Burnout reflection

I wrote yesterday about how I wasn’t feeling great. I was tired and unmotivated despite having a good night of sleep. I’ve taken a lot of time to read, speak to people, and reflect about the state of things over the last day. Perhaps I had been in denial for sometime, but it’s fairly obvious to me that I’m showing signs of burnout.

I think the most perplexing thing about this situation was that this feeling of burnout felt a lot different than the last couple times. I had some obvious signs of burnout during my previous job when I was working 80+ hour weeks for weeks at a time. Back in 2021, we were so busy that I was working long hours and weekends, and it was clear that I was burnt out and exhausted.

Those times felt different, I was clearly overworked and that was directly attributed to the hours I was putting in. I’ve made great strides since then including forcing myself to take weekends off, setting up boundaries on weekdays, finding more hobbies, working out more, sleeping more, etc. In fact, I’m fairly proud of where I’ve gotten in terms of my hours and my overall health. That’s why this time has been so perplexing.

I may be in the best shape of my life working normal hours, but yet I’m showing clear signs of burnout. I suppose I’ve been in denial for some months now. The pattern has been there a lot of weeks. I wake up Monday exhausted and feel as though the weekend drained me, I slug through the day and start to feel better after some exercise. Tuesday I feel better and my mood improves until I hit a wall around Thursday or Friday. I feel great over the weekend and then it begins again.

For awhile, I had thought that it was perhaps due to me staying up too late on weekends and that caused me some sleep issues. Maybe one drink turn into one too many on Saturday night and I blamed the Monday blues on that. But the more I read of others’ burnout stories, the more I realized that the primary reason for me feeling like crap is that I’m reaching burn out levels.

My body and brain have been telling me for some time that it’s ready for a break. I’ve just been ignoring the signs unfortunately. I’ve been largely able to make do with powering through or short weekend trips, but what I need is a longer break to rest the body and mind. I’m going to take next week off to do just that.

Next week I’ll be on a staycation where I don’t have much of an agenda. I’m going to sleep a lot, relax, read and just be a bit of a blob. I’m not planning on making any plans including any sort of exercise or chores… I’m just simply going to treat it as a sick week of recovery.

In my 10 years of working, I have yet to take a vacation like this and I couldn’t be more excited. I feel like a weight was lifted off my shoulders after I decided on this this morning. The one thing I do hope to do next week is write and reflect a lot. I’m hoping it’ll be an amazing therapeutic week.