What I Wish I'd Learned About Burnout (Before I Burned Out)
How burnout taught me to take better care of my mind
During the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I found a job on a construction crew in my hometown of Mason City, Iowa. The construction company had just secured a contract to reroof my high school’s gymnasium, and they needed extra bodies to do the grunt work. I had no prior experience working in construction, but I was young and strong and had few other summer job prospects. I think I made $10 an hour.
It’s brutal work, roofing. My coworkers and I rose at dawn and spent our days toiling in the sun, broiling in the humid Midwestern heat. We used pitchforks to pry nails from the plywood and shovels to lift and carry bunches of shingles to the edge of the roof, where we dumped them in the bed of a beat-up old pickup truck. We swung hammers, pounded nails, climbed ladders with loads of new shingles on our shoulders and fired nail guns to install them. And we kept this up, day after day, week after week, all summer long.
One day, a couple of weeks into the job, I hurt my back. I scooped up a massive shovelful of shingles, stood, twisted, and felt something in my spine go pop. A sharp, searing pain shot down my right leg. I took a knee and muttered a few expletives. Then I ignored it and went back to work.
A week later, my back still felt a little stiff.
Two weeks later, my back ached.
A month later, I was in constant pain.
I soon found myself in a physical therapist’s office. After some examination, the PT informed me that I had misaligned my sacroiliac joint, where my back met my hip. A few weeks of physical therapy had me feeling more or less back to normal. The summer came to an end, and with it, that roofing job.
But that summer job taught me a few lessons that have stayed with me ever since. That job taught me that my body — newsflash — isn’t indestructible. That job taught me that I need to take better care of my body. That job taught me that trying to outwork an injury by way of brute force will only make that injury worse. It’s common sense, in retrospect, but these were important lessons for my younger self to learn.
That job got me thinking about my future, too. Most of my coworkers were in their 30s and 40s — ancient, mythical beings from the perspective of a high school student. Nearly all of them had bad backs, bad knees, nagging injuries that they had been neglecting for years, if not decades. Most of them didn’t have health insurance.
“What will you do if you get injured?” I asked one of them, who everyone on the construction crew called “Slip,” as we sat and rested in the shade.
“Then I’m shit out of luck,” Slip told me between drags off his American Spirit.
I smiled and nodded, and decided that I’d better learn how to make a living with my brain, not my body. Because someday, somewhere, my body might fail me. I could slip and fall and seriously, irreversibly hurt myself, and suddenly find myself without a job, lacking the skills to change career paths. That was a liability that more cerebral, intellectual work didn’t have.
Or so I thought.
Lately, I’ve begun to question this assumption.
I’ve been a semi-professional writer for a few years now. Initially, writing was more of a side gig. I’d take a freelance content writing job here, do some freelance journalism there, write a new story for Medium over there — all while working a day job.
About a year ago, I decided to give writing full-time a go. And it was going pretty well at first. I was pumping out “content” (I can’t stand that word) here on Medium that was getting lots of reads and comments and claps. I was landing and executing freelance projects with efficiency and ease. I was publishing pieces of science journalism in some respectable newspapers and magazines. And I was writing a novel, on top of all of that.
I felt sharp, dialed in, in the zone.
I kept this up for the better part of a year. But about two months ago, I felt myself slowing down. I started feeling groggy, tired, lacking in energy and enthusiasm. In retrospect, these feelings were signs that I needed to, well, slow down. But I didn’t. I ignored these feelings, drank more coffee, and kept writing.
Then I burned out in a fiery, self-imposed explosion.
Until recently, I always thought the term “burnout” was just another synonym for feeling tired. Of course I’m burnt out, I used to think, before I actually burned out. Who isn’t? I didn’t realize just how debilitating burnout can be.
Strictly speaking, burnout isn’t a medical condition. In the scientific literature, burnout is referred to as a “syndrome.” That is, a group of symptoms that often occur together.
