Burnout

Smokey the Bear would have been so ashamed.

A number of years ago my wife and I took my youngest brother and several of his compadres into the woods for an adventure. Though we were outnumbered by teenage boys 3 to 1, I figured if we had enough to eat we had a good chance of making it back to civilization alive.

One With Nature

Camping is a great way to get away from the daily grind, get out in nature, and make some memories. I grew up going on camping trips, making campfires, roasting marshmallows, and swatting mosquitoes. My wife — not so much. She was still learning the ancient ways of being one with nature while surviving in the wilderness with only a pop-up tent for shelter, an air mattress to sleep on, and one measly cooler jammed with soda, hamburgers, and hotdogs.

It’s not camping without a fire, it’s not a campfire without s’mores, and you can’t have s’mores without toasted marshmallows. Just ask Lewis and Clark. They never went anywhere without a box of graham crackers, some chocolate bars, and a bag of marshmallows. It’s true.* History is unclear if Lewis and Clark learned the art of the s’more from Sacagawea, or if she learned it from them. Either way, today we have come to recognize that the chocolate, the mallow, and the graham are the basics of survival. And being the master of bushcraft that I was, I made sure we had an ample supply.

Burnt

When evening finally came and it was time to roast marshmallows for our s’mores, my wife soon had a problem.

If you’ve ever roasted a marshmallow you know that there is a fine art to getting it perfectly toasted to a golden brown. There is a delicate balance between applying the right amount of heat to the marshmallow while avoiding it bursting into flames. You must never lose your focus while carefully hovering your marshmallow-laden stick over red-hot coals of the campfire. Even a second or two of distraction can be disastrous, and that’s exactly what happened.

While we all sat around the fire roasting our marshmallows, suddenly my wife screamed, shattering the wild tranquility that surrounded us and scaring me out of my sneakers. I turned to see what was the matter and watched as she pulled her stick back from the fire and held a flaming marshmallow high aloft like it was a torch and she was ready to storm Frankenstein’s castle. Then, instead of simply blowing the fire out, she briskly waved her stick back and forth to (I guess) put the fire out. But she waved it so fast that the fire only intensified before the marshmallow flung off the end of her stick and hurtled through the air like a medieval fireball past all of our faces and then stuck to the trunk of a nearby pine tree. I watched in shock and disbelief as the flaming marshmallow bubbled and oozed as it clung to the thick bark of the tree. I had never seen anything like that before — and I’m pretty sure Smokey the Bear would say the same.

I didn’t give that flaming mallow a chance to burn because I knew that that small fire could set the woods ablaze and there was plenty of fuel in those woods to keep the fire going for a very long time. I could see the headlines in the aftermath of the would-be forest fire: Woman Burns Down State Forest With Flaming Marshmallow Of Death. That was a close one.

Cause and Effect

Burnout is a term tossed around a lot in law enforcement, and probably in the health and wellness world in general. I don’t want to get into the weeds of nuance, but I think it’s a good idea to try and define burnout and talk a little bit about what it is and is not. Burnout is different than being tired or fatigued. Being tired comes from a lot of work, physical exertion, or a lack of sleep. Burnout, on the other hand, requires two things: a fire in the first place and the exhaustion of a fuel source.

Burnout and just being tired are often confused. Some guys walk around talking about how burnt out they are, but since they were never on fire in the first place, I’m not so sure burnout is what they are experiencing. I also think that there is a sliding scale with fatigue on one end and burnout on the other. We are always somewhere on that scale, tending toward one extreme or the other. The biggest differences between burnout and being tired are the cause, the effect, and the remedy.

Fatigue

Being tired or feeling fatigued is caused by physical exertion. Working hard and being tired is a normal thing. It does not involve a lack of purpose or passion in our work or life, it is just a simple matter of output. The effects of fatigue can include sore muscles, irritability in the short term and trouble remembering things or difficulty making decisions, in the long term. And if you’re not sure what your personal symptoms of fatigue are, just ask your wife, she’ll tell you. The remedy is to do less, rest more, or a little of both. Your body is telling you it needs a break and time to recharge.

Rest does not always equal sleep. Rest can be healthy distractions like an old hobby or learning a new one that allows you to shift your focus away from the stress of work and onto the task at hand. Doing something that requires focus — like learning jiujitsu, a new language, rock climbing, or putting together a model or building something — will give you a greater return than activities that are less engaging. When you have to stop thinking about work in order to focus on what is in front of you the time you spend will feel exponentially greater than it actually was. A couple hours of healthy distraction can feel like, and do the restorative work of, a couple days.

Prioritizing our sleep, what we eat, how we exercise, stopping bad habits, and starting good ones will create a rhythm of restoration necessary for long term performance. These external routines will provide a regular supply of fuel for your fire. Repeat them daily.

Burnout

At its root, burnout is the result of mental and emotional exhaustion that will most likely have a variety of physical manifestations, which can include fatigue. But burnout is different from fatigue in that it is more inside-out than outside-in. Just like a campfire needs wood to keep it going, we all need a steady supply of fuel to feed our own personal fire — or it will go out. Burnout is caused by failing to feed our internal fire.

Your internal fire comes from your why and your passion. Your why is the reason you do what you do. If you started with an unsustainable why like money or fame, don’t expect that kind of fuel to get you very far. But a why that is greater than yourself is a durable, renewable resource. Get to know your why if you’ve lost it or you may even need to find a new one.

Your passion will revolve around your who and your what. These are the things we tend to forget when we’re repeatedly beat down by life and by work. To fuel our internal fire we must keep our why and our passion in the forefront of our minds. Writing them down, hanging them up, reciting them out loud are all ways to keep them alive in our hearts and minds. Revisit them often.

The Inevitable

What fuels your fire will probably be different for you than it is for me, but waiting for your fire to go out before you do anything about it is not a good plan.

Imagine yourself in the middle of nowhere, the sun is going down, and the temperature is dropping. You have a small fire going but by the looks of it it won’t last long. What would you do? Would you get up and go looking for firewood while there is still a flame to be had or would you wait for it to die out and freeze?

Be proactive. Don’t wait for the inevitable.

Your fire will go out. What fuels it?

__________________________

• Are you burnt out, tired, or both?
• Are you being proactive or reactive when it comes to fueling your fire?
• Do you have routines and habits in place that you repeat daily?
• Do you know your why and your passion and revisit them often?

__________________________

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* This is absolutely not true. Not even close.