The burnout monster
It’s hard to fall asleep, but it’s even harder to get up in the morning. You toss and turn all night long, and instead of jumping out of bed in the morning (or crawling if you wake up anything like me), you end up pressing the snooze button over and over... and over again.
It feels like a dark shadow hovers around you most of the time, sucking the joy out of things you used to enjoy. You might feel burned out from work or from the responsibilities of motherhood, adulthood, or living in a society that seems indifferent to your existence as a woman.
You’ve searched for remedies, but none of them seem to help. Everyone around you seems to scream that if you could just practice a little self-care, you could finally address the burnout once and for all. It seems like a shallow solution for a deeply rooted problem, but you figured you’d give it a try anyway. You attempted all the bubble baths and took long walks through the park, but none of it seemed to make a difference. Even joining a monthly book club felt like just another item to check off the to-do list.
Every morning as you groan and contemplate facing the day, you wonder why you can’t seem to get it together. Everyone else has challenging jobs or families that need them, and they seem to be doing perfectly fine. Burnout is hard enough, but feeling like you’re alone in it is even worse. There must be some kind of defect in your genetic code, some ingrained biological reason that prevents you from functioning like everyone else. Why none of the solutions that work for everyone else seem to work for you.
Most of Americans are stressed
Well, here’s the good news and the bad news: you are not alone. In the USA, 77% of workers reported stress associated with their work in the past month. Among those employees, 57% mentioned that this stress negatively affected their functioning, leading to emotional exhaustion, lack of motivation, desire for isolation, reduced productivity, and irritability. This doesn’t even consider the increased rates of mental and physical health problems Americans are experiencing due to stress levels.
Stress and Burnout are a systemic problem
With numbers as high as 77%, it’s clear that work-related stress and burnout are not individual problems. As we’ll explore in future posts, there are many structural and systemic reasons why America continues to struggle with these issues. That’s why individual self-care can’t be the sole solution. You can’t have an individual solution to a systemic problem.
Imagine your daughter, son, nephew, niece, or a neighborhood kid failing their second-grade class. Initially, you might feel frustrated with them. But upon investigating, you realize that every child in that class failed. It would be absurd to tell the child that if they study a little harder, they’ll get a better grade next time (complete with a gentle "perk up, kid" knock on their chin). Sure, more studying might improve their grade slightly. However, real and lasting change will come from investigating what caused an entire classroom of second-graders to fail and finding systemic solutions. Maybe their teacher was in and out of the hospital, leading to an inconsistent curriculum. Perhaps their teacher was like a real-life Cruella de Vil, ridiculing the students until they cried every day. There could be several reasons, but the key is that a systemic problem requires a systemic solution.
Just like we wouldn't blame that student for having a normal reaction to a stressor, it's not helpful to blame yourself for a systemic stressor. This doesn’t mean you should neglect self-care or not try to help yourself if you’re struggling with burnout. But it does mean that alongside practices that heal you individually, you would benefit from practicing self-kindness. Allow yourself some grace for living in a place where many people are grappling with the same problem.
American Psychological Association. (2023). 2023 Work in America Survey: Workplaces as engines of psychological health and well-being. https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/work-in-america/2023-workplace-health-well-being
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