If you’re experiencing burnout, taking some kind of break might sound like the best idea. After all, you’re experiencing “emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress.” Rest sounds like the answer, right? So people schedule a break, a vacation, a leave of absence from work. They take their time off, get some sleep or a change of scenery, and come back to the fray to try again. The hope is, generally, that after the break they will be able to handle the tasks and challenges more effectively.
Cue the stress and burnout loop!
The stress builds again. You try to push past it this time. Shouldn’t you be more ready after the break you already took? Why is it feeling so hard all over again? Not only do you have the stress you’re dealing with now, you may also feel negatively about having had to take a break in the first place. The pressure compounds and you start to doubt yourself.
The real cause of burnout is systemic.
You cannot come back to the same challenge, that has not changed at all, and expect to do differently or “better.” The problem that caused your burnout was the systemic challenges you were experiencing. Put another way, it’s the structure of your work, your engagement, or your life that was not sustainable. As stated by NYC anxiety, trauma, and burnout therapist Jack Szary: “The system that produced the burnout is fully intact, waiting.“
A break would have helped if it was a single task you’d been working on for an hour, for example. But by the point you’ve held enough prolonged pressure and cognitive load to experience burnout, the change you make needs to be more drastic.
Take the time… but make it work!
In order to cure or resolve current and future burnout, you need a restructuring of what you are doing and how you do it. You need to make your life sustainable for you. And while a vacation or a break might not permanently fix the problem, you can learn a lot about what will through how you spend that time. How did you spend your time on your break, vacation, or leave? What did you do that you’d like to incorporate more of? Howdid you rest? Did you sleep more and on a better schedule? Did you read more, do more art, move your body more, spend time with friends, nourish your body and mind better?
Now that you know what helped, you know what needs to be added and adjusted for in your life moving forward. Find ways to integrate the experience of rest, relaxation, and recharge into your everyday experience.
Once you’ve figured out the spaces to carve for yourself and the limits you need to place on stressful activities, don’t compare yourself to others… including your past self. While you may have “been able” to handle more challenges before, that’s what lead to your burnout in the first place. And everyone else has different limits for everything in life. This isn’t about competing: this is about what is best for you and your health.
Naturally, these can be extremely difficult challenges to navigate and mental shifts to make. If you’d like some professional support with this and think we might be a good fit, click here to reach out.
Dr. Stephanie Bloodworth, PsyD, LMFT-S