If you’ve ever taken a walk with a three-year-old, you’ve seen curiosity in action: there is fascination and wonder at every turn. Curiosity is a wonderful emotion to feel and a hallmark of health and happiness. Later in life, we tend to lose our sense of curiosity and wonder; it somehow slips through our fingers in the white knuckle-grind of adulthood. It’s important to slow down, loosen our grip on the wheel, and pick up this essential tool.
Curiosity is about questions and learning: a desire to know the truth. It’s useful not just for its emotional benefits, but for solving problems, big and small. Learning is the first step in getting yourself unstuck — and it’s the first place to start with burnout.
Just like a physical injury, it’s imperative to address burnout early on. The worse it gets, the less able we are to see ourselves as separate from it, and the more likely we are to lose our sense of agency and hope to recover. And just like a physical wound, the trajectory of healing from burnout is largely predicated by the timeliness and quality of that initial first aid.
If the wound is left to fester, burnout infects our thinking – it becomes rigid and binary. We see villains and victims at every turn. Our options become black and white: leave the job or continue to suffer; give up the career we’ve worked so hard to build. The choices feel impossible; now there’s an unsolvable unmade decision added to an already overwhelmed brain. Unmade decisions are like open tabs in our inner operating system, siphoning off energy as we continue to soldier on.
The first step in liberating yourself from burnout is to get curious about it. Attend to it with concern, noticing the symptoms. Like any other problem, burnout needs clear-eyed assessment, rather than a spiral of self-criticism and shame.
Let’s shine that beautiful light of your own tender attention on the place where it hurts.
Curiosity can be applied here, like a balm, to ease the pain. If you can step out of knowing, to a place of inquiry — a desire to learn and understand – this in itself brings benefits. You find distance, a little perspective, a relief from the white-hot cauldron of shame and blame. You’ve stepped out of the stream to a place beside it, where you can take a breath and investigate.
Start by noticing your thinking patterns. Just as a physical injury can become angry and inflamed, burnout can infuse our thinking with inflammatory language. Harsh, judgmental statements about yourself and others, playing on repeat: That is a symptom– a signal of a soul in need of care.
Often it starts with disillusionment: we no longer feel connected to our work and the world in the way we once did. A veneer of cynicism crystallizes around us, feeling self-protective at first, then calcifying into a prison. Next, the anger turns inward, and we lose faith in ourselves, feeling disempowered and ineffective.
Why start this inquiry with your thinking? It’s the driver of your experience: your emotions, your actions, your inaction, even your energy – are created and directed from these sentences running through your brain. There is so much in the environment that is out of your control. Here in your inner world – this is where you can start to take the reins.
You’ve taken the time to read this post; can you spare a few minutes more? Open a document or blank piece of paper and ask yourself: what are the thoughts you have, on repeat, in a typical workday: about your work, about yourself? Write these thoughts down. Don’t censor or worry about grammar or wording, just download your thoughts onto the page.
Next, look at the sentences you’ve written. In doing so, you’ve already begun a radical act of liberation. These are your thoughts: the sentences offered up by your tired, weary brain trying to make sense of it all. These are, in fact, just sentences. They are not: laws of the universe, the weather report, moral imperatives, or any kind of absolute truth. Thoughts are not necessarily facts – not for any of us.
What do you notice in this tangle of sentences, now that you have a bit of distance from it? Any rigid, black and white, all-or-nothing judgements? Inflamed language? Notice how much of the sentences skew negative, even catastrophic. Notice how much of your thinking are you using against yourself.
Just as you wouldn’t ignore a bleeding wound – don’t ignore this kind of thinking. It’s a signal … not of your flaws or shortcomings, but of a mind that’s been in overwhelm far too long.
