Burnout
A Pie Day Edition of Shelf Life
Welcome to a special March 14th edition of Shelf Life: Happy Pi(e) Day. Today’s Shelf Life is not about pie or π. For a Shelf Life about pie, see It’s Not Pie and pretend it was written on March 14. Here’s your writing pro-tip of the day: If you can’t find π on the character map, that’s because it’s with the Greek letters and not with the mathematical symbols. You’re welcome.
The word of the day—is not pie. It’s burnout. This is the word of the day because everyone I have spoken to all day has talked to me about burnout. It was also the topic of the weekly blog at work that posted today. Now I think on it, that latter is probably the reason for the former. Anyway, I’m not burnt out on the topic of burnout, heck no. I mean I am burnt out on the topic of physician burnout and other workplace burnout, but I’m not tired of the topic of writing burnout (yet).
Mandatory disclosure required by law: I am not a physician, I just work with a lot of them. My PhD is in internet memes. I am not legally allowed to practice any kind of medicine on humans or higher-order animals (except chiropractic).
Just kidding, haha. Chiro isn’t medicine.
Anyway, today I am going to talk about burnout generally, writing burnout, how you get burnt out, and how you recover from burnout. I have had mild job burnout and significant writing burnout and recovered from both which is why I feel qualified to speak (write) extemporaneously on this subject.
This essay will also touch on running, as in, running on the street to get cardio exercise, something I have not recovered from.
Burnout is a state of mental, emotional, and sometimes also physical exhaustion. It is characterized by feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, listless, detached, depressed, and overall terrible about everything. Well, usually about work. Burnout is caused by prolonged exposure to chronic stress. The term burnout on its own usually refers to workplace/occupational burnout, wherein someone has been overworked over time without periods of rest and lower stress to recover their mental state. When I mentioned physician burnout above I was talking about the phenomenon of increasingly common burnout among doctors, due to their high-stress work environment, long hours, and chronic exposure to patients’ negative health outcomes. But burnout can happen in any job or career.
People can also get burnout around a specific activity. You can get “burnt out” on anything you do a lot, but it’s more likely when you invest a lot, emotionally, in the activity. You know, like a lot of people do with writing. Creative endeavors can cause general burnout and they can cause specific burnout. You can get “burnt out on writing” without being burnt out in general, while still doing fine in your professional and social life. This can look like:
Chronic or prolonged writer’s block
Losing interest in your story or characters
Hopelessness about writing; for instance, believing you will never find an agent and so there is no point
Feeling exhausted when you think about writing
Good news: You can recover from writing burnout just like you can recover from occupational burnout. You will probably find it easier, in fact. Since burnout is caused by prolonged exposure to stress, the trick with recovering is to distance yourself from the cause of the stress and let the cortisol dissipate for a while.
Now: When you have occupational burnout, a lot of people (most people) can’t simply stop working for a while to get better. Taking a week of vacation is not going to do it if you’re burnt out or well on your way. Most Americans can’t get enough time off work all in a row to effectively recover.
Personally, I think this is why we see more midlife career switching in my generation (Millennials) and GenX than in the previous generations. Most of us can’t stop working for three or six months to recover from job burnout because we have to, you know, eat and pay the rent. However, if you can switch to a totally new career in a more junior/less responsible position, you might be able to shed the workplace stress of an advanced-career position for a while. At least I think that’s what many people try to do. Going into a new work situation is always its own source of stress.
With writing, if it’s your hobby or your side hustle, you might be able to put it completely aside for a while to recover, but that may not be optimal for you, either. If it’s your dream to publish a novel, you don’t want to put your dream on a shelf for a while.
This is where running comes in. Imagine you are going for a run. The starting point is your home. The ending point of your run is a place where you’re going to meet a friend who is coming in their car, and they will give you a ride home. At some point in the run, you will reach a perilous fulcrum where it’s just as much effort to go back as to go forward, and if you get to that point and feel like you can’t run anymore—what can you do? It’s too far to go back and too far to go on.
Okay, I confess I am terrible at running. My ex spouse enjoyed running and I think he did marathons or half marathons, I don’t really remember, but he ran all the time. I tried it for a while and I never got the endorphins or whatever but what I did get was outrageously bad cystic acne all over my face that took six months of topical and oral antibiotics to clear up. The dermatologist called it “race face,” apparently it’s a thing. Anyway, running was not for me.
