My peers started talking about burnout when Anne Helen Petersen first wrote about what she calledthe impossible task.
Burnout, she argued, was the overall condition of millennials as a generation.
She made this argument back in 2019, before the pandemic.
So I hadnt experienced burnout, I told myself.
But then the pandemic happened, and the stakes were raised for everyone around me.
People were quitting jobs, people were anxious and hypervigilant, people were broke and angry.
And all through the last two years, the term burnout keeps getting thrown around.
Burnout isnt special anymore.
Which made me wonder whether the term was a misnomer.
And for discuss it in any meaningful way and find solutions, we have to understand it.
After all, we cannot fix that which we dont understand.
At the most practical level, this makes it difficult to get official medical support for dealing with it.
If its not in the DSM-5, it doesnt officially exist to your health care provider.
They began talking about the future as if it didnt exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone.
In my case, the long-term trauma was 20-ish years in anabusive religious environment.
Im not, I just really struggle with imagining possible futures.
Only a crisis makes me feel truly alive.
When the crisis is every day, though, I feel numb and fatigued.
And thats what I was watching happen to the people around me in the fall of 2020.
But everyone was calling it burnout.
It caught my eye shes been talking about burnout for years.
It’s not something that can be solved with a nap or a massage or a vacation.
It’s long, deep, soul-deep exhaustion.
I can’t do anything other than the basic minimum requirements for life, she explains.
So is burnout justa trauma responsein disguise?
Itd been a long year of freelancing and getting rejection after rejection.
I cried, and told my concerned friends that I didnt want to talk about it.
I have to finish this piece on burnout, I told them.
The irony, they said.
All I wanted to do was give up, stop working.
I wanted to eat dinner and then go to bed early and call it quits.
Im also buffered from immediate consequences.
I have stable housing, I have people I can ask for help if Im floundering.
Who can take time off from work to recuperate from burnout?
says Dionne when I bring this up.
But in other industries, such as hospitality, its been the de facto reality for years.
But in terms of the rest of us, it’s just like,No, you’re lazy.
You don’t deserve to take a break.
Instead of burnout being a set of symptoms, its a situation, she says.
If thats the case, in order for healing to happen, the persons circumstances must change.
Burnout prevention is basically her bread and butter.
you’ve got the option to address exhaustion through rest.
To address burnout, she says, you gotta step away from work.
Every person I spoke with mentioned a physical breaking point.
Trips to the ER often preceded massive lifestyle changes to prevent another crash.
You have to shut things down yourself and just completely pause, says Hastick.
Because if you don’t pause, you’re going to be forced to.
Do you see any overlap here, I asked, between these symptoms and your experience of burnout?
The conversation slowed to a halt each time.
Wow, they said, or, Oh yes.
If their burnout was a response to trauma, perhaps they would have approached their recoveries differently.
Diagnosing a mental illness is a process thats often misunderstood andregularly changing.
You dont have to haveeverysymptom on a list.
Your symptoms just have to line up most consistently with thatparticular diagnosiss cluster of common symptoms.
Having one of those diagnoses would make tailored therapeutic support easier to get.
But its hard to address a problem in any real, lasting way if youre playing whack-a-mole with symptoms.
Plus, this puts the responsibility for healing burnout on the individual.
Like, who am I to feel entitled to feel exhausted living out my dream?
I did not ask for help for a very long time.
At Edinburgh Napier University, Professor Thanos Karatzias focuses his research on traumatic stress.
Is it occupational stress?
Is it complex PTSD?"
But work is changing.
Were expected to be constantly available and more productive for less money.
This new landscape raises new questions, he says.
“People are struggling with work, but why?
Is there a label for this distress?
Is this a hybrid of different things?
We do not know that yet.”
If we dont fully understand burnout and how it manifests in the body, its difficult to solve it.
And even aside from individual remedies, whats to be done on a structural level?
So once they get those in place, people start to get hopeful pretty quickly.
Since starting this piece, Ive landed a new job as a temporary teacher.
It feels good to be working again, to be teaching, to have something organizing my everyday life.
I also hold this loosely, knowing that all good things in 2022 are more fragile than we think.
Work is good, but I am not my job.
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