Taking time off work won't fix your burnout

Why taking a few days off is not the solution to burnout

Welcome to another edition of Second Guess. If you missed last week’s newsletter, catch up here. Never miss another edition of the newsletter when you subscribe

In 2008, the New Yorker published “Chef on the Edge”, a profile of celebrity chef and restauranteur, David Chang. Some people may know him as the creator (and star) of the Netflix series Ugly Delicious. In the profile, the New Yorker reported how Chang fell into a loop of falling ill due to burnout, recovering from burnout, and relapsing to the same burnout shortly after recovery.

One time, David Chang’s doctor told him he had high blood pressure and recommended a vacation, as usual, so he took time off and flew to Costa Rica by himself to lie on the beach, get a tan and recover from all the stress.

But when he got back to work, his recovery didn’t last long, and one day, he felt as if he was going to die. Parts of his body went cold and he was rushed to the emergency room. But after several tests, no one could find any cause of his ill health. He had a serious backache so he went to see a chiropractor as well, but again, they couldn’t find the cause.

The next day, Chang could no longer hear in his left ear, his jaw hurt like the devil, and his face got covered in painful spots. It was only when he went to see a dermatologist that he received a prognosis of shingles, and the doctor told him it was because he was “dangerously tense”. Another vacation was recommended. This time he went to Canada but the story was the same.

However, soon after, he realised he had a pattern of going on vacation to recover from health issues caused by work stress, only to return to work and burn out again. Apparently, suffering from burnout at your job due to weeks and months of mental and physical exertion, and going away for a few days simply won’t balance out all the accumulated stress.

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The burnout conundrum

Last year, I quit a gruelling job that caused me great pain and altered my life. For 18 months, I’d been working remotely from Nigeria, at a food-tech startup based in San Francisco. The Pacific time zone is eight hours behind Nigeria, and as operations manager, I always had to be online every second of the workday fighting fires — and often beyond the official close of business. So I typically worked at night until daybreak; my circadian rhythm went to shit, I suffered from insomnia and my health deteriorated. There was no time off on my contract and I worked across several roles in the bid to escape sapa for good. When my beloved grandfather died, I only got two days off to attend his funeral. But hey, I was earning in dollars against a failing Nigerian currency and I stayed on the job until I couldn’t.

When I sent in my resignation letter, the plan was to spend two months before I resumed work. I got a job at my current workplace and, on the back of a two-month break, I was refreshed and raring to go. But after the first month, I quickly burnt out. And then I caught COVID which took me to the brink. I took a few days off, enjoyed the company-wide end-of-year holiday, and resumed in January, pumped and ready to absolutely kill it at work. Only to burn out in February. It was then I realised recovery was deeper than taking a few days off.

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In 2022, more companies are taking mental health seriously and optimising for productivity and work-life balance. However, I fear that the rhetoric is often too superficial. When I see headlines like “Bumble closes to give ‘burnt-out’ staff a week’s break,” I wince. Don’t get me wrong — it’s good news employees are encouraged to take time off and practice self-care, but the messaging also reinforces the idea that occasional self-care can fix burnout. But the cure for burnout isn’t a few days off to watch Netflix and go to the beach.

Time off is important, of course, and can help the average worker recharge and reconnect with themself. But while a week away from the office will restore energies in the short-term, research shows that the holiday afterglow typically doesn’t last long. For example, the American Psychological Association surveyed more than 1,500 US workers in 2018 and reported that two out of every three respondents said that the mental benefits of vacation had disappeared within a few days.

49% of people in the survey said that when they returned to work, their workload piled up. Naturally, any euphoric feelings from the holiday would quickly vanish when confronted with a shitload of work as workers try to catch up while even more work is thrown their way.

Even as more companies are trying to build healthy workplaces by granting time off as a standard practice — more Nigerian companies are now giving employees upwards of 20 days annual leave and 5-10 sick days off — there’s still a fundamental problem with trying to cram several months’ worth of pent up stress into a limited time window. We often can try so hard to fix the effects of burnout that we miss the root causes.  There is simply no point taking a break only to return to the pre-break anxiety and stress.

