Of burnout and recovery

(Nimue)

Burnout is a consequence of exhaustion, and overwhelming stress. It can be more of an issue for autistic people thanks to the increased vulnerability to being overwhelmed in the first place. If what I’ve read is a fair assessment, it can take months, or longer to recover from a burnout. To recover, you have to take time off, to rest and to heal.

Except that isn’t always possible. How many people out there are already burned out but cannot afford to stop and rest? Most households are one or two paychecks from disaster, many benefits systems are punitive. There is no resting and healing if doing so is going to involve a real risk of losing your home or being unable to afford to eat,

So you burnout. You have some time where you cannot function at all, and then you crawl back and repeat the things that broke you, until it all happens again. This was me, for years, crashing every six to eight weeks. I was working multiple part time jobs while trying to sustain the creative work and the domestic side of the household. There were a lot of other stressors on top of this, undermining my ability to sleep and making me tense and hypervigilant. As a freelancer you get no sick pay, no holiday pay. There was no time off, no respite. Eventually I got to a point where I couldn’t physically keep going and I had nothing left to push with,

I’ve seen it suggested that recovery from one burnout isn’t quick. How long would it take to genuinely recover from years of living in a constant cycle of burning out? Both my physical and mental health took an absolute pasting. My body is slowly recovering, and my mental health is now reasonably ok, but it doesn’t take much to throw either into difficulty. There can be no healing without being considerably gentler with myself. No more trying to run when I can barely stand – literally or metaphorically.

Here in the UK we have a longstanding epidemic of mental illness, and millions are forced to rely on food banks. There are massive systemic issues here, underpinned by austerity as a political choice. I don’t think the ways in which I have struggled and suffered are that unusual. How can anyone cope in a capitalist system that grinds you down and threatens to punish you once it’s crushed you? There are some 300,000 homeless people in the UK at the moment.

The answers to this lie in a radical political rethink. That’s not going to happen without a culture shift. We need to move away from systemic cruelty and towards more compassionate approaches to work and health. We need to treat health like it matters. Practically speaking, ill health costs a country a great deal. Well and happy people are better able to contribute to society than those who have been crushed by that society.

As individuals, we may not be able to do much to help people who are in crisis. Encourage people to rest and recover, be kind in face of difficulty, do what you can to help. Gentleness and being supportive is worth a great deal. Building a culture of kindness is going to take time. We can contribute to that by challenging those who blame suffering people rather than the systems that hurt them. We can resist narratives that describe sick, exhausted people as lazy. We can value quality of life over economic activity. All of this is tied up in challenging the idea of perpetual economic growth. It’s that pressure for constant growth that means we are all constantly expected to do more with less. It doesn’t work, it’s killing the planet and we all deserve better.