Joy of Burnout: How burning out unlocks the way to a better, brighter future

Chapter One: The Hidden Message of Burnout

Introducing the Joy of Burnout

Burnout feels like the end of the world. It’s not. It’s the beginning of a new one. I know because it turned my life around. At the time, I didn’t even know what it was called, but once I understood what happened to me, a lot of things fell into place.

A few autumns ago, I was sitting in the cafe with my friend Ilene who had made a surprise trip from Sweden to be with me on my birthday. We chatted about work and she mentioned that in Sweden, burnout was hitting the headlines as one of the biggest problems of Swedish industry.

I heard the word burnout as if for the first time, and a light went on in my brain: Burnout--that’s it!

Until that moment, I hadn’t seen the stress breakdown I’d had ten years before as burnout. When the worst of it was over, a consultant told me I’d had ME or chronic fatigue. While it was happening, my NHS doctor said You need a holiday....Not on the National Health, I’m afraid. A homeopathic doctor told me My dear, your heart is tired.

Burnout just hadn’t been on my radar screen.

Yet, the word burnout was so powerful that it propelled me on the search that led to this book. It seems to have this evocative power not just for me but for many other people. I sat at a party and mentioned I was researching burnout. Eyes lit up all around me. Everyone sitting near me had a story. I asked participants at one of our Thailand holiday sessions, How many of you have burnt out or are burning out? Eighty percent of the hands went up. I inquired with friends and colleagues Do you know anyone who has burnt out? Almost invariably they said Yes, me, and loads of other people I know.

Often, like me, they hadn’t thought of what had happened to them as burnout, but when they heard the word, they knew it had something to say to them. Indeed the word burnout seemed to spread like wild fire (pun unintended) as soon as the concept was introduced in the 1970’s. The word was used internationally, often without being translated from English. It even appears on jazzy designer t-shirts.

I am not sure why burnout has such resonance. The word speaks, I think, to the part of us that wants to burn on with the fire of life, love, passion, challenge and meaning and describes our devastation when that fire seems to have burnt itself out. It vividly captures, also, the nature of the experience. People who have burnt out describe it in words like I could almost feel my brain burning or It was like my nervous system was fried or Instead of growing like a tree, I was a pile of ash.

For me, it also has another subliminal meaning. It reminds me that the phoenix rises from ashes, and that burnout is really a message of renewal.

When we burn out, it is our old personality that burns itself out. Then our soul fire begins to light our way and to bring us joy.

This book tells the story of burnout, of why and how we burn out, and what we can do about it. But the what we can do about it is paradoxical, because above all what we need to do is stop doing and start listening to ourselves in a completely new way.

What is burnout?

Burnout is one of the words that seems to define this moment in history. No longer an unusual event, it has become part of a normal life cycle, along with mid life crisis, stress, and serious chronic illness, all of which have connections with burnout. And rather than being a one-off event, it can recur again and again in different forms as we grapple with certain fundamental issues. It often begins in a single sphere of our lives, but it may start to spread everywhere.

The classic signs of burnout are:

a growing emotional, mental and/or physical exhaustion which isn’t alleviated by sleeping,

an increasing sense of being cut off from ourselves and from other people

a decreasing ability to be effective at doing what we have always done, either at work or at home.

Of these, exhaustion is the most defining characteristic. Each of us has our own individual pattern of burnout. and there is a range of symptoms that can alert us to the fact that we have begun to burn out. These include:

extreme tiredness; inability to relax or have a restful sleep; emotional deadness; chronic anger; high self criticism; loss of appetite for food, sex, life; feelings of being trapped, distant, disillusioned, cynical, hollow, pleasureless and humourless

poor attention; speeding up without increased effectiveness

an increase in TV watching, alcohol, junk food, shopping, computer games, internet chat rooms, casual sex, or any form of escape that is addictive

a closing down from family, friends, colleagues , bosses and/or clients

an increase in physical problems ranging from bad backs, heart pains, head pains, frozen shoulders or loss of libido to chronic fatigue/ME, adrenal and thyroid problems, irritable bowel syndrome. post viral illnesses, viral meningitis and even heart attacks.

We are tired, we are angry, we can’t relax, we are often in physical pain, there seems little point to anything we are doing, and we don’t like ourselves or anyone else very much. Indeed, we hardly recognise ourselves as the people we used to be. Yet those of us headed for serious burnout just battle on and on. We override all our danger signals and work harder and harder until one day we stop and listen and take action, or we become so incapacitated that we have no choice but to stop.

