in my life because it was the starting point of an entirely new relationship with my whole self. As we age, we are forced to learn lessons that, once understood, we wish we had known all along. And nothing ages you quite like work.
(Well—parenting, maybe.)
What was the lesson? To put it simply, the lesson was that it’s not possible to knuckle down and push through challenges forever. In fact, “just push through” is a mental motion that pushes and squeezes a part of you until it deforms and clings to the rest of you only by an ever-narrowing strand. The self is elastic: at some point it must snap back together—or perhaps, like a punctured balloon, drift to the ground in a deformed mass and lay there awhile. The latter is burnout, what happened to me.
Why do we strain ourselves like this? It can happen for so many reasons. Here is my own story.
(1/4) The way down.
I come from a somewhat poor background. I was raised with the value that the worst choice a person could make was to go into debt. In light of this, my adolescent self considered it unthinkable to pursue its deepest passion—that was, writing—without first securing a reliable source of income. So when the time came to pick an academic faculty, I chose computer science.
University had its twists and turns. The important part for this story is what came after. For a brief time, I indeed found the compromise I wanted: I could work a comfortable programming job and write in my off hours. Through a friend in Vancouver, I had lucked into a remote contract that paid very well. This balanced state lasted for about a year and a half. It was comfortable, even though I didn’t perceive it as such at the time and was preoccupied with creative angst, with uncertainty about my future, and with fears on behalf of the world.
When my comfortable contract expired, I had to go look for new work. This is where an ice-cold shock hit me. Switching from contract work for an American company to salaried work with a Canadian one came with a 20% pay cut and an hour-long commute. At the same time, I was investing in my partner’s business. There were bills that had to be paid. It was barely possible to cover expenses; I could feel myself sliding toward debt.
At the same time, I was excited about the company I worked for. I turned my anxieties toward understanding the company’s systems and the challenges they faced. If I could make a difference there, I would be rewarded, gain some breathing room. I could become my whole self again.
Accordingly, I gave myself wholly to my job. I gave up writing and everything creative that wasn’t connected to growing as a developer or as a future manager or business process consultant. The effect of this choice on my life was ironic. The more I allowed myself to care about the business, the more affected I was when the leadership of my department failed to meet the needs of the company as a whole. This was especially true when those failures—stalled projects, unusably buggy tools—forced my friends in other departments to work late. So in turn I worked late, sometimes against my manager’s wishes, trying to fight their fires with the tools I could wield independently.
Will it surprise you to learn this situation eventually blew up?
I did not burn out at that company. I quit. I was hired back as a consultant, at a much higher rate, to build the same software capabilities my department had incessantly deferred on.
But this work was feast and famine. For a while I had to balance it with a separate full-time job, working for a combined total of around sixty hours per week. I know some of my friends could handle this easily. I, however, felt creeping death. It was beyond mere misery and pain; it was a gradual loss of all sensation. Still I went to work, sent my invoices, paid my bills.
It was still somewhat after this that the burnout hit. It was after I quit that full-time job, having secured a solid longer-term contract with my client. I delivered on that contract. I delivered on a second contract, that one a little more chaotic with an unclear and widening scope. Then, and more significantly, covid hit.
The pandemic didn’t destroy me mentally like it destroyed some people. What it did was shake out the contradictions in my life and force them to collapse. My life didn’t have to change very much, because I was already living the life of a socially anxious hermit working from home. But because of the pandemic, I was now aware of the irony of this: that I had voluntarily wedged myself into a hole the likes of which were terrifying to the average person. Fun for a week or two, and then: a slow death.
The pandemic also reminded me of the absurdity of public discourse and the information space. The world as a whole was indecisive. The world swayed wildly between brazen indifference and useless panic. The world had no respect for the humbling process of seeking out verifiable facts. The experience of this washed over me, impossible to shut out in the way I had before. It was set against the feeling that my work, while profitable, was not aligned with any deeper value. The microcosm and the macrocosm aligned in a void of meaninglessness.
