Burnout in 2020: Causes, Symptoms, and Prevention (Based on My Experience)

Burnout is a complex phenomenon, and there’s usually not a single cause. There are also varying degrees of burnout. I recently experienced (and am still experiencing) a pretty brutal burnout, and I’m going to talk about it with the purpose of sharing worthwhile information and tips with you. Whether or not you are burned out, there will be something of value to you in this post as far as improving your peace of mind and overall quality of life.

In this post I’ll be discussing with you the following:

• What caused my burnout, and what are the causes of burnout for others? (causes)
• How do you get through a burnout? And what do you do when you hit “rock bottom”? (symptoms)
• How do you prevent burnout moving forward? (prevention)

Are you, or is someone you know, burned out? Do you see yourself at all in any of the following details? I hope this post will inspire you to identify the root cause, address it, and move forward to a better and healthier place.

Even if you’re not burned out now, being aware of the causes and how to prevent it will be beneficial to you. And if you are burned out, please know that you’re not alone and we will get through this together.

Causes of Burnout

On the evening of Monday, January 27^th, 2020, I found myself shaking uncontrollably for the whole evening. My body stopped functioning. After a visit to the doctor the next day, I found out I was burned out way worse than I thought.

While I didn’t officially acknowledge my burnout until late January 2020, after reflecting on it I realized I was burned out for the final three months of 2019. And thinking back through 2019, I remember symptoms starting during the summer. For a while, I didn’t know what was happening to me.

One of the challenges with our society is that few people take being “somewhat burned out” seriously. Being a little bit burned out is even considered to be a normal side effect of our fast-paced lives. I’m here to tell you that it’s actually not normal, despite what society has you believe.

One of the first things to consider is that the cause of your burnout may be deep and far-reaching, and you may be burned out worse than you first thought. Don’t beat yourself up for this: it’s easy to not face the truth of your health in an effort to maintain normalcy and sanity in your daily life. But you need to check what’s going on under the hood for the sake of your long-term health.

For me, one of the big causes was the dysfunctional jobs I’ve had throughout my life. While my writing career is going well, I also work jobs and do consulting to further support myself and my business. For the last six years or so, I’ve been doing jobs and consulting in the field of digital marketing.

Digital marketing is a super valuable skill, but after a number of challenging experiences let me tell you that the field of digital marketing can be quite hectic, chaotic, and dysfunctional. I know all jobs have their challenges, but digital marketing has its own brand of weirdness: people with low emotional intelligence; lack of communication; blaming others, without taking responsibility; and more crap like that. It gets unbelievably tiring after a while. And this is not personal to a specific geographic location – digital marketing is like this across different countries and the world.

Perhaps other people have had a different experience in this field. In my experience and the experience of others I’ve talked to, digital marketing is incredibly hectic and demanding. People in this field treat it as “warfare” and “do or die”.

I’m a high performer as well as a hard worker, so results were never an issue for me in these jobs. I did well and have good references from my previous employers (also, there were some crazy jobs I had to quit that I don’t even put on my resume/CV). The problem is the high-stress atmosphere and the toll it took on my health.

I had a couple of bad bosses that overflowed my cup – they lacked integrity and were especially crappy people, and it finally became too much. This was not the only cause of my burnout, but it was a big one.

Other causes of my burnout are also things that can cause burnout for others too:

• Giving in to other people’s demands.
• Pleasing others too much.
• Not saying no enough (this is nuanced because in the dysfunctional field I told you about, I would say no to people and they wouldn’t take no for an answer in really intense ways, but it’s still a good reflection point and something to work on).
• Doing too many things at once and burning the candle on both ends.

It’s worth pointing out I sometimes listen to YouTube advice a little too much. When certain influencers talk about the importance of working until 2 am to make your dreams a reality, I take that to heart. I didn’t work until 2 am most nights, but I was always pushing myself past my boundaries and working harder than I needed to.