According to the World Health Organization:
Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:
1. feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion,
2. increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
3. reduced professional efficacy.
Check, check, and check.
“Initially,” a 2022 study published in the Journal of International Medical Research states, “the signs and symptoms of burnout are subtle, with gradual progression. Although aware of negative changes in their mental (emotional, cognitive) and physical functioning, at first, many affected individuals neither recognize nor understand the connection between these changes and the depletion of their resources of mental and physical energy and well-being.”
This was true for me. What began as an occasional, fleeting feeling of fatigue gradually became a state of constant mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion. I started feeling detached from my work. I’d sit and write, filling my computer screen with word after meaningless word. Then I would read what I had written. This is shit, I would think. And it was. Finally, I got to a point where a day of work consisted of sitting and staring at a blank page, watching the toolbar blink the hours away, unable to write anything at all. Talk about “reduced professional efficacy.”
Then came the cynicism, the hopelessness, the despair. “Individuals with burnout experience feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness, low self-esteem, cynicism, dissatisfaction with personal accomplishments, distress, ineffective coping, and difficulties with work-related demands,” that Journal of International Medical Research study continues. And these feelings aren’t limited to one’s work, of course. These feelings affect every aspect of one’s life. When I was in the throes of my battle with burnout, I felt tense all of the time. I felt anxious. I felt irritable. I was having trouble sleeping, which made me even more tired and more burned out.
Then I started feeling, well, depressed.
Turns out, there’s a lot of overlap between the symptoms of burnout and those of depression. Even mental health professionals have trouble telling these two conditions apart. “Occasionally,” the Journal of International Medical Research study mentioned above reads, “medical practitioners either do not recognize burnout as a medical condition or mistake it for depression.” Technically, the difference between these two conditions is that burnout and its accompanying symptoms are caused by and affect one’s work-life, primarily, whereas depression has more widespread and complex causes and effects that are related to other aspects of one’s life, beyond work. It’s a blurry line, of course, and these conditions can overlap.
And like depression — and despite the fact that burnout isn’t considered to be a “medical condition” — burnout affects the brain. Burnout is associated with reduced volumes of gray matter in various brain regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This latter brain region plays key roles in working memory, cognitive flexibility, planning, and abstract thought, all of which are crucial tools for a writer (and for many other professions).
Burnout is also associated with impaired synaptic plasticity — the formation of new connections between neurons. And synaptic plasticity is the mechanism by which our brains learn and retain new information; the process by which we form new memories. When burned out, in other words, the brain struggles to make new connections between neurons, and your cognition suffers as a result.
The amygdala, too, tends to grow dysfunctional within the burned out brain. The amygdala is considered the “emotional center” of the human brain. When neurological activity in the amygdala is out of whack, we tend to feel more fearful, more anxious, and more aggressive. We tend to have more trouble regulating these negative emotions, as well.
“All the cerebral functional activities mentioned above are also involved in integration of cognitive, emotional, and autonomic activities,” the Journal of International Medical Research study states. “The neurotoxic effects of persistent stress-induced morphological changes and of functional dysregulation of neural pathways may explain the symptoms of clinical burnout.”
(All of this raises a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg issue: Does burnout cause these changes in the brain, or do these changes in the brain cause the symptoms of burnout? Both, it turns out.)
I could go on about the neurobiology of burnout, but let’s not get bogged down in the details. My point is this: Burnout is more than just fatigue. Burnout affects the very structure of your brain. Burnout impairs your brain’s ability to function, and the quality of your mind suffers as a result.
Burnout is essentially an “overuse injury” for your brain. And just as trying to “tough it out” and outwork a back injury is apt to cause more severe damage to your body (as it did to mine), the same is true of burnout. You can’t outwork burnout. Too much work — and a lack of healthy coping mechanisms to deal with the stress that comes with that work — is what causes burnout in the first place.
So, how do you heal from burnout?
I’ll tell you what worked for me.