This is also when I started thinking about executive function: more specifically, how I didn't seem to have it anymore. I remember, after the sense of dread that the world was falling apart and that doom might be right around the corner for me personally, it came as a relief when I noticed that my mind had evolved in a direction where it was no longer possible to do anything. After all, if I could not act, I also could not fail. The die was cast, and there was no need to feel responsibility.
Such a life is not for the living.
(2/4) Self-insight, and the way up.
The view from the pit did offer the opportunity for insights. I could see, better than before, the patterns of thought that led me to this place to begin with. It took time to form this understanding, because the mind that struggled to remake itself in the wake of burnout was the same mind that had to chart the course, form the narrative. The only tool I had.
In retrospect, the process of rebuilding felt most like what you would feel if you were the Biblical figure Eleazar, whose hand became stuck in a death-grip on the handle of his sword because he slayed so many enemies. You can’t force the hand to release all at once. You have to wiggle just the end of each finger; then allow the movement to travel back along the fingers; then release the palm, and finally unclench the hand. Only then, once the hand is free of the sword, can you use it wholly, and explore what powers of workmanship it has in a time of peace.
So what did I do?
As you can see already, it must be a question of what I didn’t do. Just like Eleazar is engaged in an active grip that he must become aware of in order to cease, so too the victim of burnout has a mind which is too tightly clenched. It is a mind that has squeezed itself tighter and tighter to summon one last drop of yes-it-sucks-but-I-will-do-it. Months or years after the first time it said: “just once more; then, never again”.
The mental motion of clutching onto action aimed at goals, or powered by fear of aversions, with the unspoken belief that something terrible will happen if one deviates from that path for even a moment: this is the core cycle of burnout.
So the answer for me had to be simple. It had to be: do nothing. Simply do nothing. Catch myself doing something? Whoops. Let’s get back on track. Simply do nothing. I was lucky to be in a stable enough position that this was possible for me.
Then, once I had done nothing for a while, I noticed the dissatisfaction building up. My version of doing nothing didn’t feel good. It felt like atrophy. Boring, numbing. It might also be called depression. But why? Why did my version of doing nothing feel so joyless?
At this point I was in the gap between action and torpor. After years of “bad action”, I finally landed on “bad rest”. The two do carry reflections of each other. And this is where my awareness emerged of the distinction between “bad activity”, the kind that leads to ever-diminished capacity, and “good activity”, the kind that leads to growth, increased capacity, and exciting and surprising new directions in work. It is referred to as the distinction between distress and eustress.
It is not always easy to see from the outside what leads a human being into busy distress, a state of constantly pushing toward a goal without enjoying the pursuit, building up fatigue and signs of ill health and spiritual decay. You might think only external stressors can achieve this: trauma in young life, or an extraordinarily demanding job—for instance, the trope that spending four years as U.S. President has a similar effect on health as twenty years of normal aging. But what really creates this condition is the state of a conflict on the inside, and even when the outside is stressful, it’s the reflection of that stress on the inside that will determine how one handles it.
The weight of my duty had grown heavier and heavier. It reached the point where no-one could see the size of it but me—not even the people I had in mind to protect and provide for. I simply felt an unbearable need, in all things, to be as good as possible. But this was not the need of a living thing, drawn as its whole self toward a realization of its being. It was not the need of a swan to fly south, of a bear to eat before winter. It was more like a yanking chain, whose next tug I fearfully tried to anticipate.
I call this now the distinction between “desire”—a pull that I feel in my entire being, something that awakens my senses and illuminates me with self-knowledge while pulling me toward it; and “fixation”—an impulse driven by panic and agitation, a narrow verbal tunnel of judgment through which my capacities are stretched and pulled. “Thou shalt.” “I should.” Usually the object is fixation is something I do not feel shame about: there is no shame in seeking financial stability, a healthy body, an impressive reputation or body of work. But desire, in its most whole and truthful form, can very often feel shameful. Shame, from whatever social or personal source, attached itself to: wanting to wallow in simple pleasures amidst great suffering elsewhere; wanting to build a loving, polyamorous household; wanting to pursue lanes of intense, passionate curiosity with no apparent end-game in mind.
