Burn Out
If we can learn to listen to and decipher our body’s interior messages, we can find a way out of the confused and stuck quality burnout shackles us with.
When Bob first came to me, he wasn't sleeping. Panic kept him up most of the night. He was taking sedatives to get down and amphetamines to stay sharp through the day, and the cocktail his doctor gave him had stopped working. He was on a mission, money and doing right by the planet both, and he worked like the mission couldn't spare him. He was burning out and moving too fast to see it.
We treat the body like a thing. Most of us live a few inches behind the eyes and experience the body as an appendage hanging below, a slab of meat and bone that carries the head around. And we'd rather it didn't speak. When it does, when something hurts or drags, we reach for the fix: the pill, the drink, the screen, whatever dulls it. I haven't got time for the pain.
The body will carry that for a while. It wants a little rest to repair itself, and because we've trained ourselves past its signals, we override them, and it gives way anyway. First, it's fatigue. You cover the fatigue with coffee, then more coffee, then the coffee makes sleep hard so there's a pill for that, and the pill doesn't rest you, so the morning cup becomes a double. At some point, the body stops negotiating. That's the part we call burnout, and then we're puzzled that we can't work the way we used to.
What Bob found, when he stopped and dropped his attention into what he was feeling, was that the feeling wasn't new. It had been with him since he was a teenager. He was seventeen, his team had won the state championship, and he brought it to his father. His father said, "That's child's play." From then on, Bob had a searing drive to be worthy of the man, and the drive ran straight through his body's limits. The panic at night was the old ache, still asking to be enough.
You can't always translate what the body is saying, and you can't always fix what aches. You can listen. It has been talking the whole time.
Keeping Company with Yourself
There is a powerful antidote to the Inner Critic, but you will need to learn how to cultivate it: self-compassion. The more warmth you can give yourself, the less the Inner Critic needs to take over.
Compassion means to suffer with. When a small child breaks an arm, you don't decide to feel for them. You hold their hand, you say something steadying, and it takes a little off the edge of it. You can't stop the pain. You stay near it.
Self-compassion is that, turned inward. Keeping company with yourself when you're the one suffering. Most of us were never taught to relate to ourselves at all, let alone kindly. We assume the kindness has to come from someone else.
The inner critic is suspicious of it. It is sure that if you go easy on yourself you'll go soft, cave to your worst tendencies. So it keeps the pressure on.
But self-compassion isn't self-pity, and it isn't a pint of ice cream. It isn't letting yourself off the hook or turning on other people. It's refusing to abandon yourself at the exact moment things hurt.
And it isn't earned. The kid with the broken arm didn't do anything to deserve your kindness. Neither do you. The idea that you have to be good enough first, that comfort is a reward for performing well, is the same contract the critic runs on. Compassion doesn't wait for you to measure up.
The parts of you that get shamed, told to shut up and get it together, don't leave when you attack them. Demanding they pull it together has never once worked, has it.
If being kind to yourself feels foreign, it's worth practicing on purpose. The loving-kindness meditation from the mindfulness tradition is one way in. You sit, and you turn a few plain wishes toward yourself. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be well. For a lot of people this feels awkward at first, even irritating. That isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign of how long you've gone without.