Burnout club 2K26

I am deeply and profoundly burned out! I've likely been in the earlier stages of burnout for years, but then I started noticing it in my body in June. Mainly, I wasn't reacting to or recovering from stress like I normally do. I had been trying to refill my cup with physical and mental rest, art and music and books and movies, making things, and it had just...stopped working? I went on vacation to Amsterdam but was too burned out to fully enjoy it. It felt and still feels like my cup is actually a colander — oops, all holes!

I launched a Craft 5 upgrade (for my favorite client 💅) early in June, and my body was acting like I was being chased by lions for the duration, despite this being the developer equivalent of performing an oil change. Throughout June, this got worse, until I was basically having anxiety attacks at my desk daily, for ridiculous things like seeing an unread Slack DM from a colleague I enjoy working with (?) or just looking at Jira at all (this one's maybe reasonable tbh). By the last week of June, sitting down at my desk required box breathing and a propranolol, and maybe another round of that at 2PM too.

And this was so confusing because, to toot my own horn, I am doing really good work with stellar feedback across the board! 🎺! I was working with two very happy and established clients, and on a new project that was maybe finally building some inertia. The latter project included some interesting challenges and I was genuinely excited to see where we landed with it. Why is my body freaking out while I'm feeling relatively settled, comfortable, and competent at work? Yes, there are The Constant Horrors™️, but I could just not convince my body it was safe in my own personal habitat.

I spent the last weekend of June like, catatonically sad while also, haha, simultaneously upset at myself for being sad in the beautiful summer. I am unfortunately not unfamiliar with depression, but this was different, like the Sunday scaries started at 5:01 PM on Friday and took the form of a bog I got stuck in. I sat up in bed on Sunday evening and said out loud to only the cat: "I need help, because I am not thriving in this pattern." I am so focused and productive during the day! I am also barely feeding myself, struggling to stay on top of domestic tasks and chores, barely getting outside during the week, and almost never seeing my friends or moving my body because I am fully succumbing to the freeze state at 5PM each day. My work performance was, oddly, inversely correlated with my performance in every other part of my life.

I had therapy the next day and my ass was barely on the couch before I said "I am too burned out to function and I don't know what to do next". The first thing she asked was if I could take time off, and I was like "haha of course not, I must accrue all of my time off and I have 1.93 days in the bank". So, we worked on a strategy for supporting burnout after work by determining what's burning me out about work, and committing to doing the opposite every evening. We landed on these to start:

• Too much computer → as analog as possible; read a book, listen to a record all the way through, do a puzzle. Brick your phone, delete Instagram.
• Decision fatigue → eat the same thing every day on autopilot, choose your post-work activity for the next day each night and set it up, etc.
• Context switching → do all of the above in isolation, as in you're not listening to a podcast while doing that puzzle or going on a walk.
• Lie on the rug. You can anchor your attention with like, 12 Hours Redwoods Forest Hike Walk HD 4K on the TV, and then just lie on the rug, that's the whole activity.

I did this for two glorious nights and felt like wow, maybe I'm just an idiot who wasn't laying on the run enough? On Tuesday, I proudly declared in Slack that I was gonna go to a coworking space every Thursday and blocked it out in my calendar. Look everybody, I'm okay! I am building scaffolding and routines! 🫠

July 1 was my two year anniversary at work, somehow? I logged on and we had just started a new sprint, which meant like 50 innocuous emails from Jira as tickets changed status. I very nearly had a panic attack looking at my inbox, which is a genuinely ridiculous reaction and I felt (and feel) overwhelmingly silly about it. I hopped onto weekly stand up and the icebreaker was "what are you looking forward to this summer?" and I lost my cool again because my brain was like "there is nothing good in this world, we are going to die by Jira's hand". My heart rate was sitting at 155, so I bailed on a meeting to try to box breathe my way back into my body, and I couldn't get there for hours.

I talked to my manager later that afternoon about FMLA leave, and the relief I felt learning from HR that it was an option due to my tenure was immeasurable. The HR person reiterated that it's my right to take the leave and have my job protected, that this is what my short term disability benefit is for, and that it's good that I'm taking it now before I am any deeper in burnout. I also felt sudden, deep shame for having needed to take leave at all, which I immediately filed away for therapy.

I called my dad that night to report all of that. He had visited in early June and said that he could tell I wasn't myself and he was worried about me. Before hanging up, he said "I know that the real Gina is in there, and you'll use this time to find her again", which you know, destroyed me.

It is cool to know that I'm going to be okay! I've got a plan for the structure of my leave and will be documenting week by week here, mostly as a personal record of My Journey, but also maybe it can help someone who is also burned out amongst everything going on right now.