Looking Upstream: Burnout
Often when we talk about burnout, we tend to reach for downstream solutions.
A weekend off. A yoga class. A holiday somewhere sunny. Some vitamin D and an early night. And these things help in the short term.
But if we only treat what's downstream, we stay stuck in a cycle that’s familiar to many: recover enough to keep going, keep going until you can't, recover enough to keep going again.
This is a field guide for looking upstream instead, to understand what's actually happening beneath the surface.
Because in the work to create a more just, loving & regenerative world, there are three patterns that consistently derail personal and collective impact: burnout, conflict, and navigating by known maps in unknown territory (or, relying on strategy when wayfinding is what’s needed).
This piece follows the first of these upstream.
I want to start by saying burnout is never a single moment. There's no neatly defined event with clear dates and timelines. I spent many years moving up and down the burnout spectrum - and watching friends, colleagues, employers, and fellow organisers do the same - before I understood that it works more like a slinky or the ocean tide, than a neat, one-size-fits-all box.
Burnout exists on a spectrum. At the mild end might be persistent overwhelm, tightness in the shoulders or jaw, a sense of apathy or disengagement. At the severe end: exhaustion like being weighted under a tonne of bricks, chronic illness, the sense that the self you knew has gone somewhere you can't reach, no matter how hard you try.
Asking how long burnout lasts is also like asking how long is a piece of string. Once we've reached it we tend to spiral up and down depending on our level of resourcing, responsibilities, and the care we're both receiving and giving.
One thing I learnt through my experiences however, is that in focusing on symptoms - looking downstream - we often treat burnout as a wellness problem; a ‘resiliency deficit’ that can be cured with a little more self-care, a yoga class, a weekend off or a vacation to somewhere sunny. Unsurprisingly, our ideas about resiliency and self-care are closely tied in with a culture of consumerism; the wellness industry is worth around $7 trillion dollars globally, ‘treat yourself’ became a self-care meme, and meditation – once and still a process for introspection, self-knowledge, enlightenment – now an industry worth over $7 billion dollars.
(Fun fact: Google searches for “self-care” doubled between 13 and 19 November 2016, the week after Donald Trump was first elected US president. Understandably, of course, also during the early days of Covid. Self-care is necessary because many of us have very genuine unmet needs, and importantly, as a concept and practice it cannot be separated from our political realities).
To be clear, many of these responses are great - no-one is knocking the power of getting unplugged or moving your body, and certainly not a meditation practice.
But in many cases, we approach these solutions from a place of looking downstream, rather than walking upstream to where the exhaustion is coming from in the first place.
Why does this matter? Two reasons.
Remaking the world is long-haul work. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We need to know how to have the energy – the ideas, the creativity, the spirit – to journey for many, many miles. Burnout stops this. It saps creativity and drive. It inspires apathy and powerlessness. If our only response to burnout is to patch it with self-care, it’s like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. It just won’t work, and we’ll suffer as individuals, and movements will suffer with their momentum.
We don’t create a more just, loving and regenerative world through policy or outward action alone. It is something we seed into existence through our relationships, our words, our actions. Creating the world we want also means allowing the world we want to live within us – and not many of us are dreaming of a life of exhaustion.
Because the world we want to create has to be embodied somewhere - and we are the somewhere. How we treat ourselves, how we rest, how we receive care as well as give it - these aren't separate from the work, they are microcosms of it. And if we cannot inhabit a microcosm of the world we want, we may find ourselves building toward a vision of the world that we ourselves are not yet able to inhabit.
Looking upstream
So, why are we burning out as changemakers, and what are we supposed to do about it?
If we’re to look upstream, there’s two tributaries we need to follow: the individual and the systemic.
If we follow first the individual tributary of burnout, we get to two sources of burnout-causing pollution along the way. The first is made of this question: are you doing what is yours to do in this time?
This question is specific: it’s not asking what you can do, or what needs doing. It’s asking what is yours to do.
For many of us, we’ve been conditioned by social, family and cultural expectations to do what is expected of us. For some of us, we’ve never had the chance to truly explore and answer this question; we’ve perhaps jumped from school to university to careers or pathways that haven’t brought the level of meaning and fulfilment it was thought they would.
Or the thing that once brought meaning, no longer does. What is “ours” is to enter the time of the liminal, a necessary time of gestation, where we must let go of the shore to reach new lands.
