Until the past few years, I rarely heard the term “burnout.” Then it was everywhere — in memes, news articles, tweets and the mouths of weary and discouraged friends.
As discussions of burnout have become more common, I’ve sometimes wondered: Am I burned out? As a working mom, I certainly feel exhausted much of the time. In May, The Times reported that 68 percent of working moms say they are burned out.
But how does one know what’s just the normal wear and tear of life versus when it’s something more dire? Further, if people are burned out, what can they do about it, and what role might God play in responding to burnout? With these questions in mind, I approached the psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson.
In his private practice and his books, Thompson explores, as he put it, the “intersection of neuroscience and spiritual formation.” To be honest, being an incurable pragmatist, I came to my conversation with him wanting a quick and easy five steps to cure burnout. But our talk was surprising in ways that touch on why I was drawn to speak to him in the first place. Instead of offering me life hacks or discussing work-life balance, he pointed to less understood aspects that contribute to burnout: loneliness and isolation.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
What is burnout?
“Burnout” is a euphemism. There are a number of different things that we can experience that we call burnout. The imagery is a match that’s burned out. It’s some phenomenon that once had energy to do whatever it was intended to do but all the fuel is spent.
Functionally, as a psychiatrist and as a Christian, I believe that we were made to be generative. We want to make things, whether I’m going to make art or I’m going to be creative with the patients that I see or with the students that I teach or with the congregants that I’m pastoring. When people feel burned out, they don’t have any fuel left to create. Even down to the point of “How do I create meals for my family?” Simple things. It’s the sense of “I can’t make things happen that need to happen.”
What has led to the widespread burnout that many of us are experiencing?
The pandemic certainly was causal, to some degree. But in many respects, it was simply revelatory. It revealed things that were already there, things that have been under the hood, waiting for something to come along and pull the curtain back.
We know that the brain can do a lot of really hard things for a long time, as long as it doesn’t have to do them by itself. We only develop greater resilience when we are deeply emotionally connected to other people.
Yet we were committed to any number of different practices long before the pandemic that have us moving further and further away from each other. For example, I am less deeply known by my neighbors. My children are not spontaneously known by other children in the neighborhood. They don’t go to the playground and play pickup games.
By virtue of how modernity and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the individual has atomized us, we have been practicing isolation for much longer than we know. We build it into our daily routines. We build it into our social media behavior. We have practiced liturgies of isolationism.
In being isolated, we practice believing that joy and life and delight in the world has to do with the acquisition of something. If we can have the best job. If we can have the best marriage or the best relationship or whatever it is. If we can reach a benchmark, if we personally can acquire that, then we will be OK. That’s just another aspect of our isolationism.
It sounds as if you’re saying that burnout comes in part because we are deeply isolated. When I have written articles on loneliness, I’ve gotten beautiful letters back from readers. Many of them say similar things: “I know that I’m isolated. I’m lonely. And I feel ashamed or embarrassed about that. But I don’t know what to do about it.” What does one do in that situation?
The temptation will be that an individual reader will think: “What can I do on my own to resolve this thing that I feel, whatever this is?” But no individual can resolve this on their own.
If your resource is going to be your primary care physician, call them. Make an appointment. If your resource is a church or a religious setting, call the pastor, call the priest.
Assume that if you’re burned out, your brain needs the help of another brain. Your brain is not going to be OK until or unless you have the experience and opportunity of being in the presence of someone else who can begin to ask you the kind of questions that will allow you to name the things that you’re experiencing.
The moment that you start to tell your story vulnerably to someone else, and that person meets you with empathy — without trying to fix your loneliness, without trying to fix your shame — your entire body will begin to change. Not all at once. But you feel distinctly different.
I’m not as lonely in that moment because you are with me. And I sense you sensing me. That’s a neural reality.
It is also something that immediately begins to dismantle the neurophysiological response of shame. And when you begin to dismantle that, your sense of loneliness begins to be transformed. What you need is more practice revealing what’s hard about your life with people who are willing to do the same with you.
When someone comes to me and she’s burned out, it won’t help to give her five things for her to go do to fix her burnout. Remember, she doesn’t have fuel to go do those five things.
So I would say pick one person, pick two people, and say: “John, I would like to begin to meet with you once a week and just talk about where we are, talk about our stories. Let’s talk about what’s been hard, and not try to fix things but to be present with each other.”
And here’s the thing. We have been practicing being separate from ourselves and separate from one another. This didn’t happen in the last 10 years. We’ve been practicing this for generations. So it’s going to take some time.
What you’re talking about is such a major shift in society and a less isolated way of living. It’s hard to hold on to that when you actually are burned out because you say, “Well, that’s all well and good, but I’ve got to get through my morning and I don’t know how to do it.”
This is what happens in my office. People come in with a package of symptoms. And burnout could be one of them. And what they really want is to be not sick. They don’t want to be well. It hasn’t occurred to them that they are going to have to change their life if they want their life to change.
If folks are like, “Well, yeah, but I got to get through Wednesday,” I would say: “No. You actually don’t just have to get through Wednesday.” Wednesday you’re going to start to call people, so that by Wednesday evening or Thursday you’re going to go have tea with them. And you’re not going to stop calling people until you get somebody on the line. If you want this to be different, you cannot continue to live your life the way you’ve been living it.
For folks who don’t feel like they have friends or people to call, would you say to join a pottery class? Join a church? Get yourself in the presence of other people?
Yes. And if that person was in my office and they say, “I don’t feel like I have friends to call,” I would say: “Tell me about these friends that you don’t have that you can’t call. Who are the people that you’re thinking of that you don’t have?”
Unless they’re hermits living in the Alaskan tundra, they actually do have people that they could call, but that they are afraid to call. By all means, you can go to a pottery class, you can go to a painting class, you can do all those things. But I think it’s important for us to be clear that saying things like “I don’t have friends to call” is a way that we tell a story that helps us avoid being afraid.
So where is God in the midst of burnout?
I would say God’s where he always is. He’s right in the room.
And to the degree that we cut ourselves off from parts of our stories (those parts that are too painful for us to want to recall), we will be increasingly disabled from even imagining, let alone sensing, God’s presence in the room. God abides in those painful parts of our stories because those are the very parts that he longs to heal and redeem.
We practice forgetting God. We practice not paying attention to him. And then it becomes easy for us to blame him for a sense of his absence when what we’ve done is practice cutting ourselves off from parts of our own minds.
Because, by the way, we have all this loneliness and burnout and so forth, as if it’s just this state of mind that we’re in. But nobody walks into my office with burnout from just the last six months. At some point, pretty quickly, we are going to be talking about what happened to you when you were 15. When you were 6. When you were 20.
So I would say that God is waiting. God is eager for us to have the experience of being seen, soothed and made safe and secure by him. But it will require us being willing to take the risk of allowing ourselves to look at him looking at us.
And I want to say that your longing to not be burned out is a longing for so much more than that. It is a longing for beauty and goodness that you want and you don’t even know how badly you want it. But that you want it is because you’ve been made to want it by the maker of all good things. And I want to honor that and say to people, “That’s right.” And that’s why I want you to go find the friends that you think you don’t have and tell them, “We’re going to have a conversation like we’ve never had before.”
Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”
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