2021 I had long covid for almost 14 months. I still worked and burnt out once about halfway through the year.
2022 I recovered and am burning out right now again halfway through the year.
I have plenty of energy. I work on compelling side projects, exercise everyday, and raise two kids. I just don't really feel valued at work for a plethora of reasons and it makes it hard to want to work right now after busting my ass everyday.
What I've found is the "treatment" to burnout is clarity. As I continue to reflect on why I'm burned out, it's many things that are bringing clarity to my long term goals in life. This goes back to self-determination theory of feeling a sense of competence, relatedness, and autonomy. When any of these are threatened or perceived that way at work, I see myself burning out.
This seems to be significantly undiagnosed. How do you know? What treatment has significantly helped? Getting good sleep? Mindfulness? Walks? etc?
I ask because I'm writing a book about this and want to learn more.
A lot of what you’re talking about would come under the category of dysautonomia which certainly plays a part but is not the only part. For many people treating dysautonomia may be sufficient to recover.
It’s massively undiagnosed. Doctors in general are rather oblivious.
In the long term sleep apnea will fuck up your heart due to hypoxia and it can't be good for your brain or anything else. Plus sleep disorders seem to possibly be tied to Alzheimers (one theory is that REM sleep helps clear amyloid proteins). It's just bad news in general and it's widely under-diagnosed given how fat the american population is.
CFS does not have a specific treatment. There are standard courses that are recommended, but there is no consensus on how to treat it. Usually treatment involves treating underlying disorders such as depression.
Burnout is a stress response. Unlike CFS, you should improve with rest and taking time. Note that this doesn't mean you are going to go back to a hundred percent because you take a few days, but seeing improvement on vacation is a good indicator of burnout.
Had COVID 2 weeks ago and since then I can't really focus even with meds and sleep refreshes me even less than before.
All that being said, do you have some resources to share? Sounds like I could be one of the people you describe...
There is no simple explanation nor easy treatments. It’s also very different depending on what’s actually wrong with you. I have hEDS so the treatments I do focuses on immunomodulators like LDN and LDA, hormone replacement therapy like Testosterone and T3, dysautonomia meds like propranolol, and research peptides like ipamorelin. I take a lot of vitamins as well but I’m not sure about their efficacy. These are serious meds and not recommend for most - but they have recovered a lot of functionality for me. People should do their own research. My hope is that they find out that CFS is caused by auto-antibodies and could be cured by a neutralizing aptamer like BC007. But the CFS research is only starting in earnest now with LongCovid so it could be many years before a proper treatment is available.
Turns out that I was sensitive to wheat, milk/unaged cheese and almonds but didn't know it yet. That saps serotonin, which made it feel like the world was continuously attacking me. Which feels like the withdrawal symptoms of untreated ADHD, like quitting smoking constantly. But at the time, I thought I had something like CFS or fibromyalgia. I believe that these may be correlated with inflammatory foods, and that I might have eventually developed a chronic condition like hypothyroidism or even cancer, so it's worth taking a food sensitivity test. I took the https://www.everlywell.com (no affiliation) test of 200 foods and credit it with pretty much saving my life. Or at the very least, my psyche.
I think what helped me mentally recover during the pandemic was TikTok and the shared awakening that so many people have been experiencing. Love/hate for that app is probably going to correlate with how feeling/thinking, intuitive/sensing and perceiving/judging someone's brain works though (I'm an INFP) so YMMV. I find that shifting realities from a downward to an upward spiral has made me more grateful and aligned me more towards shared prosperity. When I let my ego's goals finally die after 20 years of negative feedback loops, I found that the world picks up the slack so those goals happen anyway in a magnified way, which is manifestation.
What I'm trying to say is that if anyone is struggling with burnout, there's probably another cause which isn't apparent. For example, if you never have time to have a hobby anymore, it's probably time to set boundaries and communicate your needs. If you have no motivation for art or life goals, you might need to pencil active rest into your schedule, so that you give yourself a chance to become bored so you can hear your calling and discover a path to self-actualization. That peaceful source energy that's so abundant in nature is all but denied to us in the modern world where we can't even see the sky or hear a bird.
If that all sounds impossible, then those self-imposed barriers are probably attached to emotional trauma. Like if you're sacrificing your peace for a loved one, it might be time to do some shadow work to understand why you're overprotecting them from their own human experience and dignity. This can look like making the opposite choice than the one you have been making, and observing how reality reconfigures, who's blocking healing, who's helping, etc. It might be painful in the short term, but as each positive feedback cycle engages, it gets easier, and the other side is almost always better than what came before.
I want to emphasize though that this is a situation where leads are more important than evidence. For example, my sensitivity to wheat was shown as normal but I have since discovered that it causes instant inflammation in my gut and I gain 5 pounds the next day, then go into a slow decline if I keep eating it. And it showed normal sensitivity to beans because I've been avoiding them, but I still can't eat most types except maybe garbanzos and lentils sparingly.
Also wanted to mention that I forgot introvert/extravert in my comment about TikTok and one's reaction to it. I was thinking more about how skepticism affects it, but our tastes are more complex than 1 scale, or even 4 bits for the 16 personalities of Myers-Briggs. Even 20-30 bits might not be able to predict them, since every personality is unique.
Edit: "stars in the sky" is what I meant in my previous comment (of course we can see the sky). I'm a bit OCD but with diverging thoughts so brevity is a real challenge for me.