The Beauty of Burning Out
Burn out may just be our greatest gift, our saving grace. It may be the one thing powerful enough to awaken us from the stupor & routine of our days, motivating us to change for the better. Burn out reveals a lack of balance & health, helping us realize we are not walking in the most powerful, beautiful, or generous versions of ourselves. Burn out won’t allow us to continue living the way we once did because it forces us to come to grips with our insufficiencies & redirect our energy towards more life-giving things in the long run.
Sometimes we must let things burn. To allow beauty to rise from the ashes & make all things new, we must relinquish our old ways, patterns, & lives to embrace something greater. What new things are trying to blossom in your life? Perhaps our burn out has less to do with our activity levels, margin & boundaries we set & more to do with a presence or lack of purpose in our lives & the endless ache we feel for something more.
If we played as much as we worked, we would long to take a break from our play and relax with some good hard work. Perhaps burn out is not always due to hyperactivity, but also the grueling long haul of monotony & unaltering patterns of our lives. This could be due to incredible pressure & lack of margin or the absence thereof in equal measure. Rope burn comes from friction. What is causing friction in your life?
Couldn’t our boredom & lack of inspiration be an equally slow burn as hurried activity? I believe the stress we undergo in hurried environments is caused not by busyness alone, but because that busyness doesn’t stem from things we truly care about or treasure. We experience this tension when what we value draws us towards certain things that our daily reality seems to contradict or oppose outright. This is by no means a call to shirk duty or decry the stability of faithfully working & showing up to our posts day by day; it is rather a challenge to ponder what drives us & why we’re doing what we do.
Could there be a shift made in your lifestyle that could align you with a greater purpose? That could re-introduce meaning, intentionality & love into your life? If you have a purpose, you can endure anything, whether boredom or overwhelming pressure. Purpose is a buffer for burn out. Purpose will direct your ship through the stormiest of seas & the calmest. I don’t believe burn out is a matter of hyperactivity or inactivity intrinsically but is ultimately a lack of purpose & love. This is not to say we must always be doing something we love, but what we do should accommodate space for love to be present & flourish in our lives. It should align with some sense of purpose, greater good & service to others.
In my personal experience with my most recent job, it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy my job or even that I had too much on my plate to manage, there just wasn’t much to do because things had slowed down at my company. Meanwhile my heart was drawn to other passions, things that were fueling my soul & scratching my creative itch but weren’t yielding an income. I felt a restless itch to do something, anything other than embrace the monotony of my daily schedule, so I would go on trips as often as possible & cram my weekends with places to go, things to do & people to see. My afternoons coming home from work were no different as I desperately sought to alleviate the deep-seated boredom I was experiencing at work.
I soon found I had no margin or no room to breathe because I’d filled every crack in my schedule with someone to spend time with, a project to work on, a book to read, an event to attend or a place to visit. I believe we tend to think of burn out as becoming so overloaded & overwhelmed that we snap & everything falls apart at once. We see burn out as the result of a long, grinding down until we can’t handle the pressure anymore & we break. In my case it was not the presence of pressure but the absence thereof that made me break.
Why did I pack my schedule so tightly? Because I lacked purpose during my workday, so the moment I got off the clock, I would dive headfirst into a flurry of events to gird my days with some semblance of purpose. I needed to feel like I’d achieved something or filled my soul with meaning & in the process I faced burn out from sheer boredom. My boredom was an inactivity I couldn’t help which became a nagging torment for my soul & led me to fill my days with a flurry of activity until I was emotionally & mentally spent.
What is the source of potential burn out in your life? Are you overworked with no margin for rest or a personal life & no purpose driven by love behind it? Are you underworked & thus wandering aimlessly about searching for a purpose to fill your time with? Are you bored & burdened by a lack of purpose or do you have a solid purpose & simply need to learn to manage it better? Sometimes it’s easier to recognize an issue in our lives & harder to grasp practical tools to help us address those issues. How do we address our burn out? How do we prevent it from happening in the first place?
The ever-present dichotomy of rest & work is itself a balancing act – we must not overextend ourselves & yet we must also not under-engage ourselves. Laziness can be a quicker road to burn out than workaholic tendencies if we embrace it in equal measure of unhealth. I found when my job ended, the burn out factor shifted majorly as I realized the immense space that job had taken in my life. It had drained me of energy & purpose, crippled my sense of balance & thrown off my cycles of rest & work. Work was never strenuous enough to warrant true rest after the day ended, so I never fully rested since all my free time was packed with activity. I was stuck in a cycle of work that didn’t feel like work & play that didn’t feel like play with no margin for rest between it all.
