Avoiding burnout and overwhelm
My grandmother worked in the textile mills of New Hampshire from age fourteen until she married at twenty-five. I am grateful to have more choices than she did.
Obviously, sleep well. Eat well. Get exercise.
And if you’re doing all of that and you still feel awful, what then?
My hypothesis is that burnout comes from a mismatch of our expectations and our choices.
To fix that, we can adjust our expectations, or we can adjust our choices.
When we’re locked into a rigid set of expectations and aren’t willing our able to reconsider our choices, life becomes a sliding-block puzzle with no missing square. There’s no room to move anything around.
We can start by at least making sure we have that free square. Even better, we can pull all the squares out and rearrange them to our liking.
The times when I have felt burned out have been the times when I have had a lack of apparent choices, unreasonably high expectations of my own performance, or both.
For example, about eight years into my journey as a music teacher, I grew bored with teaching music lessons. Instead of making changes to my life and schedule to allow me to take a break from doing this work, I spent a lot of time trying to understand what had gone wrong and trying to recapture the spark.
I treated my boredom as a personal failure when it was simply part of my evolution as a person.
At the time, I couldn’t have known where my career was going. I see now that couldn’t be where I am if I had continued to assess my self-worth based on how good a music teacher I was. Trying to double down on teaching and reinvest in it made everything worse.
The difficulty was compounded by how close to the edge I was living. I was working long hours and making little money, hoping that it would pay off eventually.
I am capable of taking on a very heavy workload when I’m on a mission and feeling good. However, I have to be careful not to build my entire world around that best-case scenario. Otherwise, when my enthusiasm starts to flag or I want to do something else, I won’t have the resources to pivot.
After all, I don’t mind working hard when it’s my choice and it’s something I want to do. But when I feel trapped, I’m not going to be having fun anymore, even if the activity itself hasn’t changed.
Like many other people, I went through a hard time during the early pandemic that felt a lot like burnout. Out of necessity, I did what needed to be done to keep my businesses operating and survive.
In the back of my mind, however, I was rewriting my obligations and making space for something new. I acknowledged to myself that running a school during and post-Covid was going to look a lot different from what it had looked like in the past. I told myself that I didn’t necessarily have to commit to spending the next several years investing in new staff and systems to make that work.
Sure enough, by the time things started to go back to normal, I realized that I was done. I was ready to move on. And this time, I didn’t try to fix that. Instead, I put my energy into creating as smooth a transition as possible for my students, my staff, and myself. It was hard. It took months. But I didn’t feel burned out. I had a timeline. I knew that it would eventually be over. That allowed me to show up with my best self the vast majority of the time — and my teaching team was able to do that, too.
I don’t know if the way that I’ve been able to self-manage through the threat of burnout and overwhelm would work for anyone else, but I’m interested in learning more and exploring whether there is anything I can do to help others navigate the experience.
Above all, I’ve found it valuable to let go of the sense that there is something I should be doing differently. The shoulds are optional. What we have are choices — what we do and how we think about what we do — and the more choices we exercise, the more we will find. That’s my best antidote to the misery of burnout and overwhelm.
