Burnout: please don't tell me to just stop
Can we stop ignoring the element of choice when talking about burnout
I interviewed the author, Senator and Substacker Lynn Ruane recently for a weekly interview I write for the Sunday Independent. It’s called Just Saying and is a sort of lessons of life piece, run entirely in quotes, with no journalist/author’s voice.
I love writing it; finding the balance between the facts of a person’s life - what kind of home they grew up in, what their parents did and how that impacted them - and their observations drawn from their experiences, so that the reader has a sense of who a person is, but also gets their unique takes on things.
If there were only a handful of people I could ever interview, Lynn Ruane would be in there no question. She is an incredibly deep thinker, who never accepts received wisdom, but always wrestles with something until she comes to her own conclusion. I often find myself wondering what Lynn thinks about something and have to limit myself to how many times I will text her on such matters.
Various things she has said to me over the years we have known each other have stuck, amongst them, advice about burnout (I interviewed her about it previously), about how to handle it when your daughter complains you are always working, on the value of family living nearby for single parents.
In this recent interview, she said something that I kept coming back to afterwards. I wanted to ask her about seeming to be a high energy person. My mum is a high energy person, and I think I probably am too. We can get lots done, go go go, but you can overdo it, and then crash. So you cannot take the energy for granted, or you need to apportion it, pace yourself, check your capacity in advance. I wondered what Lynn thought about her own energy levels.
Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about her answer.
“I’m starting to look at where some of my high energy originates from. If it was from an authentic place. Or if a lot of my energy and a lot of my giving and a lot of my doing was all about potentially being accepted, being not rejected, being fearful of not being good enough. Rather than it being a natural source of energy, because you’re just doing what you would naturally do. I didn’t realise how much of my life was spent trying to people please in a sense, so people wouldn’t be annoyed with me, even though why would they be? They weren’t annoyed with me.
Now, when that feeling comes up, and I think - I promised that person I’d do that, I’m don’t want to let them down - I go, this is that thing you do, just sit with it, sit with the uncomfortable feeling. It’s not that the feeling is gone. But I’m trying to not let the feeling make me give energy that I don’t have.
I’ve been working on a piece on burnout for a while now, but had so many, too many, thoughts, and was finding it hard to solidify it into something to send you beyond something that felt like a scream into the void, “can we stop always ascribing burnout to high status productivity culture?” which wouldn't have been a pleasant Substack experience for anyone.
But I’m there now. And what I want to say is this.
Can we widen the conversation about burnout? It feels like so much of what gets attention are accounts that talk about burnout caused because someone decided to put themselves under pressure, be performatively busy or hold high standards of perfectionism in their life. Or they had the apparently perfect, high status, ambition satisfying, job, but in reality it wasn’t the perfect job because they had to work so hard there was no room for anything else. Or they're a woman and they're burnt out because women put themselves under too much pressure. Most women I know don’t put themselves under too much pressure. They are PUT under too much pressure, by society.
Or there’s the always baffling “I prioritised money” burnout. Few people I know have the option not to prioritise money. It's not a poor values choice, it's a response to the world we live in choice.
In this conversation about burnout, the advice, or the remedy, is so often then individualistic. Telling people to disengage, to stop, to do less, put themselves first, without first wondering if any of this is an option? Without pausing to think maybe a person’s choices weren’t the things that led to burnout, maybe it is…the society they live in, in which they have no choice but to engage?
I don’t mean this to undermine anyone else’s experience of burnout, to suggest it’s not valid. I know the factors above, busyness, emotional pressures we put on ourselves, are causes of terrible burnout. There are as many different narratives as there are people.
For me the issue is choice. So much of the burnout conversation assumes the element of choice. That your life choices got you here, rather than socio economic factors. I’ve hovered on the brink of burnout for a few months recently, finding unwelcome recognition whenever I read accounts about burnout, or lists of symptoms. None of it was because I chose this. Like most people I know, I have to work to a certain level. And I absolutely would not have the choice to simply stop because/when I felt exhaustedly burnout. My circumstances are being a single parent, but most of my friends (not necessarily burnout, not necessarily single parents), could not afford to simply stop either.
Again, I don’t want to criticise or shutdown anyone else’s experiences. Or to suggest that someone else’s burnout isn’t real, or difficult. More to try to widen the conversation. To point out other aspects of the experience, and cause, of burnout.
Because blaming burnout on women putting themselves under pressure and not making their own welfare a priority sort of puts the responsibility at their door. Rather than at the door of the society they live in, which told them sure, go out and work but also keep doing most of the child-rearing/house-running stuff. The society which makes it extremely difficult to be a single adult and for it to be affordable. Or which doesn’t give carers the proper support they require, allowing them to do the unpaid work the state should provide.
My own circumstances are, like I said, being a single parent, with all the emotional, financial, mental, energetic responsibility that comes with that. In terms of burnout, there's also the fact that due to interest rates my mortgage went up by about €700 in the past nearly two years. This, alongside all the other cost of living price rises.
