On being the answer to life, the universe, and everything
Today, I am the answer to life, the universe, and everything. At least, my age is.
I’m excited for this birthday. My kids say this is strange. They’ve reminded me that when I turned forty, I was not happy. I was beside myself about getting old. They say covid has changed me.
They’re right. I’ve changed. But it’s not covid.
Back when I was stuck...
When I was 38, I walked into my trainer’s studio for the first time and said, with dire urgency, “Ok. I’m turning forty.” She (understandably) did a double take when I continued: “We have 15 months to whip me into shape.”
When I turned 39, I was just as beside myself as my kids remember. I felt like my 40s were barreling down on me, closing more doors than they were opening. I felt exhausted and stressed and overwhelmed and unfulfilled and as though I was constantly reaching for something I couldn’t see.
On that birthday, three years ago today, I wrote myself a series of ultimatums. About my health, my work, my daily life, my marriage. It was a lot of, ‘if x hasn’t changed by y, then z.’ It was not a vision for the future. It was a manifesto of what was wrong in the moment.
When you're in crisis or in burnout, that’s all you're able to see — what’s right in font of you. You can think about yourself and the now. But thinking about the future actually feels harder than dealing with what’s right in front of you.
I didn’t know I was in total burnout. I didn’t know what burnout was doing to my brain and my body. I didn’t know the perpetual cycle it plunges us into, making it ever harder to break out or recover. I didn’t know I was stuck.
My dear friend Amery’s workshop on leading with resilience drove home for me only recently just what I had been experiencing back then. The lesser-known symptoms of burnout, like defensiveness — in response to yet another thing being added to your list, at work or at home, you need to defend yourself; to make the case for all the things you’re already doing and how overwhelmed you already are and why they need to just stop already. Or the “I just can’t” feeling — when you stare at your email inbox and nothing in there is that hard, but you just can’t; you just can’t open and reply to that email. It’s simple, but you just can’t do it. But, perhaps most toxic, were the tunnel vision and self-doubt. I couldn’t connect daily goals to my larger purpose. Because I couldn’t connect to my larger purpose. I was stuck in tunnel vision. And, plagued by self-doubt, even small decisions could kick off endless thought spirals. Friends and colleagues saw a competent, decisive person who just needed to get out of her own way. In some ways, they were right.
...I did the next right thing, enough times, to get unstuck.
Burnout isn’t just about being a workaholic. It comes from a combination of life and work; of life demanding more of us than we feel equipped to handle. (More on that here.) So, the path out is going to take a combination of addressing life and work, too. (And by the way, between politics and the pandemic, we’ve all experienced the effects of prolonged stress. So 2021 will be the year we’re all climbing our way out together.)
In the three years since the start of my reckoning, I’ve done and changed things that I was afraid to do; that I thought I couldn’t or shouldn’t do. Both personally and professionally. I’ve made hard choices — about my work, my marriage, my friendships. I’ve done the hard work. And, today, I’m not stuck in a myopic focus on the now. I see doors opening to me, not closing. I’m stronger, in mind and heart and body, than I’ve ever been. I’m able to practice grace with others, because my focus has expanded beyond myself and the moment. I’m unstuck.
But, the details of what I did are less important than the lessons they taught me. Because, and I don’t have any data to back this up, once you’ve fallen into the burnout cycle, you might be prone to do it again. So you need to know yourself well enough, to know the warning signs and the way out.
These are the practices I want to remember, should I fall into the burnout spiral again. And, as we all climb our way out of a year of prolonged stress and anxiety, they’re the practices I want to share.
Find your sense of control.
When we’re stuck in overwhelm, we feel powerless. When we feel powerful over our lives, that sense of overwhelm dissipates.
All of the practices that carried me from where I was three years ago to today, I can now see, were in service of finding a new sense of agency.
Do it yourself.
No one else is going to fix it for you, or at least give you the answers. Finding agency, and your way out, is trusting yourself to identify the problem, find the solution, and make it happen.
This is doubly hard in burnout mode because you’re flooded with that feeling that you just can’t. But as I did this, I saw the changes spread through all aspects of life and work, large and small. Others saw the change in me, too. And their observations reinforced my efforts.
It’s ok to start small and work your way up. Kind of like habit stacking. Trust in yourself builds over time just like trust in other people does. Choices about small things you can easily control, like your diet or workout schedule, can snowball to making major life decisions without a smidge of doubt. You’ve found your sense of control.
Accept the reality of the situation.
Sometimes, the prolonged stress that leads to burnout is partly caused by not accepting the reality that’s right in front of you. Staying for way too long in something that isn’t working for you, whether a job or a marriage or even a friendship, can steadily break your sense of control. You no longer can see what’s likely to change, and what’s not; what you have control over vs. what you don’t. But once you accept the reality of the situation — what’s working for you, what isn’t, how you’re really doing, you can make the right choices and changes.
Choose to listen to yourself.
When you don’t feel in control, and you aren’t accepting the reality that’s right in front of you, you’re prone to listen to voices other than your own. Or let them plant seeds of self-doubt within you. But the only person who knows what’s best for you is you. I got unstuck when I chose to believe myself. When I chose to explore the hard things. When I chose to do the hard things even when I wasn't sure I was ready.
Do work you believe in, and that suits you.
I’ve never not done work I believe in. That part was always there. But, working as a solo entrepreneur went from being the perfect thing at the perfect time to just not. At a certain point, I started to again feel the need for a team; the need to build something bigger than myself. Fighting against that reality, and not listening to myself, added to my constant stress, and surely came through in my work and my relationships with my clients. Because whether we want to or not, we always bring our whole selves to our work. Moving from solo consulting to a leadership role in a small startup allowed me to do work I believe in and that suits me. It’s not easy, of course. But it fits. And so it feeds me instead of draining me.
Recognize that You have more choices than you realize.
Almost always, when you’re stuck, you have more choices than you realize. Because you can’t see beyond today. But also because, sometimes, we hold ourselves back from making changes because we don’t like to change our minds. Changing something can feel like accepting that we were wrong before. We don’t like being wrong.
Make space — physically, mentally, emotionally.
To allow for the things you want, you have to make space. This isn’t some variation on the secret. It just…is. I recognized the things that did not serve me. And I shed them. Things are just things. People are harder. In some cases, people self-selected out as I made these changes. In others, it had to be a conscious and even painful separation. But, as I shed what didn’t serve me, I built up my sense of control, I felt more in ownership of my life than owned by it, and I saw the effects of that in how I moved through life, who I connected with.
Don’t underestimate the simple things.
I can fall into discounting simple daily habits like drinking enough water. But emerging research is confirming that, to function as our highest selves, we might just need to take care of our most basic needs (at least first). Because our brains aren’t made for thinking. They’re made primarily to regulate all that stuff that falls out of balance when we don’t keep up the deceptively simple daily stuff. Falling out of basic good habits might be a surefire way to start back on that slippery slope towards being stuck, especially if you’ve been there once before.
It’s only been three years, but that reckoning now feels like a lifetime ago.
Birthdays, anniversaries, and all the other milestones we build into life to distract and amuse us, are kind of arbitrary. They’re also worthwhile forced reflection points in lives built too much around being busy.
We need moments to celebrate where we were and who we were, at this time last year or five years ago; where and who we are now. The space in between. To recognize where and who you are; and where and who you would’ve been if you’d remained on that path instead of veering off.