Burnout - anyone suffering and any tips for recovery?

[Burn0ut]

I have one month recovery time (starting today!) between me leaving the high stress job which caused me severe burnout and a new, hopefully less stressful job.

Would you please hit me with your burnout happy recovery stories/tips/suggestions?

I have spent most of the weekend sleeping and analysing why my old job gave me so much stress, but I'd like to leave the past in the past and move on, have a better plan to recover.

I have thought of: swimming, walking and giving up caffeine. maybe some form of therapy if available.

At the moment my 'flight or flight' system is fully switched on and I am at the same time lethargic and terribly edgy.

I'd be really grateful to hear about others in similar situation and what helped you. Thank you!

@Gufo: I love your name! That's owl in Italian, right?

Hey @Burn0ut
You are definitely not being self-indulgent.
This is a much needed period of recovery.
Also, don’t force yourself to get up if you don’t want to. You can stay in bed for a bit with a cup of tea, read, listen to the radio, or just relax / sleep. It’s quite hard to adjust from 100 miles an hour to 0, but you don’t need to fill your time. Ergo, you don’t need to feel you have to get up. Enjoy this month off, give yourself permission to bend all the usual rules and just go with the flow. Good luck.

@bridgetreilly, I am so glad to read it and your post and experience is super helpful. to read. I believe I also need to go part time when possible (0.8 sounds perfect) and, like you, take more time off.

My new job has a very generous annual leave allowance: I need to take regular leave from the start. Thank you! Your post really helped!

Hey @ElizabethTudor! Thank you for the kind shout and suggestions her maj :)! I really appreciate it.

Ha ha! Pleasure.
Really hope this month helps and your new job is a whole lot better than the last. 🤞🏻🤞🏻

I've been where you are and in the grand scheme of things it's all about taking care of yourself and your health first and foremost. Your job is simply not important enough to wreck your health and wellbeing. Having been raised by very driven parents with perfectionist tendencies I have only just realised all this in my late 30s after having a prolonged period of being so burnt out I couldn't get out of bed for days. Take care of yourself, as noone else will!

OP how would it feel to just sit and be?

I took a month off between jobs after burn out and went travelling, which is obviously tricky at the moment but I basically slept lots and walked a bit admiring scenery.

The new job actually helped me as much as the sleep. Working with cheerful people who didn't pull you up for not doing enough even after you'd done all your assigned work and worked past midnight was a tonic in itself.

I can sympathise with you OP, it’s so important to strive for balance and do some self care, what works for me is prioritising things which give me deeper sleep, making sure evening meal is before 6pm, proper wind down with calm tv, dim lights, candles etc, then I listen to Jason stephenson guided sleep relaxation-he has loads some are a bit ‘woo’ but some are lovely. The next morning i feel really different and energised. Must get back into this routine

Sleep.

Learn TRE traumaprevention.com/ will discharge all that fight or flight from the body. The Mind Body stress reset book by Rebekah Ladyne is interesting also see Irene Lyon on YouTube. Stress starts in your nervous system so need to tend to that to overcome burnout

Ok after saying I was getting better I spent the afternoon eating chocolate and feeling deeply sorry for myself. Sigh. This too shall pass.

It’s normal. You have some strong emotions underneath your burnout feeling. I felt quite resentful that the company cared so little about its staff that they were prepared to heap shit on us. It will help, when you are ready, to get those feelings out and dealt with.
I also think you were pushing yourself to relax and now your body is making you relax on its terms.

Well done OP. It doesn't sound like a fun afternoon but this processing is really important. I think at this stage, getting off the treadmill and feeling sorry for yourself is actually much healthier than blithely ticking off "restful/indulgent" to dos. You could easily spend the whole month doing the latter and hardly address the underlying problem at all.

PP's suggestion of a therapist or counsellor is a good one.

And remember you have already completed the biggest, scariest, hardest yet most important step of all - deciding old job wasn't working for you and getting a different one. It took me years to do that.

Thank you Chaz, you know you nailed it earlier when you wrote:

"1. Do you define your self worth by your job?If so, look for the positives about yourself that don’t relate to your work performance. "

I think I do not... You know I'd love to have a 'normal' job, go to work, do my best without being pushed like it's an intellectual version of an amazon warehouse, and then go home and have a life with my family and friends, but it seems more and more that every job is a hill on which we have to die on, being high performers always and giving it '110%' ... I wonder if it is capitalism...

However, my mother's love is definitely conditional to job performance. Oh, she does not say it is, and when I had 'less important' jobs she was making all the right sounds; however, when I refused a very senior post as it was a poisoned chalice she was devastated, and now that I have this new job, which is less stressful than my past job, but has a more important sounding job title, when I told her I changed job and what it was she commented 'FINALLY (big emphasis on finally, me the slow achiever) you are having the title you deserve'.

Last summer when one of her acquaintances asked me what i was, and I said I did X she butted in saying 'but you know she also did Y and she was head of Z'.

It makes me feeling ill and makes me want to move to Peru and work on an ice cream stall in peace.

I somehow feel that until my mum is alive I won't be able to develop as I would like because I am still a performing monkey dancing to my parents' tune.

Burnout loads of us give 110% to our jobs and until lockdown i always had for decades.I work in an industry with high turnover of staff and people working eves w end Xmas Easter bank hols.With physically demanding days and few breaks.
When we stopped I realised what a punishing schedule I was on.
Sadly I was someone who identified as my job role and it has taken a yr to break free from that.
This thread is useful in making us realise work is not the be all and end all of life.
I hope this gorgeous weather is helping you recover.

I think you are getting to the crux of the issue. You feel obliged to do what your parents will approve of rather than what you want. You have been given the impression by them that their love and regard is conditional on your status and achievements. You are left choosing between your happiness or their approval. This may not even be intentional or conscious on their part. It might be them vicariously gaining status through you or poorly expressed parental pride. On the other hand it can be a sign of them being controlling and not letting you make adult choices.

I really think that this is something you might want to unpick through counselling as it may be a bigger theme in your life than you have previously acknowledged.

Today I am really struggling. I managed to have a shower. Now will tackle getting dressed and drying my hair but it's a huge huge struggle.

@ChazsBrilliantAttitude, thank you, I had years of therapy about my relationship with my (abusive) parents and I thought I had 'arrived' somewhere safe, but looks like my present situation is making me go backwards to a place that I believed I left behind me in 2006...

Don’t see that as a bad thing. Perhaps the work situation mirrored some of your experiences and so has recreated some of the feelings. Treat this as a chance to refine your approach. My experience is that a less than ideal childhood produces layers of issues and sometimes you have to deal with them as they come up. Think about what you learned last time from your therapy and how you would apply it now. What messages from your parents are still in your head and how do you ignore them and write your own version of you?

@Burn0ut I’ve sent you a PM

It is completely normal to have good days and bad days. Recovery is not linear. If you need a day in bed, or in pyjamas on the sofa, do it. Tomorrow will be different.

Meditating! Honestly! It’s been a revelation.

Headspace has a series on Netflix currently. Well worth a watch.

OP,
So sorry you having been having a tough time.
Vitamin B complex is great to support your nervous system.

AnxioCalm by Terry Naturally is an all natural alternative to Xanax.
Highly recommended for relieving anxiety, stress and calming your nerves. Also helpful for sleeping. But ALL naturaland clinically studied.

Plenty of water and pottering in the garden is great.

Mindfulness exercises are wonderful too.

Hope your day gets better.

I feel like you might be in academia. If so I sympathise. What I can suggest is getting a homeopathic appointment, listening to some Tony Robbins and starting up jogging walking or jeffing (a combination of both ).