PSA: until you've experienced burnout, you are likely to underestimate how long it takes to recover. It's not a couple of months, it's 6-18 months for partial recovery, and maybe 3 years for full recovery (all depending on how bad it gets). The company burning you out will almost never support your recovery, mostly they'll drop you when you stop being productive.
Nobody in business cares about your health but you, so be your own advocate, or suffer the consequences.
I don't say this with any particular bitterness, more that this seems to be generally how it is, and you should know that your loyalty to your team and the people that employ you is just not worth the damage that you are doing to yourself, because that loyalty will not be there for you at the end of the process, and healing takes a surprising amount of time.
To put it in ecological terms, your health needs to be a sustainable resource for you. There is no safety net.
A follow-up call to action: protect and guide the young people in your workplace. Point out the importance of rest, of not being a hero to cover for systemic failures beyond your pay grade, of getting paid for your time, of the cost of disability.
You may be the first person to let them know it's ok to ease off, or to have boundaries with work.
If not you, who?
@dznz So much this.
I've taught my kids to give 80% at most - you have to save some of you for yourself. (Still trying to learn that myself, but at least I can try to get them off to a healthier start)
As I've learnt more about boundaries, I've been teaching myself and a friend how to implement them in our lives.
Some of my š©warning flags:
- stressed staff/volunteers
- hasty departure/death of previous staff member(s)
- unpaid work / overtime requests
- overtime is essential due to project overrun
- poor role separation
- poor / non existent management support
- poor / non existent accessibility support
- poor stakeholder communication /
cooperation
@dznz That part about telling colleagues to relax is the key point, I think. Burnout is often self-inflicted, not realizing that actually nobody asks us to work that hard (but nobody will complain about it).
We should be on the look out for colleagues we're losing, burnout symptoms are easy to spot anyway : irritability, paranoia, discontentment at anything related to the company, etc.
@kik all of this, though I would add that we are socially conditioned from a young age to value hard work, and to conflate our identity with our job, and to abhor ālazinessā, and to blame ourselves first. Nobody has to ask because we show up ready to drive ourselves into the ground.
I šÆ co-sign keeping an eye on colleagues, looking for those signs. For many of us I think itās easier to spot in others than ourselves.
@scooby087 that sounds like a fortunate sequence, good on the manager and good on you. The great thing is the sooner we catch it, the less damage it does to us.
Also, let's gently laugh at ourselves for thinking a long weekend will fix things. I've been there!
@dznz I've flamed out hard twice. At the start of a career that ended quickly & at the end of a career.
1st time was teaching & the (cult-y) org I was with tried to persuade me to stay. Fortunately I was strong enough to say no.
The 2nd time it wasn't the workload, half of it was a "part time" degree that energised me, it was that I wasn't being listened to. At the end of that I changed careers. Now I'm VERY firm on my boundaries.
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