Burnout – near miss

Burnout is one of those terms that I’ve never really dwelt on too much other than in fiction. You know, the down on his luck detective who’s at the end of his rope but who’ll solve this last case because without the job he’s got nothing left.

Not any more.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this or what it is exactly. Therapy maybe? I think its a story about a not quite burnout and gratitude. I think often we wait until things get truly horrible to talk about them and that doesn’t need to be the case.

So, it’s been a long, hard, marathon of a year. I can’t think of any another time in my life that has challenged me as much as this year. I mean life always has its normal ups and downs but this year it feels like I’m experiencing an unusually confluence of long term sustained concurrent stresses. Rather than the usual short terms stresses there have been several long-term sources of stress all running concurrently.

Work disruptions due to a merger, issues with health on the home front, the general demands of being a parent and a few other challenges have all combined to slowly wear away at my long term mental and physical reserves. In the end it probably doesn’t matter what the actual stresses were. If it wasn’t these ones it would have been others at some point in the future.

Its hard to put my finger on any single definite point in time when I was fine and when I suddenly transitioned to not fine. I mean there are certainly memorable pieces of bad news and life changes but I’d still be hard pressed to pick a single straw that broke the camel’s back.

All I know for sure is that over the course of several months I got tired, stressed and generally worn out. It was a slow decline in both my mental and physical health.

What I find particularly interesting is that for most of the downwards trajectory I was more or less oblivious. I mean I was vaguely aware of feeling tired and stressed but it wasn’t like I was seeing any glaring signs or rapid drops in my physical and mental health, much bit like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water conditions got worse very gradually. [side note: Unlike the proverb, in real life the slowly warmed frog hops to safety and the frog dropped into boiling water probably dies]

My first rather prosaic wake-up call was getting sick with the flu and seeing how hard that hit me. Normally I don’t take much time off sick. I’ve got the sort of job that’s specialised and if I’m not at there jobs just pile up. Ok, so maybe a few ultra-critical things can be handed off to colleges but as a rule taking time off work sick means needing to work extra hard to get back in front at a later date. This time getting sick was like a slow train wreck I couldn’t stop. Ironically because I was so run down I could tell that I was getting sick and I made an effort to take it easy. I pre-emptively took some of my (already depleted and jealously guarded) flex leave in order to look after myself. It didn’t work. The flu hit with full force and I spent five days sick. I spent three of those days in bed alternating between shivering and sweats, counting the hours until I could take the next doses of paracetamol & ibuprofen.

When I felt myself  getting better I figured I do what I normally do, which is dip into my reserves of mental and physical energy and go back to work. It didn’t work, the emergency tank was empty. I couldn’t muster the willpower.

Honestly it was a shock. I mean I thought I was doing an okay job at juggling everything and then suddenly I’ve dropped some of the metaphorical balls and they’re hitting me in the head one after another.

Here’s where we get to the gratitude portion of the tale. My boss/work was incredibly understanding and supportive. My wife was also incredibly supportive, despite her own pre-existing health issues…as well as suffering the early stages of the flu herself. Even our daughter (who’s three) helped. I am well and truly aware of how much harder things would have been on my own and feel an immense sense of gratitude for those around me who helped (and continue to help).

The second (again prosaic) wake up call involved a dishwasher. Bear with me. A few months back due to the incredible kind and generous intervention of friends we found ourselves with a dishwasher (it being the most concrete and practical way they could help us during a very difficult time). I was grateful at the time and I’m still grateful. Every night for months I’d had a certain spring in my step as I loaded the dishwasher. It might sound silly but there sitting in our kitchen was the tangible message of love and support from our friends and I always got a kick out of using it. The entire first week I used it I kept breaking into little happy dance much like the Snoopy dance only less coordinated. One night I was loading the dishwasher and I felt like I was Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill. There was no joy in this task that had not long ago had me dancing for joy.I thought to myself ‘Gee this flu really has taken it out of me. I’ll be glad when this is over and I’m back to my old self’.

I think after being sick and noticing the sense of struggle with something as simple as loading the dishwasher I’d crossed some critical threshold where I couldn’t pretend like nothing was wrong. It didn’t mean that I had a sudden moment of clarity where all my problems and mistakes became clear but I did start the (rather slow) process of consciously self analysing.

Feeling sufficiently recovered I went back to work and immediately I could tell that something still wasn’t right. I had an ongoing sense of tiredness and brittleness that didn’t want to disappear. Work is rarely leap for joy exciting (I mean otherwise we’d call it play not work) but it seemed like it had all lost a bit of its normal lustre.

