How To "Do" Burnout When You're Not Fuckin' Rich

If I read one more essay about burnout in which the author talks about taking a sabbatical, I’m gonna set myself on fire.

Feeling burnt out? Well, do I have some tips for you:

Light a candle… hope that fucking helps.

Eat well with all the time and funds you have to cook nourishing meals from scratch.

Ask for help from one of the many other people in your life also drowning in an ocean of shit.

Take some leave from work… oh wait who the fuck can do this???

Have you tried crying all the time?

There’s been a rash of articles about burnout lately and I’ve realised that I’m going to cause myself an internal injury if I keep all my frustrations inside me for a single more second.

I’m not, by the way, gonna name-check the pieces because I’m a dick but I’m not a colossal dick. And also because all perspectives on this burnout epidemic are useful, even while they’re annoying and the advice and tips might be irritating. Obviously burnout is a real thing and spotlighting it and figuring out why it’s happening is important. Sharing our experiences is good for us – I (a person who has written TWO memoirs – an objectively obnoxious thing to do) am a big proponent of sharing our experiences. And yet, if one more person shares their experience of just realising that they had to “slow down” or “step back from work” I might start setting up burner accounts with abandon and lean fully into unhinged trolling. So I’ll do it here with a modicum less insanity.

By the way, I’m very aware that my ambivalence towards these books and articles is not entirely rational. To expect one writer to write a piece about something like this that will appeal to the circumstances of a broad group is fundamentally batshit, I accept that. But I am not a reasonable animal so allow me this rant.

It’s hard to speak on burnout without sounding like a complete knob: “oh no, all the little emails I have to send are getting on top of me!” But we all know it’s a real thing and it’s a hard thing even if it isn’t the realist and hardest thing that can happen to someone in the grand scheme of the world. That said, for the purpose of this essay, I am not going to punctuate every paragraph with wordy games of emotional tetris about the myriad worse things that can blindside us in the course of a life, I’m just going to assume that we all are aware of all the caveats and that we all have different intersecting privileges and disadvantages when making our way through life.

Burnout is often framed as the outcome of over-working and out of control ambition. This fucks me off for two reasons:

a) It makes burnout the fault of the individual instead of rigorously examining the societal system that holds us hostage to work, provides barely any subsidised childcare and has such an ailing mental health system that people in need of urgent care must re-schedule their breakdowns for 18 months hence.

And b) it feels like a very narrow take. The level of attention given to this overworking brand of burnout encourages the erroneous idea that burnout is the preserve of the relentlessly ambitious, the perfectionists and the extremely successful. This disproportionate focus, does make sense though, in that most of the burnt out high achievers are the people who actually have a platform to speak about it and so we hear about it. But this narrative ignores the fact that burnout, for the vast majority of people, is as a result of just trying to keep our heads above water. We’re not getting burnout from scaling the heights of success, most of us are getting burnout as a result of jobs we probably don’t even really care about all that much, jobs that may only just about cover our basic expenses. We’re getting burnt out from looking after family members and caring for children, often leaving no time to really mind ourselves, and in this context, burnout as a result of a voracious appetite for success feels a little… irrelevant.

I have experienced burnout once, earlier this year back in the Spring and the onset was not one that I recognised initially as burnout. The descriptions I’d read in books and online so often equated an incident of burnout with a period of over productivity, it described something closer to a crash whereas I found the burnout began subtly, incrementally, in the form of things I’d usually do and be completely unfazed about – elements of work, life admin and so on – starting to feel much much more difficult than usual. I write a weekly column for the Sunday Independent and I love doing it, but I noticed that it had become really taxing in a way it had never been before. Other work commitments followed suit. Things that were previously easy, were, bit by bit, becoming colossal. Soon all kinds of different things began to feel heavier and heavier. Staying on top of laundry, staying on top of emails, showering with any kind of regularity, looking after my three kids, even talking to my husband and friends – all suddenly had a weight to them, making completing each task feel like I was pushing a boulder forwards. The heaviness began to extend to just getting out of bed in the morning. I’d wake up with a dense feeling of flatness and apathy.

All around me, my friends were experiencing some variation of the same and daily, we shared our fantasies of suffering a mild, but hospitalisation-worthy, injury just so life would piss off for a few days.

Advice to solve burnout seems to always comes back to us as individuals, us doing things – or not doing things as the case may be – and never feels tailored to anyone who doesn’t have the option to take time out or cut back. The advice never suggests what you should do about your rent or mortgage or childcare costs or sick parent or kids while you "pull back”.

And look, I’ll be honest. I tend to really pull down the shutters when the person doing the advising doesn’t have kids. It’s not that child-free people’s time isn’t also important and being drained by work and life in general. But the reality is that people with kids are operating in a totally different system. It feels dodgy to say this part out loud sometimes because it can be read as complaining, but I do think this is the fucking reality. A 2021 study into the lives of 2,000 parents found that “the typical parent has just over 30 minutes to themselves every day once work and parenting duties are tended to.” Ooof. Elsewhere in the study they said that on average, parents skip 227 meals a year which feels apt, given I just ate a bowl of Bran Flakes for “lunch” at 4pm.

But conversely, I do think there’re positives to having kids when you’re feeling burnt out because they are joyful little creatures and, in many ways, the fact that they simply will not tolerate you bowing out of the day-to-day of life is occasionally a good thing. Where as for those who are child-free, burnout can be terrifyingly isolating and may, in turn, leave you even more vulnerable to the slow creep of depression.

So what are we actually supposed to do?

I’m sorry but this headline was a trick. I have no answers…

Have you looked into self care at all?!

Something I do recommend and helped me earlier in the year was asking myself if I had even one thing work-wise that I could get a bit of space from. This might sound like the “pulling back” that I was athletically maligning above but it’s really not. I took one thing off the list of my full time schedule for a few weeks, still leaving a full time schedule minus one thing. Of course, it was absolutely better than nothing. This could look like asking your manager for a deadline extension or just accepting that your house can go to shit for a while.

The other thing I did was eat a lot of Koka noodles. And enthusiastically fed them to my family. People are always treating burnout with healthy eating when I think it should actually be treated with easy eating. Eat healthily when you’re better and have the bandwidth to organise that. When you’re on the floor and struggling to brush your teeth, eat a fucking Koka noodle. If you can get a banana down you too that’s good enough.

Lastly, whenever I could, I’d get into bed straight after putting my kids to bed and I’d have tea and chocolate while lovingly scrolling my phone and not beating myself up with any shite about how this wasn’t “good for me”. Because fuck that.

Tell me, what has worked for you when you cannot see a way out of the perpetual exhaustion? Aside from mild injury requiring hospitalisation… we all know we’d still be bloody life admin-ing from the hospital ward.