Introduction: My Burnout Story

My Silent Addiction

My name is Amanda, and I'm an addict.

For the past 30 years, I've been struggling with a dangerous and silent addiction to overworking. And for 20 years, I don't think I even knew that's what it was.

I didn't recognize it because this addiction helped me to get things that made me feel good about myself. This addiction helped me attract attention and make my parents, spouse, and ultimately my children proud.

Overworking, overperforming, and overachieving served me well for a long time. That is, until I had a newborn baby, and also found myself at home with traumatized remote-schooling teens, evading a deadly virus, and managing a business that was bursting at the seams, all during a global pandemic.

My chronic overworking - coupled with sleep-deprived new mom moments - reached a point of burnout so severe that I cycled in and out of depression, became prone to infections, and my body began breaking down. But hey, the bank account was overflowing and clients were getting great results.

And honestly, despite my health challenges and physical exhaustion, I probably would have kept overworking had my teenagers not been present to witness and hold a mirror up to my insanity.

A Wake-up Call

By mid-pandemic, I had a new infant, two teens, and a business that was overflowing. Between working from home and schooling from home, there was always something happening in the house and it seemed like things were always falling through the cracks.

One very early Monday morning, I remember trying without success to shake off the grogginess when I rose to get some work done while the rest of the house slept. It was 3 a.m., and I had a full day of Zoom meetings before me and no other time to prepare. But by 6 a.m. I was mentally slogging through my work and feeling warm. By the time I'd thought to take my temperature I was burning up. I retrieved the steaming thermometer I'd tucked under my tongue and read the big red digital numbers: 101.5.

"Great," I thought. Behind on a few of my deliverables and already overdue for nursing my one-month-old daughter, I had no time to be sick.

The day before I'd noticed shooting pains piercing my right breast and I'd attempted to schedule a telemedicine appointment. When I finally got through and saw the doctor pop up on my iPhone screen, my fever had reached 103.5 and I was listless, lying in a pool of my own sweat.

This particular episode was precipitated by having a baby just a month earlier and recovering from a difficult cesarean surgery while still working. And because I had a newborn, my sleep schedule was out of whack, so I was up at all hours of the night trying to squeeze in work whenever I had a chance. Weakened by the trauma of surgery and sleep deprivation, my body decided to shut the whole thing down.

Halfway on the other side, I thought my experience had been largely my own. I had soldiered through a painful breast infection that sadly ended my nursing journey prematurely. No matter how groggy and disoriented, I nevertheless kept showing up on Zoom. I hadn't considered how that episode had impacted my kids, until they spoke up about it.

My son Logan, then in the ninth grade, told me that watching me fall sick from overworking made him anxious. "Your body was giving you clear signs you need to rest and you were just ignoring them," he said. "It was like watching you spiral downhill."

Connor, an eighth grader at the time, had tended to me between virtual classes on Zoom when my fever was at its height. He later told me it frightened him to see me that way.

I felt a mix of emotions upon hearing that from my kids. I was embarrassed, ashamed, disappointed. I prided myself on putting them first, healing my wounds so as not to pass them on and learning new tools to give them what I thought would amount to a great start in life. Had I just negated all of that by pulling back the curtain to who I really was and how I really operated when they were usually blissfully unaware at school?

My slip was hanging, as my grandmother used to say.

A Dangerous Example

To hear that my behavior was not only setting a dangerous model for my children but was scaring them was a wake-up call. It was one thing to put myself in danger, and another thing entirely to scare the kids. (I know - put your own mask on first.) Plus, I didn't want my kids to interpret my behavior as the acceptable way to do things. I knew I had to do something different.

But as it turns out, the pandemic put a lot of parents' and kids' unsustainable approaches to work front and center.

Kristian Owens, a therapist who treats children in the DC area, said that at the height of the pandemic she saw not only kids who were struggling, but parents who were chronically exhausted, emotionally distant, and downright disconnected.

Owens told me that burnout doesn't impact only adults. When parents are burned out, that prevents them from being emotionally present for their children, and when the kids pick up on this distance, it can lead to a host of mental and emotional problems.

The pandemic only turbocharged these issues. Owens's small practice swelled during the pandemic as frantic parents sought mental health services for their children. "Their children were being impacted from the isolation, from being away from their friends and having to do virtual school, but also because parents were not being emotionally present because they were also burned out."

With so many school-age kids home during some part of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was unfortunately not uncommon for kids to witness parental burnout. "If you're working in a work environment that is stressful and then you're coming home and you're having to parent, it's like, I don't have it to give, I'm so exhausted from my day," Owens explained. "And then I'm coming home and, especially as a mom with all the hats we wear, I can't be emotionally present because I'm not even emotionally present for myself."

One morning over coffee, I got the wake-up call I didn't know I needed. I was planning to take a sabbatical from work and was telling my teenaged son about my plans. He was happy to hear that I was finally intentionally taking a break. Reflecting on this season of overworking, he expressed his experience of watching me spiral out while virtual schooling from home.

"Did you see yourself earlier this year?" he asked me. "You were staying up all night. You were limping around in pain. You were irritated and seemed sad. You were always busy and never had time to talk."

Hearing his account was eye-opening, and a bit painful, but I asked him to go on.

"It was hard to be around you," he said finally. "It made me sad."

Ouch.

While my sons were able to describe their emotional experience of watching me struggle, that's rare for most kids. Instead of telling you how they feel, most kids simply act out. But whether they talk to you like my sons did or resort to temper tantrums, according to Owens kids are still picking up on more than we realize. And instead of speaking up they may try to get our attention by acting out at home or school.

Jalan Burton, MD, is a pediatrician with a mobile practice (she was also my pediatrician who made home visits to my baby during the pandemic). Instead of having patients come to an office to see her, she travels to her patients' homes, and in 2020 and 2021, she got an eyeful. She saw more depression, anxiety, and irritability with parents. She ordinarily administers initial depression screenings for mothers of newborns in the baby's first few months of life, but given the symptoms she was observing during routine visits, she had to increase her frequency.

"I found I was having to do it more often because parents were so burned out," she explained. When parents weren't following up with mental health professionals despite indicating depression, anxiety, and irritability during those screenings, she began asking if they wanted her to reach out to a therapist on their behalf to get the ball rolling. "Every single person I said that to took me up on the offer," she said.

Dropping Like Flies Emotionally

Owens found that during the pandemic, schools were still expecting kids to show up like we weren't in a global pandemic and experiencing this collective trauma. As she put it, "Kids were like dropping like flies emotionally."

And while parental ambition is somewhat to blame, in her opinion, our society pushes everyone to overwork. "We have been indoctrinated by a society that perpetuates grind, grind, grind, so it makes sense that's what we've been teaching our kids," she said.

And that grind comes at a cost. For me, it came at the cost of my physical and mental health. But it can be even more damaging for young people who aren't emotionally equipped to deal with the fallout.

In the Washington, DC, area where I live, ambitions run high. But apparently so do the negative effects. "I see so many kids who are getting straight A's, they go to the top schools in this area, and they're so emotionally unhealthy," Owens told me. Many of her teen patients struggle with depression and...