Dealing with Burnout (Patreon)

Hey guys! I've really been enjoying your comments on these monthly chats about life, creativity and all the stuff in between (sorry it took so long for me to reply to comments on the previous one, I got to them a couple weeks ago and your support and personal stories were all wonderful to read!). 

So in keeping with that, I thought in the month leading into the new year it would be a great idea to talk about burnout.

I think I only first became well-acquainted with burnout in college, when time was not equivalent to the amount of work we were expected to do. These were common refrains for my peers and I (probably you've heard them plenty yourselves): "Work you love doing isn't work," "I'll sleep when I'm dead," and "grind until you die." None of these are healthy or true, but I didn't know that at the time.

I was doing a bachelors in animation. People would often nap on top of their desks. They'd boast about how many consecutive all-nighters they'd pulled or how many nights in a row they'd eaten ramen and Kraft Dinner. Romanticized and touted as a lifestyle, it didn't really occur to me that none of us actually enjoyed this. Tempers flared over innocuous things, one of our peers was hospitalized for sleep-deprivation, and most calls home ended in tears. I myself only ever called my Dad when I felt like I was at the end of my tether, on the verge of a breakdown, and considering whether it was all worth it. His response, invariably, was: "they're torture-testing you. They want to know that you'll be able to handle the pressure because it will make your work in the real world seem easy by comparison." 

I know he was trying to marry sympathy with consolation, but this advice always rang a little hollow. It implied that my life in the workforce would be easier, but so far all my professors had implied their studio jobs had been just as, if not more, high-pressured and stressful. In my third year, I interned at an animation television studio as a designer. I loved my boss, but I realized pretty early on that I didn't want his life or his job. He had a newborn baby, yet told me multiple times that he'd slept at the studio overnight to get work done. The empty tuna cans on his desk, which he'd called 'lunch,' did not escape my notice. I'm not one to judge, because for some people that could be a happy life! But not for me. It horrified me that I was heading in the same direction. 

In one way, I was lucky. I'd already started taking commissions to pay the bills my student loans couldn't cover, so when graduation loomed and everyone's stress moved from 'finish my film' to 'find a job', I already had one. Industry day came, and I turned down every offer. Resolutely. I knew I needed a break and this was my opportunity to take what I'd learned in school and steer it away from the industry that would cost me my social life and personal happiness. In another way, I wasn't lucky at all. Because it wasn't just the industry responsible for this collapse of work-life balance. College hadn't just taught me how to draw, it had taught me that burning the wick at both ends was the only way to make a living, and that my work would have zero value if I didn't. I took this toxic mindset with me into freelancing and commission work, where I would recreate the industry I left behind in my own home.

I graduated nearly seven years ago, and I'm only now beginning to unlearn those habits. The habit to work from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. To check messages even on evenings and weekends. To draw until my hand cramps, or the rest of me is in too much pain to sit upright, or I get sick and my immune system can't recover for weeks. The habit to treat everything except work, including my relationships with friends and family, as secondary, and resent every errand, activity or bodily function that postpones or interrupts my productivity. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a lot of you relate. It seems all too common-place these days.

We're working hard, but we aren't working well. For the past decade, during college and after, I've been in a near-permanent state of burnout. It goes beyond exhaustion. It's not something a nap, a bubble bath, or a spa-retreat can fix. It's a state of mind. Even when I'm not physically working, I'm mentally working. If I'm on holiday, I'm thinking about the work that's piling up for me. If I'm with friends, I'm wondering how much longer the work is going to take. Christmas became a special kind of hell. I was taking time off, weeks in which work was doubling, the time I had to do it decreasing, and my money, spent on travel and presents, steadily dwindling. Money which, once depleted completely, would require extra work to replenish. Worse, I felt like my family didn't support me, understand, or appreciate this sacrifice, and I resented them for it. I'd end my 'holiday' with an insurmountable pile of work and no cash to coast off of, and so burnout became seemingly inevitable. I was miserable, and that misery was polluting every aspect of my life.

If I could go back in time, I'd take my college self by the shoulders and scream, "IT'S ALL BULLSHIT." Grind until you die, sleep when you're dead, these are backwards ass shitty slogans to strip ourselves of personhood and make us into machines. We are not our work. Our work may be meaningful or passion-driven, but it is not who we are, because none of us can be defined that simplistically. I realized that, no matter how much I loved drawing, it was not all of me, and in narrowing my focus I was only teaching myself to hate what I loved and, by extension, hate myself. I came to the conclusion last year, when I felt hopeless and driven to extremes of emotion, to therapy, that something needed to change, and that something was the way I thought about and executed my work. 

