Originally published October 20, 2024
I've redefined almost everything I believed about my life, success, and self-care over the last 3 years in burnout recovery.
Even the things I thought would be true when I started full-time recovery, have slowly changed over these years.
There has been so much trial and error.
Lots of failure (or learnings, if you will) and pushes to try again. Shifts in the words and language I use—internally and externally. Holding my own discomfort instead of constantly trying to prevent the discomfort of others.
All things that stacked like legos into a wall of burnout that I slammed into—repeatedly over the years.
Now I'm slowly dismantling them one-by-one.
I think in past burnout recovery attempts, I tried to take a wrecking ball to the wall. And it did work, kinda.
The problem was that it left large chunks intact. Allowed a crane to come through and quickly reassemble the wall. Coming back together in a way that made it hard to see that the actual structure of the wall was to blame, not just the wall as a whole.
It needed to come down, systematically. Individually. Every piece being reviewed and readjusted to build a wall that wasn't so tall, that had checkpoints, and gates for support to get through easier.
I'm really running with this metaphor but I guess what I'm trying to say is that burnout is journey for everyone. It looks different, can have different causes, and will have different journeys to recovery.
There are of course similarities on the road to burnout, which is what I want to dig into with you today.
The Warning Signs
There are so many things I wish were taught in school that aren't. True self-care, adulting (on every level) and so much more.
And sometimes, I wonder what my life may have looked like if I had known what to look for with burnout sooner. That's a slippery rabbit hole we (and I) don't go all the way down because hello late-diagnosed chronic illness and neurodivergence.
While I've come to terms with how I got to where I am, I will forever be a strong advocate for burnout prevention for a few reasons:
- I don't want anyone to struggle the way I have for 15+ years.
- If you've experienced chronic burnout, preventing it becomes the new status quo.
One of my favorite therapists on TikTok is Kobe Campbell, and her perspective on burnout is one of my favorites. That experiencing burnout is a sign that we are on the right track to healing our trauma because the lives we build through the lens of our dysregulated state should never be sustainable for someone who's healing.
It's as poetic as it is true.
After 5 burnouts and 3 years focusing on recovery, I still constantly come back to one resource.
The 12 Stages of Burnout, or as I like to call it: the roadmap to burnout.
It was originally published as a 12-stage model of burnout developed by psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North in 1992.
In 2014, a study was done in Vienna to look at the reliability of the model to be used for routine preventative screenings at medical check-ins and online that concluded, "The screening tool developed proves to be a reliable, time-efficient and descriptive tool for the early documentation of potential psychological stress factors."
So what are the 12 stages?
I'm glad you asked.