Freud, I am sure, would approve of my thinking. The object of fixation is the outward picture of an upstanding man. The real desire which underlies it comes from the id. Where the id agrees with the ego, it is tolerated, though the ego constantly abuses it and pushes it toward higher and higher performance according to the standards the ego finds fitting. But where the id disagrees with the ego, the id must hide, for if the id appears in view of the ego the ego will face its own inadequacy and lash out in horror.
All of this makes it sound like I am describing the life of a harsh, self-disciplined military officer. I, personally, have never been anything of the sort. But that’s the humour of the situation, the joke that I eventually came to recognize: one part of me held so strongly to a self-image of someone so efficient, brilliant, and powerful, while ever-greater portions of my actual time were spent:
Shooting zombies (or Steiner forces, or Unggoy, or Terrans, or Russian Ultra-Nationalists, or...)
Consuming zoomer internet humour I didn’t even like
Masturbating
The id wasted no time to find a loophole. The ego, by its nature, can only be watchful some of the time. The more watchful it is the more tired it gets. And when it closes its watchful eye, the id takes over.
But the freedom of the id is distorted by the ordeal of its imprisonment. Having been constrained for so long as the workhorse of the ego, its concept of freedom has narrowed to the indulgence of only the dullest, crudest of pleasures. So, when it can, it indulges; and when the ego wakes up again, the horrified flash of self-awareness refreshes the cycle.
What breaks the cycle? In a phrase, it’s what author Visakan Veerasamy named a section of his book Introspect (which is all about escaping self-destructive cycles): “Put the Gun Down.” Embrace peace. The ego must recognize that the id, though wounded, remains the light-bringer of the whole self because it alone holds the seat of desire. Meanwhile the id must recognize that the ego can be its partner, not its tyrant: it can plan ahead, it can realize greater desires that instant gratification cannot approach.
In practice, there was no epiphany. I liken the experience of recovery to occupational therapy after an injury. A sufficiently total catastrophe of the psyche can put it out of commission for so long that it simply forgets how to work as a unit. So to rebuild, we rebuild a piece at a time.
(3/4) The intentions of recovery.
1. We affirm to ourselves: “What I want is okay.” Desires are not bad. It is action, the next step after desire, that leads to consequences that may be good or bad. Desire itself is central to all motivation, so if I want to understand what drives me, I must remain a student of my desire.
2. We affirm to ourselves: “What I do, I choose to do.” No matter what one believes about the nature of will, one thing remains true: there is an experience of making a choice, and that experience is possible for you. As I study myself stumbling through another day, I can catch the moments where choices happen and I can see the motives that drive them.
3. We build islands of calm.
Distress is an engine. The piston of the engine rises up with a sense of urgency and falls with a sense of depletion, exhaustion. It draws everything into itself, even the sense of place and time. When all is strain, the bed is a vantage point over the strain of the day; the chewing of food is the continuation of unwanted forced labour; the music one listens to carries the tempo and the arias of superhuman effort. Anyone can be superhuman for a while; but how much longer?
In the state approaching burnout, every stimulus of everyday life is bound to the cycle of distress. But it is possible to unbind them. It begins by intentionally creating the setting of a calm state. Often it is helpful for this setting to be built from sensory trappings that are new, or, at least not commonplace in the prior stressed-out life.
For me this was a combination of: music, light, and scent. I found some nice ambient soundscape type of music, with little to no connection to what I would typically listen to. I made use of the gift of a psychedelic night lamp that draped the ceiling in swirling blue. I diffused essential oils, lemon, eucalyptus, sandalwood, and others, to create a mood.
This was my island of calm.
The point was not to take all these stimuli and surround myself with them all the time; that would have led me back to where I started. Instead, the point was to use a combined effort, prodding my mind from several directions, to reinforce the message that now, *right* now, it is safe to let go. And then, when I did engage in strain again, I would do so with a memory of what it was like to not be exhausted and tense, and an explicit knowledge of what I needed to do to get there.
