Burnout or smoulder?

I don’t think I did burnout right.

You see, burnout is supposed to be a dramatic collapse, your body finally losing patience with you ignoring its signals to slow down and keeping your foot on the accelerator, so sending you a signal you can’t ignore by shutting itself down.

Overnight, you are struck down. You can’t get out of bed. You are lost in a slough of despond. You can barely think straight. An enforced break, your body and brain insisting you stop and recover.

This is the story of burnout that we are familiar with. Proper burnout, not when people say “I”m a bit burnt out” because they are knackered and need a holiday. People write books about their burnout experience, how they were a high-flying exec one day and stopped dead in their tracks the next. They tell us what they learnt, what we need to do to avoid their fate.

We lap it up because we love a drama. It also follows a familiar narrative arc, it’s a kind of hero’s journey. There’s a refusal (ignoring the body’s signals), a crossing into another world (the forced rest and internal journey), facing up to one’s demons (the mismatch between the current life and inner desires), a kind of death and rebirth, and then return to the normal world to share this hard-earned wisdom.

These accounts are always given by ‘high achievers’, and burnout is often framed as a problem for such people. It’s caused because they try too hard, they are ‘addicted’ to work. It’s almost a badge of honour.

But that wasn’t what happened to me. To be fair, 30 years ago burnout wasn’t a ‘thing’, I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t see myself as a ‘high achiever’, either, so maybe that was the problem.

I wasn’t ‘addicted’ to work. I worked hard, though, and I cared about doing a good job. I certainly gave work more importance than, on reflection, it deserved and I prioritised it over aspects of my personal life. But I wasn’t chasing status, or salary, or symbols of success. I think I was just like a lot of people, I wanted to do work that I could be proud of, get fairly rewarded for it and progress as far as my talents merited.

So maybe burnout happens in different ways for us ordinary types. It’s not a dramatic conflagration but more of a slow, continuous smouldering. Instead of being consumed in a blaze, we are gradually turned to ash, little by little, day by day. We retain our form, albeit turned grey, until something disturbs us and we disintegrate into a heap.

I mean, I did all the right things as a hard-working employee (by which I mean, I did all the wrong things). I ignored all the signals my body was sending me that something was seriously wrong. I put it down to the ‘normal stress’ of a management position, of running big projects, of life. The disturbed sleep, the beginnings of IBS, the tiredness, the loss of enthusiasm, the increased cynicism. I numbed myself with forced indifference and alcohol, and withdrew inside myself. And I persuaded myself this was all normal, what happens at ‘my stage of life and career’. I ‘manned up’ and pushed on.

But there was no dramatic collapse. My body functioned less well, my mind lost some sharpness, I lost interest in things that used to excite me but I kept going. I was running on fumes but I was still going. Slower and slower, but never grinding to a complete halt.

You’d have thought that somebody would have noticed, that my performance would have fallen away and become an issue. However, I think there were two reasons why this didn’t happen. The first is that I largely defined my own job and was a subject expert, and I knew how to work the system. I could produce an acceptable level of performance even in my depleted state. The second reason is that many people really aren’t paying attention, and even if they notice, they’d rather ignore it than address the problem. I kept hoping someone would notice but no-one ever did.

There’s no drama to this story, not really. It’s a long, slow, steady decline until you’ve almost ceased to function, but not quite. You’re on the verge of complete break down but you never quite collapse. Something keeps you going, whether it’s misplaced stoicism, a perverse form of resilience, or just plain stubbornness (I suspect the latter, in my case). You don’t know how to stop, how to give up, so you somehow keep plodding on.

You are locked into survival mode and you can stay there a long time.

I think this is a more common experience than the dramatic type. There’s a lot of people in middle management who are just surviving, taking one day at a time, gritting their teeth and getting through to the next one. Success is making it to tomorrow. Increasingly, there’s a lot of people in non-management jobs who are in this state too, such is the nature of work today.

You see, Burnout is caused when you feel you have no control over what’s happening to you. When you feel you don’t matter, that the work doesn’t matter, and nothing is ever going to change for the better. Burnout happens when it all seems pointless and hopeless. You don’t have to be a ‘high achiever’ to feel like that, it’s becoming the default of many workplaces today, by design. In fact, when you’re just one of the foot soldiers, with little prospect of advancement or salary growth, your sense of hopelessness is going to be higher than someone on the management fast-track and associated salary.

This takes an enormous toll on the individual, on their mental and physical health, on their social life, on their family. Oh, and their career, although that barely registers.

It often takes an external event to end the stasis. It could be work-related, like a redundancy or a move to another job. However, it’s more likely to be something in their private life. Perhaps a health crisis, the loss of a loved one or some other personal tragedy. Mine was an ‘annus horribilis’, in which I lost three close relatives, the last being my father. Significant life events that most people cope with but which I no longer had the resources to handle. At the same time, I was made redundant but, to be honest, that barely registered. I was already in a mess, a crumpled heap on the ground.

In many ways, this slow, smouldering form of burnout is worse. At least with the dramatic type, there is a clear crisis. It forces acknowledgement and acceptance, it crystallises the problem, and it demands a plan of action in response. Other people see what has happened and rally round to support. The drama elicits a sympathetic response.

The smoulder, though, it allows room for doubt, grounds for denial, a downplaying of the severity of the situation. Because it’s happened so gradually, so incrementally, it can’t be that serious, can it? You feel guilty about having let it happen to you, for not taking action sooner. You feel ashamed to tell friends and colleagues you are struggling, because it sounds a bit pathetic. They probably won’t notice either, because you’ve been hiding it for so long, telling everyone you’re just fine. That means that if you do tell them, they’re going to struggle to believe you.

So you say nothing, suffer in silence, struggle on alone. Which is the worse thing you can possibly do because that just makes you recovery much harder, and probably much longer.

Have you done burnout wrong too? Have you smouldered out instead? Are you still struggling on, on the edge of collapse but never quite tipping over? If you’d like to share your experience, I’m here to listen, just get in touch.

Image by Tim Mossholder from Pixabay

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I am planning to facilitate some zoom conversations to explore the issues discussed here, share experiences and work on some possible answers. If you are interested in taking part, you can register your interest on this form.

As always, I’d love you hear your views and hear your stories, so please get in touch.