How to Head Off Burnout

About a decade ago, I worked at the writing center at the University of New Orleans. Most of the students I helped were freshman grappling with writing college papers for the first time.

One of these students was a psychology major, the assignment: write a profile of someone you look up to. His subject was one of his psychology professors, and his interview material was all about their struggles with a cyclical depression, and how they coordinated their research and teaching around when they knew they would be the most productive versus when they would need to rest.

It took years for me to truly come to terms with what this meant in my own life.

Up until a few years ago, I had figured out which times of the year I'm most productive and which times of the year I tend to struggle. However, I always made myself push through. Instead of treating myself with grace and care, I always felt like I was coming up short. And, for years, I pushed and pushed and pushed even though I was perpetually on the edge of burnout.

And then I pushed myself over the edge. From 2019 until 2021, I didn't get much writing done. I was overworked, grief-stricken from personal loss, and miserable. I was burnt out, and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to claw myself out of the hole I was in.

After talking to a close friend, I did decide I wanted to get serious about writing again; it truly feeds my soul. Saying I wanted to dig back in was much easier than actually doing it. But then I attended a panel about writing through brain fog at WisCon, and then I took some time and learned how to break my writing and related tasks into manageable chunks. This really helped me balance my writing workload, which has helped immensely in holding off burnout and continually making progress in my writing. I've written about it here.

However, none of this work helped me with an intrinsic problem I had that kept leading me into burnout over and over again.

My natural state is to push myself. To compete with myself. To always strive to work hard and to keep getting better.

In order to heal from burnout, and to avoid it in the future, I had to learn how to go against what I consider to be part of my nature. I had to learn when not to push myself.

I had to learn how to accept imperfection.

I had to learn how to drop balls that I was juggling and how to say no to all of the shiny new balls I want to pick up.

Through this period of healing from burnout, I've learned that in order to keep making progress and to keep writing, I have to stop writing.

And this is where it seems counterintuitive because writing feeds my soul.

But, when I'm sick, or grieving, or exhausted, or in pain, at these times writing often does push me towards burnout.

The trick is to combine breaking down a project with having enough self-awareness to know what I can handle on any given day. It takes trial and error. Trial and error can be terrifying when you feel like you're losing something you love (writing) and may never get back.

So there are days that I write thousands of words worth of material, which is often the most intensive task on my list, and there are days that I research a few short story markets I might want to submit my work to and call it a day, which is one of the easiest tasks on my running writing to-dos.

And there are days, which have popped up more often in the past few weeks, where I don't write at all, and I give myself the grace to be okay with this.

A few weeks ago, I lost a friend to advanced liver cancer. In the past, this loss would have pulled me under. I would have lost all momentum. But, instead of dropping all of the writing tasks I was juggling, I dropped a few. I gave myself days to not write, to not do much at all. There were some days I dropped other tasks, like making dinner, and got takeout and managed to write. There were days I took off from work and wrote in the mornings before giving myself time to grieve, or attend her funeral. And through all of this, I've been making progress on a novella.

It's not the progress I'd planned out. It's not ideal. But it's progress nonetheless, and instead of dropping the whole novella, I've kept chipping away at it bit by bit. I expect that, by next weekend, I'll have a working draft.

Life never seems to slow down. Things constantly pop up that need our attention. It's easy to chase perfection; when I do, I often find it's to my own detriment.

The world is always grinding away at us, and society is always trying to propel us forward, to extract as much as it can from us before spitting us out.

That's why it's so hard to slow down. When I was in burnout, it was like I was paralyzed. I wanted to write, but I was too tired and overwhelmed. The projects I wanted to work on were too big. There was so much I wanted to do, but I ended up doing nothing.

It's hard to slow down, to stop, but that's what I had to do to move forward. It was like staring into the void and jumping.

The next time you're kicking yourself for not getting enough done, for feeling tired, for needing a break, just stop. Take a nap. Go to the park or a museum or watch one of your favorite movies from your childhood. Give your psyche a rest.

See how you feel tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow.

And then, pick up the easiest, lowest lift writing-related task you can find.

Do it.

Cross it off your list.

See how you feel.