4. We build fences around effortful work.
Once I had a bunch of stimuli I could combine to bring up the feeling of “island of calm”, the next step was to perform a similar type of conditioning around work. True, most of life does not end up being so clear cut: I can’t just put up a red flag when I’m busy and a green flag when I am enjoying peace and quiet. But that’s exactly why it’s important to have multiple overlapping stimuli, why it’s important to have distinct sets for both states. When I feel the danger creeping up of life collapsing again into a single endless drudge, that is when I know it is time to tend to the boundaries of work and play, which I do by rehearsing the corresponding patterns of association.
Some people do this with a “no work in bed” rule. I followed in the footsteps of Emily Dickinson and abstained. What I did instead was organize my work into sprints. In a sprint, I would listen to music. Not just any music, but a preset playlist that would play in a fixed order. When the final song played, a song of victorious triumph, I knew it was time to take a break.
The sprint system was only a means to an end. I stuck with it for a while. At first, all that mattered was that I was building the habit of settling in to focus on a task. Because I had the cue of the final song to lift me back out, I believe my subconscious mind found it easier to let go of the fear of becoming strained again. The sprint system allowed me to approach work in a way that kept me in control.
At first, my burnt-out state was such that I was lucky to get in two sprints over the course of a day. (For context: at this time the content of the “sprints” usually consisted of hobby software projects I hoped would get me back in the saddle as a coder. I was optimistic enough to hope they would even yield a profitable business, but they didn’t.) I was unbelievably happy with that. When for a long time your “work days” looked like eight hours of hazy, surly distraction punctuated by fifteen to twenty minute phases of something resembling focus, the clarity of these sprints was a godsend. I had my brain back, for about two hours a day.
5. We give our bodies what they need.
The mind is a system embedded within the greater system of the whole body. The body’s cycles feed the mind’s cycles, the mind’s cycles feed the body’s cycles. For that reason it is incomplete to talk about how the mind can recover from burnout without also talking about the part of that cycle that runs through the rest of the body.
When I am in a cycle of repeated strain on the verge of burnout, more often than not the early warning signs include ways I am pushing my body into a strained state:
I stay up late, often with no nameable reason
I go without eating for a long time, then gorge myself on junk food
I frown habitually, even when doing chores or going for a walk
I tense my shoulders and back
Each of these impulses that go into the body reverberate within it and then travel back to the mind. They are part of the medium-term memory of the body.
“Hmm, what was I doing just then? *Checks jaw* Oh! That’s right: panicking.”
When my mind is circling toward a strained, burnt-out state, self-denial is part and parcel of the process as well. Stretching? What good would that do? Food? I can worry about that later. That’s why it’s a spiral! The desire to squeeze ever more effort out of a flagging system leads to self-destructive habits that have self-destructive effects that yield yet more self-destructive habits, leading to a peak of effort (usually well after the peak of real productivity) followed by a descent into anomie, akrasia, apathy, atrophy.
(4/4) Staying clear.
So much depends on not being cruel to oneself. And, in my case at least, the absurdity of it is that the part that wants the most for me to go on pouring in effort is not the part that has the best ideas. It’s not the part that exercises prudence and suggests well-timed changes of direction. When I am squeezing myself dry of every last ounce of motion and action, I lose access to those parts. I lose access to what makes me me, in the fullest and highest sense.
The more I set boundaries, making space for calm as well as for effort, the more my strengths reveal themselves to me. I have found that the cycle of burnout is more than a reductively-capitalist impulse toward productivity at any cost. It is also a way of hiding from everything that is ostensibly my goal: from success, from the realization of my potential, from the thrill of trying something really new.
It is becoming easy to avoid atrophy, because it is first becoming easier to avoid over-strain. By repetition, exercised with a discipline that itself had to be built painfully and slowly over time, I found out how to suck the fuel out of the fire of burnout.
If it is not there already, my wish is that the same power may emerge in you.