If we are forced finally to stop work or other activities for what we tell ourselves is a few days, we who may never have taken more than a day or two of sick leave in our lives sometimes find the time stretching into weeks, months, even into a decision to resign. We may be seriously ill, emotionally empty, exhausted beyond belief.

Gemma, a psychotherapist, aged 39 when she burnt out, described this exhaustion:

It was all I could do to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. Anything more than a white wall was exhausting. I could feel physically ill if I looked at colour. I was so exhausted I felt like my body would stop breathing because there wasn’t the energy to breathe. I wondered if this was what it is like to be old.

We are bound to think we have done something wrong, or that something is wrong with us, or that the world has treated us badly. And yet, if we did but know it, burnout is so powerfully transformative that it appears to be a signal not of failure, but of a challenge to create a new way of life. This book can help you to understand that challenge and meet it in a way that will bring you joy. That’s why this is probably the best thing that ever happened to you.

Carl’s story

To give you a picture of how burnout can work, I’d like to tell you Carl’s story. Carl was a high flying manager of a medium sized company who burnt out when he was in his early forties. He is in many ways typical of the many people I have known who have gone through burnout. He is bright, ambitious, likable and a high achiever. He loved his work and was immensely energetic. He rose quickly into top management, ate up challenges and never believed he had limits.

Carl had a broad vision for how Information Technology could transform the business and was delighted when he was appointed director of IT. The project soon grew too big for him to handle alone but he didn’t request additional staff. Not long after, a small Board of Directors was formed. He wasn’t invited while two of his close colleagues were.

Thus at a time that he was giving more than his all, he felt undermined and undervalued by his boss, and was shut out of the circle of his peers. He didn’t challenge his boss’s decision because he was so upset and humiliated, nor could he overcome the combination of independence, pride and need for approval that stopped him from asking for help with his project. He just denied that any of it was important, pushed down his feelings and did what he always did: work harder and harder.

Before long, he was experiencing chest pains and mild depression and found himself sighing without knowing why. His judgment became clouded and he began to suffer insomnia. He was angry and impatient a lot of the time and distracted himself with television and fantasies about the future. His marriage suffered as he stopped confiding in anyone, including his wife. He drove himself even harder until he developed a flu which turned into post viral syndrome and kept him off work for months.

When he returned to work, he was appointed to the Board, and, as part of a reorganisation, became second in command, working closely with his boss, coaching him and creating a new vision. His energy was high and he was firing on all cylinders.

But when his boss stopped relying on Carl, and even got in someone new to coach him, the stress feelings returned along with the driven work, emotional shutdown, and illness. He became so ill with ME/chronic fatigue that he resigned from his job, and soon after, his wife resigned from their marriage.

Having lost the shape of his life as he knew it, Carl faced despair. But before long, he discovered the wonders of having space in his life. He regained his usual determination and optimism, but this time put his energy toward getting healthy, finding out who he really was, working towards a sense of community, and revisioning his life.

Now five years later, he has a new life, a new career as a successful coach of business leaders, a new relationship in which he strives to stay open and intimate, and a new sense of himself. As he puts it, "Burnout was life catching up with me, creating the space for the real me to emerge".

You are not alone

I would not be writing this book if I had not burnt out and found it such a remarkable opportunity for a more joyful life that I have always been thankful for it, despite its costs to me. The story of what happened follows right after this chapter, complete with a surprising twist of fate.

I also wouldn’t be writing this book if my life hadn’t always involved a commitment to working with myself and with others to find and express our truth and joy. I have been a psychotherapist, a group leader, a consultant, and a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and in Social Psychology. I have run training workshops around the world in Imagework, my self help approach to tapping into the inner images that guide our lives, and the subject of my book Life Choices, Life Changes. ¹ Since 1979 I have, with my former husband, founded and directed two holistic holiday centres on the Greek island of Skyros, as well as winter centres first in Tobago and then in Thailand. This lifelong direction is what inspires this book.

Through my people-work background, I have had the privilege of working with, talking deeply to, or corresponding with about seventy five men and women who have burned out. Together we explored what it all meant and where it was leading them. I include here clients, students, course participants, friends, colleagues, and members of various relevant networks.

Their occupations when they burnt out include: airline planner, artist, banking lawyer, chemist, consultant, engineer, geophysicist, headhunter, health practitioner, insurance broker, journalist, manager, Managing Director, overseas development worker, psychotherapist, singer, social worker, teacher and writer. Their ages at the time of burnout ranged between late 20’s and mid 50’s. Several burnt out more than once.

