How to break the burnout cycle
The last time I wrote to you I had a job...
In March, I was laid off from my corporate job of a little over six years. I wasn’t shocked by the move, but I was caught off guard just three weeks before my wife and I were due to move from New York to Philadelphia.
While it’s never nice to be laid off, the timing was serendipitous. I had been planning on starting my own marketing consultancy for some time, picking back up the freedom I had earlier in my career when I could jump from one country to the next and take my work with me.
In the end, this was just the nudge I needed to do just that! (Now, allow me the briefest of plugs for my new business before we get on to the main event.)
While leading marketing and communications at my former company (in the sustainability tech sector), I saw the power of bold storytelling to build credibility and drive action. I founded Exile Marketing to help sustainability innovators do the same.
Exile Marketing is a purpose-driven marketing consultancy that helps sustainability tech leaders stand out, earn trust, and scale.
If you own or work for a company in sustainability and you’re looking to grow through education-driven content and strategic lead generation, visit my website to learn more and get in touch.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Give me a break
It would be unfair to say that I’ve been idle during the last two months—building a business and moving a couple hours south certainly required some work. But it is fair to say that I’ve not been working a full-time job.
This has been a break of sorts, and I appreciate the time it has allowed me to sit and think about what I want from life, my career, and the places I will call home.
Earlier in the year, I read The Answer Is No: A Short Story by Fredrik Backman, the Swedish author of A Man Called Ove and other novels. The book is a lot of grouchy fun. Here’s a quote from near the end:
Doctors and nurses understand very well that all the modern pills and treatments are surely great, but sometimes what people really need most of all is a prescription for a break.
In writing my business plan for Exile, I chose to prescribe myself breaks into the workweek, which is why I wrote “No late meetings on Fridays,” and “Don’t check work emails in the evening,” into the business plan itself.
Of course, this doesn’t mean I will never take a late meeting on a Friday or check email after hours, but it’s a goal to live up to.
Break up your day
Taking a break before moving on to your next project is the way to go if you have the means, but taking regular breaks throughout your day is just as important.
In Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity by Gloria Mark, the author talks at length about the power of taking short breaks from our work throughout the day.
Per Mark, “Focusing for lengthy periods of time, especially without breaks, is not natural for most people.” As I noted in an earlier post on how to improve your attention span with rote activity, what Mark is saying here is that focus isn’t the optimal state of attention—in order for us to focus properly, we need to balance periods of focus with other forms of attention that tax our resources less.
Trust the (recovery) process
Taking a break isn’t just important for our mental health; it’s equally necessary for our physical health.
In Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey MD and Eric Hagerman, the authors touch upon the physical stressors associated with not taking a break:
There are a number of scenarios in which the body fails to shut off the flow of stress hormones. The most obvious is simply unrelenting stress. If we never get a break, the recovery process never gets started.
We know this in our bones, and yet we push ourselves time and again to do more than we can reasonably do.
Case in point, I started the draft of this newsletter on Wednesday afternoon, knowing that if there were to be any chance of me getting it out Thursday morning I would need to work on it during the time in which I would usually be winding down for bed. While I briefly considered this, I figured that after a ten-week absence from your inboxes, it didn’t make a single bit of difference if I posted this yesterday or today. So, I allowed myself to take a break and wind down for the evening, and I finished this newsletter yesterday instead.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when you should push through—there absolutely are. But it does mean that you should choose your battles within yourself and cut yourself some slack when you can.
Have you ever given yourself a prescription for a break, such as after a job loss or the completion of a large project? What did that look like, and on a micro level, how do you build small breaks into your workday?
Such a nice topic