My Experience Of Burnout AudioChapter from When You Can't Go On AudioBook by Charles Hugh Smith
When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal By Charles Hugh Smith
Hear it Here - https://adbl.co/3OFQ1MB
00:11:09 Triage
00:12:15 Get Help
00:14:23 How Long Will It Take to Get Through This?
00:17:58 Make a Simple Recovery Plan
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B14BG9QL
When I burned out, what I wanted but could not find was a practical guide by someone who had experienced burnout themselves. None of the material I found spoke to what I was experiencing or to my sense that our economy is now optimized to burn people out.
I decided to write the guide I wanted but could not find. This is my experience of burnout, reckoning and renewal.
This book is my account of what helped me. The intended audience is other burnouts and those who want to better understand the experience of burnout.
Burnout is a life-changing experience in a good way, as absurd as that may sound to those in the depths of burnout. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: I can’t go on but I must go on. There is a way forward.
#Beckett #Burnout #Deluca #DrDeluca #DrMaryDeluca #Exhaustion #MECFS #MyalgicEncephalomyelitischronic #RBuckminsterFuller #SamuelBeckett #Zenlike #RussellNewton #NewtonMG #WhenYouCan'tGoOn #MyExperienceOfBurnout #CharlesHughSmith
Transcript
When you can't go on, Burnout, Reckoning, and Renewal, written by Charles H. Smith, narrated by Russell Newton.
Speaker:Before we begin, please remember, I'm not an expert in Burnout. I'm only an expert in my own Burnout.
Speaker:This is not advice or guidance. I'm only sharing my experience, which might not be relevant to your experience or useful to anyone else.
Speaker:It's very important to me that you keep in mind that I'm only sharing my experience and views.
Speaker:I like working, and I like my work. That wasn't the problem. The problem was, I didn't think I had any limits.
Speaker:I thought that I could keep pushing myself, even as I became increasingly exhausted. But all humans have limits. Mine were not visible to me.
Speaker:Even as I slipped closer and closer to my limits, I didn't see the cliff edge just ahead. When I exceeded my limits, I burned out.
Speaker:Burnout teaches us we all have limits. What is Burnout?
Speaker:In my experience, when our capacity to keep working drops to zero, that's burnout. We want to continue working, but the capacity to do so is no longer in our control.
Speaker:We hit our limit, and there's no fuel left in our tank. We want the validation, purpose, and livelihood we gain from work, but we can no longer do the work.
Speaker:This loss of power and control is distressing and puzzling. Why is this happening to me?
Speaker:Here's what I felt at the bottom of Burnout. An exhaustion deeper than I'd ever felt before, a tiredness that never ended, a collapse of my willpower, and a depression that never lifted.
Speaker:I lost the self-discipline that I'd maintained without much difficulty for years. I also lost the joy de vivre, the joy of being alive, which had been replaced by exhaustion and a feeling of unending stress.
Speaker:I'll never get out from beneath terrible burdens and never catch up or be free from crushing responsibilities.
Speaker:Though I didn't want to admit it, I also felt self-pity. I'm trapped, hopeless, and misunderstood.
Speaker:Even my spouse, who would burn out six months later, made light of my exhaustion, dismissing it as temporary and mere complaints.
Speaker:Only those who have fallen down the same well can understand, and I didn't have any other burnouts to consult.
Speaker:That's one of the things that makes Burnout so painful. The Burnout is often totally alone.
Speaker:Those of us who are accustomed to accomplishing a great deal and being in charge are most devastated by Burnout because we pride ourselves on being productive and take charge.
Speaker:Our willpower and ability to work hard are lost in Burnout. We can no longer force ourselves to take charge, and since Burnout is outside of our control, we feel a devastating powerlessness.
Speaker:Burnout is the loss of self. Our trusted tools no longer work. Something in our life is broken, and it's broken us.
Speaker:Burnout isn't something you choose. It's something that happens to you against your will. Willing it to go away doesn't make it go away.
Speaker:Burnout is frustrating, not just because it's outside our control. It's also beyond our understanding of how the world works.