Reading the extensive research literature was invaluable to me, but it was these depth explorations and sharings that enabled me to get a profound and subtle understanding of the inner experience of burnout. Several of the people of burnout I talked to or worked with have kindly permitted me to quote them here, either giving their real first names or using a change of name. One, the writer Sue Townsend, tells her story here under her own name as her identity is so intrinsic to her experience.

All my people-work activities gave me a wonderfully creative life doing work I loved. But, along with raising small children, they also added up to a life as over-full and driven as that of most of the burnout people I have known. Yet working too hard and being overstressed for years did not burn me out.

I started on the burnout trail only when I was ready to make a different choice, and went back to my old ways instead. Burnout was a sign that I had no option but to listen to myself even better and follow where my real self was asking me to go. This is what I have done, and I would like to support you to do too, if it seems right to you.

This book is my way of bringing you the insights that have helped me and others through and beyond burnout. I want to reach out to those of you who are, or have been, in similar situations and say: You are not alone, it is not wrong or bad for you to be where you are, and there is a way forward. It is the way to joy.

Is burnout new?

Let us backtrack for a moment to look at the history of burnout. In the sixteenth century, St. John of the Cross wrote The Dark Night of the Soul ²about the experience of mystics who, after an experience of God’s grace, went through despair, aridity, and loss of connection with God. This phase was seen as a necessary one in the soul’s journey toward purification. The dark night of the soul could be considered a religious forerunner of what is now called burnout, and is a phrase that people who are burning out often use about themselves.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann comprehensively described the process of burnout in his character Consul Thomas Buddenbrook, long before the concept of burnout was studied by social scientists. His story follows later.

More recently, the word burnout itself has been used in a variety of different contexts. It is used for drug takers who get to the end of the road and become like walking zombies. Among lawyers who worked in poor communities. it referred to those who had started off full of fire and enthusiasm and ended up disillusioned and deadened. In sports it describes the effect of having overtrained. Graham Greene used the term burnt out case³ in his novel by that name for lepers who came for treatment too late and had to wait until the disease burnt itself out, taking whatever limbs it was going to take. His main character, Querry, an architect who lost his faith and his ability to love, also considered himself a burnt out case.

It wasn’t until the late 1970’s and early 1980’s that social scientists began to pick up the word burnout and use it in relation to work. Herbert Freudenberger,⁴ who is given credit for using the word first, and Christina Maslach,⁵ who defined it and applied a research perspective, were the pioneers. Burnout immediately caught the imagination of people all over the world. When I began my library research, I found over 7000 entries for burnout on one database. In general, the research is about work burnout. There has been a little study of marriage burnout, but mainly this is about burnt out relationships,⁶ rather than about people who have actually burnt out as a result of a relationship, a subject which is covered in this book.

At first, burnout was widely thought of as an individual clinical problem and it has been attributed to a variety of causes: failure to retain one’s idealised self image, lack of balance in one’s life, progressive disillusionment, wrong expectations, poor coping mechanisms when goals are frustrated, a failed quest for existential meaning, a lack of social competence, or extreme emotional overload.

Burnout was then shown to be far more prevalent in some professions or organisations than in others. It began to be seen as an organisational problem resulting from: a high level of demands and responsibility; a low level of support and appreciation; a lack of control or decision making making power; a dearth of resources to carry out the job; and the loss of meaning and community. At first it was associated with social workers, nurses and workers in the caring professions, the people with all the responsibility and emotional demands but very little decision making power. Soon it became clear that it was happening throughout industry as well. Some researchers have considered burnout to be the symptom of a materialistic and alienating society.

Other researchers and clinicians argue that since some people burn out in the best situations, and others never burn out no matter what happens, burnout is best described as the result of a lack of fit between the individual and his work situation.

Burnout is considered to be rapidly and dangerously increasing. Estimates of its incidence have ranged between 10% and 80% of the working population, and are generally thought of as between 20% and 40%. In Japan,karoshi, death by overwork, which is often associated with burnout, is becoming a major social concern. Burnout is commonly described as having reached epidemic or even pandemic proportions.⁷

An incomplete picture

The research on burnout is wide ranging and fascinating, and the threads of what I believe burnout is about are all there in the literature. But what hasn’t emerged is a complete picture. This is because the literature is focused too narrowly on work situations, and, more importantly, because burnout is seen as a problem or illness that needs to be fixed or cured or prevented.

I am in the rather unusual position of arguing that although there is a great deal wrong with our society, our work places, our relationships and our lives, if we are open to its message, burnout is ultimately positive. This is because it asks us to become more of who we really are and it is part of an evolutionary process that is happening at all levels of our personal and social lives.

