#10: How to identify and recover from burnout (so it never happens again)
Episode Shownotes
How do we, as a society, actually break the cycle of burnout?
Like so many other small business owners, creatives and solopreneurs over the past two years, I fell into the trap of believing I didn’t need rest—I just needed to work harder to succeed.
In this episode of Free Wild Souls, I delve into how my six-month burnout in 2022 was a blessing in disguise and what I learnt in the process of recovery. I share my 7 key learnings and how I am no longer available for hustle culture (and how you don't have to be either.)
I discuss practical steps in how to identify and recover from burnout, and what balms worked magic for me. I share how I rediscovered my love for life and work and how genuine rest and energy shifts were directly aligned with my business opportunities in recovery.
This episode is for you if you have ever experienced burnout, are losing your spark for life, or want to truly honour the seasons of your energy. Let this be your permission slip to recharge and renourish.
“Create from a place of rest, not hustle. I truly believe that the quality of your work can be felt as well as seen, especially when it comes to creative work.”
Let’s continue the conversation at https://www.instagram.com/emilypeilan/
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Episode Transcript
I am not available for burnout.
Hello, my beautiful friends, and welcome back to another episode, it's been a while.
I'm currently tuning in from Cascais in Portugal, and I'm back with a solo episode. I wanted to talk about something that has been a huge, significant part of my year, and that is experiencing burnout for the first time in my life, which was incredibly humbling as somebody who was a bit of a workaholic.
I think I really saw myself as someone who could just keep working; I was Superwoman, and I didn't need rest. And I could just keep going and tumbling because in the end, obviously, you can't keep going like that; at some point it really does catch up with you.
It caught up to me, and what happened was, for six months of this year, I felt the most tired, uninspired and drained I've ever been in my life.
The reason why I thought I'd do this episode was because I've been talking to a lot of people, especially small business owners, creatives and solopreneurs, who spent the majority of the pandemic working because there wasn't much else to do.
As a result of that, after say two and a half years of that, we're all kind of getting to a point where we're so tired. There have been some people who noticed that and pulled themselves out and allowed themselves the rest. They’ve taken the rest and the space and the time they needed to get back on their feet.
Then there are others who I see continuously trying to keep going, like, it's okay, I've got this if I keep working. And they're just continuously perhaps struggling through it.
Being on the other side of it is so amazing. It's like I've been reborn, it's the most marvellous thing to be on the other side of burnout.
For the longest time it's something I didn't speak a lot of, I didn't really share about it. I was kind of in denial that I even that burnout even happened to me, it was kind of a bit of an embarrassing thing.
And of course, I didn't want to communicate that to anybody, especially not my clients. I wanted to pretend that nothing was wrong, that I was fine, that I've got what it takes to keep going. The truth is I didn't. But it's always one of those things where you can talk about it and see it as a more holistic kind of perspective; Looking back once you're on the other side.
I've been thinking about doing an episode like this for a while; I just needed some time to collect my thoughts. I feel like I'm at a place where I can openly share a little bit more about what it was like to go through burnout.
I know for a fact, it wasn't a bad burnout, and here are other people who experience much, much worse. But I wanted to share a few touch points of what I learnt from my experience.
How to identify burnout: What that was like for me, and at what point did I realise I was hitting it.
How to recover from burnout: Some of the things that I did that worked, some of the things I could have done better, and how long it took me.
And then the third, bigger touch point is just the lessons that I learned from almost six months of being burnt out.
Let's get into it. So, how do you identify if you're burning out?
For me, and I can only speak from personal experience, was that it started very slowly. Through the pandemic, I was working almost every day.
Even when I was on holiday, I'd be thinking about work, I'd be doing the secret emails here and there and doing some work behind the scenes. And I would say it was an exciting two years of learning, working, and constantly ‘doing’.
When my business really took off, I was like, Okay, this is working. All these actions I'm taking and all these extra hours it's paying off. And so I correlated doing-doing-doing with success and my business taking off. This is true to an extent.
However, my fear was that if I ever stopped or if I slowed down, everything would stop and come crashing down.
My fear, my burnout was driven by this fear of like, I can't stop, I have to keep going.
And I didn't stop, I didn't want to stop. It was really scary to even consider the idea of slowing down or stopping. As I got to the end of last year, I finished up a few amazing dream client projects.
And then we came to the Christmas and New Year's period and I actually took off six weeks for myself. And those six weeks were meant to for me to realign my business: To work on my own brand and work on my own website.
So, even though I say six weeks off, it was actually like, Okay, six weeks of working on your own business now.
Over New Year I got hit with COVID. It was the first time I got COVID and I was stuck in bed for two days. I recovered, but I think having just that week off, my entire body was like, Emily, we are so tired, like so tired.