Rachel Botsman, author of Rethink with Rachel newsletter, notes that if you find that despite switching jobs or changing habits you still feel the same, it may be because of any of these four causes:

• Lack of control in our jobs or personal life (or in balancing both)

• Unclear expectations at work

• Lack of support (or the right kind of support )    

• We don’t know how much more we have to do before we’ve done enough (such a tough one!)

Burnout has become a catchall for so many different stresses, anxieties, and other mental health issues that it can be tricky to notice early signs, from annoyance to cynicism, loss of focus and concentration, attention deficit, inability to prioritise or the intense feeling of wanting to just go away and hide from it all.

When we finally can’t take any more, the typical response is to take a few days off or quit. Research by Microsoft reports that 40% of the entire global workforce could be considering handing in their resignation. That’s a massive number by any metric.

A vacation may help you gain a temporary sense of relief from those problems, but it won’t solve them. And it’s possible for time off to even worsen the stress. Take me for instance, last time I went on leave for ten days, I experienced anxiety about getting back to work, knowing that my time off work was temporary.

How then can we treat burnout?

Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, write that the cure for burnout isn’t — and can’t be — self-care; it has to be all of us caring for each other. They go ahead to stress that self-care requires a bubble of protection of other people who value your well-being at least as highly as you do.

While employees and companies try to combat burnout, it’s important to keep an open line of communication. Companies that excel at staff welfare know how to assign tasks and manage expectations. Building a great place to work means making sure staff enjoy their work and aren’t constantly overwhelmed. Burnout can also arise from deeper unhappiness with the job anyway, which could include a lack of autonomy, workers feeling undervalued, and feelings of disdain toward the employers.

Managers and team leads can have conversations with their staff about which aspects of the job make them truly come alive and which ones make people want to stick forks in their eyes. That could be a good start to figuring out ways to increase the way jobs can be rewarding.

For workaholics who like to take on new projects and veering dangerously toward burnout, they simply can’t just unplug from work as that might make them lose their sense of fulfillment and replace one stressor with another. However, something as simple as encouraging daily breaks can go a long way. Could workers take a quick 20-minute nap after a few hours of work, for example?

Workers need to take breaks from work all the time, not just on scheduled occasions at the end of a long period of stress. We have to build small breaks into our lifestyles. This means one week away from work after six months of nonstop work simply won’t do. Rather, we can make small incremental changes in our lives like getting up from our desks to stretch and taking a few minutes off-screen during the workday to go outside and touch the grass.

As a remote worker, a simple hack I do these days which has taken my life from a 60 to a 100 is, I often inform my teammates I’ll be away from my desk for thirty minutes to an hour, depending, to rest my eyes. I also use the time to actually prepare lunch, rather than order delivery or microwave leftovers. My energy levels have jumped since I started to do this. I also take quick 20-minute naps between tasks, go to the gym and take evening walks in the neighborhood.

Giving a lot of ourselves can fill us up with joy. And total immersion in work can bring meaning to our lives, but burnout happens when we give of ourselves in ways that completely drain us and up feeling like we have nothing left to give.

Burnout often creeps in and compounds in our bodies and minds over a long stretch of time, but we don’t have to overcompensate with a few days off. With small changes built into our lives, we can renew ourselves daily.

Four things I really enjoyed this week

• Mr whosetheboos does a great job in this deep dive into how mobile games are designed to SCAM you with an interesting video of the dark patterns in mobile games.

• CMQ Media’s hypothesis on what an African digital media company needs to do to sell itself for $500 million

• Florence + the Machine’s High as Hope album which has been on replay since 2019

• This interview about how a couple is co-habiting in Yaba, Lagos, on a ₦500k monthly income which I might have enjoyed writing a little bit too much.

  See you next Wednesday!