No One Can ‘Fix’ Your Burnout
The factors that cause burnout are external, feeding into internal, and personal, issues across our physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, creative and truly whole selves. We become tied into operating under conditions of burnout, and when we finally recognize and acknowledge it, it feels like something we’ve done to ourselves. Yet often, while we might have been able to see the flags sooner and made a few different choices to ease the level of burnout, once we’re on that path it’s incredibly difficult to avoid.
Burnout (and pushing through it) becomes habit. And habits are difficult to break.
When we seek help, conflicting messages come in. Even the most well meaning friends and professionals will say that burnout can be fixed — just try this method, this coach, this therapist, this time management program, this self care product, this class, this book, this content creator’s videos (and the 70 others the algorithm then feeds you). Yet none of those address the root causes of your burnout, nor can they do the essential work of removing those causes AND actively healing you. Because let’s face it: even if you’re ready to overcome your burnout, if the things causing are still in your life and cannot be removed, it’s going to take exponentially more, deeper work to cope with actively being in burnout, with the things that caused it, while trying to heal enough to feel a little better and find a way to eventually divest from those causes.
You can be (and hopefully are or have been) supported on your journey of healing from burnout. You can be provided tools for coping with life in the midst of, and working through to get over burnout. But there is no external fix that will happen from another person — especially not someone selling you that fix.
Until you can eliminate the conditions causing your burnout AND rest AND are in a place of security to start healing from it, you’re going to get stuck, get frustrated, and overwhelm yourself thinking you’re broken (or you’re ‘fixed’ when all you’ve really done is covered up or pushed aside the burnout to deal with later), or pin your hopes on a person, product, or system that will do the healing for you.
None of this is to say it can’t be done.
All of this to say: if any individual or company or mouthpiece or product tells you they have the path to fix your burnout — it’s a lie.
They may have tools to help you recognize the causes, and methods of dealing with them while you try to find ways of removing them from your life. They may have suggestions of what to do when you have actually gotten rid of those external causes — how to use your time and energy to start healing. They may have techniques, or workbooks, or courses of options to assist your healing journey. And all of these things can be helpful. But you ultimately have the work to do yourself. No one else, sadly, can actually cure your burnout.
When we work with clients who are actively burned out, or recovering from periods of burn out, we are not trying to find a creative practice that will make them feel whole again. We don’t promise, ever, to heal the trauma caused by having their creative soul sucked away. We can’t hand you a workbook that gives you creative activities to do for just ten minutes a day to feel like your best self again.
Because while a consistent, sustainable creative practice can do an enormous, and essential, amount of good for our brains, bodies, and souls, none of that work alone will heal your burn out, or remove what’s causing it.
We know that. We acknowledge it. And we call bullshit on anyone saying they alone have the answers to fix you (via their exclusive method, workshop, class, workbook, product, whatever).