And since then, I think I never really fully recovered or bounced back to where I was before. I think getting COVID and in conjunction with me taking six weeks off client work was my body saying, okay; hey, why don't we just give ourselves this time off and just enjoy? Enjoy it. And that was the plan.
However, I had all these shoulds at the back of my mind.
I should be working on my branding.
I should be working on my business.
I should be getting this website.
I should be doing more, I should be planning and outsourcing and building a team.
All these ‘should’ start meant I couldn't even enjoy my time off. It was January, February I was starting to feel really tired. And then I had this creeping up feeling of resentfulness towards my business.
Towards this wonderful thing that I created for myself and my lifestyle! I started to resent it because I was so tired. But I couldn't stop. And I resented that, and I felt uninspired.
I felt like all these things I like should do and everything come came from a place of should, and I just lost my spark actually for the work that I do. I lost my spark for life a little bit.
I was really enjoying living in Seville at the time, I was really enjoying my time with my friends, and I just wanted to enjoy life for a bit more. And yet, I couldn't fully let myself enjoy life because I had a business to run and I had client projects to do, and I needed to because that was my income source, right?
And so I really kept working even though I was supposed to give myself time off.
I didn't, and I kept working through that. Which was a mistake. I realised I was hitting burnout when I started to feel resentment and lack of creativity, lack of inspiration. And at some point, it got so bad I was just like, I don't freaking care. And that point, I was like, Emily, we need to change something.
That around that time I decided I was going to come to Portugal; the ocean was what brought me back to life.
Moving into part two of that, how I recovered from burnout.
Definitely change of scenery changes space. Nature is life-giving, being by the ocean, it’s like magic, the ocean is magic for me. And it wasn't like, straight away, I felt better.
Again, I was living out by the coast in Portugal here for two months at a surf lodge. And just almost every day, going out for a run, going down to the beach, going out to the farmers market, going surfing.
It took just feeling the ocean, feeling the energy absorbing all of that. It really gave me a lot of life back and the spark back into my eyes. This sense of adventure, adventure is my word for the year.
Adventure is life for me, and I think I got so caught up in working, that I forgot why I was working. It's so I can have adventure and feel alive. And it was beautiful to give myself those two months of adventure and rediscovering my love for life again.
And during those two months, when I was in the surf lodge, I was still working. But minimally. I really scaled back on the number of projects that I took. And at the same time, I didn't receive a lot of inquiries, which really shocked me because since my business started taking off I always had a consistent stream of inquiries; I always had a consistent stream of work, and I never had to worry that I wouldn't have it.
And for the first time, it actually started to freak me out a little bit because my energy was so low. I also wasn't putting a lot of energy into my marketing; I wasn't putting my energy out there because I didn't have a lot of energy to give anymore.
I needed to recharge myself, and it really reflected interestingly enough in my inquiries. There are things I can't explain, but when your energy is low you just don't attract opportunities. I really felt like I almost felt like the universe was like, I know, if I give you more clients, you're going to work and not actually rest.
And it's like, you need to rest, and so it's almost like just confiscating clients from me! I felt like it meant I was meant to not have a lot of inquiries, I almost felt forced to be okay with that, to sit with that and to sort my own shit out and to recharge and really nourish my own self.
And so that was two months of really intensely resting and recovering. And then, as we got into summer. So I was there in March, April, and May. I was starting to come back to life a lot more in June, July. And then when it hit July, I was like, bam, like summer.
I don't know if it's summer or just because I had months of recovery already. But I really felt a shift in energy between June and July. And especially between July and August, and especially in August, like holy shit, when you give yourself that time to recover, you can recover extremely quickly, in my opinion, from my experience.
The magic of that is when I felt my energy coming back to me.
Client inquiries started coming in like left right centre everywhere, and that’s coming from such a slow start to the air. I'm not gonna lie. It was like there were times when I was freaking out that I might not actually have enough to pay my team or because it'd been so many months of really slow I was starting to freak the shit out.
But still, I needed to trust in the unfolding; I needed to trust in myself and to prioritise recovery and getting my energy levels back up. Finally, it did.
And when that happened, client inquiries started coming in and opportunities started coming. People started coming into my life and I was just attracting all of these opportunities, not out of nowhere, but you know, out of nowhere, simply because I took the time to recover and look after myself.
That was six months process, which has been really interesting. I learned upon reflection, I learned so many lessons from that.
Rounding off into this last part of the last topic of the episode, it's, I've got seven big takeaways for you.
ONE — create from a place of rest, not hustle.
