Today’s episode of Creating The Path is about burnout and how recovering from burnout has been for me. I was burnt out for 8 years when I was working a 9-5. Eight years. That sounds completely insane when I think about it now. I’m now a year into my recovery, and I’ve learned a lot. So today, I want to share 7 lessons I’ve learned about burnout and what recovering feels like.
Listen On:
Topics discussed in this episode:
[01:15] How I felt burnt out for 8 of the 10 years I was in mty 9-5
[02:06] What I’ve done to recover from burnout
[03:58] Resources I recommend if you’re feeling burnt out or recovering from burnout
[05:30] Lesson #1: Doing mode and letting the recovery happen
[08:46] Lesson #2: Managing my energy properly
[11:45] Lesson #3: The burnout recovery process isn’t linear
[14:20] Lesson #4: Brain fog is real
[15:50] Lesson #5: I didn’t feel like I was burnt out
[17:15] Lesson #6: I realized burnout had not changed me permanently
[18:08] Lesson #7: I can arrange my day anyway that I want to
Resources:
The Bouncebackability Factor: End Burnout, Gain Resilience, and Change the World
Get your FREE Energy Tracker here and start doing less and accomplishing more in your business.
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Noteworthy Quotes:
“Just stop doing so much stuff..”
“What I needed to do is let the recovery happen.”
“What I need to do to recover is the same as what I need to do going forward, and that is managing my energy properly.”
“What got me into burnout was poor energy management.”
“The burnout recovery process isn’t linear.”
“Life is not just a smooth line forward. There’s ups and downs. Good days and bad days. That’s just the way life is.”
“Doing all the things is what burns us all out.”
“I can arrange my day anyway that I want to.”
Summary of the Podcast:
Creating the Path is a podcast that challenges multi-passionate entrepreneurs to achieve their goals by working less and eliminating overwhelm, so they can create their own unique pathway to a life they love. My mission is to transform hustle culture and assist others to shift away from living life on auto-pilot to living intentionally and following your own path to a life you love instead.
Host Bio:
Heather Grace Hanson is a certified positive psychology-based coach and creator of the Intentional Energy Framework, a system that empowers you to create a life and business you love without burning out. Heather is obsessed with all things personal development, running and walking in the park, interior design, salsa dancing and most importantly, spending time with her pup, Barclay.
Episode Transcript:
All right. So today on the podcast I want to share a little bit about my experience in recovering from burnout over the past year, and some of the lessons that I've learned. So I'm recording this for a couple of reasons, first I honestly just want to keep a record of what I've learned so that I don't forget, and I'm also hoping that this can help you if you are burned out, recovering, or if you feel like you're on your way to burnout.
I know for me hearing other people's stories and the lessons that they learned were really helpful in my own recovery. So if you are in that situation I'm really hoping that this will help you. And quick little backstory to how I got to where I am now. I quit my corporate nine to five job a little over a year ago at this point. I quit in November 2020 and I'm recording this in November 2021, and the job that I quit I had been there for a little over 10 years by the time I quit.
And looking back on it now, I realize that I was burned out for 8 of those 10 years, which is absolutely insane to think about. Looking back on it now, I honestly don't know how I survived being burned out for 8 years, but anyway, so that's how I got to where I am now. I'm a year into my recovery, and so what I've done over the past year to recover is, first of all, a lot of nothing, just doing nothing.
I also at some point, actually I think it was April of this year, I started going to acupuncture. I've gotten lots of coaching over the last year. I would sometimes do some light exercise but only when that felt right. I think exercise can be a good part of burnout recovery, but I was very careful not to push myself or do anything too intense. I would only do it when I felt like I was motivated, and I would keep it light. You know, just yoga, stretching, or just an easy walk. I also focused strongly on getting enough sleep, and I learned a lot about burnout and just health in general so I could get myself back to a healthy place, and I also just learned a lot about myself and sort of rediscovering who I am and who I'm becoming in my post burnout life, because I realized after being in burnout for 8 years, those 8 years pretty much all I did was work. You know I didn't really have time to do anything else and so over the past year it's just been a little bit of discovering what I enjoy doing and what I like, and it's been a really fun process.
