Why rest alone doesn’t fix burnout
Read me in: 2:16 min
Rest is vital for burnout recovery, and it’s only part of the solution.
If we rest and recover, but then go back to the exact same life that burned us out in the first place, then what we’re really doing is creating a cycle. A pattern where we go from burnout to burnout. Fill and empty. Fill and empty.
If you’re reading this you probably understand what I mean on a gut level because one of the big signs of burnout is a feeling of “I just can’t go on. I can’t do this anymore”. Your body knows. Your system knows. Something needs to change. The challenge is figuring out what, exactly, needs to change, and how to change it without causing more burnout (because change is hard and takes energy).
This is the work I do with my clients, and it’s a lot like restoring an ecosystem. There are stages to burnout recovery which each come with their own landscapes, insights and challenges. And, because everything in ecosystems is a circle, these stages overlap, iterate and happen in layers. Here’s a visual of how I think about it.
A lot of conventional advice about burnout falls flat because it focuses only on increasing capacity through rest, which is important. In fact, it’s step 1! The Initial rest allows for everything else to take place. But like any type of healing in the body, rest becomes active rest that then becomes strengthening. That in turn shifts into a natural cycle of rest and exertion. That’s the system we’re working to restore in burnout recovery (well, one of them.)
Burnout doesn’t only come from over-work or exertion. There’s sensory overwhelm burnout, caregiving burnout, misalignment burnout (aka: moral injury), under-use burnout (bore-out) and more. And you can experience more than one kind at once. Ultimately each one stems from some sort of imbalance. The solutions to your burnout pattern will be as unique as you are. In my experience, exiting the burnout cycle requires us to move through:
Deconstructing the lessons we’ve learned from systems, institutions, and people who’ve claimed agency over how we use our time, bodies and expression.
Rebuilding our capacity to learn, effort, create and rest; and our trust in that capacity.
Navigating how we actually move through the world and interact with it and its challenges.
Cultivating the interests, systems, boundaries, and natural motivation that works best for us.
And as we do so, we each get to solve the puzzle of our unique burnout experience. With my clients, I always try to zoom out and see the larger patterns there. For example, maybe it’s less about not exerting yourself and more about expressing yourself more. But we work on the little stuff that adds up. Maybe we find you a bunch of smaller wins that lead to big reductions in your mental load (like, did you know you don’t have to fold workout clothes? At one time, I sure didn’t). But most importantly, we tackle the complexity of living as you in a world made both of magic and wonder, and exploitative systems. And we work to put as much of the agency, and creative control over your life back in your hands.
If this resonates, the burnout coaching page is a good place to learn more.