Work, burnout, anxiety and me
As it’s mental health awareness week , so I thought it would be a good time to share my experience of anxiety and burnout. It’s quite scary to share this, but I think it’s more important to share than any discomfort my might feel. It’s important share because you never really know what’s going on with a person. What kind of day, week, month, year, life they’re having; what they might be struggling with. Being empathetic is extremely important in life, it’s something I try to live by, although in times of stress or busyness I don’t always manage it.
On the outside, I may seem like a calm and collected person. Someone that can cope with anything. Sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not. When it seems to be true, you and others don’t always stop to consider how your doing. We’re all busy people. You start to see how easy it is to be on the road to burn out, which happen to me a few years ago.
Feel the fear
You know that saying ‘kids are fearless’. I’ve never been able to relate to that. I’ve never been that way, anxious and nervous kid. I’m more a feel the fear and do it anyway kind of person. And sometimes a feel the fear, and stay at home to read a book instead person. Anxiety is something I live with on a daily basis and it varies in magnitude. Sometimes it not noticeable at all, sometimes its a low hum in the background, other times its sky high. Sometimes anxiety can stop me doing everyday things, such as trying something as seemingly simple as a new place to eat, I can’t, I can’t go in on my own because sometimes the unknown is too much and I go somewhere familiar, there can be comfort in familiarity. And yet I have had many times in my career where working in ambiguity and uncertainty is the norm as I’m working on the the edge of new things and I’m comfortable with that, in fact I consider it a privilege to do that kind of endlessly fascinating work. For me, my anxiety has never been so high as when I suffered a burnout.
Social anxiety
It seems easier for me to overcome or at least I’m able to deal with, and work through work-related anxiety and fear (when I’m in a support environment). As a socially anxious (and socially awkward) shy introvert, public speaking doesn’t come naturally to me. I remember the first time I had to present to a large audience, I was just starting my PhD and I was at a conference to talk about my Masters dissertation. I was so nervous it was like I had not only forgotten everything, it felt like I hadn’t done the work in the first place. I read the presentation out word for word from queue cards. I knew I’d have to do this again and again now that I was doctoral student, I didn’t know how I was going to make it happen. And I didn’t know quite why I’d chosen a life that would take me out of my small comfort zone so regularly. I’m better at it now, over the years I have trained and retrained myself to do it, through practice. I’m still not a great public speaker, but I’ll keep working at it, practice really does help.
The burnout
I had been covering two jobs for 6 months (because a member of my team was on long term sick leave), when I got a promotion. At the time I took the job, I had been promised that I could recruit a replacement to do my old job. However, there was a recruitment freeze and it took many month of negotiation to get exemption from the freeze. So I started doing 3 jobs, I did that for 6 months. I don’t mean I had so much work to do it was like having 3 jobs, I was literally doing 3 different jobs. I had asked for support from my manager at the time, their advice to me was to ruthlessly prioritise and stop doing some work. I asked them to help me choose what work I should not deliver for them, they were less than forthcoming. Their advice switched to delegate, ruthlessly delegate. I did a little delegation, what I could, but several of my team were also overworked and I wasn’t going to risk their wellbeing for the sake of my own by giving them more work to do, so I carried on doing too much, because I don’t know how to say no to work, when I know its things that need to be done and there is no one else to do them. 3 months in and I was a shell of a person. I was barely functioning. It was Christmas, and I was covering for the team between Christmas and New Year. Luckily those days are quiet, as at this point I could only manage the most basic of admin tasks at work, even that was a stretch. Getting to and from work was a massively exhausting physical effort. That this point I felt properly broken. Like a walking corpse, dragging myself around. I was with family for Christmas but couldn’t interact, I didn’t feel any joy, I didn’t really feel anything. I basically sat around until I could no longer keep my eyes open. It was all I could manage.
