Burnout Unraveled Part 4: Recovery

From Exhaustion to Empowerment: Recovery Insights from a Two-Year Burnout Journey

//This is an entry in the "War to Writing" series. Join me as I explore my Air Force service, retirement, and transition to my storytelling journey in November of 2024.//

Everyone who experiences burnout has a story that goes with it. Burnout is not a single event. It’s a season.

If you are struggling with burnout, know that:

Burnout is not a sign of weakness. Recovery is possible but takes time.

Everyone’s recovery path will be different, but I will share what I’ve learned (so far) from mine, and I hope you find some ideas, perspective, or tips that help you or someone you know recover from Burnout.

---

These are the main ideas we’ll explore below as we wrap up this series:

Burnout

• is not a sign of weakness

• has no clear beginning or end

• can be identified, prevented, reduced, and overcome, but takes time and effort.

A Wholistic Approach to Recovery

• begins with identification

• then apply reduction techniques

• consider sleep, nutrition, and exercise

Timeline

• Most of my research indicates recovery from burnout can typically take 2 years or longer.

• I’m about 2 years into my burnout journey and have seen significant recovery, but mostly in the last 6-9 months.

• I’ll highlight a few pieces of my story to illustrate key learning points and milestones.

Next Recovery Steps

• Look Inward

• Connect Outward

• Seek Alignment

---

Before we get started:

Disclaimer:

• I am not a doctor.¹

• Take what I write as entertainment only, NOT medical advice.

• Burnout is a massive topic. I will only scratch the surface here. (Feel free to ask questions or add more thoughts to the conversation.)

Okay… Let’s go! 8^)

Recovery takes a Wholistic Approach

To add some context, it seems the best approach to recover from burnout is from a wholistic perspective. While this generally means a whole-health (and spelled: holistic) approach, what I mean is when you fully incorporate insight from identification, prevention, and reduction, recovery becomes easier and possible.

The catch is, too many of us begin focusing our efforts on burnout after we’ve moved beyond the ID and prevent stages. Because of that, we should start with a review of some important points from earlier in this series.

Recovery Begins With Identification

Recovery begins with identification. That can be difficult because it is often complicated and is different for everyone.

In Part 2 we discussed some definitions of burnout and we found some key takeaways to increase your awareness, aid your struggle with burnout, or help those around you:

• Burnout is exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation, fatigue, frustration, or apathy resulting from prolonged stress, overwork, or intense activity.

• Early signs are detectable.

• There are no "Quick Fixes."

• Regression of Executive Functioning Skills is a hallmark of Burnout.

• It is possible to work through and overcome burnout, but it takes time.

• Burnout has a significant and measurable overlap with ADHD and Complex PTSD.

Apply Prevention and Reduction Techniques

Recovery looks a lot like prevention and reduction because it is accomplished by effectively implementing similar strategies used to prevent or reduce burnout.

The following tips can be effective when they apply to your situation. I suggest looking at the list below as a toolbox. Figure out which few work best for you and use them well, rather than trying to use a bunch of them all at once.

While all these tips can be effective, I found I could only focus on two or a three at a time in practice. Additional details can be found in Part 3 of this series.

Tips to Lower Stress and Prevent or Reduce Burnout

• Recognize red flags

• Have creative outlets

• Take care of yourself

• Get support where you can find it

• Get real and go there

• Increase positive thought ratio (3:1)

• Check alignment in professional roles

• Prioritize self-care / Establish self-care routines

• Set healthy boundaries / Learn to say “No”

• Develop strong coping skills

• Don't strive for perfection

• Know when to move on

• Exercise your body and mind

• Identify what you need from your work

Thoughts for employers, organizational leaders, managers and supervisors

Leaders, managers, or supervisors taking care of their people is huge, and it doesn't happen often enough.

These tips can be precise action points for "be the change you want to see in the world." If implemented well, you can help prevent or reduce burnout in your workplace and reduce the need for burnout recovery efforts.

• Increase Psychological Safety

• Maintain temporal boundaries

• Assess alignment between skillset and job tasks

• Regularly assess workloads

• Establish clear roles and responsibilities

The Big 3

These three tips stood out as the “big picture” items for reducing burnout, and apply just as well for recovery:

• Work/Life Balance - Take care of your family first.

• Boundaries - healthy boundaries improve relationships and mental health.

• Perfectionism - is really about “finding fault easily”

If you would like additional references, I include some links below.²

Sleep

One thing often overlooked is the importance of quality Sleep. I simply forgot to mention it on the first pass through this series. I think I saw it as a big enough issue to keep it separate, but it deserves a solid mention here.

