Can you have burnout if you don't believe it exists?
'Burning out' is the crisis of our time. But if you're a strung-out, over-achieving Gen X-er who refuses to believe it's a thing, how do you begin to find a way out?
In my day it was called ‘having a bad day.’ Sometimes that bad day turned into a ‘bad week’. And a bad week could roll into a really bad month. Sometimes you would hear colleagues murmur things like exhaustion. Or worse, nervous exhaustion which was basically a polite way of saying someone was having a nervous breakdown. And of course a nervous breakdown meant that you silently disappeared, never to return to the office again.
At school I heard of a young girl having to leave due to such things. One minute she was there, the next she was gone. And later, when I became a magazine writer, there was a very glamorous work colleague who was rumoured to be suffering from ‘exhaustion’. Her desk was left empty for 3 months, then 6, then eventually a new person was found to replace her altogether. Occasionally I try to find her on the internet- after all, you can find most people with enough time and Facebook stalking, but there is nothing. Nothing at all.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, mainly because the world and the language it now speaks feels so alien to me. Increasing numbers of people I know are coming out as having ADHD. I used to think that was something little boys had, not women in their 30s, 40s and beyond. Then last week a close friend told me she had just discovered she was dyslexic - at 45 years of age. She laughed when she told me. Then she reeled off a huge list of signs and signals that to be honest, sounded a lot like me.
But perhaps the word that keeps coming up time and again- from acquaintances, from social media, from book titles staring back at me on the shelf at WH Smiths is burnout. Everyone it appears is either burnout, on the brink of burnout or has just recovered from burnout.
When did this happen? When did people’s lives suddenly start sounding like the devastating wreck of a car crash?
The first time I heard someone use the term burnout was a year into my first editing job. I was 33 and had been pushing 15 hours days for over a year as the editor of a new magazine launch. I would rise at 6am, work on the train into the office, then leave at 10pm just as the security guards were turning off the lights. We were a small team of just three people, at a time when other magazines were closing all around us. This was what start-up culture in the publishing world looked like- neat and nimble. Work became my life, because that’s quite simply what it took to get the job done.
‘Be careful you don’t burnout,’ an older colleague, some years ahead of me in the publishing game said one day. I nodded but inside I smiled: my commitment to the job was being recognised.
This was 2012. Hard work was next to godliness in the corporate world. Back then there were endless articles about the ‘sleepless elite’- people like Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and even designer Tom Ford, who needed only three to four hours shut-eye a night. It never occurred to me they slept so little because their adrenal systems were on fire.
‘Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses,’ said the basketball player Kobe Bryant that same year. It was a mantra both I and the culture around me lived by.
When I look back now you can see it in the magazines coverlines I put out: Your perfect weight in just 14 days! Build a hot yoga body! Better sex in 60 seconds! It went on and on. Perseverance, commitment, slogging away -this is what it took to lead the good life.
The magazine became an overnight success feeding into the stoicism of the day. And I became a wreck behind the scenes. Except of course, I didn’t see it that way. Not back then, at least.
About 18 months into the job I was sent to review a fancy health clinic on the shores of Lake Worthersee in Austria. It was the most beautiful setting I had ever seen. Not that I had chance to enjoy it- I couldn’t get out bed for the entire week. Did it scare me? Not really. This was normal, I told myself. My body was simply playing catch-up with the life I had thrown at it.
That same year I developed an explosive temper, usually with complete strangers- people not walking fast enough in the street, old people dawdling to pay for train tickets, that sort of thing. I would sputter and shout and people would look horrified at this smartly dressed young woman in the ticket hall who was basically a ball of fire.