I have been registered ill for 392 days, also known as 1 year, 3 weeks and 6 days. About 1/3rd in, I had written about my burnout and the events leading up to it. Now, I am declared healthy and I registered myself 100% recovered at work. It's a big milestone for me and it took a lot of hard work to achieve this. A part of me cannot believe that I've made it here. I haven't felt like myself or even like a functional human being for such a long time. Burnouts suck. Granted, I've learned many lessons from the burnout but I would have loved to learn them in a different, less invasive manner. But it is what it is, and looking back, there are certain things I wished I knew while going through the burnout that would have made the journey a bit more bearable.
For anyone going through it now, I thought I'd share some of my musings in the hopes that it provides some assurance and maybe even a shimmer of light and the end of the tunnel.
Recovery is trial and error. You don't know where you're at if you don't try things and you need to build in additional recovery time in case the trial resulted in an error. I did know this early on but I didn't feel comfortable about it until very late in my recovery. In the beginning of the burnout every symptom was so bad and heavy, I wanted to do everything I could to avoid making them worse. In other words, I was highly error-averse. As a result, I didn't want to do any trials and essentially locked myself up in a dark home for a while. It wasn't until much later that I accidentally stumbled into trials and grew comfortable with them after I had experienced several times that the results were not as bad as I expected.
It was difficult to monitor the progress I've made on a day-to-day basis. The symptoms felt just as bad as the day before and after a couple of months of seemingly zero progress I started to think "this is just who I am from now on, I'll have these symptoms forever." Fast forward several more months, I seemed to have reached a turning point where big leaps of progress happened on a weekly basis. It is similar to your hair growing; you don't notice any difference from one day to another but over the span of a month you can see significant growth. For me, noticing progress was oftentimes a chance situation. For instance, I needed to wear earplugs when meeting with a group of people or going to a restaurant to spare my brain of having to process a lot of noise, and one day I forgot my earplugs at home and discovered that my tolerance of noise had become much better. On another occasion, I had accidentally worked much longer than I was supposed to (I got into a flow and forgot about time) and so I expected a relapse with massive headaches, but the headache was only mild. I had still overdone it but the backlash was less than it used to be. This just shows how trial is important in the recovery process, both conscious as well as accidental.
As I already mentioned, there will be a turning point but only after a long time and after you have given up all hope of ever being fully functional (at least, that's how I felt). But once the trend starts to go upwards, it goes up exponentially. Looking back, it seems as though 90% of my recovery happened in the last 25% of my recovery time. For a very long time it felt as if I wasn't improving at all and I started to doubt whether I would ever get better. It felt as if my symptoms had become permanent and I couldn't imagine not having them. The good news is that they really are temporary, it just takes a while before any improvement is noticeable. That being said, I will still have some of the symptoms for a couple more months even though I'm fully recovered. I am able to resume my work and all of my hobbies but there are some delicate neural connections that take a little longer to restore. This impacts, for instance, the ability to promptly think of the right words or to swiftly switch between tasks (which we should limit anyway).
There's no such thing as recovering too slowly. It's better to err on the safe side and take extra time to recover, rather than rushing through it and risking a relapse. I've decided on multiple occasions to take extra time. It was uncomfortable the first time and felt like a setback but the second and third time I decided to slow down it was already easier. In this, I also learned to trust my intuition. My head wanted to push through, my body wanted to hit the brakes. Learning to listen to my body and continue to practice this will help me in the long run, so I embraced these opportunities. To give an example: my working schedule increased by 4 hours per 2 weeks. Every time I was due to go up in hours, I would assess whether I felt ready for it by thinking about working more hours and feeling how my body responds to that thought. Most of the time I would feel a bit nervous but also curious, which I saw as a green light to follow the schedule. When I was due to go from 32 to 36 hours I felt tired and a little scared, so I considered increasing my working time by only 2 hours and felt calm about that. The 34-hour week felt easy in the end and I probably could have handled 36, but I stand by my decision to let my intuition guide me. A year ago I would have never consulted my gut feeling and make decisions purely based on logic or discipline so this is a big change for me. It is a change I am happy about, though.
Even when things have started to improve, there will still be ups and downs. After several weeks on end of lots of improvement, I felt invincible. I was functioning again, able to hold conversations normally, wasn't debilitated by headaches, and things felt like old times. But then a small setback happened and all the symptoms came back. I was shocked. I thought I had left all of that behind. I was also scared: is this a relapse? Answer: no, it was just a setback and a little dip, nothing major or concerning. It's part of the process and over time, the dips will become smaller and shorter. At the beginning of my burnout I could have a headache for multiple days after spending one evening with a couple of friends. Now, after-work drinks with a group of colleagues in a crowded cafe would give me a headache only for the rest of the evening, and maybe spill over into the next morning. Better yet, if I wear ear plugs I'd only feel tired afterwards and have no headache at all.
Another thing I have learned to do and will continue to practice, is to communicate my boundaries. For instance, being in back-to-back (video) meetings costs a lot of energy and we have all assumed that we are able to handle that. "Fortunately" for me, the burnout made me hyperaware of my energy levels and I noticed that I really need a break in between video calls. So now I either block time in my agenda to take a break, or announce at the start of a meeting that I have time until 5 or 10 minutes before my next meeting, or, when it's an informal meeting, I suggest to talk over the phone so that I can step away from my computer. It was scary at first to carry out these strategies but after noticing that no one ever reacted negatively to these boundaries, it became easier.
Reflecting on the struggle to recover and on the lessons I learned and changes I applied, I have mixed feelings about this whole experience. The burnout has forced me to take a step back and evaluate everything I was doing and feeling, and it caused me to implement changes in my behavior which will benefit me in the long run. For that, I feel appreciation. However, the journey itself has been extremely painful and I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy. I hope (and will do everything I can) to never experience this again and if there are any necessary life lessons I need to learn, I will do anything in my power to choose a less severe manner to learn them.