Burnout is a multifaceted shutdown physically, mentally, and emotionally where your motivation to engage with life reaches its lowest ebb. Burnout is not just about being tired after a hard week’s work; this isn’t something you can sleep-off over a weekend or on vacation. Many people are incapacitated for months, if not years, before they can recover a level of energy that allows them to re-engage with life again. There are also often serious chronic illnesses, like autoimmune diseases, that arise from burnout because your body is too depleted to overcome them.
Burnout more commonly afflicts high-achievers, those ambitious people driven to succeed despite the cost to their health, or perfectionists who cannot rest until everything is running perfectly.
Burnout sneaks up on people gradually over a period of years, we get so used to feeling drained and exhausted that we forget it isn’t normal. Other people start to notice our symptoms way before we do, and we become masters of denial and rationalisation.
Physically we push our bodies to perform at work for long hours, bragging about our eighty-hour weeks, and showcasing our busyness on social media, we wear our weariness like a badge of honour. In response, our bodies produce copious stress hormones, originally only designed for a quick release to get us out of immediate danger. Our bodies were not designed to deal with stress hormones being released all day long, dominating our physiology for hours at a time, day-in and day-out, these hormones have a cascade effect on the rest of your hormonal balances wreaking havoc on our health over time, affecting sleep, mood, digestion, energy and so on.
Mentally we are ON all day and often even during our downtime we are still processing data in our heads, and on our devices, planning our competitive advantage, mitigating loss, and strategizing future gains. People are struggling to rest and recover in between the go, go, go.
Emotionally we are being pulled in different directions, our families need us, our clients need us, our employers need us, and our colleagues need us; all demanding very different responses. We spend our days constantly pivoting from one request to another. Is it any wonder that we are exhausted and burning out.