The burnout is real
Exhausted Girl Getaways is based in the Washington, D.C., area, and we don’t know anyone who works in or around government who hasn’t experienced extreme stress and burnout in the last few months. Friends and loved ones have lost jobs, have been compelled to retire or resign after decades of dedicated and commendable service, and the job market is terrifying. Even before we got to this particular point, everyone we know was already exhausted and desperate for some sign that the pace of work would slow down.
Friends and family have cried in their cars in parking lots before going into work each day. We feel apathy and fear during meetings and stare at inboxes that are outrageously full while overwhelm crashes over us in waves. The stress is causing physical illness, and an overall sense of deep, deep exhaustion and as if we have lived a lifetime in just a few short months. There is a reason you feel like you’ve aged too fast when you are under extreme stress—because you have. NIH (thoughts and prayers) has done the research: you are aging prematurely due to stress and burnout, and your brain is suffering the consequences as your telomeres shorten, and your grey matter is increasingly inflamed.
Burnout as a concept hit big in 2019 when the World Health Organization classified it as a “workplace phenomenon” that often leads people to seek medical support, but it is not a medical condition or disease. This approach has its critics— particularly from Dr. Christina Maslach, the foremost researcher on burnout— as being a way to push blame back on employees rather than employers. Since 2019, a host of industries have looked into burnout and the implications for their workforce and their bottom line, and as expected, burnout is costing companies money. A. Lot. Of. Money.
Harvard Business Review estimates that extreme stress costs businesses over $500 Billion-with-a-B-dollars every year. That was in 2019- before the current crises in the government and economy led to massive layoffs and desperate job searches that led to even more burnout. A relatively small number of companies offer mental health initiatives and attempt to address burnout— most notably KPMG— but those companies are in the minority and the initiatives come across more as technical band-aids rather than real, long-term changes. Occasional mental health days and 10 counselling sessions a year are necessary but insufficient for dealing with burnout. Those are technical bandaids that will not resolve a complex, adaptive problem: businesses want to make as much money as possible and human brains are not squishy grey factories that can produce exponentially. These two things are becoming increasingly incongruous, and that is a recipe for burnout.
More promising are the recent studies on four-day work weeks that reduce the total number of hours worked per week while maintaining full benefits and pay. The results of pilot initiatives thus far are fairly promising that productivity either remains the same or increases with the reduction of hours. Sadly, it will be years before countries and cultures accept the idea of four-day weeks or –gasp–not monitoring hours at all, so for now, we will have to put up our own boundaries when we are burnt to a crisp.
Popular burnout therapist and business coach Sheena Schuy provides therapy services specific to burnout for women in business. Her advice as described in an interview should be simple, but we all know it’s not: rest.
“ ‘Rest means doing things for joy,’ Schuy says. ‘Not working out or listening to podcasts, as those still involve learning or productivity. True rest is seeing friends or creating art just for the fun of it. Many of us have lost the art of living life.’”
A weekend getaway is not going to cure you of your burnout, but it could be the start of you setting aside time to rest. Time to start new or deepen old friendships with other women who are struggling with perfectionism and have also never given themselves permission to rest. Consider joining Summer Camp or the Fall Interlude.