Burnout

Around January my baseline workload at my job drastically increased for no visible reason. Over the following months, world events compounded my mental load. Not to mention wedding planning and an endless to-do list of house projects.

All my hobbies evaporated. My relationships were strained. I fell behind on work (or at least that is how I felt by my standards). I never felt present with anything or anyone. There is this constant fight against thinking about all the things I need to do.

Yeah, I'm "busy." I always feel busy. It is easy to feel busy when after work all you have the mental bandwidth to handle are 30 minutes of chores before you go do something mindlessly and maybe drink/smoke to take the edge off.

Last week I attended a company retreat. In it a guest speaker talked about burnout at length. I didn't think I was experiencing burnout until a PowerPoint slide of symptoms showed up on screen. Aside from irritability, every symptom was something I was experiencing. Definitely an "oh shit" moment.

What a creeping monster. Even now I don't feel "burnt-out." Emotionally I don't feel "bad." I guess I never thought that hard about it, but I thought burnout was this vague feeling that people expressed when they were overly exhausted by something. It is way more observable and insidious than that.

This is my second run in with burnout so I should have been able to detect it. In 2019 I was working crazy hours for almost a year. I had literally no life. My friends were worried about me. Romantic relationships were destroyed. It is hard to remember those times because it was all a blur of all my waking hours being at the office.

That felt awful in comparison to how I feel nowadays. That's why I'm so surprised to be in it again. The 2019 burnout felt like a car crash every day. The 2026 burnout feels like a vampire that has slowly bled me dry without me noticing. The only thing worse than a burnout is to not know you are in burnout.

There is good news however! I'm taking regular days off now. Prior to the retreat I had already agreed with my fiance that I need to do that more. Post retreat I know why I need to take those days off. Integrating more time out of work to my schedule is really all it took to snap me out of it. That is combined with pushing back a lot more on work and delegating more. I'm on the mend.

Take care of yourselves.