Speaker:We rely on our intellect, experience, and willpower to solve problems, and all three come up empty in Burnout.
Speaker:We don't know how to make Burnout go away. Our previous experience doesn't apply, and our will, our most trusted tool in managing the world, has collapsed.
Speaker:We're completely broken. There's nothing left in our tank. No reserves, no willpower, no control of what's happening to us.
Speaker:We haven't lost our energy. We've lost our sense of who we are.
Speaker:Being positive is the secular religion of America. The power of a positive attitude can solve any problem and overcome any obstacle.
Speaker:This is the can-do spirit. If you stop being negative, you'll become a winner.
Speaker:The problem for the Burnout is there's nothing left to fuel a can-do attitude, and so revealing the despair we feel draws criticism.
Speaker:Stop being so negative. Here's a self-help checklist. Follow this. You'll be back on your feet in no time.
Speaker:Being positive has a dual nature. Much of the positivity we hear is phony because it's for public consumption.
Speaker:Never mind what you actually feel. Just repeat the positive script aloud because that's what makes everyone comfortable.
Speaker:Burnouts who are unable to repeat the positive script with the expected enthusiasm become castaways.
Speaker:Not only does no one understand our distress, we're criticized for not being upbeat.
Speaker:The implicit message is you could fix your burnout if you'd just be more positive.
Speaker:Your stress will melt away once you say positive things, but the unending stress doesn't melt away. It melts us away.
Speaker:The non-burned-out haven't felt so drained that there's nothing left to prop up the expected cheerfulness.
Speaker:With no experience of burnout, they can't understand the gravity of what we're feeling.
Speaker:The burnout soon gives up expressing what they're experiencing rather than bear the additional burden of criticism.
Speaker:This disapproval further isolates the burnout. Nobody wants to hear how the burnout feels because that makes everyone uncomfortable.
Speaker:Whether we want to admit it or not, usually not until much later in the process, burnout is a life-changing experience.
Speaker:This further isolates the burnout because everyone wants us to bounce back and resume the work we did before we collapsed, but the burnout can't do the same work.
Speaker:Going back isn't possible, and nobody wants to hear that.
Speaker:This inability to return to the harness and a growing unwillingness to do so runs counter to the kind of self-help counseling which focuses on helping the burnout strap themselves back into overwork and open-ended responsibility.
Speaker:To reject this is unacceptable to everyone who depended on the burnout being an uncomplaining pack animal.
Speaker:Burnouts find the world is dead set on our prompt return to the workload that broke us.
Speaker:The self-help industry is typically focused on helping the pack animal stagger back to its feet because this is what our economy depends on.
Speaker:Work hard, play hard, and strive for achievement, wealth, and recognition. Anything less? And the economy unravels.
Speaker:Whether those still have any meaning is not a question anyone other than the burnout wants to ask, as the question challenges their assumptions about what's meaningful and worthy of sacrifice.
Speaker:The end result is the burnout is alone. Not only does no one understand us, no one wants to understand we won't be resuming our workload.
Speaker:What the non-burned out don't understand is the burnout has been so drained, there's nothing left.
Speaker:Rewards for our work have vanished, along with the means to carry heavy burdens. The pack animal has collapsed and cannot get to its feet, no matter how many people flog it.
Speaker:The messages the burnout hears are not helpful. Some might begin as superficially sympathetic, but only as an introduction to try harder to not be burned out, even though trying harder is what burned us out.
Speaker:Everyone's worried because they're not prepared to do everything we can no longer do. They can't help wanting us to get better so we can go back to making their lives easier.
Speaker:The burnout is annoyed. To the degree we can feel anything at all, because it's now clear that nobody really cares about our well-being.
Speaker:They care about whatever we kept glued together, the enterprise, the household, and the facade of normalcy and cheerfulness.
Speaker:The burnout no longer cares about any of that, because we no longer have the means to care.
Speaker:The burnout may want to care, may feel pressured to care, but neither gives us the means to care. The tank is bone dry, and so no matter how much the burnout wants to care, we no longer have the energy to care.
