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The
Joy of Burnout: How the End of the World Can Be a New Beginning
By
Dr. Dina Glouberman
Burnout feels like the end of the world. It's not. It's
the beginning of a new one. I know because burnout turned my life
around. At the time, I didn't even know what it was called.
Once I understood what had happened to me, a lot of things fell
into place.
A few autumns ago, I was sitting in a cafe with my friend Ilene
who had made a surprise trip from Sweden to be with me on my birthday.
We chatted about work and she mentioned that in Sweden, burnout
was hitting the headlines as one of the biggest problems of the
country's industry.
I heard the word 'burnout' as if for the first time, and
a light went on in my brain: Burnout - that's it!
Until that moment,I hadn't seen the 'stress breakdown'
I'd suffered ten years before as burnout. When the worst of
it was over, a consultant told me I'd had ME or chronic fatigue.
A homeopathic doctor told me, “My dear, your heart is tired.”
Burnout just hadn't been on my radar screen.
I sat at a party and mentioned that I was researching burnout.
Eyes lit up all around me. Everyone sitting near me had a story.
I asked participants on one of our Thailand holidays, “How
many of you have burnt out or are burning out?” Eighty per
cent of hands went up. I inquired of friends and colleagues, “Do
you know anyone who has burnt out?” Almost invariably they
replied, “Yes, me, and loads of other people I know.”
Often, like me, they hadn't thought of what had happened to
them as burnout, but when they heard the word, they knew it had
something to say to them.
People who have burnt out describe it in terms such as “I
could almost feel my brain burning,” or “It was like
my nervous system was fried,” or “Instead of growing
like a tree, I was a pile of ash.” For me, it also has another
subliminal meaning. It reminds me that the phoenix rises from
ashes, and that burnout is really a message of renewal.
Burnout is, or rather can be, a door to walk through into a life
with space, love and joy – indeed, a sense of being able
to be one's true self. In fact, burning out is a sign that
we have already begun to know something about our true selves
that we are not quite ready to tell ourselves. Some voice of truth
inside whispers to us that our old ways of relating are not working
and we need to stop, rethink and find a new way forward. We don't
dare to. Yet we cannot afford not to.
There's an old saying that “Experience is a hard teacher
because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.”
Burnout is sometimes an even harder teacher. We may need to fail
the test – or quite a few tests – before we get the
lesson.
The beautiful thing about the human condition is that what looks
like the end of a road never is. It is only the end of the road
we know. This is very frightening at first because it means stopping
doing what is familiar and has gained us rewards in the past.
We live in a culture in which stopping often signifies a failure
to make the grade, to continue up the ladder, to win the prizes
that are hanging at the top, or at least on the rung above us.
As long as we are climbing, we are holding on to old identities
or old beliefs about what we should be, and winning for ourselves
the right to have new and more sparkling identities. If we lose
these, who and what will we be? Yet once we get to burnout, we
often have no choice but to stop. Stop is of course what we need
to do most of all. We need to stop fighting the burnout, indeed
stop any kind of struggle. It is time for a new beginning.
Are you or someone you know burning out?
The
classic signs of burnout are:
• A growing emotional, mental and/or physical exhaustion
which isn't alleviated by sleeping
• An increasing sense of being cut off from ourselves and
other people
• A decreasing ability to be effective at doing what we have
always done, either at work or at home.
Psychotherapist
Dr. Dina Glouberman is the author of a new book The Joy
of Burnout: How the End of the World Can Be a New Beginning
(Inner Ocean Publishing, ISBN 1-930722-20-6).
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Doorways