I truly believe that the quality of your work can be felt as well as seen depending on what kind of work you do, especially creative work. I personally feel like hustling producers like non aligned, non-inspiring work. I feel like your work gets infused with the energy you pour into it during its creation. I do feel like my work that the websites or designs there’s more spark and inspiration now. I want to create more from a place of rest and inspiration and play and not hustle.
TWO — you hear from so many people, consistency is key, like you need consistency, you need consistency. I'd say fuck consistency.
I'm not a consistent person, it doesn't work for me; I tried it. And it kind of led me a little bit to burning out because consistency tied me to a whole bunch of shoulds, you should do this, you should do that.
I would say actually strive to honour the seasons of your energy and to go with the flow. Like in winter, obviously, things slow down, it's supposed to slow down, you're supposed to take that winter period to rejuvenate to recharge.
Then in summer, that's when you're supposed to just go wild and do all the things because you've got so much energy. And so basically, there are times to work harder, there are times to rest more.
And this idea of consistency means you should work the same all through the year. And that's just not possible for people who aren't robots. There are areas where we could strive for consistency, but I also think that we need to honour our own energetic cycle, and everybody is different.
So yeah, I feel like it doesn't always have to be monotonous in the same. Previously, I think I wanted to be in summer all the time. Like I wanted to be go go go all the time doing doing doing and in the end it was like my energetic battery pack just didn't have enough time to recharge and it just exploded.
three — it takes so much longer to recover from burnout. Like the longer you kind of wait to actually admit that to yourself and then recover.
It's just not worth it. prioritise your rest. Your mantra should be, I am not available for burnout. End of story. Just not available because it's truly not worth it. And if you even took a month off, you could save yourself six months of shitty work or six months of feeling like shit and frustrated and just burned out. So take the time off. Look after yourself, and really prioritise your rest.
four — it's not cool, and it's not okay to work all the time.
Go play, enjoy life receive beautiful experiences, pleasures and joy. And think of it like a gift from the universe, like you are still enough and worth all of this, even when you don't have the energy to work at the workaholic capacity that you used to.
five — have a financial buffer.
I had one, it was actually a pretty healthy buffer, I have to say. But I thought it would be a couple months max. I never thought or figured that it would last six months. It was really unexpected. When you burn out, and you're low on energy, like work will be slow, you will almost stop working.
And when that happens, income kind of stops depending on what kind of business model you have. But you still need income to live. So just make sure you have a financial buffer so that you can actually allow yourself that period of rest without freaking out financially, because there's nothing worse than that.
When you hit your red zone, then you can't rest because you need to work and then that vicious cycle just keeps going. And so actually, one of the mistakes I made was not having more in my financial buffer, not being more financially organised. Let's say I wish I had given myself more. And I think I could have recovered faster, I wouldn't have been so stressed so that makes a massive, massive makes a difference.
six — energy is everything.
You have exactly what you need right now; The perfect amount of clients and work with the right people around you. Enjoy it, be grateful. When the work finally picks back up, you're going to wish you savoured this beautiful rest period more. And trust me, the work will pick back up once you've learned how to fill up your own cup first and find your own balance.
seven — For me, burnout was actually a blessing in disguise.
It held a mirror held up to my face and show me all my flaws and weaknesses. But it also showed me what I truly needed and reminded me of my why; why I started my business in the first place.
It was never about the money. It was always about the lifestyle of freedom and adventure. It humbled me that I'm not Superwoman. I'm not a robot, and I can't do it all, and neither do I actually want to do it all myself.
Coming out the other side, I've learned to prioritise outsourcing and collaboration and building a team that can actually support me and, and my business so that the next time I need to step back and take a break for myself.
It means that not everything has to come to a halt; my business can still keep going even without me. So that was a major wake-up call for me.
I just wanted to say, you know, if you feel like you're on the verge of burnout, or you're deep in it, then ask yourself this.
What would it cost you in the future?
If you don't stop and look after yourself now?
Can you learn to sit with yourself to love and accept yourself just as you are totally separate from your work and your successes? Can you look yourself in the eye on a tiring day where you barely had the energy to do anything?
And yet still feel and know that you are enough and trust that everything is happening for you, not to you? Do you have the courage and the strength to overcome this failure?
There is so much more abundance waiting for you on the other side. Take it from me, there is so much beauty, so much abundance, so many amazing people and opportunities waiting for you on the other side when you learn to slow down and give yourself the luxury of time to rest and play and rediscover your spark for life.
I truly think that is the greatest gift you could give yourself and to the people around you and to your clients.
Definitely feel free to reach out to me via DM @emilypeilan and tell me your biggest takeaway from this episode. Or even if you just like to share your experiences of burnout or are currently going through it and you'd like to have somebody to hold you accountable or just hold space for you.
Send me a DM or send me a voice message. I'd love to connect. I personally respond to every DM that I do get.