Speaker:The burnout understands others depend on us, and so we feel guilty for being burned out.
Speaker:The burnout understands that others fear the collapse of their own lives should we fail to get back on our feet, but we cannot help but have mixed feelings that our health matters less than our work.
Speaker:Advice to take a week off, drink fresh lemon juice, take supplements, etc., as if overwork and not taking care of ourselves were easily fixable with superficial cures, isn't helpful.
Speaker:The burnout never feels more alone than when hearing yet another suggestion to take a few days off, listen to calming music, treat yourself to some luxury, etc., for superficial to-do lists only increase the distance between the castaway and the shore left behind.
Speaker:Your experience of burnout may have been less difficult. Perhaps you had supportive understanding people around you who had no stake in whatever collapsed in the wake of your burnout. Others haven't been so blessed.
Speaker:Dreams are one of the few reliable sources of insight available to the burnout. One of my dreams offers a vivid summary of the burnout's dilemma. In the dream, I parked my car and crossed a dry creek bed on foot to reach a remote construction site.
Speaker:Unable to locate the site, I retraced my steps and found the creek had become a raging river I could not possibly forward. At that point, I realized I'd left my phone in my car. I was stranded and unable to contact anyone.
Speaker:That's the burnout's dilemma. Unable to return to your previous life, unable to communicate with others, and unable to find a new beginning. To paraphrase Samuel Beckett, I can't go on, but I must go on.
Speaker:Beckett's line was, you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.
Speaker:Burnout isn't a destination we choose to visit and leave. It's a reckoning no one chooses, a forced quest of discovery, and so we must go on, even though we're broken. Although there is no path visible ahead, there is a way forward.
Speaker:Nobody knows what will be most helpful to someone else in the depths of burnout. I certainly don't. I do know that if we can get away and a shopping spree resolve your exhaustion, you aren't burned out.
Speaker:If you're burned out, planning a getaway is a joyless burden. Never mind getting to the hideaway. And shopping is just another ordeal.
Speaker:I titled this chapter Triage to introduce the idea that the goal is to stop the bleeding and start the healing.
Speaker:Burnouts aren't bleeding from open wounds, but we're wounded physically and psychologically, nonetheless. Triage is the process of prioritizing care to those most in need.
Speaker:The burnout is the person most in need, so we must start caring for ourselves. The goal is to reduce whatever is causing burnout so it doesn't get worse and take the first steps towards healing ourselves.
Speaker:We can't help anyone else unless we first help ourselves.
Speaker:Get Help
Speaker:Let's start with the obvious. If you need help, get help.
Speaker:In my first burnout at age 33, I became very depressed and sought the help of a psychiatrist. I chose to see a medical doctor. Psychiatrists are MDs because I wanted someone who looked at the entirety of my health, not just my depression.
Speaker:In my second burnout at age 63, I consulted my doctor, primary care physician, and asked for a battery of tests to confirm the burnout hadn't damaged my health and to check if some unknown medical issue might have triggered my burnout.
Speaker:Fortunately, the test results were normal, but it was certainly prudent to check and prudent to seek help.
Speaker:Exhaustion has many possible sources, including myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome, ME-CFS.
Speaker:As the visibility of burnout increases, the number of professionals with experience helping burnouts has also increased.
Speaker:Not all physicians and mental health professionals have experienced treating burnout.
Speaker:The psychiatrist my spouse consulted after she burned out gave her a prescription for an antidepressant and sent her on her way without asking about the life circumstances causing her depression.
Speaker:It may require a search to find professionals with experience treating burnout.
Speaker:Researchers found, Scientific American, January 2022, the long shadow of trauma, that having someone with whom we can share our experiences is the key difference between those who struggle with the aftermath of trauma and those who manage to have fulfilling lives despite traumatic experiences.
Speaker:As one researcher put it,
Speaker:Of course it's unpleasant, it's a disaster, but it's not so disastrous if you can share it.
Speaker:It's not helpful to suffer in silence, so finding someone with whom you can share your experience is an important step toward healing.
Speaker:How long will it take to get through this?