About the time I started doing the 2 jobs I also started to learn about mindfulness, in weekly session with a wonderful yoga teacher I had been practicing with. I knew I needed to do something, I felt like I was being crushed by sadness and anxiety. I had tried a couple of kinds of counselling in the past, but I never really felt comfortable with either of them. In mindfulness practices had I found something that worked for me. Being able to talk about how I thought and felt really helped and to learn a toolkit of mindfulness exercises. This helps me put things into perspective, improve my ability to have a few moments in the present each day, identify negative thought patterns, even break a few — or at least reduce that power and impact on me. I’m more able to check in with myself physically, mentally and emotionally to understand what it is I need, rather than just trying to keep calm and carry on. Its even help me develop some self worth and self confidence, which I didn’t have before. Practicing mindfulness didn’t stop me burning out, but it could have been much worse.
After New Years, I had a 10 day holiday of sorts (I was a bridesmaid in a wedding in Johannesburg. So it wasn’t exactly lounging around but it wasn’t work either). When I got back I felt almost human again. I knew things had to change. I ended a long term relationship that wasn’t working anymore, I went into work and told my manager that I absolutely couldn’t sustain doing this amount of work. They promised to help with prioritisation and to be more supportive. Yet, the next day, my manager came to me and said someone in the department was leaving and because of the recruitment freeze I’d have to take on their workload. Two weeks later I’d found myself a new job and I quit. I worked most of my 3 months notice, still doing the 3 jobs (not the 4th) and doing recruitment to find replacements for all 3 of the jobs I’d been doing. Apparently my resigning was the catalyst they needed to get exemption from the recruitment freeze.
I was completely exhausted, extremely emotional and anxious all the time and after I quit I also feel guilt about the creating more work for the team I was leaving. But if you didn’t know what was going on, you wouldn’t be able to tell because I was seemingly getting on with it and delivering all my work. I was also writing a book at the time. I did little else but work and sleep or at least try to sleep for many months, I did try to practice mindfulness, but I wasn’t doing well at all, at least that’s how it felt. I had 3 weeks off when changing jobs. Three weeks isn’t enough time to recover from a burn out, especially when you aren’t really resting (books don’t write themselves).
So I started my new job, a job I had wanted for a long time, but I still exhausted, still emotional and very anxious. New work situations are usually a time of high anxiety and stress for me anyway. I find meeting lots of new people all at once difficult and scary. I was terrified. I didn’t know how I was going to get through each day. My way of coping was to take the day hour by hour. I’d figure out what I was going to do to make it through the next hour and then do that again and again. I did that every workday for the first few months of my new job, even though it was a job that I loved, I still didn’t know how to get through each day. Again, if you didn’t know what was going on, you wouldn’t be able to tell because I was seemingly getting on and delivering. Living hour to hour is no way to live. I was talking about it with my mindfulness teacher, which was helping, but no one at work knew what was going on. My new work colleagues were wonderful and I was in a supportive environment, but I still felt like the new person and I wasn’t comfortable sharing something like this. My mindfulness teacher encouraged me to talk to someone at work, to let them know what was going on with me. It felt scary, but I did it. I choose two people that I trusted and felt comfortable talking to. They were very supportive and understanding. They asked if there was anything they could do, I said no, I just needed them to know. The amazing thing is just having someone know made me feel a lot better and things started to improve and I continued to practice mindfulness. Less than a month after that I had stopped counting the hours and my anxiety had greatly reduced.
What I’m learning and relearning
I’ve seen in others the difference between those who choose not share and those who do andI have felt the difference in myself. For most my life I wasn’t really a talker, I was ‘a hold it all inside until its absolutely necessary to talk’ kind of person and even then I wouldn’t always share.
Mindfulness isn’t for everyone. But Its good to talk, I know that much. My advice would be, if talking to a friend or family member, make it clear you aren’t looking for sympathy or a solution, you just need to be heard. It makes it easier for you and for them. People who care can have a tendency to want to offer advice or help fix the problem. Its very well meaning, but solutionising doesn’t really help, but empathic listening does.
I wouldn’t say I’ve got it all figured out, that I have a good work/life balance and my the picture of health, but I continue to practice, its all a work in progress. To be human is to be a work in progress. I still don’t know how to say no to work that’s important, even when I don’t really have capacity to do. I still find myself telling myself that I’ll manage it all somehow. I’ll just work harder. I’m at least more aware of my tendencies now.
