Get off the hamster wheel

Companies benefit from keeping you tired and unhappy. If you are moderately tired all the time, you have less energy to look for another job (I’m sure you can relate to the feeling that looking for a job, preparing custom resumes and cover letters, feels like a full time job in and of itself). So, if you’re like a lot of people, and you work the week waiting for two consecutive days just to get rested for the next week, you’re on the hamster wheel, and that’s just where they want you.

This isn’t intended as a socialist manifesto, just my thoughts on feeling physically, mentally, and spiritually drained.

A few years ago, I started my journey with burnout. I was unhappy at my day job and so my solution was to work harder (this is a coping mechanism I learned when I was young, that has been a difficult habit to break, as I don’t even know when I’m doing it). I launched my freelance design business in a more official capacity, secured a couple of amazing ongoing contracts and proceeded to work my ass off building that business as part of my exit strategy from damndayjob. Sounds exciting, right? Well, it was. But it was also totally and utterly exhausting. But I needed the income from my day job to fund my slowly growing startup business, so I buckled down and I worked harder than I have in my whole life. I got up at 5am each morning to get 3 billable freelance hours in before I went to my full time job. I would often work evenings and weekends. Such is the life of a startup, but after a year or so, I started feeling some serious effects. I was exhausted all the time, and even when I took breaks or was away on vacation, I never felt rested. My mind was always at work. I started having panic attacks for the first time in my life. My drinking was getting out of control (it was the only way to shut down the constantly working part of my brain) and my depression was getting significantly worse.

The phrase late stage capitalism is everywhere these days, but it was the phrase I was grasping for. Everywhere we look, we are told that if we work really hard, and deprive ourselves of sleep and pour 110% into something, it has this romantic cache. My friends were in awe of how much energy I had to run my business with high profile clients while also performing at a high-functioning level at an office job.

If we are exhausting ourselves to the point of complete depletion, we don’t have the time or energy to even understand how tired we are. We’re on the hamster wheel.

Remember that saying “Work smarter, not harder”? Well, I was working really, really stupid.

While I recognize I had the luxury of being able to take a sabbatical from work, I didn’t even know I had that luxury available to me until I was too far deep into the tunnel to have any other choice. I was breaking down. But in the three months that I was away from work, I noticed a couple of things. One thing I noticed was, even after 2 months off, I was still exhausted. I wondered how long it takes to recover from burnout. I suppose it differs, depending on how bad your burnout is, and how long you’ve been suffering, but I’m *still* in recovery, nearly a year later.

Another thing I noticed was my quickness to beat myself up over not getting enough done during my time off. With seemingly gaping amounts of time to kill, I felt like I was getting absolutely nothing done. Sure, I was reading a book or two a week, but what was I *actually* getting done? I felt like I could have been better using this gift of time. Why hadn’t I finished the great American novel yet?

Perhaps the most important thing I could have learned was to be patient with my healing process and allow myself time. If I felt like I was procrastinating on something, I asked myself what good I was getting out of that procrastination, and I could almost always say “rest”. Which, let’s be honest, I was off work on disability and my number one priority was rest. So why was I feeling guilty about resting?

Because I had been taught that resting is bad.

I thought resting was for lazy people. Unproductive people. I’ve often used the phrase “I’m not much of a sleeper.” I felt like, if every minute of every day wasn’t packed with productivity, then what was my value to the world?

Last year, when I started my Radical Self Care program, a coworker asked me, “But, how do you know whether it’s self-care, or if you’re just being lazy?” I asked her what she meant by that and she said “Well, what if you know you’re supposed to be going to the gym, but you really want to lay on the couch instead?”

First of all, if you practice self-love you wouldn’t be calling yourself lazy. But anyway.

I said, “If you feel like you’re getting something tangibly positive from laying on the couch, something that you could write down in a sentence or two, then that’s probably self-care.”

I am an extremely indecisive person, so I use this technique a lot when it comes to making up my mind. I ask myself how the activity will benefit me, from a loving, gentle, self-care perspective. If exercise is what my body needs and I feel positive about doing it, that’s what I do. If laying on the couch watching Netflix is what I want to do to feel more rested and relaxed, then that’s what I do.