Burnout Sabotage!

Maybe you’ll recognise this: you’re coming up to a holiday, some kind of respite from your normal routine. You’ve been looking forward to a break for a long time. You’re feeling stressed and burnt out at work and at home. But right before the rest begins, you get into a big argument that will have consequences you need to sort out, or you begin making lots of plans for the week and overcommit, or you take on a huge task that’s going to absorb all your time and be tricky to complete, or instead of getting the rest that you need, you stay up late ‘catching up’ on essential TV viewing you’ve missed, or doom scrolling, or literally pulling your hair out. What is going on??

It could be that your brain is in fact sabotaging the very thing that you need - rest! Our brains learn by repetition, so if our daily experience is stress and high levels of cortisol or anxiety, our brain codes this as ‘normal’. In other words, your brain could be so used to being in that mode, that it doesn’t know what to do without stress, and so it sees non-stress as threatening! And what is the function of our brain when we are under threat? It’s job is to get us back to ‘normal’ as quickly as possible and away from any kind of threat. 

High stress levels mean our brain is receiving lots of dopamine for survival (not the pleasure kind), therefore low stress means lower dopamine, which makes us feel bored and even uncomfortable. You aren’t choosing to create chaos, but your brain is feeling as though it needs it.  

Does it seem like your brain actually feels more comfortable in chaos? Does it deal well with high stress situations and in fact maybe it needs a little stress in order to get anything done? Is there a part that, now you think about it, probably creates a little mess or chaos if things are all going ok and you’re starting to slow down? This is your nervous system bringing you back to your ‘safe’ space. In my own experience, I used to think I was just a bit stressed and I’d distract myself with a bit of scrolling, or an extravagant DIY project, or I’d make plans to see people every single day and multiple times a day for the whole week I was off work. My brain would recoil at the idea of being on my own and quietly not busy because I was scared of what might come to mind when it wasn’t filled with things to stress about.

So how do we stop our brains from sabotaging our rest? 

Firstly, we need to retrain it to accept rest as an acceptable state. Part of that is the conscious acknowledgment of rest being good, and also not judging the impulse to sabotage. I sometimes talk to myself like I would a child - I re-parent parts of myself. I might think ‘I know you find this hard and uncomfortable, and I understand why, you’ve been on high alert for so long, but you’re safe, and rest is good, and we need to practice to get better at it.’. It might seem weird at first, but we all need reassurance, and if no one is giving it to you from an external source, we can give it to ourselves! 

Secondly, we need to build in little practices that retrain the brain to accept rest as a useful state. You could consciously count 10 breaths at your desk with your eyes closed. You could look at the sky for a few moments and watch the clouds. You could introduce a gentle rocking motions or rhythm to your body, or humming; these can regulate our nervous system and allow us to accept moments of peace. (If your mind is rebelling at these suggestions, it may already think rest is a ridiculous waste of time and you need to get on with your day. Sabotage!!)

Thirdly, we can try to achieve the same dopamine response but from a more sympathetic or kind source. For me, good sources of dopamine are live music or comedy gigs, great coffee especially if it is a new coffee-shop find, cold-water swimming (makes me feel more alive than anything ever but I also hate the thought of it and sometimes can’t make myself get in!), sitting in a sunny spot in my house and feeling the light and warmth, growing seeds and every day checking how big they are. There are many! 

Lastly, we might need to talk to someone - like a therapist - who can help us to work out what it is our stress response is doing for us that is useful. There’s a theory in most therapeutic modalities, that even the things we do that seem not growthful are in fact working for us in some way. So for me, my stress response was allowing me to carry on in a very high-trauma job. It gave me enough adrenaline and dopamine to feel like I was getting things done and achieving my goals. It was keeping me from processing the trauma I was seeing on a daily basis and saving it up for a later date. That last one turned out to be pretty catastrophic. 

Don’t wait until it is too late to ask for help or speak to someone about burnout or burnout sabotage!