Where do we begin with all of this? Allow me to propose a few tips for handling the work-rest balance in a practical way. Once a day, set aside an hour for yourself to do something you love – it could be a hobby, a self-care routine, book to read, self-reflection practice such as journaling, meditating, or walking, or treating yourself to something – a cookie, a movie, a bath. The goal is to have one hour to do something life-giving that recharges our soul & feeds you, relaxes you & gives you something to look forward to each day. Having this practice will re-calibrate your heart to your purpose, values & loves, helping keep you on course & creating a buffer for potential burn-out.
Once a week, have a day off – a true day off, one with no errands, chores, meal prep, or catch-up items on your to-do list. Fill this day with life-giving things, by yourself or with people you love, that truly recharge your batteries & bring beauty, joy, relaxation & refreshment to your life. Having this day off to rest will give you space to reflect on the week & adjust any areas of potential burn out that have lingered. This time off will also allow you to be a better friend, partner, parent & neighbor as it will refuel you before you dive into another work week & will make you a more pleasant person to be with.
Once a quarter, make sure you plan a vacation of some sort where you can get out of town & go somewhere new. Our best reflection is often done in a foreign environment where the things we are most accustomed to are no longer buffers around us. This will give you space to dream bigger, love more boldly & think about how your life is aligning with your values. Use this time to gauge if you are truly being fed by purpose, or if it would serve you to investigate a lifestyle shift.
It’s a great opportunity to reflect on how you are balancing your work & rest rhythms & if your life could be healthier with some sifts in schedule, vocation, or social circles. We are not static creatures & our lives are meant so shift & bend with time. Having this set aside time to ponder the sort of people we have become & how our lives should shift with those changes is important & a great way to avoid burn out when what we feel called to no longer aligns with our lifestyle.
Once a year I would highly encourage a day or weekend for a silence & solitude retreat. This is best done on your own as a solo trip. This can be as relaxed and easy as booking yourself a stay in a log cabin or beach cottage somewhere by yourself for personal reflection. It can also be as focused as signing up for a guided meditation retreat or silence & solitude stay at a monastery where they run programs for self-reflection. This practice may sound odd considering the noise & busyness of our current culture, but I believe it is just for that reason that it becomes even more valuable.
Taking time away from our hectic lives to be alone with ourselves & reflect on the past year will provide us invaluable insight into the next season. Who have you become? What have you accomplished? How have your experiences shaped you? How have your values shifted or grown? How might you want to make changes to your life to avoid burn out? Investing yourself into things you no longer value or which no longer serve you or align with your purpose will continue to cultivate that slow burn& this time away for self-reflection is an excellent opportunity to measure where you are & where you want to go, who you are & who you want to become.
These are all practical ways for us to incorporate rest into our life & provide space us for to reflect on what is causing friction that could lead to the slow burn of burn out & eventual collapse. What if the solution was simply to slow down long enough to check in with our hearts & see what is serving us & what is draining us? Determine what aligns with our values & what is set against them? Check what is life-giving & what is sucking energy from us?
Perhaps it truly is awareness we are lacking more than anything in our fast-paced modern lifestyle. Do we ever even slow down enough to ask ourselves what we want, what we love & how we can live lives that reflect those things more strongly? Do we even think we can have a life full of the things we treasure most dearly? A life with the beautiful balance of rest & work, purpose & life-giving moments? To both give & receive, to pour out & be poured into- a beautiful symbiotic relationship of loving others around us & being loved by them as well?
If boredom is the issue at hand in your life rather than over-exertion, what is something you can add to your life that will beautify it, uplift others, & give you deeper meaning? It doesn’t have to be something huge – it can be as simple as looking outside yourself more & serving someone around you or taking something you are good at & utilizing it to bless others. To be less absorbed in the monotony of your own days & see how you might be able to shed some light on another person’s darkness.
We need each other. Our burn out comes from misalignment in our lives where we are no longer connected to love, community & purpose. We are needed & we need others. We have something to give to others & something to gain from them. There is good we can do & good we can receive. What if we stopped resisting the burn & allowed it to refine us & walk us into a new season? A better season full of hope, joy & a more restful existence? Let burn out do her best work & refine your life until it blooms in to something magnificent, something you can be proud of, something life-giving that will leave a legacy for years to come.