Speaker:It's natural to ask when will it end, because we're suffering and so we hope burnout will end soon.
Speaker:In the depths of her burnout, my spouse sought answers to the question, how long will it last in others' experiences?
Speaker:There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
Speaker:Some burnouts report being back to normal in a few months, while others report still being burned out a year later.
Speaker:No one can say how long it will take to emerge from burnout, because it depends on the individual's circumstance and age, and whether the sources of burnout are identified and reduced or eliminated.
Speaker:In my experience, it's not helpful to focus on speeding up the process.
Speaker:Just as it took a long time to burn out, it may take an equivalent period of time to work through the reckoning and the renewal.
Speaker:Burning out and recovering from burnout are both imperceptible as they're happening.
Speaker:It's a process of small steps that can't be leapfrogged or hurried.
Speaker:It's akin to watching a deep-cut heal.
Speaker:You want it to heal immediately, but this can't happen as you wish.
Speaker:The wound heals in its own time, without you noticing it, until you notice the pain is gone and it's healed.
Speaker:Burnout is like this. You'll notice when you feel better, but expecting rapid healing is frustrating.
Speaker:Healing proceeds on its own time.
Speaker:Trying to get through burnout as fast as possible, as if the recovery were a task that can be accelerated by sheer will, is what burned us out in the first place.
Speaker:One of the lessons of burnout is that we're not in absolute control of the recovery process any more than we were in absolute control of our slide into burnout.
Speaker:If we'd had total control of everything, we wouldn't have burned out in the first place.
Speaker:Our mind and body are one, but each operates at its own pace.
Speaker:Our mind made desire to push us to get through burnout in a set length of time, as if the recovery was just another deadline to meet, but our body doesn't respond to the mind's manic deadlines.
Speaker:The body will heal itself in its own time, not according to the mind's schedule.
Speaker:Our emotional health recovers on its own pace, too, and can't be hurried.
Speaker:Our burnout-impaired intellectual capabilities also take their own time to recover.
Speaker:My memory, ability to focus, and my overall judgment were all impaired by burnout.
Speaker:It took a long time for me to regain my pre-burnout capabilities.
Speaker:Burnout teaches us to become patient.
Speaker:I'm an impatient person, and so learning this was difficult, but there really isn't a choice.
Speaker:As becoming frustrated and anxious about the speed of one's recovery only adds stress that further delays recovery.
Speaker:Rather than focus on trying to hurry what cannot be hurried, we serve our best interests by focusing in making progress one step at a time.
Speaker:Making small improvements is what we do control.
Speaker:My view is that burnout is life-changing experience.
Speaker:It's not a destination you visit and then return from unchanged.
Speaker:Four years after hitting bottom, I'm still learning about my post-burnout self and life.
Speaker:I say more about this in the section Where We Are Now.
Speaker:Make a simple recovery plan.
Speaker:The mind and body have evolved to heal themselves.
Speaker:We can either help or hinder this healing.
Speaker:Just as the mind is accustomed to setting deadlines and goals, it's also accustomed to making demanding plans to reach the goal faster.
Speaker:Complicated plans require more energy than we can muster.
Speaker:Make a simple plan that we can follow every day, even though we're exhausted.
Speaker:There is no instant cure to burnout.
Speaker:Just as the slide into burnout was imperceptible, progress out of burnout is also imperceptible.
Speaker:Over time, small efforts that aid our healing accumulate, much like a spring will fill a pond one drop at a time.
Speaker:Our Buckminster Fuller famously described how one individual can change the course of an entire society.
Speaker:His analogy is the trim tab, which he described as a miniature rudder.
Speaker:Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around, takes almost no effort at all.
Speaker:So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab.
Speaker:In other words, making a small adjustment in the trim tab will eventually change the course of a mighty ship.
Speaker:The small adjustments we make can be thought of as trim tabs, taking a walk, rewarding ourselves for completing any task no matter how small,
Speaker:and learning replacement thoughts for those that generate despair.
Speaker:These small changes eventually change the course of our life.
Speaker:What worked for me was focusing on one small task, even though I didn't feel up to it.