I'm not saying I'm perfect now, far from it, but I'm learning. In my first attempt to nail down what I should do to avoid and identify burnout, I wrote down the signs and what I should do about it. The 'what I should do' part is the hardest, so I'll come back to it later. All that said, here's the list I made of signs and symptoms of burnout, so I'm at least more aware of what leads to it and how to avoid it.

1. Just say "no."

One of the instincts school taught me that I needed to kill, was taking on more work than I was finishing. No matter how cool the project or commission, it cannot be added to an already over-crammed schedule. 

2. Exchange, don't add.

If something comes up that I REALLY want to do, I have to take an equivalent project or item off my to-do list first. Not by completing it, by abandoning it. Time is my most limited resource and I can't afford to keep indebting my future self to my past commitments. If I'm not willing to do this, it means my current projects are clearly worth more to me than the new one. The new one can wait or go away entirely.

3. Get militant in defending routine.

Both working and non-working hours. Don't work constant overtime, and don't let well-meaning friends and family invade my work schedule. I risk resenting both if I do.

4. Schedule me-time.

The first thing that falls by the wayside when I'm overwhelmed are the things I do for pleasure. I need to see this for the early warning sign it is and cut that shit out.

5. Don't beat yourself up.

I need to accept that sometimes I'm going to fall behind. This isn't the end of the world if I stop treating it like it is. Don't beat yourself up. The work will get done when it gets done.

6. Spend more time with friends and family.

Another early warning-sign is resentment for social commitments and isolating myself. There's a difference between normal levels of introversion (for me), and total hermit life. I need my friends and I want to be there for them too.

7. Work smart, not hard.

Long, gruelling hours are counter-productive. I've seen this in practice. A task that would normally take a day, takes me 3 when I'm burnt out. If I took two days off instead, the third day I'd get that task finished in the time it should, and still within the same timeframe. Take the break when it's needed.

8. Feelings aren't permanent.

At some point in every project, you'll hate it and want to quit. Don't. Quit. This feeling is transient. It will pass, but the feeling of regret if you quit won't. On the other side of it, you'll be glad you persevered. 

9. Self-care.

Sleep 8 hours. Eat healthy and regularly. Drink lots of water. Take walks. Read in the bath. Your body needs all these things to function well.

10. Acknowledge accomplishments.

How often have you told yourself 'I got nothing done today' when the reality is you just got less done than expected? The worst part about burnout is that it leaves no room for celebration when you accomplish something or hit a milestone. Instead, your sense of accomplishment is overshadowed by what's next. Take a moment to revel in each success rather than wallowing in future drudgery. 

So those are all the things I use to avoid burnout, but what do I do if I already am burnt out? When I first wrote these (about six months ago), I thought I had it figured, but then I realized this prescription was prevention, not a cure. In writing all the usual, trite tips of 'treat yourself' and 'get 8 hours of sleep', I realized that the best cure for burnout is none of those things because I'd been doing all of them and it hadn't helped. There isn't anything you can DO to fix burnout, because the best cure is to do nothing. Paradoxical as that sounds, burnout is when my brain is so full of EVERYTHING that, like an overtaxed fuse box, my circuits blow and I cease to function at all. So to recover, I need to stop EVERYTHING, which can actually include bubble baths and meditation if I'm only treating those things as a means to an end, a fast-track back to my job. If they are part of a checklist, then they're probably only adding to my sense of overwhelming exhaustion, not helping it. This was a huge epiphany for me. Just do nothing. Sit. Stare out the window. Go about the day without any plan or purpose. Does that make sense? Just be instead of do. 

Ironically, after writing this I found an online essay published recently calling millennials 'the burnout generation' so maybe something about 2018 got us feeling some kind of way, and trying to be kinder to ourselves in 2019 ;) 

Anyway, these things have helped me a lot. I find myself less frayed, more present, and happier since using these as my guidelines. Maybe it can be helpful for some of you too? Do you relate? What kind of things help alleviate burnout for you?

P.S. nowhere here do I want anyone to feel like I'm blaming patreon or my commissioners for my burnout, this was ENTIRELY self-inflicted pain that could have been avoided if I'd learned how to balance work properly! Luckily I'm learning better, and I still love what I do whole-heartedly ;)