I find just being told to rest, or stop, as the answer, quite frustrating. When I read those Instagram squares about doing less, cutting back, stop performing being busy as some sort of social capital, I feel slightly enraged. I’m not busy as a bragging matter, and I don’t really know anyone who is. I’m busy because I need to make a living (I'm also lucky enough to really love my job, to have relatively flexible hours, lovely editors, and to live near my parents who are extremely involved on a day to day basis with my daughter’s care). Being told to stop feels impossible, never more so than in the past year in the midst of a financial crisis. Instead I just instantly start to argue with that line of thinking in my head.
I find this do-less, stop more, line of advice to be quite man-with-a-wife-at-home-who-does-the-invisible-things to be honest.
Ok, so I take to the bed, to rest (so much burnout advice seems aimed at those with understanding HR departments ready and waiting to sign you off for paid leave). Who sorts the school lunch and makes my daughter’s dinner? Who files work so there is money coming in? Who keeps the house from becoming completely feral? Who puts on the washes, and puts them away afterwards, so my daughter has clean clothes to go to school in? Who finds the goddamn matching clean socks???
Who books the summer camps, does the school run, puts out the bins? Just telling a burnt-out person to rest, without looking at why it is they are burnt out, and if this is in fact something that can simply come to a halt, is not helpful. I’m loathe to lapse into therapy speech, but at times it feels like a form of gaslighting. Your insistence on some sort of productivity-for-show has brought you to this point. Not the late-stage capitalist patriarchal society within which you exist.
I know this is the experience of many, and that's absolutely valid. But there's also the fact that when we put burnout down to someone's life choices rather than that they are doing the things to financially survive in this world, and then assume they have the choice to change their circumstances, we're not helping change that world.
I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to help with feeling burnout when you cannot stop or make large, overhaul-type changes.
What I do find more helpful is a phrase my boyfriend uses. Resourcing yourself. When there are things you cannot shift from the load, how resourced are you to deal with them? How can you resource yourself more? Rather than a matter of coming to a full stop, it is a matter of filling yourself up, which feels more doable, or a mindset I can more easily take on, for some reason. I’m really still figuring this out, but for me this can be things like going back to what I did in early post-divorce days, going to bed at the same time as my kid (this was 8 then, sadly it’s more like 9.30-10 now). At the time, it could feel slightly depressing, as if the rest of the world was out having tonnes of fun, on say, a Tuesday evening, while I was in bed (now I would KILL for an eight o’ clock bedtime), but I knew I needed the sleep to cope with the tiring days. I’m doing that again now; getting into bed at nine with my book is the high point of the day.
Resourcing yourself is an active thing, and for some reason I find this easier to get my head round than being told to stop, do less.
For me, it looks like making sure I see friends by doing things with the kids, because I do not have much time away for work and parenting, but seeing my friends is a necessity if I don’t want to succumb to overwhelm. It's a walk with my boyfriend and his dog, an episode of Poirot or Vera on a Sunday, a twenty minute nap. Saturday morning pancakes after swimming at my friend's house.
What Lynn said pushed my thoughts on this out further. That if rest feels like a hard thing to come by, maybe thinking about what is fuelling your energy, is a good thing? Rather than running on adrenaline, can you come at it from another angle? Maybe rest doesn’t have to mean coming to a stop, which just makes me think of all the things I have to do. Maybe it can be an active thing, woven into your existing life, rather than demanding an overhaul circumstances do not allow for?
In thinking of all this, the two words that keep coming to me are pacing and capacity. Keeping an eye on your capacity. Your energy levels essentially. Knowing when you are running low. Catching it and doing little things to replenish.
And pacing yourself. For me this means looking at my diary for the week ahead on a Sunday, seeing how full-on the week feels, noticing the days that will be especially busy or tiring, and making sure I allow small moments of recompense. That could be an evening spent watching an episode of Downton with my daughter before going to bed early. A coffee with a friend. Quick short things that fill me back up again.
But please, do not tell me to stop. It’s not an option.
"(so much burnout advice seems aimed at those with understanding HR departments ready and waiting to sign you off for paid leave)." This holds for mental heath crises/illness too, and it has always frustrated me - tales of people just dropping out of life for a period of time, without any indication of how the bills are getting paid (or who's doing the caring work). I really needed to read this today; thank you. 💜
So many valid points, Lia. As someone who cared for an elderly parent with dementia and cancer, the advice to ‘put yourself first’ ‘prioritise your own health’ etc etc etc was maddening because it’s just not possible. The person being cared for takes up all your physical and mental energy and there is no one else to take up the reins. I had to cut so many things out of my life to cope - my house only got the most rudimentary clean for two or three years and I hadn’t the energy or inclination to cook proper meals. Most carers are utterly burned out but have no choice but to keep going because there is no support, no back up, and what is available is so minor as to be insignificant. And yes, carers are mostly women. Something has to change.