Speaker:Prepare for a simple meal, answer an email, etc.
Speaker:The goal of a simple recovery plan is to put Fuller's insight about small adjustments into a stripped down daily list that an utterly exhausted burnout can manage.
Speaker:In my experience, what's pervasive in burnout is the feeling of an endless exhaustion, only rest and sleep can heal.
Speaker:What worked for me was listening to my own body, rather than trying to follow a rigid schedule, rest and sleep as my body dictated.
Speaker:In my experience, our emotional health also needs time to heal.
Speaker:I needed time alone. I had no energy for socializing or even answering the phone.
Speaker:I needed all my limited energy to get through the day and follow my simple recovery plan.
Speaker:As I keep saying, I'm not an expert on burnout. I'm only an expert on my burnout. I don't know what will help anyone else.
Speaker:I could only share what helped me. Here is my simple recovery plan.
Speaker:1. Eat healthy food.
Speaker:2. Personal care.
Speaker:3. Light exercise.
Speaker:4. Write down dreams, thoughts and feelings.
Speaker:5. Give myself credit for completing a task.
Speaker:6. Rest and sleep.
Speaker:The list is simple cause and effect. We can either help or hinder our recovery, our daily actions, no matter how small, steer the ship of our recovery and our life.
Speaker:Eating healthy food, light exercise and positive habits aid our healing.
Speaker:Junk food, being sedentary and self-medication hinder healing.
Speaker:Helping and hindering are cause and effect.
Speaker:Depriving ourselves of real food, exercise and healing habits has negative consequences.
Speaker:Treating ourselves well by eating real food and forging habits of exercise and healthy mental health practices has positive consequences.
Speaker:1. What is a nutritious diet?
Speaker:There are endless cultural and individual variations, but they all boil down to real food, fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and legumes, and wholesomely raised or wild fish and meat.
Speaker:Processed food has little or no role in a healthy diet.
Speaker:I wish I had kept the diary of our menu when we were both burned out.
Speaker:I forget the details, but we managed to prepare simple healthy meals.
Speaker:That there were three cooks in the house was a big plus. My elderly mom-in-law, my spouse and I all prepared meals.
Speaker:As long as one of us scraped up the energy to go shopping or make a meal, we all benefited.
Speaker:What worked for us was to plan a few days' meals so we'd have wholesome food on hand, fresh fruits and vegetables, dried beans, etc.
Speaker:We favored one dish meals, such as stir-fry that offered variety.
Speaker:Meal prep is a challenge for burnouts who live alone, but there are workarounds, stews, soups, and dishes that offer leftovers or extra portions to freeze, etc.
Speaker:Our mind and body are designed to heal themselves, but we need to provide nutritious fuel for that healing.
Speaker:2. When we feel so exhausted, it's tempting to let go of personal care habits,
Speaker:such as taking a shower, washing your hair, brushing your teeth, and getting dressed for the day.
Speaker:In my experience, maintaining our basic personal care routine makes us feel better and is part of healing.
Speaker:3. Walk every day.
Speaker:Walking is our natural curative, our natural state of motion.
Speaker:Walking stimulates positive dynamics in our body and our mind.
Speaker:Even when we were exhausted, we walked every day, even if it was a short walk.
Speaker:If not a walk, a light exercise equivalent.
Speaker:We explored our neighborhood to find routes that offered some natural beauty for walking and nature, our healing.
Speaker:4. Write down your thoughts, insights, and dreams every day.
Speaker:Even if you don't feel that it's helping, writing down what we're thinking, feeling, and dreaming is essential,
Speaker:as we may not remember our dreams and thoughts from a few days ago.
Speaker:Writing them down engages our focus and allows us to reread what we wrote later.
Speaker:In my experience, this is an essential step in the process of understanding and insight.
Speaker:5. If you're like many other burnouts, you were accustomed to getting a lot done
Speaker:every day, but rarely gave yourself credit for your productivity, attention to detail, accountability, and service to others.
Speaker:Let's say you accomplished 100 points, but gave yourself credit for only 10 points.