And a couple things I want to mention right here in terms of resources, in case you also want to start learning and and start recovering yourself, a couple resources that I have found super helpful for myself in my burnout recovery is, so I mentioned that I started going to acupuncture. The woman who I saw for acupuncture and who also gave me some burnout coaching her name is Caitlin Donovan and she has her own podcast. It's called Fried: The Burnout Podcast. Highly, highly recommend. I still listen to it every week and it's just amazing. If you're burned out, I think it's a must listen, so I will link that in the show notes but definitely check that out. And she also wrote a book called The Bouncebackability Factor. It's a really great book to help start you on your burnout journey.
And another book that I think everyone who has burned out, is recovering, or on their way to burnout needs to read is um, it's a book called Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, that's by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. And it's yeah I think it's required reading. So all of that will be linked up in the show notes, but definitely check those out if you are looking for more resources on how to recover from burnout, or just preventing yourself from burning out in the first place, highly recommended.
So that's how I got to where I am now, and so the first lesson I guess that I want to talk about that I learned over the past year was, so when I first started my burnout recovery, my initial instinct was to actively recover. You know, basically some of my first first thoughts were okay, so I've quit my job now, now what do I do? I need to recover, so what does that involve, like what do I need to do? I was still in doing mode. I was going straight from, you know working all the time to all of a sudden quitting my job, and you know, granted I was starting up my own coaching business, So I still had work to do, but I was purposely trying to do less so that I could recover, but I was still thinking that there were things I needed to do to recover, and granted I think there are things that are good to you know, actively do in order to support your recovery, but I think one of the most important things and one of the first things you should do when you when you start recovery is to just stop doing so much stuff, just stop doing stuff, and it took me a while to realize this, because I think it's hard, I think, for our brains and our bodies to just quickly shift gears like that. So it did take a little while, but I think that's so important you know, rather than actively recovering, what I needed to do was just let the recovery happen. If you slow down, if you stop doing all the things, the recovery will happen. And again, so like I said, it took me a while to realize this for myself, but when I did realize that, I realized, okay, the doing nothing feels weird and it feels like I'm not doing anything, but I had to trust that that's actually what I need to be doing and that by doing that, that's what's going to help my energy levels recover.
And you know, because basically it's like I see this on a spectrum. You know there's burnout on the one side where it's like we're doing all the things, and then there's the other extreme which is doing nothing, so I got burned out after spending so much time on the burnout side that I had to go to the other extreme of doing nothing or doing very very little so that eventually my energy levels could return to like some kind of balance or whatever my normal is.
And I don't know if I'm there yet or maybe I'm almost there, but you know actually like the other thing I have come to realize recently is that I'm actually not too concerned anymore how much longer it takes for me to recover, because I realize at this point it doesn't matter, which brings me to another important point that I learned which is that - What I needed to do to recover, is the same as what I need to keep doing going forward, which is managing my energy properly.
I want to say that again, because I think it's a really important point - what I needed to do to recover, is the same as what I need to keep doing going forward, and that is managing my energy properly. Because I realized what got me into burnout was poor energy management and that what I need to do going forward is proper energy management.
And I realized that when I started my burnout, I was thinking of things in 3 phases - there was my pre-burnout life, there is my burnout recovery phase of my life, and then whenever I recover then there's my post burnout life. And I realize now that no, there's 2 phases, when I started my burnout recovery that was the start of my post burnout life. It just felt a little bit different because I was starting from such a low place with my energy so low that it felt like a different phase. And I think it is going to feel different, you know, just in terms of how I feel during that phase of my life but in terms of what I need to do, there's not much difference because it's all just proper energy management. When I started out at that low point, I needed to have a higher percentage of energy replenishment in my day-to-day life again to sort of counteract the long phase of my life where I was having too much energy draining in my life. So in that sense it felt a lot different, but it's still the same going forward on a day-to-day basis. Whatever my energy levels are, I just need to honor that and manage my energy properly from that point. If I have a random day where I'm feeling low energy, well that means I just need to make sure I'm not draining my energy too much even more, and you know, do a little bit more to replenish my energy. It's all just honoring my energy and managing it properly going forward. That's what it all comes down to.
