Three Myths and a Lie.

The long road back from burnout. Part 2.

If you missed part one of this series, you can find it here.

My descent into burnout required self-deception.

Recovery had two phases – the healing phase and the management phase. In my case, the first demanded a clean break and lots of rest followed by a slow and careful return to work.

The next stage, was about preventing it from happening again. It seemed I was susceptible to working myself into oblivion.

It was a lot like suffering from recurring repetitive strain injuries. If I didn’t catch the early signs, I could easily over-extend myself and begin to spiral . It took several more mini flameouts before I learned the underlying contributors and early warning signs.

The Myths

In retrospect, I can see three contributing myths that kept me in this over-extend, crash, and recover cycle. 

Myth #1. I can have it all.

The hard and beautiful truth is you can’t have it all.

Hard, because it means you have to choose between more than one good option. Hard, because you have to make painful trade-offs. You have to confront the facts that time is limited and life is finite.

And beautiful because when you stop chasing it all, you begin to appreciate what is already available to you. You find a universe brimming with treasures.

I’ve been a subscriber to Maria Popova’s incomparable newsletter, The Marginalian, for many years. She curates and comments on the work of some of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers, philosophers, and poets. You can’t skim this one. It’s a sippin’ publication.

Every once in awhile, she slays me with a piece that seems to shout,

“Hey there, I’m talking to YOU!”

Such was the case a few days ago when I found a 2019 post containing the poem, “You Can’t Have It All,” by Barbara Ras.

This breathtaking poem reminds me, that when you chase it all, you miss what is already here for you. You miss what your heart and soul need to flourish.

Myth #2. If I just keep working, I can catch up.

I believed I had to work longer hours than others because I was slow, disorganized, and inefficient. I believed most others would be able to handle my workload better.

A few months after I resigned, a former coworker invited me for coffee. She told me that the person who replaced me met with my boss after a few weeks into the job and told him the workload was unsustainable. As a result, they divided my role into three parts and reassigned two of those parts to other people.

My colleague also told me that the administrative staff named one of their printers after me, because, she said, “it handles more than any other printer in the office, and it never crashes.”

I was stunned by these stories because they didn’t align with my distorted self-perception.

The issue wasn’t my inefficiency or my lack of productivity. The problem was the enormous gap between what I felt I should be able to accomplish and what was possible.

Sadly, there was one key difference between me and the printer. I did crash.

As I support clients who are struggling with unsustainable workloads, it seems in many ways, the environment has gotten worse.

We are all inhaling huge gulps of information and communication from a multi-channel, digital universe. The constant din of dings, beeps, and whistles designed to help us keep up, only serve to remind us that we are falling hopelessly behind. They contribute to anxiety and a litany of self-recrimination.

I am too slow.

I am too disorganized and unfocused.

I should be able to keep up.

The truth is, no one can keep up with this.

In my experience, the people who function best in this environment are the ones who don’t try to keep up. They know it’s a rigged game. They believe their best effort is enough.

Rather than work themselves to exhaustion, they train themselves to discern the difference between signal and noise, between what is vital and what is not. When things become overwhelming, they don’t beat themselves up. They do what the person who took my job did, they ask for help.

Myth #3. My life will be better as soon as I get it under control.

You cannot control everything in your life. In fact, you can’t control most things in life.

For many of us, trying to control the uncontrollable is a strategy to manage anxiety and stress. We do this unconsciously by over-planning, obsessing, or micro-managing others. While this may quell our anxiety in the short term, it feeds it in the long term. Further, it makes us and everyone around us miserable.

Letting go of trying to control the uncontrollable is liberating. Especially when we also recognize that we have the power to choose our response to whatever life brings.

Which brings me to the BIG lie.

The Big Lie.

I have no choice.

I remember that I kept saying “I have no choice.” It was my standard answer when my family complained that I was living at the office, or when friends and colleagues told me I was working too hard.

This was self-deception. I believed it with my whole being, but it was still a lie.

I was making a choice every time I chose to work rather than leave the office at the end of the day. And most damaging, every time I chose work over sleep.

It was easier to say, I have no choice. It was easier than taking personal responsibility for my decisions and facing the real and imagined consequences head on. I had developed a strong work identity around being reliable, responsive, and high performing. I liked being that person. The one who was indispensable. My choices protected that identity.

You may be thinking, yeah but, some people really don’t have a choice.

For example, maybe you believe that keeping your job depends on you working long hours or getting every detail right. Maybe you have a boss who reinforces that belief. This does not mean you don't have a choice. It means that there are real world consequences to your choices and those consequences may be unacceptable to you.

The key is understanding that you are making a choice and that whatever choice you make comes with trade-offs and consequences. It is taking personal responsibility for the choices you make. Even if, the only choice you have is the perspective you hold and how you choose to respond to your circumstances.

Believing in your power to choose is to operate with a sense of personal agency. It means that while you may not have total control and although your options may be ugly, you are still in the driver’s seat of your own life. You still have influence, if not over your outer world, at least over your inner one.

“In the psychological sense, agency entails a category of beliefs, a mindset. More profoundly, genuine agency includes the strategies and actions that accomplish what we want and bring us what we need.” Bateman, Thomas S. Agency is the Highest Level of Personal Competence, Psychology Today, 2022 03 27.

For me, learning that I had agency over my life was liberating and empowering. Learning to use it in ways that put me in the best position to succeed was life changing. Being willing to take personal responsibility for my choices, was an essential step toward building a healthy and sustainable relationship with work.

Please take care of yourself.

The ideas, concepts, recommendations, and practices I talk about here are for general informational purposes only and should not be considered advice for your unique situation or treatment for mental illness, trauma, or other health conditions. If you are having difficulty functioning or are experiencing persistent anxiety, depression, or other symptoms, please see your family doctor.