The Flipside of Burnout You Rarely Hear About — And How You Can Overcome It
Many people associate burnout with simply working too much.
There is another side to it, however. One many people don’t give nearly enough attention to. A more pernicious type of burnout that can slip right under your radar.
This subtler form of burnout doesn’t take place at work. No, it takes place when you’re at home with family, when you’re out with friends. But the problem is you’re not really with them.
Your body’s with them, but your mind is elsewhere. Still in the office, still in the classroom, still in the meeting room — still working.
It’s not just the exertion of energy spent during your working hours, but the exertion of thought spent during the time you’re not working.
— Lawrence Yeo
Amardeep Parmar speaks about the value of viewing your work and productivity through the lens of your energy levels, instead of the more commonly used metric of time.
You might work the same number of hours each week as your friends. But if you can’t forget about that meeting, or that business call that didn’t go to plan, your energy levels quickly never get the chance to replenish, causing you to run on empty.
Your ability to generate power is directly proportional to your ability to relax.
— David Allen
Without a solid rest ethic, your energy levels don’t get the chance to recharge and you put yourself in danger of burnout.
Overworked or Under-rested?
You might think these two terms are the same. They’re not.
The pandemic clearly illustrated the difference between the two, as Covid-induced remote work meant the line between work and home became blurred and it became infinitely more difficult for us to switch off.
Many of us were starved us of rest, not simply overfed with work.
Take this survey published by Deloitte US last year. In a survey of 1,000 full-time professionals, 77% reported burnout at their current job, but only 29% of those put that down to consistently working longer hours.
Despite the number of working hours remaining the same for many people, there were exponential increases in reported cases of burnout during the pandemic. In fact, people had even more free time given they no longer needed to commute!
But perhaps this commute served an essential purpose in allowing us to transition from the workplace to home?
The act of stepping out of the workplace, which served as a cue for us to physically and mentally leave our work behind us for the day, vanished. And with it our ability to be done, fully done, with our work for the day deteriorated.
When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.
— Cal Newport
As you can see by now, this simple act of “being done” with work is much easier said than done. Now more than ever. Given your boss and colleagues can reach you on e-mail or instant messaging 24/7. It means many of us literally carry our work home with us via our smartphones.
So, what’s the solution?
Active Rest
“Recovery is active, not passive, and we can design it to get greater benefit.”
— Alex Soojung
In times of burnout, you might think that more activity is the last thing you need. But the reward lies in the effort; learning a new activity demands your full attention. Given all the new sensory information your brain is processing, your mind simply doesn’t have the space to worry about work.
In fact, it doesn’t leave room for anything else but focusing on the activity itself. Because of your inexperience and incompetence with the new activity, it pulls you out of your mind and into your body. Catapulting you into the present moment.
Dermot Whelan likes to call it “mindfulness in motion” and it may be just what you need in times of crisis when burnout strikes.
Meditation is great, don’t get me wrong. But in times of considerable stress such as burnout, a much more active form of mindfulness might be called for. One that uses up instead of pointlessly trying to suppress the increased levels of stress-hormones flooding your body.
In his brilliant book ‘The Stress Solution’, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee mentions his wife Vidhaata’s temporary switch from being a full time criminal barrister to a stay at home mam.
They were shocked to find that her switch to being a full-time mother left her feeling more stressed and exhausted than the ultra-demanding legal work she’d been doing for years.
She found that even after dropping the kids to school, she never could find the time in the day to recharge her batteries and fully switch off from her responsibilities at home.
That was until she introduced the non-negotiable habit of prioritising ‘Do’ Time, Not ‘Me’ Time. Vidhaata engaged in active rest by taking up a new hobby, indoor rock-climbing.
After a few weeks, her 2-hour weekly session spent climbing found her returning to her old self and quickly recovering from burnout.
Final Thoughts
So many of us view rest as an entirely passive act. Engaging couch-potato mode and indulging in what I like to call the 3Ns: Netflix, Naps and Nachos.
The problem is that it’s difficult to fully switch your mind off fully during passive activities such as these. You leave wiggle-room for your subconscious to pester you with thoughts like:
- “You should be working right now.”
- “You’ve X to have done for this week’s deadline.”
- “You made this stupid mistake at work today. “
It might seem counterintuitive to spend even more energy on after-hours activities, but it’s the mental rest afforded by these intensely physical activities where their immense value lies.
There are countless forms of active rest and play you can take up:
- Dancing
- Golf
- Yoga
- Tennis
- Skateboarding
- Rock climbing
Let myself and others know in the comments below if you can think of any other forms of active rest that you deeply enjoy or always wanted to try out.
In times of psychological burnout, move your body to rest your mind.
This month I’m joining other new writers on a March Medium sprint with Jessica Lynn. If you’ve always wanted to give writing here on Medium a shot — come join us!
