Sunday, November 9, 2014

I Came Undone: One Woman's Horrifying Experience With Burnout

Following years of being glued to her Blackberry and the Internet news cycle, Glynnis MacNicol felt burned out and broken down. But she never expected what would come subsequent: the dissociative glee that came with being a woman who does nothing. Nothing at all.



Some three years ago, after shooting up the career ladder as a media reporter and manager, I quite suddenly quit my very well-paying-if not dream-job at a leading website. And then, for a long time afterward, I did nothing.

Literally. Nothing.

When I did depart my house and venture back into my social circles to attend a cocktail event, or a book release, or a business dinner, I would tell people who inquired (and they always did. I live in New York City, where what you do comes after your label but before your real estate vitae) that I did nothing. Then I would step back and also, with a sort of perverse satisfaction, watch them squirm. It turns out folks don't really know what regarding people who are so nakedly unambitious. It was a little bit like I was inviting them to our funeral. For a long while, this little party trick was my favorite portion about going out.

Very likely I should have been the one squirming-at least after the first few days of this life stasis. Not being independently wealthy, my relatively small savings account has been clearly only going to last me for so long. When I did seriously consider trying to find work, usually after a morning spent paying my bills, the thought of returning to any life in which I was shackled to the Internet, hostage to the news cycle, and consistently sleeping with my Blackberry in hand (frequently I would be awakened by it is vibrations only to discover an intrepid commenter had Photoshopped my face on a porn still and thoughtfully sent it to me) was way too awful. I couldn’t face it.

Instead, during those weeks, and as opposed to all common sense, I turned down two high-profile jobs, and remained in my house where my mornings were spent away from my computer watching Golden Women reruns on the Hallmark Channel. How I coveted those ladies' pre-Internet, Florida retirement living lifestyles.

Who was I?

I wasn’t sure anymore. And I was even fewer sure that I cared, which was actually both the strangest and most terrifying part of the complete ordeal. I’d been supporting myself since high school and had always been grounded inside and by certain financial realities. And yet even as I watched my bank account diminish to numbers not seen since I was a teenager, I couldn’t muster the kind of reliable panic that would have hightailed a saner person back into the task force. Worse still, far worse, was that I had grown to dislike, and even see as punishment, the thing I cherished most: the act regarding writing.

I was badly burned out. Which, as it works out, is not the same as being tired out, stressed out, bored, or in need of a vacation. It may be more like all those things wrapped together, times ten, plus a lobotomy.

"Burnout if you’ve been experiencing chronic stress for so long that your body and your mental system have begun to shut down and are operating in survival mode, " claims Dr . Sara Denning, a clinical psychologist based in Manhattan who specializes in dealing with stress and panic. "You numb out because you can’t think. You can’t even make decisions any more. "

Bingo.

Unfortunately, it’s also one of those terms so overused that showing people you’re burned out, particularly in a country that fetishizes work (Americans perform more than any other country in the industrialized world) and in a city that works on ambition, does not exactly engender much sympathy. Mostly it’s hard never to sound like a whiner. And yet, the real thing-actual, life-stopping burnout-demands to be noticed.


A few years ago, Marissa Mayer made headlines when she reported that she doesn't believe in burnout. Here’s Mayer’s reasoning:

"Avoiding burnout certainly is not about getting three square meals or eight hours of sleep. It may be not even necessarily about getting time at home. I have a theory that termes conseillés is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re letting go of that makes you resentful…I had a young guy, just out of college, and I saw several early burnout signs. I said, 'Think about it and tell me what your beat is. ' He came back and said, 'Tuesday night dinners. My friends coming from college, we all get together every Tuesday night and do a potluck. If I skip it, the whole rest of the week I'm like, I'm just not going to stay overdue tonight. I didn’t even get to do my Tuesday night dinner. ' So now we know that Nathan can never miss Tuesday night dinner again. Is actually just that simple. "

I've given a lot of thought to this as I've thought about what happened to me and why, because in some ways Mayer does have an area: learning to say no is an important part of professional growth (also personal, but honestly, that is another article). Would I have flamed out quite as spectacularly if Would made sure to check out for a dinner once a week? Oh Marissa, I wish it were that easy. The problem was, like for so many of us, my priority was my career. And for a long time, I was resentful of anything that caused me to miss perform, including, but not limited to, people who expected me to hold uninterrupted conversations over meal. But at some point my lifestyle went from overdrive to overheat and when that did, not only did I not know where the brakes were, I was not convinced there were brakes.

