More than half a million of us are suffering from work-related stress, but what happens when it breaks the boundaries?
There was the routine visit to the dentist where he pointed out that I grind my teeth badly. And then there was the time that I burst into tears while unpacking the dishwasher. I knew that I was stressed. But it turns out that thereβs a fine line between living a stressful life and slowly burning out. Recently, the World Health Organisation recognised βburn outβ syndrome as a legitimate medical concern, adding it to the list of International Classification of diseases for 2020. Burn out isnβt just everyday stress, nor is it depression or anxiety. Burn out is all consuming; itβs sacrificing tiny, seemingly insignificant pieces of yourself: your sleep, your time until it feels as if youβre drowning.
Two years ago I was the Beauty Director at one of the biggest weekly magazines in the UK. I loved and lived my job. A promotion coincided with returning from maternity leave; motherhood would not become the full stop on the end of my CV. Four days a week Iβd flit between meetings with beauty brand CEOβs, conceptualizing the weekly beauty pages, shooting, writing and travelling internationally for work before downing tools (and donning trainers) at 4.59pm to <run> for the train and collect my two year old son from nursery, falling through the door at 6.01pm, his face crumbling as they vacuumed up around him. My Fridays, intended to spend time with him, were spent completing work I couldnβt squeeze into four days, and my evenings were spent building an idea – This is Mothership – a fashion and beauty platform for mothers, into the early hours. βCumulative work stress is a big contributor towards burn out but the first signs often emerge at home,β psychotherapist, Jessica Henley tells me. Itβs true. I may have looked like I was acing it on the job front but at home we ate cereal for dinner at least once a week because Iβd forgotten to do the online shop, I skipped pages of my sons bedtime story in order to return to my emails quicker and my to-do list was out of control. It felt like Iβd been blindfolded after ten espressos and put in a tumble dryer. I was exhausted yet wired, bad tempered, anxious and always in a rush. My thoughts were scattered around my head like a deck of playing cards and I couldnβt sleep. Despite my bone dead exhaustion, I would wake at 2am thinking about work dilemmas and email myself notes in case Iβd forget by the morning. But it wasnβt until I had my adrenals tested for a feature that I was working that I realised something was very wrong.
Holistic GP and hormone specialist, Dr Sohere Roked tested my hormone levels via four saliva swabs taken at intervals during a regular working day. She called me after hours with the results; it sounded serious, βYour cortisol levels are abnormally high all day, spiking when you wake up and around 4pm. If your cortisol and adrenaline levels remain this high, you will burn out within two years.β These spikes of adrenaline are good in a sample sale but bad when they donβt subside. Roked sees many women in her clinic suffering from whatβs being described as adrenal fatigue or βcity syndromeβ: a stress induced state when your adrenal glands (the two walnut sized ones sitting atop your kidneys) are on constant high alert. When called upon to exert the fight or flight response over and over, these adrenal glands simply accommodate by switching to βlow battery modeβ until they have a chance to fully recover. This is when you βburn outβ. As well as the usual symptoms (moodiness, exhaustion, over-caffeinating) there are less obvious ones: headaches, muscle pain, indigestion, unable to conceive (something that I was trying β and failing β to do) and allergy flare-ups.
Something had to go. I had worked painfully hard to climb to the top of my industry but this was a wake-up call. My husband and I discussed finances. If I resigned it would mean weβd both be self-employed; was that risky? It would also mean giving up a hefty maternity pay if I fell pregnant again. We went backwards and forwards over the course of a month. I made the mental decision to resign eight weeks before I physically did it. A week after I handed in my notice, I found out that I was pregnant.
So here I was: no job, a fledgling business and a baby on the way. But I felt exhilarated. I re-discovered everything that I loved about writing. I vowed to only write for Editors that I liked and tell stories that I wanted to tell. I had space and time to grow <This is Mothership>, which two years on has now become my primary source of income. I had a baby boy. I won awards for my writing.
As we emerge from a summer of slowness and enter a frenetic new school year, my advice to anyone feeling this sense of βoverwhelmβ is that rather than leaning in, itβs often more beneficial to lean out. Re-framing βhowβ and βwhyβ I work was the key to my recovery from burn out. I donβt work past 9pm; in fact I turn my phone onto airplane mode. As an ex-Editor told me, emailing outside of work hours looks less like someone being diligent and more that they canβt handle their workload. My laptop stays in my study and no longer joins my husband and I on the sofa in the evenings. And when my son starts school this September, Iβll be in the playground waiting for him, every day.
I originally wrote this feature for Space NK ‘Inside Space’ magazine, September 2019, where it was first published.