Getting off the Hamster Wheel (Before You Burnout)
Burnout has become a popular topic lately, and it's no surprise with the development of our always-on always hustling culture. The term burnout was first coined in the '70s by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger. He was using it to describe the consequences of the extreme stress that nurses, doctors, and others in the "helping" field were suffering. Burnout has gone on to become a term that can affect anyone. But one group, in particular, that is susceptible to burnout, is those of us with ADHD.
Burnout is hard to define - it's a mental state where we feel like everything is impossible, you're devoid of motivation, you're mentally and physically exhausted. It becomes challenging to muster up the energy to care about anything, let alone take action to better your situation. I don't know about you, but that also sounds a little like depression to me - although I do want to be clear that burnout and depression aren't the same things. While they do share some similar characteristics, you reach those points through different means and treat them differently.
We often think of burnout as stemming from overworking, but it is often more than just merely working "too hard." A big piece of burnout is not taking the time to appreciate what you've already created - if you're too busy to see the progress you've made, it can feel like you're just spinning your wheels.
Burnout can be especially hard for those of us with ADHD because we can easily become bored with what we already have. We end up in a cycle of escalation because we want more more more.
Brendan Mahan of the ADHD Essentials podcast calls ADHD life on Hard Mode - if you're comparing yourself to someone who's playing on normal, you're going to find yourself needing to put in more work to get to the same place. The problem is that we don't always notice that we're playing on Hard Mode, and so we think we kind of just suck at what we're doing.
That feeling of general ineptitude is a driving factor in burnout. When we feel like no matter what we do that we're never going to measure up, it often makes us feel like quitting. I've felt this way a lot in my life. I've had those little voices in my head telling me that I'm never going to amount to anything because I'm not working hard enough. And as the self-doubt sets in, I find myself slowing down. And when that negative momentum grinds me to a halt, I just don't want to get back up. I don't want to do anything. Those voices in my head tell me that that work I was doing was pointless anyway, so why should I even try.
Burnout sucks. You are drained, and even the act of trying to help yourself seems like too much.
Well, before I got into podcasting and before I really understood the management side of treating my ADHD, I worked for a professional ultimate frisbee league - yes, that is a thing (although the league I worked with closed down). Specifically, I worked with a team called the Portland Stags. I worked as an operations manager and a content director. For the operations side of things, my job mainly consisted of booking places for the team to practice and play. But I'd make sure the players had food at the games, I'd book travel, and I'd cover anything that got missed over the week. Very detail-oriented, and yes, there were a number of times I screwed up in that job. The content side of things was a little easier cause, well, I like writing, but it was equally demanding of my time. While we did hire some writers, we didn't have writers for everything. When we short, it was usually just me filling in and writing those pieces, which meant I was generally writing 2-3 articles a week - along with editing the other writing that came in and managing our social accounts.
In retrospect, I was doing way too much. But we were operating pretty much the same way that any start-up did, and so I didn't give much thought to the fact that I was killing myself with work - well when we were in season. Because you see as a sports league, we didn't play all year round, and so I'd work way too much and then hit the end of the season, and within a couple of weeks, my work would trickle down to nothing.
I usually had plans for what I was going to do in the offseason, but generally, by the time I hit that point, I was at burnout. I know I definitely rolled into the end of the season with some pretty shoddy work a few times. I was working at such a frantic pace that I never got to see the results of what I was doing during the season, and so by the end I kind of just felt worn down to nothing.
I spent four years running through this cycle of extreme anxiety and then falling into burnout. I never recognized it while I was in it - which is surprising because my best friend got out of the league because of the anxiety it was giving him. I think I'd probably still be on the roller coaster if the league hadn't shut down - and while I'm sad the league is gone, I'm also glad that I'm not working there anymore.
One of the most insidious things about burnout is that you don't always realize that you are in it. When I was in that postseason rut, I always told myself that I could just work myself out of it - and thank goodness I didn't have any real deadlines that during that time because I might have really tried to.
Since I've started working on my ADHD in earnest, I've come to realize that working harder is rarely the answer - but it is something that so many of us with ADHD believe is the answer. We've been told that we're lazy or that we just need to apply ourselves. Unfortunately, that belief is something that is only going to lead us into burnout.
There are three main components of burnout,
Exhaustion - usually both physical and emotional
Depersonalization - which is when we lose our enthusiasm, for well, everything
Inefficacy, which is that sense of ineptitude I was talking about earlier
Listing out those components of burnout makes me realize that people with ADHD are definitely at higher risk for burnout. That's like a typical day for me. Do you know how often I feel like I can't do anything, right? And then, when I feel like I'm unable to do what I'm trying at, I lose my enthusiasm for doing it and then end up exhausted because I've been working so hard. So yeah, those of us with ADHD are probably more predisposed to burnout.
Fortunately, there are things we can do to keep ourselves from burning out and also things we can do to help us recover from burnout.
I've never been good at setting boundaries - especially with myself. When we're trying to prevent burnout, one of the most vital things we can do is set reasonable limits on our work. After coming to terms with how unhealthy working for the league was, I realized that one of the significant issues was that I hadn't created boundaries on when or how much I was working. At one point, I did say that I was going to be taking Fridays off since I usually had to work at games on the weekends. But really, that just meant I wasn't scheduling any new work on Fridays, and I used it as a chance to catch up on work that had been piling up.
And when work is piling up like that, it is tough to set those boundaries. But you know what? Sometimes stuff piles up. Sometimes things don't get done. When I got a message that we needed an update on an article at 10pm, I didn't need to do that work right then. I mean, if I had been sleeping when that message came in, I wouldn't have read it until the next day anyways. It would have been fine. It's essential to set those boundaries for when you aren't working. Now that I have young kids, I make it a rule that I don't work in the evenings - it's not fair to them, and honestly, it's impossible to actually get any work done when they're trying to distract me. It's just frustrating all around, so it's better to just not do it.
