The Remarkable Story of Recovering from Burnout by Doing More

The Endless To-dos

Fewer years ago than I would like to admit, I lived in slow-moving chaos.

The thing about being human is that the brain will adapt to just about anything. Even when we are not deliberately choosing how we spend our time, the brain rushes to establish our situation as normal and predictable so it can rest. 

A snapshot of any room of my house would have illuminated (even to strangers) a laundry list of things that needed attention (and yes, laundry was on the list). 

I knew these things needed to get done, but rather than addressing them, I filled my life with workarounds. I would kick the laundry into an increasingly messy, overflowing pile (rather than do 2 hours of laundry). I would avoid that window because the latch broke (it would have been a $20, 10-minute replacement). I’d turn on the shower early because insufficient water pressure meant warm water would not arrive for a while (fix: one valve adjustment). I’d put a space heater by the door because the weather stripping is old (fix: 3 dollars, 10 minutes). I’d wonder if any new tissue boxes were left because the cupboard was too cluttered to see replacements (fix: 3-hour reorg). I’d squeeze a to-go box into a fridge already full of untouched, decaying to-go food (fix: 30-minute cleanout), etc.

I could go on, but the feelings around these memories are as unpleasant as you rightfully imagine the experiences to be. 

Why would I let this happen? Why not just clean things up? Why live in chaos for longer than any fix could possibly have taken? Just how lazy am I? Do I really think I deserve nice things when I can’t even find last night’s pizza in the fridge?

If you wondered any of these things, I hear you. Literally. You are voicing my inner monologue.

So why not do it? The truth is, I didn’t want to. There always seemed to be a compelling reason not to fix something, usually revolving around not wanting to spend the time to do it. I felt beholden to my job and willing to let it take priority over anything else. Long workdays amplified my internal reasoning to not “waste” my 2 free hours between work and sleep on chores.

What is the purpose, I questioned, of a life of endless work followed by cleaning so that I would be in a tidier place to do more work? That cycle would be dismal, I answered myself, so I just allowed the chaos to grow while I spent two brain-fried hours per night on the couch rewatching hours of comfort shows like Parks and Recreation. 

At least some part of the day felt OK, rather than an endless slog of to-dos.

Burnout

Burnout is often associated with over-work. Culturally, we assume that someone has been doing too many hours at a job and should take some time off to recover, but this is only one part of the equation.

As Adam Grant puts it: the heart of burnout is emotional exhaustion. Burnout is not the result of doing too much work; it’s doing too little work that has any meaning to you. 

Have you ever run back-to-back weeks of long hours until you finally decide to take a Saturday completely off to melt into a couch, only to find yourself at least as exhausted by the next workday? This is the result of emotional exhaustion, which physical rest cannot address alone. 

When we burn out, we have diminished emotional energy to critically reason. This kickstarts a negative feedback loop; we struggle to diagnose ourselves, much less solve the problem, so we continue the patterns growing our emotional debt in the first place.

I could feel this downward cycle, even if I could not describe it at the time. I felt resentful when asked to take on more cleaning or do a home repair, thinking about all the things that felt more important to do. I wanted to start a business, and any hour I spent cleaning was an hour lost on other goals. Beyond a paycheck, I knew my job was not exactly moving the needle. The company mission had no meaning to me personally, and the days blended together.

When I avoided tasks like grocery shopping or vacuuming, however, I still did not work on my business. This is the painful secondary slap of burnout - exhaustion reaches a point where it feels like a herculean effort to start something new or do anything outside of the activities already burning you out. So I watched shows to numb the cycle perpetuated by watching shows. 

Feed Your Soul

Logically, it makes sense why motivation is sparse during periods of burnout. Cleaning and organizing require executive function. Where does this go? Do I need this anymore? I can’t put this away because the closet is already a mess. Should I start there instead? On a brain already out of fuel, these decisions are exhausting. 

And if I did them, what would be gained? Clean clothes get dirty again, groceries are eaten or go bad, and the hours spent buying food and doing laundry will be replayed in a week. With so many hours spent on repeating chores, when are you building on a life you want to lead? If you’re never building a life you want, where are you going to end up? What good is a clean house to live a life you don’t want? 

