Burn rubber does not mean warp speed!

"...If you were a car...when you reach brown out, this is when your fuel

warning light turns on... often when people present to therapy, it's when they've reached brown out or near brown out... Full burnout is when you have no fuel left in the tank. You're completely depleted and exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally."

-Monique Mitchelson

Woman slumped on a bed looking exhausted

The heading for this blog post is a line from one of my favourite movies, The Lost Boys (Schumacher, 1987). It is an odd phrase and never really made complete sense to me until recently. Here I explore how I have come to understand it.

I am currently taking a weeks leave from work. I have done this as part of a commitment to myself to better manage my health and avoid burning out. This commitment follows many years of ignoring my body and pushing through, well beyond my limits. Which, not surprisingly resulted in ill health and extended periods of recovery.

Following confirmation of my ADHD I came to understand burnout in more depth. Prior to that I had used it as a throw away term that I would often interchange with being run down. Since covid I have seen a huge uptick in clients being depleted and feeling depressed or unmotivated. I was also seeing an uptick in my teen clients being dysregulated more than usual for their adolescent years. It was only after listening to the Neurodivergent Woman podcast episode on Autistic Burnout that I started to connect a lot of dots, not only for my own experience but for that of clients. The episode details the signs of occupational/generalised burnout along with autistic burnout. While there is limited research to definitely support it, there is a growing understanding that the features of autistic burnout are experienced by ADHDrs and other neurodivergent individuals. It is therefore now more commonly known as ND burnout. Regardless of neurotype, however, the impact of burnout is significant and the treatment of it is important. In this podcast episode they argue that burnout is a state of nervous system exhaustion where the only real option for full recovery is to rest and recuperate. They also stress that burnout is accumulative so the more times you experience burnout the harder and longer your recovery can be.

I personally prefer the definition of burnout coined by Herbert Freudenberger (1975) (in Nagoski, E. & Nagoski, A., 2020) because I believe it more aptly describes what is reported to me by clients. That is, emotional exhaustion - the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; depersonalisation - the depletion of empathy, caring and compassion; and decreased sense of accomplishment - an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference. 

In a capitalist world where your value can often be equated with your productivity it is not surprising that burnout happens. Couple that with a number of years of global instability and you have a perfect storm for people reaching their physical, mental and emotional limits. Then you add the self care industry and with it encouragement to schedule self care in to an already full schedule and people are left feeling like they are failing at life. I have spoken about my views on self care in various instagram posts over the years. In a nutshell I am not a fan of the concept. I believe it separates people from each other and fosters hyper independence. It erodes connection and community support when what we are needing is to connect and support each other because so many of us are struggling in isolation. Then there is the monetisation of the self care (cue eye roll).

I sometimes present seminars on wellbeing and resilience for government departments. More recently I have adjusted these presentations to discuss burnout and how misrepresentations of resilience can contribute to it. I discuss concepts like surge capacity, stoicism and the arrival fallacy; the belief that attaining a particular goal will lead to long-term happiness (Ben-Shahar (2007). These concepts help us to understand resilience as knowing that life will sometimes be challenging and will require us to go above and beyond (surge) but these challenges do not last. Life is never a perfect plain of zen where nothing bad ever happens ever again. We are consistently faced with hard times and then we are blessed with good times; sometimes within the same day. Resilience is knowing that you have survived hard things and you will survive them again and in between life is good. Sadly, resilience is often depicted as stoicism where you must solider on, keep a stiff upper lip, or suck it up princess!

I also explain the autonomic nervous system and the impact of being in a sustained sympathetic activation (fight/flight) for extended periods of time. Generally speaking when we overuse our nervous system it borrows resources from our immune system. This is where long term damage to our health, including burnout, can happen. I believe we need to start talking about stress in terms of it's impact on our nervous system and in language that includes fight/flight so people can better grasp the significant impact it can have on them. Greater universal use of the nervous system to explain stress also provides language for recovery options. If more people understood sympathetic and parasympathetic activation they may take the need for rest more seriously. Additionally, knowing the role of the nervous system in our emotional responses and encouraging interoceptive practice would go along way to buffering our risk of burnout.

So back to the heading of this post, burn rubber does not mean warp speed. I now believe that this means that we don't have to wipe ourselves out to be productive. Slowing down can preserve our physical, mental and emotional resources so that we can surge when the need arises and we can operate in a more functional way at all other times. Covid was a clear example of the need to surge, particularly for those working in healthcare. The mental health crisis that has followed, to me, indicates that too many of us were operating in surge already and we did not have the capacity to surge further.

Woman sitting in mediation by a calm body of water

Ideal rest is unique to each individual so I am not going to bang on about what everyone should do or not do. I do, however, recommend taking some time to define what feels like rest for you (even if it doesn't make sense for others!). For me, it is a quiet week (or longer) at home, going to yoga and pilates classes, getting out in my garden, sleeping in or having a nana nap, watching something binge worthy on TV or sinking in to a good book. It also includes ticking off things on my mental to-do list like odd jobs around the house that have been ignored or put off for way too long or refinishing a piece of furniture. Rest does not have to be saving up all your leave for months to go on an island holiday or trip overseas (although they can be pretty unreal too). It can be the odd longer weekend here and there.

If you take anything away from reading this I hope it is this... there is movement in rest, there is productivity in rest and most importantly, there is wellbeing in rest.

Ben-Shahar, T. PhD (2007). Happier. McGraw Hill

Nagoski, E and Nagoski, A (2020). Burnout; The secret to solving the stress cycle. Random House UK