NICOLA TAGER: Daily habits that build energy help to overcome burnout

Burnout is prevalent in times of high stress and cannot easily be helped by finding balance when our energy flatlines. Instead, recovery needs us to make different choices.

Burnout blazed into the headlines with news of former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern stepping down, saying: “I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice.” But the reality is burnout is nothing new.

The constant pressure to succeed without fail is a heavy burden many of us carry as we aim to meet expectations and aspirations in our personal and professional circles. This can put us on the road to burnout as we push through despite reaching points of exhaustion. Sustained performance is the goal as continued peak performance is not real life.

The fact is burnout is not an experience limited to a brave country leader such as Ardern. It can happen to any of us when we burden ourselves to remain resilient, regardless of what our bodies are quietly whispering to us. 

I reached my lowest point in December 2018. It was five months after my mom passed away and I found myself emotionally, intellectually and physically exhausted. It went beyond being unsettled.

My mother had been a pillar of strength in my life, particularly at that stage in my professional and motherhood journey. My role had expanded, I was travelling quite a bit and studying that year. Her loss, the admin surrounding her death; end-of-year work volumes and my personal pressure of wanting to be whole for my husband and children pushed me to exhaustion. December holidays were on the horizon and that was the goal.

On the first night of our holiday we were faced with an intruder who was about to approach my daughter’s room. At the time, I was holding my son on my hip, and I froze. It was the most frightening point of my experience of burnout because protecting my children is part of my purpose and I couldn’t respond. I realised I needed help to reboot my life.

Burnout doesn’t only show up as hospitalisation; it presents and manifests differently and we must learn to listen to ourselves, to hear and see the signs. Taking a holistic wellness approach to recover and rediscover myself, I began with a focus on rebuilding my energy levels. I needed to start with basic building blocks; I couldn’t do it all. I opened up to my husband and a friend (and homeopath). We started with full bloods and a regime of vitamins and meds to start to regain energy and get some of my hormones firing again.

While I still didn’t have the capacity to do the deep emotional work, I chose an alternate healing path in the form of reiki. This enabled me to take the next step; speaking to someone. Counselling was a journey of understanding, experiencing and working through all of the emotions that had been ignored. I was able to direct my journey, with loads of input from friends, and made choices that would result in a more meaningful, integrated life for me.

Managing burnout is not about regaining balance but rather about making choices for ourselves. Choices that don’t conflict but build daily habits that support our energy and being. You can only give what you have. Dealing with burnout is about taking care of yourself.

The common reference to work-life balance is misleading. The many demands of daily living inevitably conflict with one another, making it impossible to fully achieve the holy grail of “balance”. And honestly, that’s OK. Failure is inevitable as we attempt to pursue balance, because juggling our responsibilities in the hope of finding balance is likely to result in us sometimes dropping the ball. Instead, we should aim for integration, which asks us to choose our priorities with purpose.

Find hobbies

The fundamental choices we make centre on how much focus our families and work require in a week. When we look at responsibilities in this light we are empowered to find patterns that enable us to find our rhythm in a more sustainable way. Doing so allows us to create a space where we are able to cope with high performance pressure. There is a lot of value in understanding habits and building habits that support the correct routine, lifestyle and way of being.

I had to find hobbies, exercise and apply good diet habits. I had to make space for social connectedness, which has led to the most phenomenal friendships. Most importantly, I needed to create quality habits of just being with my children and husband. That included “me” time, which led to finding my purpose. All of which are now built into my daily routine. I had to make it a habit.

This integrated approach also applies to the workplace. Wellbeing must be treated as an organisational imperative to build peoples’ energy at an individual level, that helps to make team performance sustainable and strong. In this context, wellness work requires an awareness and education for companies to create a context in which it is acceptable to ask for help the moment burnout threatens.

One overarching reality of burnout that rings true for every person is that moving beyond it is possible. And there’s a huge upside to that: overcoming burnout makes us stronger than before because we emerge knowing ourselves more, and are all the better for it.

• Tager is global head of Investec Careers & Employee Experience.