This hyperbolic cycle of thoughts is demotivating and challenging to reset once they become habitual. 

So how to break the cycle? For once in the self-improvement game, the answer is fun and even feels indulgent:

Be a little “selfish”

As the phrase goes: put on your own mask before helping others. 

If we want to recharge our emotional capacity, we have to fill our emotional tanks. We refill our energy by experiencing passion and excitement, best achieved in flow-states. This is another reason watching TV cannot resolve burnout - we’re not deeply excited or fully resting.

It may feel counterintuitive and even frustrating to counteract burnout with more work, but the work that resolves burnout is meaningful to us. Because it gives us purpose, it does not feel like work.

We might need to experiment to find what brings us into flow. For me, I had an inkling that writing could be that activity, so I began to journal my thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness every morning. Initially, the thoughts were just rants and frustrations about the feelings of burnout I was experiencing, but after a couple of weeks, the immovable boulder of exhaustion began to shift. I started to feel some relief; my written thoughts widened much broader topics than my tunnel-vision frustration. 

Momentum created momentum: I hired an accountability coach to maintain my efforts, I started to clean my house without resentment, and I reconnected with creativity in my job. It turns out, spending hours on work and cleaning felt far more manageable when I had already dedicated some time for myself in the day. I proactively kept clutter out of my spaces and finished chores with energy leftover. 

Clutter in your environment can increase stress, but I think the opposite is also true. Increased stress leads to increased clutter, leading to more stress, etc. Luckily, the cycle also works in reverse, but changing that direction is no small feat.

Be Selfish For Others

As my mindset improved and cynicism retreated, I found myself helping others more, taking on more at my job, and coming up with increasingly creative paths forward in my life. Ironically, I could only get this work done by doing more work. Meaningful work. 

But how do we find meaningful activities?

Define your values

To find meaningful work, we can start with our values. It’s easy to think of values as career paths, like “I want to be a writer,” or in life domains  (e.g. “family is important to me”), but values are deeper than that. 

Values are abstract themes, like freedom, authenticity, connection, independence, etc. They are unique to the individual and will change over time, but if we continue to invest in them, they will serve as a powerful decision guide.

Find the themes

For me, I derive joy from writing, but not because of writing itself. I value curiosity, originality, and connection, plus I love playing with words, so writing is a perfect conduit for flow. 

Once we hone in on values that resonate with us, it’s time to try avenues to express and encourage them. We must think deeper than career paths or the inherited values we think we should have.

For instance, do you like working in sales, or do you like conversation and connection which jobs in sales can provide? Where else could you find that?

Experiment again, after failures and successes

If we don’t find flow in our initial experiments, we need to be brave enough to try again. It’s easy to limit ourselves, believing a “failed” experiment is exclusively a waste of time, but this vision is restrictive and too short-sighted. 

Steve Jobs famously spent many hours developing a friendly typeface for Apple computers because he had taken calligraphy classes before and liked the aesthetic. Would Apple be as user-friendly without these early, seemingly unrelated influences?

And when we discover flow, we can experiment with other factors - what times of day work best? Can we carve out time to ensure we experience it? What other expressions of our values can we uncover?

Finding connections between past “failures” and current decisions, plus considering different times we have experienced flow, helps us understand the underlying patterns to create a guide on our quest for meaning.

Watch for burnout in others

A bonus perk to discovering our values and reducing burnout is the ability to look for similar patterns in others.

You might notice dropped productivity or morale on your team or in close friends. It’s easy to fall back on default beliefs, like deciding that someone is lazy or unmotivated, but these thoughts tend to lead us towards punishment rather than compassion. Punishment will drive the negative cycle downwards, whereas allowing people to unlock their flow, even if it means taking some time away from work, will pay much larger dividends in the long run.

It can be hard to allow for this level of seemingly “selfish” focus. Parents often feel shame for not putting their children’s needs before theirs, employees are told to think of the team first, and we are told explicitly to “not be selfish.” Helping others is a noble cause, but if we want to live an effective, helpful, and connected life, we need our own supply of oxygen first. 

Once we have that, we may find we don’t need any reminders to help others - that part will happen naturally.