So I won't harp on that too much because I know I'll talk about that in many many future podcast episodes, but that is such an important one and the next point I want to talk about is that my burnout recovery process, and I know this is true for a lot of other people, is that the burnout recovery process is not linear. It feels very messy, feels up and down and forward and backward. There were so many times over the last year where I felt like I made a lot of progress. I felt like I was recovering and then maybe the next week my energy would tank again, and then I would feel super discouraged, and I would feel like I was never going to recover from burnout because all of a sudden I felt like I was just right back where I started, at the beginning of my recovery. And what my burnout coach Cait helped me realize is that what I thought was a backslide was actually probably just life, right?
I mean, it seems so obvious once she helped me realize this, but life is not just a smooth line forward. There's ups and downs. There's good days. There's bad days. That's just the way life is. So why should I think that my burnout recovery should be this, like if it was on a graph, why should it be this like smooth line going just like a straight angle upwards. That's not realistic if you think about it, you know life in general is up and down. So why would there not be ups and downs throughout the burnout recovery process? That's just life. So once I realized that, I was able to not let myself get so discouraged when that would happen. I would just be able to say, oh okay, so my energy feels like it's, you know, dropped a little bit today. So all right. What do I need to do in this moment? Again, going back to the core of energy management. Just in that moment, just honoring where my energy was in that moment and then deciding what to do from there, but the important thing for me was just realizing that that's okay and that it's to be expected and to not let that discourage me.
That was really important and this brings me to my next point, which is brain fog is a real thing y'all. It's a real thing. So, throughout the whole 8 years that I was burned out, my coworkers and I would talk about the fact that we couldn't believe that we were in our thirty’s and it felt like we were sliding into old age. We felt like our brain had just checked out, and we would have these conversations all the time, like it was just crazy, and now that I'm recovering from my burnout and and actually you know, I had this aha after one of my acupuncture sessions where I had one particular session, and then the next week I had a moment where I felt like my brain came back online. I was like whoa, I was like, what just happened? I feel like I don't even know how to fully describe it, but it was like I, yeah it was just like I realized like my brain was back. It was Back. So if you are feeling the same, like you're wondering like, what has happened to your brain, like where did it go, if you're feeling that brain fog, let me tell you, it is real but it's not permanent. You can get your brain back. So yeah, there's some hope for you.
And so another thing that I realized in my burnout recovery at some point, so I mentioned that I was burned out for like 8 years, but when I was going through it, it didn't feel like I was burned out that whole time. It felt like I was cycling in and out of burnout. So I usually felt like I would have these phases where I would burn out and be exhausted, followed by a phase where I had more energy, and that's when I would go full force and like, do all the things and just work myself until I worked myself into another burnout phase. So it felt like I was just like cycling in and out of it. But what I realize now is that I was actually burned out the whole time and that in that time, I just had like boosts of energy. Basically, so if you feel like you're in that phase and maybe you're like, in and out of burnout, just realize that just because you have a boost of energy, it doesn't mean that you're out of the burnout.
And actually what I realize now, is that when I had those boosts of energy and then I would do more stuff, that was only like just fueling the continuation of my burnout, because again, doing all the things is what burns us out. So yeah, I just realized now that it wasn't a cycle in and out of it. It was just burnout for 8 years.
That brings me to my next point, which is that when I was burned out, I felt like my burnout had fundamentally changed me as a person. I felt like it had turned me into this negative pessimistic person that I didn't like, and now that I'm recovering, I realize that it wasn't permanent. I was so glad when I realized that because the changes felt so deeply rooted that I just honestly didn't know if I would get back to the happier, more optimistic person that I used to be, not that I'm always an optimist or not that you always have to be happy, but I won't get into a whole thing about the way that my burnout changed me and things like that, but it was just so encouraging when I realized that I was kind of getting back to what felt like me, if that makes sense,
And I realize this is getting a little long, so I will wrap this up with my last lesson that I learned, which is that I can arrange my day any way that I want to. It took me a while before I really learned this, and I feel like I've learned it multiple times in the sense that I would learn certain ways that I can rearrange my day in a way that maybe doesn't look so traditional. And then I would make those changes, and then I would still feel like there was just still something not quite right in my day, and then I would realize like another thing that I didn't have to do a certain way. So I feel like there's been phases of me learning this lesson. But that's been a big one, so I will wrap this up with that last point. I hope this has been helpful for you and again, just remember I have those resources linked up in the show notes and if there's anything that I talked about today that you want me to expand on in future episodes, please let me know. Send me and a DM on Instagram @heathergracehanson and I will see you next time.