How early stories of harm may lead to burnout
By: Megan Brewer, LMHC
Burnout can be an easy topic to read about cognitively, file away as good information, and then disregard without letting it impact you further. But as we talk about burnout in this article, I encourage you to not only engage it cognitively, but to consider the personal implications for how it affects your own life.
Burnout can be discussed in different contexts, such as in our careers or personal lives. but let’s start with a simple definition of burnout that can cover a lot of contexts. Burnout is the depletion of a substance that is needed to keep something going. When we strip the definition of burnout down like this, we can easily see burnout in a number of different areas, such as in the physical, emotional, mental, and relational arenas. Anything that requires something of you—some output of energy or effort—will 1) require you to have what is needed to engage the work you want to do, and 2) require replenishment to keep going.
Now, if we think about what it means for our bodies to simply function on a daily basis to accomplish the things we are working at, we are not only talking about basic needs like food, water, and sleep. We are also talking about our nervous system. You have a nervous system. That nervous system is specially designed to respond to the world around you. It tells you what feels safe and what feels threatening, and it even does things outside of your conscious awareness in response to your environment. The more you pay attention to how your nervous system is responding to the world, the more you learn about your capacity to function healthily in it. Paying attention to how you are impacted by the world around you is how you start to develop an understanding of what takes and what gives you the resources you need to engage your life the way you want and need.
Learning to pay attention to and tend to your nervous system is something we start learning very early. Before we even know we have a nervous system, our parents or caregivers are teaching us how to regulate it. They help us by setting healthy emotional and physical boundaries for us, so we learn where we stop and others start. They reflect back our emotions and help us make sense of how we experience the world. They help us build resilience through being a safe and responsive presence when things do not go well inside of us. When we are cared for well, we tend to learn how to care for ourselves well.
But what happens if these necessary relational attachment engagements are not present or are distorted to meet the needs of the caregiver? We grow into adults with nervous systems that are ignored entirely and/or are over-focused or hyper-vigilant regarding others. There are many ways our stories and our home culture growing up would lead to avoiding and disconnecting from the parts of us we really need in order to not overuse our energy and end up in burnout.
For example, let’s talk about a situation in context. Let’s say you are a little girl who grows up being “parentified” by one of your parents—meaning you are put, in some way, in the role of the caregiver for your caregivers. Maybe you were the one responsible for tending to mom’s emotions and helping her feel better when she was stressed instead of it being the other way around. Or maybe you were responsible for parenting siblings in ways your parents should have been doing themselves. Maybe your father or mother were not getting the emotional care they needed from the marriage and would instead go to you for the emotional attunement they needed from their spouse. While one of these scenarios is playing out, one of your parents may have also been emotionally unpredictable or abusive, causing your nervous system to be on high alert at all times to help you anticipate the blow up.
Growing up in experiences like these and many more unmentioned ones can cause us over time to ignore and disconnect from what our nervous system is designed to help us regulate. They can also shift our focus away from how something is impacting us and towards the experience of someone else. If this happens, we can spend more energy caring for someone else or being worried about the reaction of someone else than what we really need to be healthy. These may be some of the factors that contribute to the ways we often ignore the warning signs of burnout and push ourselves beyond the energy and capacity we actually possess. Unfortunately, many of us can continue to push ourselves past the yellow and red flags our nervous system is sending up until it begins to burn out on a chemical level.
There are many articles easily accessible on the basics of workplace burnout and emotional burn out, but hopefully this article helps you think a little deeper into the ways you have learned to relate to yourself and the world around you and how they may be roots of what leads you to feeling burned out.
One helpful place to start working on this is to risk listening to the ways your body and mind are already giving you signals that something is not right and then notice what makes you want to avoid or disconnect from what they are trying to communicate. Where have yellow and red flags been coming up in your relationships, job, and personal life and how long have you been avoiding them? Notice how the story you’ve lived in makes it difficult to see warning signs and address them appropriately. This is often helpful and necessary work to do with a therapist who can help you notice where your story is leading you to burnout.
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