The word epidemic, like many of the words associated with burnout, makes it sound as if something terrible is happening. Epidemics must be stopped so that life as we knew it before can go on. But life as we knew it before cannot go on. We are being pushed by burnout towards that which we do not yet know but are yearning to discover. This is why the prevalence of burnout is in many ways a good though painful omen.

The message of burnout

Burnout is not just something that happens to people when they work too hard or have too much stress or don’t like their jobs. It is not the direct result of inhumane or unfair or overdemanding situations at work. All of these contribute to burnout but don’t cause it. It is not the same as mid-life crisis, but mid life crises can be forms of burnout. It is not depression though depression can be involved. It is not related only to work, though it does have to do with how we use our creativity. Nor is burnout a modern epidemic that needs to be arrested.

The message of this book is that burnout is the state of mind, body and spirit reached by those of us who have come to the end of a particular road but haven’t acknowledged it. When we burn out, we are informed of this fact in the strongest possible terms. Burnout can emerge out of any situation or relationship where we put our creativity in the service of our passion our heart, our belief, our identity or our belonging. And rather than being cured, it needs to be honoured and listened to.

Burnout is, or rather it can be, a door to walk through into a life with space, love and joy--indeed a sense of being able to be one’s true self.

In my view, burning out is a sign that we have already begun to know something about our true self that we are not quite ready to tell ourselves. Some voice of truth inside tells us that our old ways of relating are not working and we need to stop, rethink, and find a new way forward. We don’t dare to. Yet we cannot afford not to.

We are evolving beings, becoming more and more conscious of the direction of our lives. As we do so, it is a greater cost to us not to follow our intuitive longings. It can be literally fatal for us not to do what on some level we know we are meant to do.

Burnout is the result of having become better able to hear our soul but not yet daring to listen. Burnout demands that we listen.

People who have been through burnout and listened to what it had to teach them feel grateful for the experience, even if they are still suffering from its effects. They know burnout stopped them from doing or being something they no longer wanted to do or be. Most are amazed that they could have lived that way, and some are equally amazed that they managed to get out of it. Edward, an engineer at the time he burnt out, told me:

"If it weren’t for that I don’t think I would be around today. It saved my life."

What does joy have to do with it?

Where does joy fit in? Joy, as I am referring to it in this book, has a rather specific meaning. It is not happiness, or contentment or excitement. These are related to being satisfied or even thrilled with our present life situation. Joy has nothing to do with our life situation. It has to do with the love of life itself.

Joy emerges in the spaces rather than in the content of our lives. It is what happens when, even for a moment, we feel totally free, with a sense of space around us and inside us. The colours become more vivid, and a laugh bubbles up naturally. It may be by ourselves or with others. It may be when we connect to nature or to a child’s smile. It may emerge after hours of meditation or a momentary glimpse of the blue lining of a bird’s wing. It may even happen when everything has gone wrong and we just start to laugh and laugh at the sheer surreal irony of it all.

At that moment, our life situation doesn’t matter. Life itself is our joy. Being ourselves is our delight.

Burning out could almost be defined as joylessness. We have lost contact with the Divine Comedy, that ability to laugh compassionately at the terrible and wonderful ways in which life works itself out. Yet burnout forces us to take a step toward joy. We won’t stop, so burnout stops us. We won’t make a space for ourselves, so we burn out and all we have is space. And it is out of that space that the joy eventually comes.

Mary, an airline planner, returned to the same job and same life situation after being burnt out but felt very different inside. She described her emerging joy:

It’s just waking up in the morning thinking--today is going to be good. There’s so much to look forward to. But it’s not in the future--it will be good when--but it’s good now. I’m at peace with myself, not beating myself up about things. I know I’m quite a nice person, the sun’s going to shine, and I’m going to talk to my best friends and we’ll have a life.

You don’t have to burn out to chart your new course

You don’t have to go through the devastating effects of a full blown forest fire type burnout to learn its lessons. My hope is that this book will help you change direction before you burn out completely. If it is too late for that, you will understand better why it happened and what is good about it. Either way, you can learn to appreciate the message of burnout and take the path of Radical Healing to a new way of living .

In my experience, once we acknowledge the true meaning of our burnout-- or of our first signs of burnout--we are able to let go of old unhelpful patterns of thought and action and begin to chart our course for a new way of life.

The individuals who are highly prone to burnout can be among the most creative, dynamic, loving, and focussed people in our society. We have driven ourselves all our lives, often in the service of others, and are now having to learn a new way to drive and a new direction to drive in. If we cooperate with what burnout is teaching us, a vast creative potential can be redirected to benefit not only us, but also our loved ones, our organisations, and society as a whole.

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