In hindsight, it should have been clear there was a problem when I commenced fantasizing about being a garbage truck driver. I would sit at my desk, Gchat windows exploding, no less than 40 tabs open on my screen, my Blackberry within just arms reach like a small tethered child or, perhaps more accurately, like a contraband substance, my television set tuned to the morning shows, and gaze out our window overcome by a sharp longing-a deep envy-of men who toss can lids of refuse into a rumbling truck before continuing on to parts unknown. Elements free from the Internet.

"You were looking for permission to go home, " Patty Forbes Pedzwater, a practicing psychotherapist in Manhattan tells me when I relay what I assume will be evidence that there is something deeply wrong with me. "I hear it all the time, " the lady notes, somewhat reassuringly. "It's simply a fantasy of something we perceive to get a beginning, middle, and an end. There’s a timer on it. You work anywhere, the whistle blows, and you’re out. "

When Pedzwater says this specific to me I nearly burst into tears, because OH MY GOD, OF COURSE, this is exactly it. I am also suddenly reminded of the opening of the Flinstones and also think the days of being able to "go home' are equally as archaic. In the last a decade, the Internet has essentially become the worldwide Hotel California for anyone with a connection. Positive you can check out, you can check out all you want-there are entire movements devoted to looking at out-but you can’t leave. Barring some sort of Zombie apocalypse, non-e of us are ever before leaving the Hotel Internet ever again.


So how do we figure out how to go home? Because there is mounting evidence that we desperately need to, especially the under-thirty established, who have never known a digitally unconnected adult life. I was midway by means of my thirties, only half of which had been spent on the Internet, before my life-style began to catch up with me. But recent conversations I’ve had with women five and fifteen years younger than me, some of whom are barely away from college, often make them sound alarmingly like old men dragging themselves home coming from work, forty years into a career, and suggest our professional practices may be running table to our professional lifespan.

When I mention this anecdotally to Denning, she informs me it’s not my imagination: In recent years, the uptick in younger patients using themselves of her services was such that she has had to refocus her training to deal specifically with clients between the ages of 22 and 35.

"I was starting to see a lot of young women around 32-33 that had already surpassed into that burnout state, " she says, noting that one of the reasons the lady went younger was that she was hoping to head these women down before it got too bad. Instead, she’s now hearing patients complain of termes conseillés symptoms as early as their freshman year in college. "That’s new. "

Without a doubt. Everything is new these days. Sometimes this digital age seems strangely related to the unknowns of the birth control pill, an invention that has fundamentally altered the way we all live, but whose long-term effects are yet to be fully understood. Naturally , my case may have been an extreme one. My life for many years was about chasing good news cycle, a cycle that shifted into wild overdrive with the advent of social media marketing. The thing is, that lifestyle is no longer so far off from what most people deal with every day: Most people in possession of a smart phone is tied to some sort of information cycle, often comprised of social media marketing feeds and a heavy dose of work in the form of e-mails that, like the sweets in this old clip of Lucy on an assembly line, come faster and more quickly no matter where they try to hide them. Add to this the nonstop highlight reel that will so often makes up most of what we see of other people’s lives-even Garance Doré, who appears to be living a life most of us dream about, recently revealed that she’s certainly not immune to the pain of the discrepancy between real life and Instagram-and keeping up with the particular Jones’s (or the "likes") is proving professionally dangerous.

So what is the solution? As nice as it was to check out of my life and also into Blanche Devereaux’s, it wasn’t exactly a long-term plan (though Used to do give it my all for a while). Nor was it short-term recovery. I actually still sidestep the Internet and most things that require me to always be on call, even merely socially; earlier this year I went so far as to delete my Instagram consideration. Denning echoes Marissa’s advice and says it’s a matter of "watching your anxiety and knowing what your behaviors are. Know what you are doing and learn how to prioritize your own personal needs over anything else that is going on. " Again, this is all very well and also good. But how exactly does one phrase that in an e-mail to her employer?

I suspect the answer may be less of an individual decision and more of a collectif one. At some point, when enough people fall down on the job five years into their occupations, maybe we'll start rethinking how we define availability. And that day may not be since far off as we imagine. A friend of mine was visiting her college younger niece the other day, or trying to. Ironically, she was having a tough time pinning down the visit as her niece had neither a Facebook consideration nor a smart phone. Availability, it seems, may soon be a thing of the earlier. Something we lived with before we knew better.

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