Bargaining with Burnout

When I recognized how depleted I truly was

I was half-way through a podcast when I noticed how irritated I felt. It was first thing in the morning and I wasn’t awake long enough to be truly annoyed by anything, but once I paused the podcast, I realized it was the sound of the podcasters talking that was bothering me. The discovery was unsettling, since I normally love an influx of ideas – listening to podcasts, reading multiple books at the same time, and having thought provoking conversations. I’ve based my career around being in conversation with people for hours every day. I brushed the experience aside, put on some music and went about my routine.

The next morning, I tried again. And the next. And the next. But I couldn’t tolerate listening longer than a couple of minutes. It felt like I was having an input overload. That was when I recognized how truly burned out I was. I unsubscribed from all my podcasts and started only listening to upbeat music in the mornings. I stopped reading non-fiction and I watched a lot less TV. This was the spring of 2020 and like so many other healthcare professionals at the time, I bore down and did my best to help the people in my care.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic aggravated my burnout, it had been percolating for a while. While I loved my career and the work I was doing with clients, I found the structures I worked under stifling, rigid, and alienating. I was nurturing the seeds of an idea – to fully commit to my private practice and create a business where I could work remotely from anywhere in the world. But the realities of the world made it hard to imagine.

Sarakiniko, Greece - a place I go back to often in my mind

Burnout seems to be on everyone’s mind in recent years and with good reason. Whether it’s due to societal issues (a global pandemic, structural injustices, increasing costs of living, war and genocide…) or personal issues (relationship struggles, job insecurity, grief & loss, mental health…), chances are you’ve felt burned out at some point.

Maybe you’re burned out right now.

Among psychologists, therapists, and anyone in a helping profession, it can often seem like an inevitable detour in one’s career path. For a lot of people, they recognize they are deep in burnout, but don’t have the resources to make the changes needed to start to recover. For many years, I just pushed through in the hopes the ideal set of circumstances would present themselves so that I could start anew. It took much longer than I care to admit for me to realize that those circumstances didn’t exist and I had to make a change. That while my client work hadn’t suffered yet, it inevitably would. Or, if it wasn’t work that would suffer, some other area of my life would change for the worse. I’ve seen too many clients to know it doesn’t go any differently.

It took another year before I left the golden handcuffs of my government job and set out without a return ticket to travel and work around the world. I recognize that many do not have the privilege and circumstances that allowed me to leave a draining environment and to work substantially less so that I could recover from burnout. But there’s often something we can change, even if we can’t see it clearly right away.

What about you?

Tell me about your experiences with burnout. Did things improve on their own or did you make a change? What was the catalyst for change in your life?