~10 minute read / 1900 words
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A quick warning and disclaimer: I talk about mental health difficulties and systemic issues here. This writing is without gory details but please consider your state before proceeding. This text is from my perspective and your experience will differ, please take what is useful and leave the rest.
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This is a series on meditation and burnout. I’m thinking through the causes of burnout, why it is such a challenging experience, what to do in the moment, meditation practices that create important shifts, and developing an understanding that will lead to burnout being done with, for good. This first part sets the view that burnout is sustained by external and internal systems and that self-compassion is the key to beginning practising with this.
While the September retreat on burnout has a waiting list, registrations for the 23-26 January Retreat are open.
What is Burnout?
Let’s begin with a definition. Burnout arises when demands exceed your capacity. It is a state of depletion that results from an extended period of stress and demand without appropriate support. Burnout is associated with chronic stress, working in caring professions, caring responsibilities, big life events, activist work, or perhaps just witnessing the turmoil of the world with little recourse.
Burnout is a state of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and sense of hopelessness. The phenomenological experience differs person-to-person: it can be felt physically as a heaviness, pain, or tiredness that is not relieved by sleep; emotionally as a sense of misery, flatness, malaise, or depression; or felt existentially as a sense of hopelessness, futility, or worthlessness. Burnout generally comes with a decrease in skills and capabilities: moving and thinking in slow motion, problems seem harder, increased self-criticism, finding the right words becomes a challenge, your memory falters, task-related skills deteriorate.
It brings to mind Samuel Beckett’s refrain: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” It’s the drive to continue to perform, care, and give effort after the resources have been used up.
One reason that burnout is such a challenging experience is because it is entangled with doing what you value. There are things you want to do, projects to contribute to, causes to fight for, and people to care for. The world is in need of more goodness and it sometimes seems like the way to provide this is to just do more. Unfortunately this doesn’t work. Burnout is an unhelpful imbalance in how the self is being cared for in relation to the wider situation — this imbalance leaves less resources and leads to less goodness. (differentiating it from tiredness, or even exhaustion, which can be fine when temporary and called for, like being exhausted after a big physical exertion.)
I personally have experienced several phases of burnout in my life. My worst period of mental health, where I experienced anxiety and depression, in hindsight seems to have been brought on by burnout — I had no sense of the term burnout at the time and it wasn’t mentioned to me by healthcare professionals. I’ve also experienced burnout from my profession, from being neurodivergent and trying to meet neurotypical expectations, and from activist work. It is troubling to me that I didn’t know what burnout was, even while in it, and that many others also don’t know to look for it. I’m writing this to try to make sense of my own experience, to help myself not fall into this again, and to hopefully give others a heads up.
Meditation as Uprooting the Systems that Cause Burnout
Mindfulness is so often talked about in terms of practising meditation to relax and calm down, to be non-reactive, to be mindfully present, and to release some of the “stuff” that makes it so tiring and painful to be in the world. Now this is undeniably helpful. Sometimes, it even feels like this is the cure. Being calm and present is a great start to help with some aspects of burnout (I’ll talk more about how meditation helps in the later parts of this series). But meditation could also lead to a kind of dead-end where you become an inert robot that simply “copes” with what is happening; where one finds a kind of “equanimous productivity”, as Rob Burbea describes, to function in a society that constantly pressures us to do and be in ways that are exhausting, depleting, and lead to a sense of futility and meaninglessness.
This was my experience — I had formed a personality around being valued for achievements, and being kind, polite, and willing to put my hand up to take responsibility. When I was getting deeper in my meditation journey I found that I could sit on my cushion and feel peace, bliss, and happiness, then have some sense of equanimity to get through a day of hearing about my colleagues losing their jobs and university students being exploited. I poured so much into union work, being a caring support to friends, and also trying to do my work productively. But it wasn’t a sustainable approach. Eventually it had to give. Meditation had treated the symptoms but hadn’t uprooted the cause.
I fantasise of meditation as a radical and revolutionary force. The image of meditation that I’m calling forward is one where we collectively use the practice to change ourselves, the systems we live in, and our whole sense of existence. I’m imagining a practice of meditation that ultimately uproots the causes of burnout by giving us the clarity and insight to dismantle and re-makes the systems holding this pattern in place.