Speaker:You, and everyone around you, took your work for granted.
Speaker:Many of us only acknowledged what we could have done better and gave ourselves a little credit for what we accomplished.
Speaker:Credit yourself for every small task completed.
Speaker:Changing bedsheets, doing laundry, washing dishes, they're all positive accomplishments.
Speaker:Once we burn out, this ratio must be reversed.
Speaker:If we accomplished 10 points, we must give ourselves 100 points of credit, because every task is arduous.
Speaker:We must acknowledge our effort, for now we need our own encouragement above all else.
Speaker:We cannot rely on others to praise what to them looks very modest indeed.
Speaker:Only the burnout understands that completing any task is now major accomplishment.
Speaker:It took me every bit of willpower to get off the sofa and get something done.
Speaker:Giving myself credit for completing a task, no matter how small, improved my spirits and encouraged me to do so the next day.
Speaker:6. In my experience, it takes time to recover from extreme exhaustion.
Speaker:Maybe much longer than we anticipate.
Speaker:Our conscious mind may have unrealistic expectations, as it's not as exhausted as our body.
Speaker:Exhaustion can disturb our sleep routine, leading to insomnia.
Speaker:It may be tempting to draw the curtains, close the bedroom door and stay in bed all day, as all we want is to be undisturbed and unstressed.
Speaker:The downside of doing so is revealed by the difficulty in falling asleep at night.
Speaker:Any benefit gained by staying in bed all day is cancelled by the additional exhaustion and frustration of insomnia.
Speaker:Keeping daily routines helps maintain healthy sleep routines.
Speaker:We aid our body's recovery by listening to its needs for rest and sleep, along with healthy food, moderate exercise, healing routines, self encouragement, and patience.
Speaker:What Helped Me
Speaker:No one knows what will help another individual, but we can share what helped us.
Speaker:Keeping these principles in mind helped me.
Speaker:1. Burnout is like a governor on an engine that's running at top speed.
Speaker:As it overheats, the danger of the engine self-destructing rises.
Speaker:The governor shuts the engine down to protect it from self-inflicted damage.
Speaker:Burnout is the automatic safety valve that shuts us down before we self-destruct.
Speaker:In other words, burnout protects us from harm.
Speaker:Though it may not feel like it, burnout is saving us.
Speaker:2. America's can-do philosophy holds that all problems have solutions and anything is possible if we embrace the idea that there are no limits.
Speaker:The upside of this can-do spirit is inspirational, but glorifying no limits convinced us that each individual has no limits.
Speaker:This dogma is a prescription for burnout, as we each have limits.
Speaker:Trying to live as if we have no limits self-creates burnout, accepting that we all have limits is a necessary step to recovery.
Speaker:3. Burnout reduces the energy available to spend on guilt, regret, and anxiety about the future.
Speaker:I only have enough energy to deal with this hour and this day.
Speaker:Regret, guilt, and worry all consume energy I no longer have to spare.
Speaker:4. It's easy to label burnout a failure, but this isn't an accurate assessment.
Speaker:Burnout is a reckoning.
Speaker:Whatever is no longer working in our lives wears us down and breaks us.
Speaker:Since we like to think of ourselves as strong, smart, competent, and successful, losing those attributes feels like a failure, but it's not a failure.
Speaker:It simply caused an effect in action.
Speaker:We exceeded our limits and burned out.
Speaker:It was helpful for me to stop labeling burnout as a failure.
Speaker:Burnout happens despite our best efforts to keep going.
Speaker:Burnout is not a random bolt from the blue.
Speaker:It happens for a reason.
Speaker:Stressors pile up and eventually break us.
Speaker:Once we understand it as cause and effect, then we can identify and address the causes.
Speaker:5. It's easy to think something's wrong with me.
Speaker:This is not a realistic assessment.
Speaker:Burnout is the result of sweeping what wasn't working under the carpet for everyone's sake, including our own.
Speaker:What's deficient is our understanding of how we pushed ourselves over our limits and triggered the automatic shutoff of burnout.
Speaker:6. Our expectations of ourselves were unrealistic.
