Signs of burnout; but what does it actually feel like from the inside?

Burnout, used so many times, always with the mindset that burnout = break, burnout = rest. I knew this. With the confidence of a rat.

I had read about it. I had helped people through it. I knew the metaphors, the frameworks, the language. Almost heedless of how one actually experiences it in their body, their mind and soul.

Until I found out I didn't.

I remember my first group supervision session. All new faces. I shed a tear without any explanation. I asked my supervisor if I could go off camera; it was my first day and I didn't want this as a first impression.

She was speaking about structure and boundaries. How we can have our own and colour them our way. How they stay despite others revolting against them.

I recollect what that sentence did to me. How the tear in my eyes changed into shedding an ocean of it. I just couldn't get myself to talk. My lips pursed out of embarrassment. It was just three of us; but it did a lot more work than I thought it would.

It was the start of something. Start of my love towards relational work. I felt it in my skin. Goosebumps like something had just struck right. And this time it wasn't even a solution. My legs restless, shaking up and down. My eyes sore, swollen from all the salt water they released.

I tried my best to understand it. Thinking that would just solve it.

My third group supervision session, I brought up a case and somehow pivoted to how messed up my workplace was. How much it felt like customer service. Almost chasing every rating. Every session a race to prove my worth. Going overboard. The crisis line turning into something unfathomable.

My peers applauded my courage and strength. But one line from my supervisor and it came back; flooding out like a river; She knows she is courageous but it looks like she is tired of being that. It sounds like she is running on empty.

That was it.

And yet I still thought; this session I would overcome all of these feelings piling in my body, floating in my back, grappling to hold onto my muscles, my shoulders, my scapula. They called it trapezitis. Until after almost all the MRI scans the orthopaedic called it somatic. I remember my nerve in my forehead going, wtf? you think it's in my mind? There was a minor issue in the report. My overthinking mind left perplexed, wanting to understand what somatic even meant.

I never paid attention to it. I took a week off. Came to the decision to leave my job; blaming everything on it, hoping it would solve everything else. My last working day came and I gave myself three days off.

Three days off. To recover from burnout.

That was the solution, right?

It started getting worse.

Slowly the ocean of tears came more often than not. A creeping sensation in my body moving from my core towards my periphery. I shook my legs harder, up and down up and down. Some days almost made me feel I was completely okay; just a bad day. But then it came in chunks. Weeks to months. Getting worse before my period. Almost like something was being pulled out of me.

I lost myself. More in the process.

I stopped planning. Later, initiating even a simple walk felt like a battlefield I had to step onto with myself. Going out with friends felt easy. But by myself; despite discovering myself; felt like a heavy weight in my neck.

My body rescued me and protected me from not giving myself a long enough break. From the thoughts that someone like me; a professional; cannot afford to waste time resting, right?

Every me-time became a lab. An aha moment waiting to happen; My mind an F1 track where ideas for work, for content raced like cars with the DRS on. I thought it was beautiful. I was in awe of my mind. I didn't want to lose it, but I kept calling it a blessing and a curse. It became difficult to be in my body. To be me, in my mind, in me.

I was exhausted. Empty. No fuel. My reserve was unreserved. My car was wobbling and making noise; starting, but more often stopping. Starting with abnormal speed, ideas, strategies; but along with it came me leaving my mind, my body. Almost like a fog had filled in instead.

On a rickshaw ride home, I typed into Google: executive dysfunction symptoms.

When I read it I froze. It was scary and yet funny. I could feel it in my bones. I noticed I had pressed myself tightly into the seat. I could notice the seat was black but I couldn't defrost myself. My legs pierced into the bottom of it. Black. Until I forced myself to breathe. To notice more than just the color. The temperature of the seat. The floor. Slowly I got myself back. Luckily, within my vicinity. I remember speaking with my therapist, I remember still trying to act like I have got it together and pushed myself into confirming what google said with my therapist.

Things I had taken pride in started getting away from me. My photographic memory. My impulse. Executing my beautiful ideas. Crying more in sessions with my own therapist and supervisors.

I started a mission to come out of it. But the more I tried to do something great to change my feelings, the more I fell deeper into it.

I read everything. I could have written a thesis. Yet nothing landed. It got more difficult to stay within myself and not distract myself into working, into showing up more, more like their therapist, less like their friend.

I started acting. I wanted action to change my feelings, my state. But it wasn't about that, right? It was the experience and the repetition of that action. Of expanding my world into something more than my work and my family.

I am still not like freshly toasted bread. I am black and burnt. I smell and I serve bitterness alongside everything good. But I realised that I feel like that bread; but I am not bread that can simply be thrown away and replaced. I had to be patient. To not be driven by my feelings. I showed up. Expanding the world I had in my mind. I went out alone to a café, still on empty, still unmotivated, still sad, finding a hundred reasons to give up on the plan. Telling myself and believing in the technicality, not the experience.

My feelings provided all the information about how this was not a good idea. But they weren't instructions.

This action I took did some work. It planted a seed. I'm still watering it. I still feel the burn out and I choose to yet expand my world.

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Written by Tanisha Sanghavi

Tanisha is a counselling psychologist and co-founder at Therapea, working with young adults on food-body relationships, attachment, and complex trauma. Work with Tanisha →