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.