Are You Burned Out?

Full-blown occupational burnout is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a person professionally.

It can strike anyone, but it’s most crushing when it happens after a long climb to a dream job. There’s nothing like the feeling of work bliss turning to ashes except for divorce.

Dr. Dina Glouberman wrote the book on the subject, called The Joy of Burnout: How Burning Out Unlocks the Way to a Better, Brighter Future. The title may seem ridiculous, but it’s not, as anyone who has burned out and fully recovered knows.

“Burnout feels like the end of the world,” she writes in Chapter One. “It’s not. It’s the beginning of a new one.”

Most professionals work for roughly 40 years, from their mid-20s to their mid-60s. Some work even longer, well into their 80s. Virtually none stay in one place, in one job, or on a single track for that entire duration. Otherwise, the mid-life crisis wouldn’t be so distressingly common.

What does slamming into the wall feel like? “Your heart has gone out of something,” Glouberman writes, “but fear, often of the loss of your sense of identity, drives you to work even harder or give even more.”

If you’re on the road to burning out but aren’t there yet, you can slow down and take more time for yourself. Stop working overtime on weekends if you don’t have to. Do what you can to reduce the amount of stress in your life. Get out more and remember that there is more to life than your job.

If you’ve reached the end of the road, though, if you’re truly finished with a long chapter in your life, no extra down time—not even a long sabbatical—is going to work, and you’ll find yourself having to choose from one of three options.

Start a whole new career. This one is the hardest and by far the most intimidating. There are no shortcuts, either. The key here is to leverage the skills you learned from your last career into your next one.

This is relatively straightforward if, say, you’re making the leap from journalism to marketing or from the military to law enforcement. It’s tougher if you want to hop from dentistry to real estate development. Still, the skills and experience you develop in one career will almost certainly apply in another one.

You can always start over from scratch. Lots of corporate managers pull the pin and move to the countryside to open a bed-and-breakfast. There are plenty law and medical students in their 40s and even 50s. The vast majority of these people are happier after they make the transition, though many go through hell first to get there.

Make changes to your career. Sometimes, you just need a new job that’s only a little bit different from your previous job. Maybe you need more responsibility, or perhaps you’re willing to take a pay cut to reduce your responsibilities and therefore your stress level. Jumping from writing to editing might do the trick, or from graphic design to management.

Nurture a new attitude toward your career. One of the characteristics of burnout is disengagement and a complete loss of interest in whatever attracted you to the job in the first place. It might help to remind yourself why you chose your career, but perhaps you’re no longer the same person you used to be. Either way, there is almost certainly some value in what you do or you wouldn’t have chosen to do it, and you may simply need to find something new to appreciate.

Some of us just need to overhaul our work-life balance. There is more to life than work, after all. None of us are here solely to produce. We are also children, siblings, parents and friends. If work is the only thing that matters, why would anyone ever want to retire or go on vacation?

Whether you just need a break or a whole new direction, remember that burnout isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom caused by something that’s wrong in your life, your mind’s way of saying it’s time to make some small or large changes.

Once you’ve implemented those changes, whether it takes a couple of weeks or a couple of years, you’ll feel refreshed and invigorated, like yourself again, only better.

Are You Suffering From Imposter Syndrome?

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Bertrand Russell

Do you feel in over your head? Is fear of failure making you weak in the knees? Are you afraid of being “found out,” that the recent success you’ve enjoyed is based purely on happenstance and that there’s no chance you’ll win the luck lottery twice? Do you dread that any day now a man will show up at your front door and, staring at a clipboard, inform you that there’s been a mistake, that your professional credentials you never deserved in the first place are finally being revoked?

If that’s you, you probably have Imposter Syndrome, a condition identified by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. High achieving individuals are especially prone to it. “The more people think you’re really great,” prize-winning author David Foster Wallace said in the outstanding film The End of the Tour, “the bigger the fear of being a fraud is.”

It’s not quote a mental disorder (it isn’t serious and it requires no therapy), but it affects as many as 70 percent of us at one point or another, and it can lead to anxiety and depression if we don’t come to grips with it.

The good news is that, contrary to how it makes you feel, imposter syndrome means you’re on the way up. You’re either embarking on an exciting new career path or you’ve recently been promoted. You’re outside your comfort zone, but you’re on your way to creating a new one.

Think about lobsters. As these creatures grow, they burst their shells and are temporarily vulnerable and exposed. Over time, though, they create new shells and feel safe and protected again. Their growth is always inwardly driven, rendering their former shells too small to contain them.

That’s you. If you have imposter syndrome, you’re probably growing. (No, you are not getting fatter.) You’re either growing taller or more expansive. Your resume, no doubt, looks better than it did even a short time ago. And the longer you stay where you are, the more comfortable you’ll feel in your new skin until you grow and expand again and begin the process anew.

Bear in mind that the feeling is most likely temporary, though it isn’t likely to switch off all at once. Rather, it will gradually diminish in stages.

It also helps to remember that the problem is almost universal.

“I have written eleven books,” Maya Angelou once said, “but each time I think, ‘uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’” “I still think people will find out that I’m really not very talented,” actress Michelle Pfeifer said. “I’m really not very good.  It’s all been a big sham.” “The first problem of any kind of even limited success,” author Neil Gaiman wrote, “is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. It’…something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said she feels the same way sometimes.

If those four people—and those are just four famous examples—are susceptible to repeated bouts of Imposter Syndrome despite being so spectacularly accomplished, the feeling clearly has no bearing on reality whatsoever. It’s just a feeling. An illusion. It can be safely dismissed. You can tell yourself that the feeling of being a fraud is itself fraudulent.

You know who never suffers from imposter syndrome? Those who don’t care. People who aren’t ambitious, who refuse to grow, who are content to coast through life without stretching themselves or trying anything new.

We all feel like we don’t know what we’re doing sometimes, but there will always be someone who feels this more intensely than we do. (Imagine what it must feel like to be inaugurated as President of the United States. It’s not like the White House begins with a job training program.)

Unless you’re truly a fraud, though—unless you’re prepping for surgery without any medical training, or working as an undercover agent inside a terrorist organization—just give this feeling the middle finger and get on with your day. Each day you finish your work, even when you do it imperfectly, counts as one more piece of evidence that you are, in fact, precisely where you’re supposed to be.