First and foremost: Rest. Relax. Give your brain a much needed break. This is what I did, and it worked wonders for me. I set aside two weeks to do, well, not much of anything, really. I got out of the city and into nature. I read a few books. I did lots of yoga. I spent time with my partner and our chihuahua. I gave myself permission to simply be and enjoy my life.
This might sound like common sense — and it should be — but in a culture that glorifies the grind, it’s a heretical act. We are constantly bombarded by Instagram influencers and “thought leaders” who urge us to do more, better, faster. We are expected to make constant, unrelenting progress; to produce an endless stream of ever-improving content. Keep moving forward. No days off. Publish every day. It’s an impossible standard that many of us accept and hold ourselves to, consciously or unconsciously.
And if you don’t live up to it?
Well, that means you’re lazy. You’re weak. You’re a suboptimal human being soon to be surpassed by the always-on-your-heels competition.
This is bullshit, of course, but many of us believe it and act accordingly. Breaking news: You’re not a productivity machine. You’re a human being, and you have basic biological, psychological, and emotional needs. Rest is one of them.
That’s what my therapist told me, in so many words.
And that brings me to another tool that has helped me better understand and overcome my battle with burnout: therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy, specifically. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is “a type of psychotherapy in which negative patterns of thought about the self and the world are challenged in order to alter unwanted behaviour patterns or treat mood disorders such as depression.” CBT, simply put, focuses on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us, and helps us change those narratives. (“With our thoughts we make the world,” quoth the Buddha . . .) It also helps us better understand the relationship between our thoughts and emotions, and how our thoughts and emotions shape our behavior. It helped me, at least.
The science shows that CBT is effective in treating burnout, too. A 2012 study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment, and Health found that 10 weeks of CBT helped alleviate burnout symptoms in a group of 16 patients struggling with the syndrome. Many studies since then have found similar results across many different professions, with larger sample sizes. I mention these 16 patients in particular to point out that their burnout symptoms improved after 10 weeks of CBT, but their performance on cognitive tests did not. Not right away, at least.
Remember: Burnout affects the structure and activity of the brain. The prefrontal cortex shrinks. Connections between neurons die and are pruned away. The amygdala grows dysfunctional and hyperactive. It takes time and practice to make and reinforce new connections in the brain. It takes time for the brain to recover and get back into shape, so to speak.
That’s where mindfulness comes in.
Like CBT, several studies have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce (and prevent) burnout symptoms. Mindfulness meditation has also been shown to increase neural activity in the prefrontal cortex, decrease activity in the amygdala, and promote synaptic plasticity. Mindfulness meditation, in other words, directly combats the changes in the brain that are caused by burnout.
I’ve been practicing mindfulness meditation for more than a decade now, and I’ve been meditating more than ever as I recover from my bout with burnout. Lately, I’ve been beginning and ending every day with 30 minutes of meditation. And one thing I’ve noticed is that meditation has helped me cultivate more patience and compassion for myself as I get back to writing full-time.
I’m still dealing with some lingering effects of burnout. My memory isn’t as good as it was before I burned out, for example. Some days, I still struggle with brain fog. I feel like I have to work twice as hard for twice as long to achieve half of what I used to, before I burned out.
It’s frustrating.
But mindfulness helps me see myself and my present situation with just a little more patience, more kindness, more compassion. Meditation helps me see myself as a process — a part and process of nature itself. And that’s the thing about nature: you can’t rush it. You can’t force a tree to grow, or a flower to bloom, or a cloud to become rain. “Nature does not hurry,” as Lao Tzu (allegedly) said, “yet everything is accomplished.”
My brain is still recovering, is what I’m trying to say, and it takes time to heal. Meditation has helped me be more mindful of that fact. And more accepting of it.
That construction job that I worked back in the day — and the back injury I suffered as a result — taught me how to take better care of my body. This episode of burnout that I’ve been struggling with lately has taught me how to take better care of my mind. I hope these words help you do the same.
Take care of your body and your brain.
The quality of your life depends on it.