Burnout and beyond: How to cope?

Burnout can be exhausting, and I speak from personal experience. I am someone who enjoys immersing myself into things that I commit myself to do, and many a times, I go to the far end. Before I realise it, I am jeopardising my own health and mental wellbeing, by not taking enough rest.

Rewind to early 2021

Going back a few months from today, I found myself over working, exhausting myself on the laptop, with sky rocketing screen time levels. My head constantly hurt, and I was perpetually irritable. When I got a breather (which was barely a few minutes), the battle in my head was whether to listen to a song, or take a walk, or call a friend.

Before I knew it, my sleep cycle was barely consistent, and I did not feel rested. As I started reading more about what I was going through, I realised I was burning myself out. More than anything, questions buzzed in my mind. What is the point of life? What am I earning for when I am a slave to my laptop and chair? What do I even do with the salary I was making when I didn’t have the time to use it meaningfully for my life? Had I studied so hard in my college to find myself at a point where I have restless nights?

The questions puzzled me. They made me want to escape. But where would one go in a devastating second wave of the pandemic?

It felt as if my mind was becoming my enemy. My thoughts were negative, and peace was nowhere to be found.

Finding my feet again

I found my feet again in my mentor’s words. Dr. Daisaku Ikeda says and I quote, “It’s important to have the courage to ask yourself what it is that you should be doing now, at this very moment.”

When I focussed on what I should be doing right now and did some research, the simple answer was: Focus on myself and value my wellbeing over anything else till I felt better. So I took small steps to make life better. They massively helped me over a period of a few months, I hope they help you too:

• Painting: I took to colours and art solely to get off the screen. Some music, and paints helped me unwind. I am not a good painter, but I don’t care. The reason I was doing it was not to produce an amazing piece of art, but to get off the screen. It massively helped.
• Taking a lunch break: Working lunches are common place in a work-from-home environment. There seems to be no boundary between different time slots of the day and they spill onto each other. Whenever a meeting came up around 1 or 1:30 PM, I wouldn’t say no and readily agree (Not being able to say no is another problem, but calls for a fresh blog post). When I reflected upon myself, I realised I needed to craft my own time, and it was not a crime to say no to a meeting that spilled into your lunch time, and the first time I said “No, can we reschedule?”, there was no push back, rather relief. So, clearly, sometimes all you have to do is ask and not assume.
• Reading: I was so absorbed in my work world, that there was no time left to do anything else at all. I was on Work, Eat, Sleep mode, out of which eat and sleep were messed up. I needed something in my day to take myself away from work, and as always, books came to my rescue. Since I was struggling with time, I picked up short stories, that took my mind off for a few minutes. Ever since, I am love with short stories (DM for book recommendations of short stories!).
• Don’t check email at odd hours: I don’t know if it happens to you too, but I had this really bad habit of responding “immediately” to emails I received, even if they were at an odd hour. I wasn’t expected to respond all the time, and even if I was expected to respond, I consciously tried to schedule time in the day to answer email, and star marked those that needed attention. It was not like any work was going to get done at 12 AM anyway, so what was the point of responding? A supervisor’s words had stuck in my head, “What you allow and keep doing, becomes the norm!” When I stopped replying to emails immediately, to my utter surprise, nothing happened. The world didn’t shatter and I was not on the edge of it. It was once again all in my head. So, I stopped creating that urgency (Trust me it’s easier said than done, but it WORKS!)

And gradually, over a period of time, I was able to consciously focus on myself. In my case, I also left my toxic job, but that’s a story for another day. If you want to take away one thing from this blog post, please let it be cherishing yourself. It doesn’t matter whether its painting, music, dance etc. for you. Just know that YOU matter, and if you need to recharge your batteries, do that! Its better than doing bad quality work and having to redo it all over again!

Photo by Tara Winstead from Pexels