Burnout

A value equation

Image by Chuk Yong from Pixabay

A friend asked me what I thought about burnout recently, and here’s what poured out…

Burnout is a full body experience.

• Guts up in flames.

• Fingernails that won't grow.

• Teeth ground to cracking.

 It happens when our internal give-and-take equations fail to compute. Let me explain …

The best book on Burnout I've ever read is by Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski. In it they remind us.

“Only by making sure we have as much energy coming in as we have going out can we all stay committed to the people, work, and ideas we love.”

— Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski

On the surface this is just the first law of thermodynamics:

Energy in = Energy out + Energy stored

But not all human energy is equal. I may have the physical energy to climb mountains all day, but I can tolerate about 90 seconds of bullshit before I tap out. You might be the opposite.

Lisa Feldman Barrett frames this in terms of body budgets, and you can learn all about it in her book How Emotions Are Made. It's a pretty rad read, too. Full of fascinating stuff; I highly recommend.

Here’s my take:

Burnout happens when there’s a profound and relentless mismatch between the value of the energy you give and the value of the energy you get back.

These value equations are a hell of a lot more complex than thermo. And they don't follow any laws.

Instead, they're an unknowable function of time, culture, personal identity, health, safety, power dynamics, social networks, belief systems, stability, status, and a whole bunch more non-linear and unpredictable fudge-factors.

We can do almost anything when these value reconcile over the long term. We can expend nearly limitless energy on projects that give back in the ways we need them to. But if the value of what we get back doesn’t compensate for the value of what we put in, no amount of grit or willpower can change that fact. Burnout is not a moral failure, and it’s not laziness. It’s just math doing math.

And that’s the hidden grace in it: noticing when the equation needs tweaking is the first step in giving ourselves permission to rebalance it.

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