The best thing about these burnout discussions is that everyone just makes up their own definition to fit whatever symptoms they want to talk about.
The WHO has a pretty clear definition that I find a lot more useful.
https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupat...
I’ve gone through burnout and mentored a few dozen people going through it. It’s nothing to do with relaxing, or is confined to work. It’s all encompassing, has strong parallels and likely includes depression and an anxiety disorder. It has more of a sense of the inability to initiate anything rather than the inability to do nothing. Everything feels too hard, you feel too old, you see no prosperous future, and you yearn to end everything - not suicide, but to quit work, quit life, and disappear. These sounds like the appropriate mental response to unrelenting and uneasing stress to which you see no way out of. Most people suffering burn out spend an awful lot of time simply doing nothing.
However myself and the folks I’ve worked with as a mentor at work on burnout share the trait we lose the ability to identify things we enjoy - video games, music, travel, etc, lose their redeeming value and they can’t identify what music they like any more or a game they want to play. When they relax, it’s spent ruminating. To that extent maybe the articles point is true.
For me the way out was vipassana meditation and Buddhism. It taught me to master my rumination, detach myself from the stress, and discover the value of simply being rather than being someone or something. I recommend it to most people but only one or two have actually tried it.
I also found a lot of help in meditation and developing and practicing mindfulness. Recognising thoughts and emotions as they arise and to not identify with them was a big eye opener and relief. Just letting thoughts be or talking about it with someone when I noticed a pattern really helped. I think part of it was also processing some buried away issues.
I thought it's not burn out, but just getting older and wiser :)
Very few people over say 40-45 year old are chipper and burst with energy and enthusiasm. On the contrary, most of them are in sort of "Aikido mode", when they try to deal with whatever threats and external demands come with minimum amount of energy expended. IMO, it's a combination of just having less energy at that age, and the acquired wisdom that most things that you could be doing, aren't really worth doing.
Do the people you mentor also do Buddhism and meditation? What did they do that helped (or did they just never recover)?
My suggestion to most is to start with Gil as a teacher -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Fronsdal
He has an enormous amount of recorded teachings and does a daily mediation at 7am PST on YouTube. I would start with this:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq_lRuaNj50Nm-SRxYPFSTyTt...
Regarding recovery I think most people do, but it does require dramatically changing your lifestyle in some way. You’re there mostly due to how you view life and your situation, as well as the situation. I think no one is ever the same and their limits in life are closer than before. You have to be more gentle with yourself, and more aware of yourself. A lot of vipassana meditation is learning to detach your “self,” or awareness from your thoughts and feelings and sensations and being able to observe them without becoming entangled in them. For instance I feel anxiety in my chest. By letting my thoughts and feelings be as they are but holding the tightness in my chest in awareness without judgement, the tightness eventually dissipates because it never really existed somatically. Concurrently my anxiety does as well, and I can then let the thoughts go as well as they’ve lost their power. It’s taken me two years but at this point I am fully engaged in my life, learning and loving more than I ever have all that life has to offer. I’ve got a great job at a late stage startup and switched from senior leadership roles to distinguished engineer roles.
Good luck man. Find friends too, friends are hard to engage with when burned out, but it is helpful.
One way to recover is to just do nothing. The resources will start to accumulate back but it'very slow.
One thing that worked for me was multivitamins. I could see a change in a week.
Not sure if it was proper burnout or something else (bad diet) though. The simptoms look the same.
What I find funny about this is that it would imply I've been burned out since I was 10 or 12 years old. "Just do nothing" was something I never considered possible for me, or desirable in general. For me the struggle was, and is, always about autonomy - being able to do what I want, instead of chores, homework, demands of parents, $dayjob, errands, demands of partner, etc.
It's weird because my job is OK and I love my kids, and it's not that bad - I just feel like an NPC doing this day after day and want to "jump off the rails".
Sometimes the only thing I can fall back on is that even if I can't choose what I'm doing I get to choose how I'm doing it.
I remember one internal dialogue from that time:
-She woke up already. I barely had half an hour today to do something else than cleaning and that's only because I skipped some tasks. Where's my time off?
-What do you mean where's your time off? This was your time off.
It got better when I let go of my mid 30s childless person presumption of having time after work.
Also it got better because my daughter is now two and a half and can focus on an activity for the 114 seconds at worst it takes me to use the toilet.
They would rather be entertaining themselves, being with their families, relaxing, etc.
Yet they have to work, and do things they don't want to do day after day, month after month, and year after year. On top of that they often have to pretend to like it, and to spend time with people they don't want to be with.
It's even worse if they have to commute or not get enough sleep, or if they're not valued at work or don't feel they can make a difference.
After a while, that takes its toll. Some can handle it, but some can't.
The word "burnout," hasn't suffered the same unfortunate fate, although there are those of us who are waiting for competition to declare that they have burned out so we can take their share of the profits etc. It's more of a self-inflicted wound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorde...
Yes it can be occupational, but it can also be applied to home, location, country or life.
When thinking about being burnt out by life, its more commonly known as suicide but not the only reason for suicide.
When thinking about being burnt out by a country, its seen in a variety of ways, like not voting for brexit if you are british and relying on the EU to draw up the legislation, which may or may not be enacted in full. It can be the culture of the country, the way people did/do things because its always been done that way.
When thinking about being burnt out by home life, I think most parents can relate to that, but social conformity means they must maintain a stiff upper lip!
Either way, I take everything people in authority or expertise or both say with a massive pinch of salt. I've seen so much hypocrisy its laughable.
On the point of inability to relax, calcium has a massive stimulatory effect[1]. Sodium (too little or too much) also causes a rise in osteoclasts which release calcium from the bones.[2,3] And there is so much salt in the processed food today (dont think I need to provide links for that), and water hardness is a contributory factor (dont think I need to provide links for that), beit soaking in the bath, having long showers[4], or drinking lots of hot beverages, is it any wonder people cant relax? If you get banged up in a mental health hospital, you wont be eating processed food, so your sodium intake will likely fall, and they probably filter their water so its soft water, to reduce estate maintenance costs.
So yes the WHO has a very narrow definition of burn out, but in the absence of any other definition for the above possible factors, I think the populace apply their own definitions and interpretation of burn out, although needing a holiday could be applied to country/location/home burn out whilst not being recognised as burnt out, like I've described above, mainly because to quote Monty Python "Always look on the bright side of life..."
Also, considering the all encompassing nature of the DSM, I'd have thought they would have had some input on burnout, but it looks like they are still contemplating it as a mental disorder.[5]
"Stemming from a lack of conceptual clarity, the current state of burnout research remains, unfortunately, largely circular and riddled with measurement issues."[5]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2269601/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3060537/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5635092/
In general, there's usually something very pathological going on for calcium to become dysregulated in the bloodstream, such as cancer, hyperparathyroidism, hypervitaminosis D, or hyperphosphatemia.
Sources: any physiology textbook, supplemented with a cell biology textbook.
Hyperphosphatemia is very easy with supermarket cappuccino style beverages as is extremely hard water, and an NHS that fails to act on any diagnosis for several years, even from 3rd party's.
I say extremely hard water, based on the amount of chalky residue left behind in a situation best described as pan evaporation. Never seen anything like it before in all my life.
But then I only have to look at the water and food regulations to see the govt is using legislation to create health problems.
The perfect GDP boosting circle jerk to the unassuming uneducated person on the street, unless of course big business is influencing or writing the regulations?
I fail to see the need to have worked poorly backed political ideologies into an unrelated post unless the intention was to FUD or flame.
The core point
> Yes it can be occupational, but it can also be applied to home, location, country or life.
Completely.