I want to be clear in saying that burnout is systemic. It is systemic in that an individual is a part of a system where they feel a certain sense of expectation to meet demands without also receiving appropriate support. It is also systemic in that the individual absorbs and internalises external systems that hold these dynamics in place.
Because burnout is a systemic issue, it won’t be solved by 15 minutes of meditation, or a weekend retreat, or even three years on silent retreat (although all these things will help). It won’t be fixed through mindfulness. You can’t just learn how to focus and calm yourself and then push through and do things in the same way. Getting up off the cushion and going back into conditions that lead to exhaustion, depletion, and a scarcity of the meaningful and sacred will take you back down that road.
Without this acknowledgement and starting from a place of understanding and self-compassion, there’s a danger that any practice you do will likely be driven by a motivation to somehow fix an issue in yourself — operating from a place of self-deficiency, or from a place of guilt or shame. It’s not that you are in burnout because you didn’t meditate, perfect your morning routine, and write in your gratitude journal. Burnout is not your fault, your sole responsibility, or your punishment. It is not some kind of failing of you as an individual. You are in burnout because you are trying to function in systems of capitalism, sexism, ableism, racism et al. that are extractive and ask more of you without providing appropriate care.
I don’t mean that you don’t have agency and choice. Each of us has limited agency within our conditioned existence. Your decisions are conditioned by the interpersonal relationships, social dynamics, and broader systems that you are part of. You will have absorbed these and played them out to some extent. External systems are reflected in social systems, which influence internal systems.
Through practice, I discovered that I had internalised an idea of productivity where my sense of both social acceptance and self-worth was dependent on me producing something of value for other people. I had a sense that being accepted and valued came with the condition that I must also act and behave in a certain way. For me this was a mode of productivity: generating a certain amount of work or time spent working. This is a tough one to break out of because the sense of my own value is socially constructed — I wanted to feel like I fit in, like I was valued, and that others would be there for me (all important human needs). The resolution appeared to me through seeing that I am actually whole, valuable, and meaningful as a human being, rather than being somehow lacking and needing to work, care for others, or produce. I’m inherently whole and deserving of acceptance and love.
By acknowledging these internal and external systems and how they shape your present moment experience, a kind of acceptance and allowing arises. From this place of self-compassion and equanimity, you create the space for change.
Practising with Burnout
We will get to the specific meditation practices in the next part. If you are currently in the midst of intense burnout, meditating may not be the best option. I recommend that you seek support from an experienced teacher, mental health professional, or trusted friend. Do what you can to create some space.
I’m offering three steps to beginning this practice:
- Find a view that creates space.
- Bring forward compassion and acceptance.
- Tune in to what is present.
What I’ve talked about here is finding ways to bring forward a sense of equanimity and self-compassion. Acknowledge that some of the ways your mind works are inherited rather than chosen. Your present moment experience is the coming together of causes and conditions over time. Some of them you had a hand in, most of them you didn’t. Going back, you can see that your choices are always influenced and conditioned by systems beyond yourself. Taking this view places your situation in a wider context. Find ease in your relationship to yourself. Often, just taking this view helps to see the situation differently and leads to a bit more space and a sense of kindness.
Bring as much compassion and acceptance as you can to your present moment experience. Connect to this moment, welcome whatever is present, and acknowledge any suffering. Open to what is being experienced and felt, without blaming yourself.
Then pause and listen. Tune in to how you really feel and your current capacity. Through self-attunement you can come to terms with the reality of your situation and see it clearly. From this place you can resolve to move out of burnout and to make decisions to shift the pattern, and to shift the systems. Then you can make decisions to create more space for caring for the self that sits in the middle of all of this. From a place of equanimity, feel your situatedness. Feel your sense of agency and your intention to move in a direction, to unfold what comes next as more wholeness and goodness.
Practice is a constantly updating iterative process. You set a view, bring forward an intention, observe your experience, and then update the view again. You can also begin practising without having a clear sense of the view. If you’re not feeling particularly self-compassionate at the moment, don’t let that stop you. Start with what you have available.
As you undertake this work, my biggest recommendation is to have some form of guidance, friendship, and sangha (community) — others who understand, who can support you, and can provide companionship on this path.
In the next part I will follow on from self-compassion into how meditation can help with finding the ease and calm that will allow change to occur.
View the upcoming retreats focused on burnout.