I’m all for hard work and my work ethic has and will continue to benefit me throughout my life, but there’s also a thing called balance. Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and sometimes the best thing you can do is pace yourself.

One of the things I can improve on more is learning to weed out advice and to know what applies to me and what doesn’t. It’s not like I’m listening to anyone and everyone, but when I hear certain words from people I respect I sometimes take them too seriously. It’s important to take what works for you and discard the rest.

Are these YouTubers to blame for my burnout? Of course not. For example, I genuinely love Gary Vaynerchuk’s content and find him to be inspirational. At the same time, I need to get better at knowing when Gary is speaking to me and when he’s speaking to someone else (he has a broad audience). I know that when I work until 2 am, I’m miserable the next day. Being miserable is no way to go through life, so that’s how I know this particular tip is not really for me. It’s ok to work until 2 am once in a while, but in my opinion, to have that be your norm – especially if you have to get up for work in the morning – is insane.

An additional cause to touch on is family dysfunction. I’m not going to go into the details now, but I have certain traumatic experiences and memories from my past that have been eating at me for years. These memories have been taking away from my enjoyment of life and finally became too much. For many, there is often something underneath the surface that is some kind of root cause of their burnout. This is not always the case, but it is more often than you’d think. If it’s not family dysfunction, it could be some other kind of trauma. I’ll mention how to address something like this in the next section.

There are more causes to go into, and more nuances to explain, but this is a blog post, not a book. The above covers the gist of how I became so incredibly burned out, and how it may happen with others. Now let’s talk about symptoms.

How Do You Get Through a Burnout? And What About Hitting Rock Bottom?

Getting through burnout is definitely not easy. Having struggled tremendously, especially over the last three months, this is where I can empathize with you if you find yourself in an endless pit.

Burnout seems never-ending and is incredibly difficult to get through, especially when you are severely burned out to your core like I was (and still am right now). As powerful as meditation is, one of the challenges with burnout – at least, in my own experience – is that a simple meditation won’t cure your burnout. It will alleviate some symptoms for a bit and possibly make you feel a little better, but it doesn’t solve it. Burnout runs deep. While I recommend you to engage in a practice of meditation and/or prayer, realize that this alone may not solve your problem.

For the record, this is not a knock on meditation, as meditation got me through the dark night of my soul when I was seventeen years old. I’m simply pointing out that burnout is a complex phenomenon that doesn’t heal and go away easily.

With burnout can come a feeling of incredible anxiety, as if you are stuck in an intense black hole with no escape. I struggled and continue to struggle enormously with anxiety. I’m not talking about “normal” functional levels of anxiousness, which is tough enough. I’m referring here to acute anxiety, where everything seems like an emergency, your world is overwhelming you to the point of collapse, nothing seems to help, and it won’t go away. At a low point in February of 2020, my anxiety was so bad my chest was hurting, and it was hard to breathe. I was thinking, when will this end?

If/when you have these challenging symptoms, here are some ideas to help ease your pain. None of them are guaranteed to work, but one of them might help you in some way. Sometimes it’s not about trying to be positive. Sometimes it’s about alleviating your pain and doing your best to get back to neutral, or at least at a point with less severe anxiety:

• Face your feelings directly. This can be insanely difficult, and a lot of people in society shy away from doing this. But it’s what you need to do in order to get better. The way out is through. The paradoxical nature of facing your feelings directly is that it sometimes gets worse before it gets better. Instead of partially feeling your feelings, dive into them completely and feel them in their entirety. You do this by:
  1. Recognizing that there’s a problem.
  2. Acknowledging that the problem is difficult and traumatic.
  3. Validating your feelings. Validating your feelings is so hard because this is where you accept them and give them space instead of resisting and denying them. Ironically, this acceptance of your crappy state can actually start to neutralize your acute anxiety. Validating your feelings is also about “giving a name” to them. For example, naming and recognizing your pain and sadness. Often, there is some sadness buried within anger.
• Just breathe. Lie down without any stimuli and take big, deep belly breaths. As I’ve mentioned, this may not solve everything, but it can help you get through your anxiety when it’s at its worst.
• Reflect in a journal, venting your innermost thoughts and feelings into it.
• Listen to a guided meditation. I often do this in the evening. While this likely won’t solve your burnout, it can help to reduce anxiety.
• Get social support by speaking with some of your friends and/or family about what you’re going through.
• Seriously consider getting therapy. I’m in therapy now and it does help with some of the anxiety.
• Read books, especially fiction. I’ve started reading more fiction lately and it really does distract your mind.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list, and if your anxiety turns into something even worse please call a hotline and get help from a psychologist immediately (there’s always help out there; even before it turns into an acute crisis, you can still utilize hotlines and psychologists as needed). My goal here was to point out and address that anxiety can be a big side effect of burnout, in regards to the burnout itself as well as how much it sucks to not have the kind of energy to do the things you’d normally do.

When you’re struggling and burned out beyond belief, it’s crucial to not push yourself. I had to rethink my ways of always wanting to do more because it was this type of behavior that led to my burnout to begin with. The key is to get active when you’re ready for it. Not when you think you should, but when you actually feel ready for it. Don’t jump back into your life before you’re actually ready.

If you’re at rock bottom and nothing else seems to have helped, this is when therapy can make a big difference. Therapy can help at any stage and you don’t need to wait until rock bottom to get help – I’m just pointing out here some go-to strategies if you do find yourself at a low. If you’re still waiting to see your therapist, you have immediate access to hotlines, your family/friends, and/or other kinds of support groups. If you’re alone and too embarrassed to speak to anyone else about what you’re going through, feel free to email me at jeff@jeffdspeaks.com.

Rock bottom is relative to everyone, so don’t compare your rock bottom to someone else’s – if you know in your core that you’ve had enough, and you truly need help, that’s enough to take immediate action to improve your situation. Taking action doesn’t mean you will start to feel better right away, as your body and soul need time to fully recover. With that said, it does keep you focused on what you can control.

Please don’t misunderstand: sometimes the best thing you can do is to be patient and not do any kind of work. When I talk about taking action here, I’m talking about activating the right kinds of resources to get you out of rock bottom – like talking to a therapist and those you trust. Don’t feel obligated to be productive in the typical societal sense.

Preventing Burnout Moving Forward

When preventing burnout moving forward, one of the first things to do is consider a whole lifestyle shift. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean a full revamp of everything in your life, but it does mean you need to get back to the fundamentals. This includes things like eating better, pushing yourself less, and saying no more. Become more comfortable with yourself and your own version of success, regardless of what others think.

“Just a little bit more” – whatever a “little bit” means to you – really eats away at you over time. Long nights and early mornings can wear at you far faster than you think, and you need to watch out that you don’t burn the candle on both ends.

Work-life balance is not a myth. It’s an important part of your long-term success.

Consider reinventing yourself. I know I certainly am. In my business, I’m focusing on my writing now more than my speaking. This simplifies my focus and doesn’t have me spinning my wheels in too many different directions. Small changes lead to remarkable results.

Society will almost always ask too much of you. People will never stop with their demands. The solution is to shift the focus away from the outside world and to yourself. Make peace with yourself by validating your own worth as a human being. Simplify your life as much as possible, and outside of work, only do things you want to do – not things you “have to” or “should do”.

Remember that if you say yes to other people’s demands, you are saying no to your own health and well-being. Letting go of pleasing others is very hard, but it can be a skill that is learned, harnessed, and refined over time with practice. Also, keep in mind that sometimes it’s about finding the balance and middle way between pleasing yourself and others. Give yourself space to be you and leave chunks of time open in your schedule each week to just be. Get to know your own values. Take trips each year to get away from it all (even if it’s a staycation), and remind yourself often that your health is more important than almost everything else.

Jeff Davis is an award-winning author. If you resonated with some of the tips in this blog post, feel free to check out the follow-up post on how to recover from burnout while still working.