But while I was still putting in the effort and trying to do it, it was a really miserable time. I started slow and built up to where I could run several miles at a reasonable pace without stopping but every step felt like torture. I mean seriously, 30 seconds into running I felt terrible and then I felt terrible the rest of the way. I kept trying because I had heard from so many people that you just have to push past that phase and then it gets better. I put in about six months of daily running and the situation never improved.
Also I later learned I have exercise-induced asthma, so. Now we know.
But anyway, I am coming to the point, which is: One day I asked my ex-spouse, “How long before I can just run nonstop without getting tired, like you do?” Because that guy would literally run ten or more miles and feel fine and do it again the next day. And what he told me was that he did get tired, but his body was so used to running that he didn’t have to stop running to rest; he just had to run slower for a while until he felt rested and then he could go back up to his regular running pace.
In essence, let’s say, his regular running pace was 80 percent. He could run pretty reliably at 80 percent most of the time. Could he run at 100 percent? Sure, he could dial it up to 100 percent for a while, but he couldn’t run at 100 percent for as long as he could run at 80 percent. His 80 percent effort was his comfortable going pace. However, sometimes he needed a break and he’d dial it back to 60 percent. His 60 percent effort running pace was still much faster than my 0 percent sitting-on-the-couch pace. Dialing it back to 60 percent is still moving forward; just not moving forward as fast.
If you push yourself to 100 percent and hold it too long, then 60 percent isn’t going to be dialed back far enough for you to recover. Push yourself at 100 percent too long and you get injured. Then you can’t run at all until you fully stop and wait to recover.
That should be the rule: Hold steady at 80 percent most of the time; push it to 100 percent for short periods when you need to go harder; dial back to 60 percent for short periods when you need to rest.
Most of us can’t stop working for an extended period of time; we can’t go to 0 percent. Those of us who are reading Shelf Life probably don’t want to stop writing, don’t want to go to 0 percent, even if we feel ourselves getting frustrated or stressed with the writing.
But most of us are dealing with the death throes of this late-stage capitalist hellhole in which we’re living and we’ve become accustomed to going 100 percent in the workplace at all times, because that is the modern-day expectation. The new normal, which was not the norm thirty years ago, is to see if you can get one person to do the workload of two so you can fire one of them, and then repeat down the line a few years. Keep getting the same amount of work (or more) done, but with fewer people all the time. The expectation is not that you’ll maintain 80 percent and dial it up and back as needed, but that you’ll maintain 100 percent and dial it back never.
Hence, injury.
I can’t do anything about the capitalism hellhole, I’m sorry. That is beyond my modest abilities.
With writing, that’s a passion for many of the people who do it. When you’re passionate about something, you want to go 100 percent on it and it’s easy to lose perspective on how much of yourself you’re investing into it. Then, on top of that, there’s—I’m sorry if I sound like a broken record—the late stage capitalism hellhole, again, tugging on your sleeve to remind you that if you’re spending time on writing you really ought to be making some money from that because, after all, why spend time on anything you don’t make money from? So that’s another incentive to go full-tilt 100 percent on writing.
And that’s where a lot of people—us—writers—lose the thread. You have a great idea, you dive in, you’re going 100 percent or even 110 percent on it—most of us on top of whatever our day job or other daily responsibilities like caregiving demand of us—and then you start to feel some of those early burnout symptoms like the writer’s block or detachment from the work in progress.
Try going at 80 percent effort instead of 100 percent. Reserve the 100-percent-effort sprints for when you’re highly motivated and on a tear to get a lot of text out, and then dial it back. Hit your modest word count goal early today? You could use the leftover time to write more—or go take a walk. Take a nap. Spend some time re-reading a book you admire to see how the author accomplishes certain scenes.
Burnt out on submissions or agent queries? Dial it back. Prioritize your list of agents/venues to query/submit to, and do a few at a time or even one at a time. Rejection burnout can be particularly tough because when we have a piece ready for submission or query—or at least when I do, I can’t speak for everyone—there’s a flurry of activity and motivation and you send out all your subs/queries in that burst of 100 percent effort and then you have a steady stream of rejections to pummel you for weeks. No matter how good a writer you are, there will be rejections—that’s just the way the numbers work out.
If you dial back to a sustainable pace, you can slow down from there to catch your breath while you keep moving forward. If you start to experience writing burnout, dial it back. If you keep pushing forward you’ll set yourself back further than if you just took it easy for a while.
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