But there’s a certain trade off when we’re not doing what is ours: because the thing that’s ours to do – the thing that calls to us from deep within, that some part of us says yes to (even when deeply uneasy or uncomfortable) tends to be a more generative experience, which gives energy and feedback in response to our effort toward it. Work we do out of ‘shoulds’, expectation, obligation – no matter how ‘helpful’ or ‘good’ it is – can often be a drainer of energy.
Think of a bee following its draw toward particular flowers - it’s not about all the flowers, or the nearest flowers, or the ones that most need pollinating. Instead, it follows some sort of instinct or calling or attunement. And in doing so, it feeds itself and the flower reproduces. The effort and the nourishment aren't separate. The right relationship generates more life in both directions.
This is what I mean by generative - it's not that the work is easy, or comfortable, or free from uncertainty. It's that something comes back. Energy, feedback, a sense of alignment - even in the difficulty.
Obligation work can look identical from the outside, but internally, it's different. Effort goes out; not much returns.
This is something I’ve often witnessed in both movement spaces and purpose-driven organisations: people (often women) stepping up to fill the gaps but at the expense of time and energy for the work that truly matters to them, the work they’re called to in this time.
I’ve also seen people deep in disruptive spaces of activism and changemaking, but whom are called to weave different threads at this point in their life, dreaming of growing community, planting seeds (literal and metaphorical), or weaving other – necessary – threads of healing and building in this time.
If we cannot follow the call to what is ours to do in this time, it inevitably results in unmet needs, a depletion of energy and dampened impact - often accompanied, of course, by burnout.
The second form of burnout-causing pollution we encounter in the individual tributary is what to do with the weight of the work. And let me be clear on this: we’re not all supposed to be magically regulated beings without any stress, anxiety or emotions in a collapsing late-stage capitalist world.
Moving between the world as it is and the world as it could be is literally the work of sitting in the unknown and uncomfortable – we’re not bypassing messy emotions here.
However, we do need to know how to process and work with both the stressors in our everyday lives (from work overload, to conflict, to change) and the stressors of living in a reshaping world (genocides, wars, economic precarity, climate change, the threat of a new nuclear arms race!).
So let me ask: how connected are you to your body right now? What do you feel? What does it need? When did you last move your body, get 8 hours of quality sleep, drink some water? When did you last talk to someone about what you were feeling or afraid of or unclear on? When did you last express your desires – or even feel your desires? When did you last move amongst the trees and the rivers and oceans and feel the sun on your face? When did you last turn off your phone with its actual off button? When did you last dance to your favourite song or cook your favourite meal?
Part of processing the stressors we have in our life and world is by being resourced enough to do so. It’s having an outlet to talk about our feelings, but also to enjoy life. While suffering and struggle have a place in the collective struggle for change, our individual suffering is not revolutionary, and does not change the world.
What systems, choices, communities and practices do you need to resource yourself to move through this world with an infinite sense of care for yourself?
Changing Course
It’s here that we meet another tributary in the river – the systemic.
Because let’s be very real here: burnout is a system problem. It’s not an individual failing, nor is it something that can be entirely “dealt with” at the level of the individual.
One example here is to think about a plant in your garden. Give it the right conditions – the right sunlight, rain, soil nutrients – it thrives. Poor conditions – not enough care, insects, poor soil – it suffers.
Burnout at the scale it currently exists is, in part, a natural consequence of our poor soil. So what is our shared soil? What’s it made of?
Our world is made by systems: cultural, political, economic. Underneath every system however, is a story: a set of beliefs, values or a mindset that shapes it and upholds it. Stories are the soil of our shared world. They’re assumptions, stated and unstated, that play out in our thoughts, words and actions. They form the conditions that inform what we value, how we act and the relationships and collaborations we foster.
And here’s the thing: we collectively believe these stories (or at least act as if we do). We play the role. We internalise their message – consciously and unconsciously – allowing them to live within us.
This includes (though of course is far from limited to) the story of growth or neoliberalism: a story built on three pillars.
A premise of infinite growth, often defining or equating growth with success or wellbeing (ignoring the value of natural cycles of rest, loss, decay or the landscape of valleys or ocean depths).
Manufactured scarcity, because how – indeed, why – do you keep growing if you have enough? Satiety and satisfaction are out of alignment with a forever growth imperative. If growth is your goal, scarcity is a brilliant driver.
