I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.
By Anne Helen Petersen
This is a FANTASTIC article, and I cannot recommend it enough. Petersen points out how many millennials are suffering from burnout: it’s basically our baseline condition.
“Burnout” was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.” Burnout is of a substantively different category than “exhaustion,” although it’s related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.
What’s worse, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task — passing the final! Finishing the massive work project! — never comes. “The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”
Petersen also explores the causes of our generational burnout: we have been trained to be CONSTANTLY WORKING and to see anything that we do that isn’t working as BAD, as laziness, as time we could be using to work. We’re also exhausted from poverty, from mental load, from the expectations the world has placed on us to find the perfect job.
Petersen reminds us that burnout can’t be solved by a vacation or by going to the spa. Instead, she suggests that learning to recognize our own burnout and its causes is key:
The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there’s no solution to it. You can’t optimize it to make it end faster… . The best way to treat it is to first acknowledge it for what it is — not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease — and to understand its roots and its parameters… . It’s not a problem I can solve, but it’s a reality I can acknowledge, a paradigm through which I can understand my actions.
In the end, Petersen concludes that she feels better just knowing that she’s not lazy, or incapable of adulting, but burned out. She gives herself some permission to engage in behaviors that before she felt guilty about: she’s going to learn to see relaxation and her “failure” to check off her to-do list as okay. I think that’s a good idea for all of us.
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