
As the Covid-19 pandemic starts to wind down, the earth is breathing a collective sigh of relief that life can return to "normal". While it's a positive development, Covid-19 ending doesn't mean that we are out of the woods yet. You've probably noticed that there's a new pandemic starting, it's picking up media attention, it's becoming a hashtag, it's trending on social media, and that pandemic is burnout.
If you haven't experienced it, you know someone who has. The problem is, unlike Covid, the symptoms aren't always as noticeable and they can often be unique to the person experiencing the psychological illness.
Having dreams about work, not wanting to leave the house, needing complete silence or hours of staring at a blank wall, tired all the time, lack of focus, working harder to compensate…these are all potential ways burnout can manifest, and this list is far from complete.
So, if this is so serious, why aren't we doing something about it? My answer is, because we're too busy glorifying it.
Start-up environments in general have a reputation for expecting long hours and consistently high levels of output and in return they provide you with "benefits" that don't actually benefit the emotional and psychological wellbeing of their team members. Burnout is considered inevitable and is so normalized that it's often worn as a badge of honor on most teams.
Next time you're in a meeting on a Monday and everyone's talking about their weekend, pay attention to how many people downplay the good time they had, maybe they'll talk about catching up on much needed sleep, or not wanting to move because of the week they had. What comes next is the justification for the sleep or relaxing: "after the week I had", "with the week of work coming up", "with all the work on my plate".
Experiencing burnout in a start-up team is like taking a corner kick on a soccer team. At some point, everyone on the team will check it off their list during the year. Now you may be shocked by that, "there's no way multiple people on a team are burning out in just 365 days…we have long weekends and vacations, there's no way!"
There is a way when you consider the reality that burnout starts long before the symptoms take over and impact your work. You can be experiencing burnout for months before you see any slow-down in your deliverables or mindset if you're a generally high performing employee. What's worse? We celebrate it, we use it as a sign that we're pouring our hearts and souls into the company. If you're not exhausted after the week, working late into the night most days, unable to spend frequent quality time with friends and family, and you talk about it when people ask "how's your week going", you're likely speaking about it not to worry them, but to impress them.
This becomes even trickier in a work environment filled with or run by millennials. Unlike the Boomers and Gen Xers, Millennials can't be satisfied with their work or their life in isolation, we grade everything we do in life on a bellcurve, if you're doing well but everyone around you is doing way better, you're no longer doing well. So, to follow that logic, if you're working until 7 each night and your team member is working until 7:30, you'll be online until 8 the next evening.
So how do we slow this pandemic? How do we make sure it doesn't become an endemic in all start-up environments? Well, like most things, it starts at the top. Managers and executives are notorious for not taking vacations or sick days. They flaunt it, use it to get increases and more stock options, and because their team members see them working so hard all the time, the first thought we have is "I can't let my manager down and take time off if they haven't" because surely, if they were able to take a pause they would, right? Not necessarily.
As someone who sat on the verge of burnout for 4 months and then fully burned out and worked for an additional 3 months, here are the valuable lessons I learned along the way:
Don’t wait for your manager or the exec team to tell you you're crushing it. Decide for yourself what success looks like in your role and use that as your standard.
Learn how to say "no" or ask "what's the priority". Employers will rarely pause to say "hang on, you've got a long going on, let's re-arrange things for you so you concentrate on the right things." But, most of them are very open to moving things around on your roadmap to let you tackle projects in the right order and still sign off at a normal hour.
Don't wait until it's too late to take a break. Similar to medicine, preventative measures are always the most impactful. Take a vacation even if you don't "feel" like you need the break. Take a personal day to go people watch in a park or stare at your bedroom wall and contemplate life. You might no feel it at the time, but the long-term benefits are significant.
Celebrate the positives. Did you have a fantastic weekend? Tell your coworkers about it. Did you sign off on time and have a great evening? Tell your manager about it when they ask about your week. Don't hide your happiness out of guilt or fear that it will make others feel worse.
Know when to walk away. We tend to tell ourselves things will change, or "just one more month and it'll get better". I said that for years in an emotionally abusive relationship and I said it for months in a toxic work environment. They don't change, and even if they do, you don't need to be there to see it, let that shit go.
It takes one person changing their narrative for a revolution to happen. One employee sharing openly about how healthy their work-life balance is for others to want that as well. One employee to say no to a project to protect their energy, or to walk away from a team that isn't healthy for them and others will follow. Rather than holding our burnout and stress as a badge of honour, wear your beautiful life as one. Be proud of your own happiness, it sounds cliché but the moment I started to prioritise that, I realised others respected me more, not less. My work got better, I quit and I started my own business that is thriving. I am embracing my best self every single day, there are absolute SHIT days still, no doubt, but they're no longer paralyzing.
Burnout isn't a way of life, it's a sign to change your life, and no one can know when the timing is right but you. Check-in with yourself and more importantly, be honest and don't hide from yourself. Just like staying home and wearing a mask helped reduce the spread, standing up for your mental health in your organization will reduce burnout, the ripple effect is huge, too huge to delay any more than we have already.
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