Recovering from chronic burnout
It’s Mental Health Awareness month. And it’s the end of another academic year. I want to help normalize the conversation about exhaustion, disengagement, depression, and recovering from a chronic burnout lifestyle, for lack of a better phrase.
Let’s talk a little about chronic burnout
I talk to a lot of folks who are in active burnout or, more likely, who have been living in chronic burnout for some time. In a recent conversation with a public health colleague, she used 1st and 3rd degree burn metaphor to describe the level of burnout before and after the pandemic started.
Unfortunately, the expectations and ways of working that lead to chronic burnout are normalized in our current hustle-focused, exploitative work culture. These ways of working are not natural for human and Nature’s cycles. It’s no wonder so many of us are experiencing this level of burnout.
Some of us are beginning to make shifts, though, toward more humane ways of working. This is at the heart of the work I’m doing right now with my mentorship coaching clients and with organizations through my Regenerative Resilience model. My upcoming workshop on June 8th uses this model to help you sync up with these more natural cycles to create a restorative summer.
With that context set…
Let’s talk about the process and timeline of recovery and ways to use restorative practices to recover.
When you’re recovering from burnout, rest is essential. But rest is more than sleep and naps. We actually need restorative rest, and there are 7 types: physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and spiritual. Restorative rest practices help recovery, but recovery is a deeper process.
Take the example of being sick. Back in March I had covid, and while I was sick in bed for 5 days, my recovery took about 3+ weeks more. Recovery required lower self-expectations and fewer commitments than my normal well-timed rest and restorative practices (of journaling, movement, etc). As I’ve talked about in last week’s email about routines, initially as I was recovering, I didn’t have the energy, focus, motivation to do my normal restorative routines. I was just tired and sluggish and down.
Now if I apply recovery to my own burnout and depression… [a research sidenote: the medical debate about the overlap of burnout and depression shows mixed results but that was pre-pandemic. ]
For me, I hit my all time low at the end of fall semester 2020 and took FMLA leave for the first time in my career. There was no other way for me at that point. Unfortunately for the then-me, I didn’t have a now-me in my own life, but I did have a great HR colleague who held my hand compassionately through the process of leave. (Thank you, Sarah.) I was often non-functioning, I wanted to quit immediately, and work negatively affected my abilities to single-parent while managing virtually/home schooling.
For the first six weeks of my FMLA leave, I did nothing. I laid in bed when the kiddo was at school. Gradually I started coming out of the fog and found recovery in nature–the rawness is there in one of my few Instagram posts from that time.
My recovery continued. I used FMLA to come back to work part-time that semester. I began layering in restorative practices. Because burnout and depression affect brain structure, physical capabilities and symptoms, and mental and emotional health, it requires recovery time combined with levels or layers of restorative practices.
The layers of my burnout and major depression recovery included:
SNRI antidepressant for about a year until my brain healed (this will vary by person and was the right path for me as worked with my healthcare providers)
Regular cognitive behavioral therapy appointments
Nature--so much nature time sitting, walking, being, observing Nature’s beings
Gardening therapy, getting my hands dirty and growing living things
Workload reduction for set amount of time, which me helped shift out of overscheduling
Getting back to journaling
And how we make recovery last is about developing restorative practices, mindset shifts, and behavioral changes in your schedule, routines, etc. This to me all falls under rebuilding regenerative resilience as a skill set and lifestyle. We build layers of practices to support the shifts and changes. It’s not all or nothing or all at once.
While my upcoming workshop won’t magically heal chronic burnout, you will learn restorative practices (and strategies for actually doing them!) that you can begin layering this summer.