(Important note: many people do not have enough, but this is in part artificially created through a variety of means from planned obsolescence, to austerity measures, to colonisation (both historical and modern day), to fears of scarcity, to greed, to poorly designed systems (hello food waste!) etc. Real scarcity however needs addressing, but this field guide is rather speaking to the ideology & desire point of growth in the Global North).The devaluation of beautiful, living, complex systems to lifeless resources. Jungles, rainforest, oceans have more value as timber or tourism than for their own existence.
So what happens is this:
We internalise this story, and where the systemic tributary meets the individual, we get this merging of waters where we start to act out the system. Because the system isn’t just outside us – it’s in us; in our beliefs, values, mindsets and relationships.
How have we internalised capitalism, living our its story foundations of scarcity and infinite growth?Internalised capitalism shows up as the feeling of ‘not enough’. Never doing enough, being enough, giving enough, having enough. Never enough.
Internalised capitalism also manifests as feeling uncomfortable with rest or time off, the inner compulsion to continue working when sick, either from the office or home; because if the only metric of success is growth, output and productivity, rest can be interpreted as without value (or alternatively, rest’s value lies only in enhancing productivity - eg, “If I rest now, I can get even more done tomorrow!”).
It’s not uncommon that we treat our inner resources – our creativity, energy, attention – in much the same way we treat the Earth’s: with the expectation that they will always be there, available, on demand, with little regard for their renewal or the surrounding environment, which in this case is our body or nervous system. Between self and world is a mirror - internalised extractivism.
With internalised capitalism, even fitness or inner work can become hijacked to the ideology of growth at all costs. A message focused on ‘bettering’, or ‘levelling up’ as opposed to our liberation, wellbeing or thriving. Mindfulness becomes a tool not just of insight and harmony, but of productivity and performance; presence measured by its results, rather than the experience of being.
And so where these tributaries meet - the blending of the systemic and the individual - we override our natural desires, boundaries and needs in order to prove our value and worth – thus embodying capitalism’s premise (we do not have enough! We must have more! Our bodies are resources to extract from!) and putting us on a path to burnout.
2. We create environments – workplaces, movements, community groups – which mirror and enforce the system. In a collective setting, this manifests as:
Connecting value or belonging to output (so belonging becomes conditional on productivity)
Normalising overwork and individual strain (often with messages confusing resilience and endurance)
Having limited capacity for time off and usually even less so for dreaming or creativity (essential skills in remaking the world).
Measuring success only in the quantitative
Shifting responsibility downward and authority upward (h/t Himal Mandalia).
A loop of scarcity > pushing through > small wins > pushing through > overriding limits > exhaustion > scarcity
Forgetting that we are human beings having beautiful, messy, complicated and awe-inspiring lives.
And this isn’t just in workplaces – these same patterns can be replicated in our movement spaces, our faith groups, our community hubs. We act what we know, creating conditions that don’t allow people to flourish.
Going Forward
Now this particular examination of upstream tributaries is speaking to the system of capitalism, but of course burnout is an experience also deeply shaped by patriarchy and systems of supremacy – including whiteness and ableness. Women typically do more unpaid labour than men, and volunteer for undesired tasks (eg, minute taking or admin) more often as well. The burden of being the recipient of racism or micro-aggressions, of homophobia or ableist narratives, also unjustly increases the stress, the workload and the emotional toll for many people.
This is why when we’re looking at the obstacles we’re facing in remaking the world, burnout needs to be addressed – but not just as an individual wellness issue or resiliency deficit (even though there is individual work to be done!).
Rather, by looking upstream we can start to see both why it’s happening but also what to do about it. Because we also need to address the systemic, starting at the point we all have impact - the blending waters of the systemic and individual, the places we have internalised and mirror systems of harm and violence.
So yes: take that weekend vacation, go to that yoga class, learn to say no. That’s part of the work!
But also, let’s actively be part of remaking the world by Getting Free – unlearning and composting those systems of harm from the inside out. By allowing our lives and bodies to be a microcosm of the world as it could be, through actively dismantling the narratives which are not serving us as a people or planet.
And let’s actively reshape our organisations, our movements, our community spaces to be micro-cultures of change, to be messy embodiments of the values and striving of a more just, loving and regenerative world.
Curious how? Explore:
Rise: Finding What’s Yours To Do In This Time
Getting Free: The Foundations of Deep Change
1:1 Work With Founder, Laura Hartley