Bottom line: Proper sleep is important. Poor sleep causes many health problems, which can increase the chances of experiencing burnout and increase its impact. On top of that, experiencing burnout leads to lower quality sleep, which reinforces the cycle by reducing our ability to function effectively.

This article from sleep.com tackles the relationship between sleep and burnout quite well. If you’re looking for more info on sleep and burnout, I suggest checking it out.

How Burnout Affects Sleep — and What to Do About It

“Americans are reporting feeling more burnt out than ever. Here’s how to manage the stress and stop overwhelming feelings from ruining your sleep.”

https://www.sleep.com/sleep-health/burnout-and-sleep

Concerns regarding sleep will likely get integrated into this series for future presentations. Please let me know if you have questions or comments about this subject so I can make sure to consider your thoughts. :)

A quick plug for diet and exercise: they help too. In addition to proper sleep, quality nutrition and moving your body help you stay healthy in general. It is easy to stop caring for ourselves as well as we should when we’re experiencing burnout. Diet and exercise are largely under our control and help us generally feel better when properly addressed. :)

Recovery Timeline

Burnout is a bit of an enigma. Not only does it require a wholistic strategy to address, it also requires a broad view from a timeline perspective. (There is no quick fix)

Recovery can be lengthy

Recovery can be lengthy - I’ve heard 2 years is a common starting timeline. I touched on that in my "2 Years in a Blink” missive when I wrote about how two years of my life seemingly vanished as I fought through other challenges, including the deeper parts of burnout.

It seems my timeline is common, if not typical. If you find yourself recovering from burnout, I hope my words here provide tips to help shorten your struggle.

I noticed the first big signs of burnout in early 2023, then retired that summer. My bout with burnout intensified in retirement, which I did not expect and was not prepared to fight.

It took almost a year and a half, and a few days at a cabin in the woods, for me to get any real footing in my fight against burnout. After that it was another 5 months before I started writing here (which helped greatly) and several months of research and writing before I realized the term “burnout” was the appropriate name for one big enemy I was fighting.

My Timeline - Before Solitude

The events in this timeline illustrate what my burnout experience looked like over the most intense two-year period. There were different lessons learned at different stages and I hope you find some of them useful. I'm still working my way through this burnout journey, and I hope the lessons I can share provide some value.

Autobahn Freeze — May ‘23 — This is when I learned I had limits I didn’t realize. My executive functioning totally stopped when I tried to accomplish a simple task, and I had never experienced anything like that before.

“Go, Go, Go” mentality didn't work — July - October '23 — When I first retired, I pushed hard to keep motivated, active, and productive. I learned pushing so hard was making my fight against burnout even more difficult.

Vocational Rehabilitation — November ‘23 - March '24 — I stopped pushing so hard to stay productive and tried to get my head squared away to get a job. Through the lengthy rehab process, I learned that others could not understand my struggles and were not equipped to assist.

"The Interview" — March - Jun '24 — When I managed to land a job interview, I still didn’t understand my struggles or know how “out of touch” I was. The VP of the small company stated he feared I wanted his job, but I was just trying to find work. Though the interview process only took a couple weeks, I spent a couple months figuring out what happened, and I learned I was due for some serious internal reflection.

Looking back, I consider all this part of the downward trajectory of my burnout journey. At this point I had been retired for a year and still didn’t know what I was fighting or how to fight it — but I knew I was going to fight.

My Timeline - After Solitude

In the summer of 2024, my big turning point came when I began my recovery with my first attempt at solitude. Progress since then has been slow, but steady.

If you are on a burnout journey, I hope you have already found or soon identify the point where you feel progress toward recovery.

If you are searching for that turnaround place, I encourage you to consider trying something different to spark that moment - break your routine. If a cabin in the woods isn’t your thing, maybe try a day at the beach. Perhaps adding a lengthy walk to your daily routine can help.

However you arrange your personal recharge and reflection time, make that time sacred. Do something special or different to recharge. That may help you get moving in a better direction.

My First Attempt At Solitude — June ‘24 — For my recharge and reflection time, I spent two nights alone at a cabin in the woods. It wasn’t as relaxing as I’d hoped… but it was instructive. I learned I was not ready for silence.

After my first attempt at solitude, I realized I needed to do something, anything, to try to sort out the chaos in my head. I still wouldn’t name it “burnout” for another 9 months, but at least I had identified that my racing thoughts were a key target to address.

Looking Inward for Survival — July - November '24 — To calm my mind, I started thinking about writing. A couple of former colleagues and an old friend helped me realize I could write to recover better — for myself and my family.

That led to publishing here on Substack, and I finally began seeing a small measure of recovery in my rear-view mirror.

I learned that writing helped calm my mind. Organizing my thoughts and filtering them on a page was helpful by itself, but shaping my thoughts to provide value to you was probably the most helpful piece of this puzzle.