Speaker:We thought the most important thing was to meet everyone's expectations and fulfill our own definition of success.
Speaker:We tried to meet unrealistic demands of others and ourselves to be near-perfect in our work, godlike in our strength, and zen-like in our resolve, wise beyond our years, never failing to make the right decision.
Speaker:No one can meet these unrealistic demands, but we tend to forget that.
Speaker:And so instead of being a friend to ourselves, we're our own harsh critic.
Speaker:Rather than being critical of ourselves, we must be mindful of the positives that still exist despite our burnout.
Speaker:7. We need to be as good a friend to ourselves as we are to others.
Speaker:Just as we wouldn't endlessly criticize a friend, we shouldn't endlessly criticize ourselves, especially when we're struggling with burnout.
Speaker:8. Changing distorted thoughts that lead to depression.
Speaker:After my first burnout at age 33, I became very depressed and consulted psychiatrist Dr. Mary DeLuca.
Speaker:After five hectic, stressful years as a builder, I felt like a failure.
Speaker:My partner and I built dozens of houses, a 43-unit subdivision, and a commercial retail project but earned nothing but a modest wage.
Speaker:Financially, the business was not a success. We'd both made so many sacrifices and poured in so much effort just to pay all our bills and earned the same wage we paid our foreman.
Speaker:Spending five years running a business that burned me out felt like a failure.
Speaker:I loved the hands-on building, but was worn down by the business and financial burdens and managing multiple crews.
Speaker:Financial stress only increased as we expanded. The more we built, the more money we had to front.
Speaker:Neither of us was rich, so went without paychecks to pay our crews and subcontractors.
Speaker:One thing I learned in therapy was a depressed person erases all the positives of their work and life and focuses exclusively on their mistakes, flaws, failures, regrets, and poor prospects.
Speaker:This is a gross distortion of reality. A realistic assessment acknowledges the positives of our work and life and credits us for what we accomplished.
Speaker:Dr. DeLuca pointed out that we'd built affordable homes, employed many people, and learned so much in a few years.
Speaker:I learned to substitute these more realistic assessments for the gross distortions that pushed me down the chute into depression.
Speaker:Eight. One way to incorporate these principles into every day is to write down all the helpful things we tend to forget and read them every day, or better yet, read them aloud every day.
Speaker:I call them helpful things to keep in mind. Here's my list. Reading it daily helped me.
Speaker:I am a friend to myself.
Speaker:Distorted thoughts are habits that can be changed.
Speaker:Distorted thoughts are not realistic. They create negative emotions.
Speaker:I replace unrealistic distorted thoughts with realistic assessments.
Speaker:I am a positive person.
Speaker:I'm letting go of shoulds.
Speaker:I no longer need to do or be anything to be worthy.
Speaker:I am worthy as I am, i.e. burned out.
Speaker:No one can be everything to everybody.
Speaker:If I lose myself, I have nothing to give others.
Speaker:My first responsibility is to regain my health. Only then will I be able to help others.
Speaker:I've earned this period of reflection and exploration.
Speaker:Feeling guilty because I'm burned out is not helpful. It doesn't help me or anyone else.
Speaker:Focus on now, today. That is all we control.
Speaker:Again, these are not suggestions for anyone else. These are things to keep in mind that helped me.
Speaker:When we feel exhausted, it's difficult to do much of anything, but it is possible to eat very simple real food,
Speaker:take a short walk, and write down a few of our thoughts.
Speaker:The mind and body are one, and like all of nature, manifest cause and effect.
Speaker:We cannot extinguish burnout with magic or a pill, but we can help our mind, body's own healing with daily effort on our own behalf.
Speaker:Once we feel better, the goal is to eliminate sources of burnout so we can regain our capacity to enjoy life, do good work,
Speaker:and help those we care about.
Speaker:This has been When You Can't Go On. Burnout, Reckoning, and Renewal.
Speaker:Written by Charles Hugh Smith. Narrated by Russell Newton.
Speaker:Copyright 2022 by Charles Hugh Smith. Production copyright by Spokane Tome Media. You need to hear this.