I became painfully aware of just how woefully vulnerable my health, fitness, habits and coping strategies had left me to external disruptions. Twelve months prior if you’d asked me about any one of the above I might have reluctantly admitted to there being room for improvement but overall I’d have told you that I’m on top of things.

Not anymore.

I’ve always thought of myself as being fairly stoic and someone possessing a reasonable amount of mental resilience. I’m not sure this is exactly how I come across to the outside world because I do find it beneficial, even cathartic, to bitch and moan (especially with a few drinks in me).

I’m not usually one to worry things I cannot change, nor to overly stress about things that I don’t need to deal with until later.

Not anymore.

Another thing I noticed failing me was my ability to compartmentalise. In the past I have often been quite good at separating parts of my life where necessary e.g. work and home.

Not anymore.

I now know that when sufficiently tired and stressed all those little mental partitions come tumbling down and I become a worrier.

In my mind I’ve just had a lucky near miss (yes I do know that technically the correct term is near hit) in regards to burnout. While I did drop a few proverbial balls I did manage to keep the critical ones going. I kept on top of the basics….just. The lights were still on, the family was fed. To the outside observer it would have looked uneventful.

Thankfully once I stripped away a lot of the bullshit the problem was actually could be boiled down to a few basics that I’d let slide: good sleep, exercise, diet and deliberate ‘me’ time.

I mean it’s nothing profound or earth shatteringly original. I was trying to do too much and so I was doing too many things badly. I got tired and stressed and stopped doing the things that I know help manage my energy and stress levels. Doh.

Sleep had become a gradually reducing cycle of diminishing returns. Despite knowing my daughter would wake me up early I kept staying up late. Burning the candle at both ends was both a cause and symptom of being tired and stressed. In the evening after my daughter was asleep I’d try to relax by watching TV with my wife then reading…and then be even more tired (and therefore stressed) the next day. Getting a full eight hours sleep became the exception not the norm. Not through conscious action and the change was gradual, not all at once.

I think exercise is where I failed the most. Due to external factors beyond my control it became much harder to play sport once a week, and so when the new season started I didn’t register. Then my before-work walks with a friend faltered due to his and my work commitments… and I failed to compensate. Soon my optional extra walks at lunch time became virtually non-existent. After all I was stressed, busy and ‘couldn’t make the time’.

I began making worse choices when it came to buying lunch or cooking dinner. I didn’t stoop to the Maccas drive through but the balance/quality of my cooking suffered. Lastly the insidious portion-control creep occurred. I.e. I was eating just a little bit too much and it was getting worse.

Sleep, exercise, food and generally just looking after myself. Once I could just take a step back and see the blindingly obvious things actually felt like they turned around quite quickly. I’m not saying I was suddenly better over-night because I wasn’t but things did start to improve almost immediately.

Instead of a near constant feeling of tiredness and overwhelm I suddenly had a tangible problem to solve. Engineer heal thyself!

I finally went and found my Fitbit and starting wearing it again. It had been ‘in a safe place’ for weeks but somehow I never managed to find it. Yet it took less than five minutes to find it when I truly set my mind to it. I started once again tracking my daily steps as well as jumping on the scales every morning without fail.

I made a very deliberate effort to walk more. At first it wasn’t much but I built it up each session and soon I was back into the swing of things. An obvious but unexpected side benefit to extra walking was being alone. I tend more towards the introverted end of the spectrum and a little bit extra alone time was actually an opportunity to recharge. Sometimes this would be conscious introspection but just as often it would be listening to fiction on the iPhone. I’d almost forgotten how much listening to a good book and a long walk could reinvigorate me.

As they say less is more, so I started saying no to things. No to watching that second TV show, no to the extra helping of mashed potato (despite how much I wanted it), no the little voice that wanted me to read ‘just another chapter’ when I should be asleep and no to the same voice that kept telling me I was too tired to go for a walk.

I made an effort to once again attempt to meditate. Despite being a novice meditator I do find that when I work at quieting my mind a few times a week that it does helps. Nothing woo woo about it just a way of calming the turmoil inside my head. It helps.

So am I better? Yes and no.

A few weeks of making a concerted effort to exercise more has seen a slow but steady increase in my energy levels.

I’m definitely eating better, and the scales are (oh so painfully slowly) trending downwards.

I’m still more tired and brittle than I’ve been for years, after almost all of the stressors that got me onto that downward slope still exist but I’m certainly not as bad as I’ve been.

I still struggle to get enough sleep but I’m working on it and things are improving.

Overall however I know I’m more cognizant of the problem than I’ve ever been before and honestly I think that’s the greater part of the battle.

Last but not least, I once again get a sense of joy and appreciation when loading the dishwasher.