Next Recovery Steps

To wrap up this series, it is important to touch on three final things:

Look Inward — Yes, grab at lifelines, but swim too.

Connect Outward — because we need to connect, not control.

Seek Alignment — Whatever that means to you, finding alignment will help tackle burnout.

Look Inward

We should look inward because burnout often overwhelms us when we focus too hard on changing the world around us, instead of changing ourselves.

Identify what is in your control. (hint: outside yourself that may be less than you think)

I discovered a large part of my early burnout struggle was perfectionism… manifesting as trying to control things I couldn’t or shouldn’t control.

Part of an old prayer sums up this point well:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

I’m not suggesting homework like a writing prompt to brainstorm things you can, can’t, or shouldn’t control… though that’s not a bad idea if you are so inclined. :)

Instead, I offer this:

There are many tools listed above - find the best ones for you and apply them to your situation.

If you notice, pretty much all those tips involve things we can address within ourselves.

Connect Outward

While a bit of solitude may be helpful to gain clarity and refocus, it is not a long-term sustainable solution. :)

Isolation is not the answer.

When I think about my burnout journey and ask: “What do I wish I had done differently?” my best answer is: Prioritize human connections with more people around me.

Connection with others may be the lifeline I almost missed. There were times I didn’t realize I had been ‘blown overboard.’ My family was trying to reel me in, but I was just bobbing along not reaching for their help.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I pushed my family away when I was sinking and thought I could swim on my own. For a while, I didn’t even know how to tell them I was struggling.

Learning to reconnect with my family was how I grabbed their lifeline and got out of the water.

Even though burnout can make us feel alone, or perhaps because it does, we need to prioritize connecting with people.

I found it important to remember that while I felt overburdened, connecting wasn’t about “unloading everything,” it was about remembering I had people around me who cared about me and wanted to help.

Seek Alignment

After all the research and writing for this series, everything about burnout seems to come down to Alignment.

The following quote is from an article that digs deep into this concept: Embracing Your True Path: 12 Powerful Strategies for Living in Alignment and Achieving Well-being

The author, Valarie Alvarez, Founder of Wellness Bum says:

…living in alignment is about being honest with yourself about your desires, fears, and dreams. It’s about making decisions that are true to your core values, even when they go against the grain.

I know this is easier said than done.

So many life priorities don’t allow us easy freedom to ‘align’ everything the way we would like. (If you’re a perfectionist, you may already feel this quite clearly.)

What we can do is take a few steps to seek alignment:

• Step Back - Look at the bigger picture. It is easy for ‘normal’ or routine things to be out-of-alignment. Too many routine things out of alignment will increase stress and hinder burnout recovery.

• ID Alignment Options - What can you change? Routines? Responsibilities? Your reactions? A job change is one big option to re-align, but we can start smaller. Many tips in the list above provide ideas for areas to seek alignment. Finding alignment in small things can be effective as they add up.

• Integrate - As you identify ways to improve alignment, integrating those ideas into your life is the next, most important step. When you find things to re-align, make sure you follow through and make those changes stick.

For more detail on the topic of Alignment, the article above is full of quality information.

At the end of the day, if you look inward to control the things you can, connect with others, and seek alignment in your life, you will find recovery from burnout is within your reach.

Thank you.

Thank you, my dear reader, for joining me on this journey. Writing this series has been a fun challenge. We just finished a 12,000-word deep-dive, but it feels like we only scratched the surface.

This is probably only the beginning of our burnout discussion here at jofty’s Corner. I am not declaring ‘burnout’ to be my elusive niche’, but many things I plan to write will easily tie back in here. I am confident we will return to this topic from time to time.

Next month there will NOT be a 4-part series. I don’t know when (or if) I’ll tackle a project this size again, but if I do, it won’t be this May. :)

Thank you again for your time. I wish you a pleasant week and look forward to seeing you next Saturday.

Take care,

- jofty 8^)

1. I am not a doctor.

2

The following links address burnout from many angles:

• Harvard Business Review - Creating the Best Workplace on Earth

• Psychology Today - 7 Strategies to Prevent Burnout

• MyWellBeing.com - Preventing Burnout: What Therapists Want You To Know

• Time.com - How Perfectionism Leads to Burnout—and What You Can Do About it

• Pushfar.com - 15 Simple Ways to Avoid Burnout and Improve Your Work-Life Balance

• Medical News Today - 7 strategies to help prevent burnout

• Positive Psychology - How to Prevent Burnout in the Workplace: 20 Strategies

• American Heart Association - 9 policies companies should implement to reduce burnout, according to employees

• Wellness Bum - Embracing Your True Path: 12 Powerful Strategies for Living in Alignment and Achieving Well-being