Giving yourself boundaries for when you are working also means that you need to be taking time off from work. I've come to realize that means I'm also going to need to take time off from doing this podcast sometimes. Sure I love what I'm doing, but that doesn't mean I don't need recovery time as well. So yeah, I'm going to be having a few weeks here and there where I'm not putting up new content. That's kind of scary as a content creator, but also something that's important for my mental health.
Next, we need to be prioritizing self-care, and boundaries are going to come in again here too because it is all too easy to try and skimp on self-care to get a little more done. No, self-care has to come first. If we're not taking care of ourselves, we are going to be shorting ourselves in the long run. We let not taking care of ourselves, become a habit, and then we just wear ourselves down.
Often when we're thinking about self-care, we're thinking about just the basics of taking care of ourselves. Getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, exercising - but self-care is more than just doing the minimum to keep you going. Yeah, I know you could get by with less, but we don't want to be "just getting by." We find ourselves in burnout when we spend too much time just getting by, so just getting by isn't our goal.
And self-care is more than just the basics of sleep, diet, and exercise. Are you getting enough sunlight? I mean, I live in Washington State, so sometimes the sun can be a little hard to come by, but it's important, so I still try. You've also got to be making sure that you're getting out and seeing friends. We're social creatures, and lack of meaningful time with friends and family takes a toll. I had a busy week this week, but I still made it out to lunch with a friend because keeping up that relationship matters to me. So go beyond the basics with your self-care - make yourself a priority.
But one thing we've got to make sure of is that we're not just numbing - which is when we're doing stuff to get away from the world around us. Self-care is about taking care of your needs, numbing is about shutting out the world. Relaxing and bingeing on Netflix can be self-care, but if you're only doing it to block out that stress at work, it isn't actually going to be helping. A key difference is a deliberateness of what your doing - sitting down and watching Netflix to spend time with my wife? Yeah, that might be self-care. Dropping down to the couch and turning on Netflix because I don't want to deal with anything else? That's numbing.
The last thing I want to say about preventing burnout is that we don't need to be sprinting to our next goal all the time. We've got to slow down and just go at our own pace. I know that it can feel like we're behind sometimes, even a lot of the time, but there is no finish line. If we're trying to run this endless marathon at a dead sprint the whole time, well, our legs are just going to fall off at some point. All the duck tape in the world isn't going to fix that.
Sometimes it takes us a little longer to do things and that okay - and I'll be honest this is something I still struggle with a lot. I've come a long way in accepting my ADHD, but one thing that I always find hard is genuinely believing that some things are harder for me. There are obvious things like when I forget what I'm saying mid-sentence, but there are other things that I still sometimes believe I just need to punish myself for. Like when I'm having trouble sitting down and finishing what I'm working on. I know beating myself up over it isn't the right answer, I mean I've tried that for most of my life, and, spoiler alert, I've yet to see that actually produce good results. But what has helped me, slowly but surely for sure, is coming to terms with the fact that ADHD does make things hard, even if I can't see how.
If we can, we want to try and prevent burnout, but we're not always lucky enough to recognize it in time to stop before it hits us. I know when I've hit burnout, it's often because I get into a cycle of believing that I'm just not doing enough and so I try and just do more more more and more - which is really just throwing gasoline on that fire.
So we've also got to know how we can recover from burnout.
I wish there was an easy solution I could give you all, but everyone's recovery is going to look different. But really that first step is going to be taking some time and reassessing what actually matters to you.
Burnout is often a symptom of when your reward no longer matches the amount of work you're putting in. When you lose sight of what matters to you and why you're doing what your doing, the reward is never going to seem worth it.
An excellent way to work on that reassessment is through journaling. When I'm just trying to think through a problem, I often have trouble with thinking in loops and never really articulating my feelings. When I spend the time to write down those thoughts, the structure of the page really helps me understand what I want to say.
For me, getting out of burnout has often meant getting out into nature and doing some kind of physical labor. My last bout of burnout several years ago, I remember getting out to Mt. Rainier and also tearing down an old shed. I also greatly restricted my access to technology - video games and social media are really easy for me to use for numbing, and to get out of burnout, we've got to stop numbing.
We've also got a pretty good blueprint for what else is going to help us get to that recovery. All those things that help prevent burnout are going to be essential to start adding back into your life. If you've been living on a diet of ramen and Clif Bars for a couple of months, find some ways to add in some real foods in your diet. If your exercise routine has mostly consisted of counting the steps between your couch and your fridge, then call a friend and see if they want to go on a walk with you (double points for getting active and being social).
To reiterate, burnout sucks. It sneaks up on us, and it drags us through the mud. It can feel like a cycle we're never going to get out of, but with some patience and some focus on managing our ADHD, we can work on preventing burnout and living a happier life.
This Episode’s Top Tips
Burnout consists of three parts - exhaustion (both mental and physical), loss of meaning in our work, and a feeling of ineptitude. Burnout is a slow grind and we've got to pay attention to why we're feeling unmotivated when doing tasks we normally enjoy.
We want to prevent burnout by setting healthy boundaries around our work, prioritizing self-care, and remembering to take time off. Not comparing ourselves to others and accepting that our ADHD makes things hard will also help us with not feeling like we're so far behind everyone else.
If we do hit burnout, we need to reassess what are needs are and identify what was causing us to burnout. Take some time off and figure out what really matters to you. We often hit burnout when our rewards don't match our efforts.
