BURNOUT bullet list

Watch out for these signs

Hey everyone, I hope you're doing alright. I have something rather atypical to share with you but nonetheless something I think has the potential to save someone's ass. 

I couldn't help but notice that the past two weeks I've been living on the verge of a meltdown - I don't know why, it just kinda crept up on me. But I'm smarter now and looking back can actually see the signs I've missed that pushed me right on the edge of a nervous breakdown. 

Now, contrary to what people will have you believe - burnout isn't exclusive to 24/7 caretakers, power brokers and single moms of 14. I just want you to know that if you are experiencing several of these things I'm about to lay out for you, you are at risk of burning out. Even if you're a 23yo hermit crab. What makes some people more mentally fragile than others is a complex topic and thus anyone's judgement is invalid - but for your own. 

Please take a moment to evaluate your life. I will be sharing examples from my own life to further detail my points. Truthfully, I've had my fair share of "oh shit" moments after randomly clicking through videos and that's when I noticed that some of these things are so much my baseline that I never stopped to think they might be a sign that something's wrong. That is, until my nervous system routinely shuts down and the stress builds up to the point where it renders me completely dysfunctional. 

There is no order to these points, no method to my madness. Just a compilation of knowledge in whatever sequence my brain shits it out. 

• Everything is irritating. As someone who is naturally rather fiery and explosive, I often put this symptom down to "just my personality" or "that time of the month". The moment that I notice something off is when I seem to be "overreacting" to "minor inconveniences", like wishing death upon my upstairs neighbor for smoking every 15 minutes or losing my temper when steam fails to send a message for the 7th time in a day or when an app lags for .75 seconds. Birds chirping outside? Fuck right off. Food comes out slightly burnt? How would you like a sledge hammer down your fucking face piece of shit stove?! A fly in the apartment? I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU MOTHERFUCKING SHITCUNT OF A WORTHLESS PIECE OF TRASH LOWLIFE BASTARD DIARRHEA OF NATURE. Ahem. The point is, watch out when everything just seems annoying.
• Consistent bad mood. I've been waking up grumpy and it's really hard to shake a constant underlying bad mood and still get things done in a day. Caffeine and alcohol make it bearable but never quite make it go away. Most people wake up in a neutral mood and the tone of the day is decided by what happens a little further down the line. Now, I can see how excruciating noise would put me in a bad mood for the day. I'm looking at you, obnoxious ass gardener who spent a full hour hammering away at a tractor right outside my window on Monday. But some mornings I wake up to nothing special at all and I already viscerally feel that I'm having none of this existing thing. That's ... fishy. 
• You don't have time for anything. Wow... Where has my day gone? I've been doing things all day and yet I still have so much to do, I've exchanged all of 5 sentences with my husband in 7 hours, I wanted to shower but it's already 4:30AM and I still have to eat dinner... When it feels like I don't have time to do basic things, when simple tasks fill me with dread, when progress seems painfully slow, when my blood sugar crashes because I routinely forget to eat, when I can't seem to get around to doing the other 5000 things I want to be doing because I'm already doing 300 things... That's when I know I'm probably low key killing myself. 
• Fatigue. Eventually, your body will break down under the work load and it starts with just a casual fatigue. You feel weak just trying to get out of bed in the morning. You feel exhausted for way longer than you think you should, don't seem to recover as you would expect, neglect your needs because you're too tired to get up, the slightest activity has you panting and breathing heavily - at least this is what fatigue is like for me. Do not ignore this symptom because it will get worse quickly.
• Ravenous hunger. This is your body's desperate attempt at taking in energy to remain functioning through everything you're putting yourself through. Along with feeling very grumpy, irritable and tired usually comes an extraordinarily intense hunger that doesn't seem to ever get satisfied. I find myself eating much larger meals than normal and still feeling like I need more food. I know this is my body telling me that I'm burning more energy than I'm taking in - physically or mentally. Thinking back, this is precisely what I experienced in hospital when they put my barely functional ass through a full 24/7 schedule of stuff and appointments all the time and then told me "oh, you shouldn't be feeling this" when I was getting extreme symptoms. Hunger was one of them. I just felt like I needed to be eating all the time and still managed to lose 8 pounds in 4 weeks. Then they claimed I had an ED because it's never the treatment's fault, always the patient's. So if you're unusually hungry, take a step back. You need energy. 
• Restlessness. This is one of the symptoms that is the hardest for me to spot because I've lived almost my entire life just alternating between tired-depressed and tired but wired. The latter has become so normal to me that I don't even notice anything wrong when I'm supposed to settle down for the night and I feel like I should still be doing things because there's still so much to be done. I'm guilty of this right now! I can't rest, I want to make things happen, I want to see progress! I'm so exhausted and yet I can't get to sleep. This state of being is all too familiar and when I was younger I used to be able to live in this state much longer before I broke down. Now, I'm not as resilient. When I get like this, it's a matter of a few days before it catches up with me. I don't have a lot of time to reverse this, I know that. The hardest part is getting myself to do it because I feel like while I'm still functional, I should be getting as much done as possible. This is dangerous. The self-loving thing to do when you feel like this is the exact opposite of what you're inclined to do. I think part of me is thinking the sooner I can get everything done, the sooner I can rest - but neglecting obvious signs like this one is a risky game. You don't know how long you have until you've gone too far with it. 
• Isolation. We all know those moments when it just seems like too damn much effort to respond to people. When you want to make it as short as possible even with your loved ones. When you feel like you don't even have the strength to type as you usually would and your responses get scarce and short. When conversation seems like too much of a pain in the ass and you find yourself annoyed at the thought of responding to even people you love dearly. It just seems like you don't have the time or energy or nerve to be talking to anyone. Given that social contact is our #1 human need, nothing is more blatant than avoiding those you love. This should set off alarm bells in your mind if you experience it. 
• Inconsistent blood pressure. At the height of my burnout at 22, I developed truly scary symptoms. Like I got home from work one day and I just dropped down on the couch and for about 15 minutes tried my damnedest to make myself get up to take the dog for a walk. I managed to sit up for about a second, then instantly felt fatigued and nauseous and dropped back down. My father knew I hadn't been feeling well and gave me a blood pressure monitor for at home that you put on your arm and it blows up kinda like the ones they use at the doctor's. So when I calmed down a little and was able to move again, I decided that was the perfect time to test it out. I did one reading right after getting up to go get it and - lo and behold - my reading was very high. 136/something. Then I laid down to rest for a moment and with the thing still on my arm pressed the little button again. Second reading - 62/38. In a matter of minutes. Propped myself back up again and did a third reading. 129/something. This scared me - not so much because I felt like I was in immediate danger but because I knew I physically couldn't keep up with about half the things people expected me to be able to do. I've never been in such awful shape since but that's purely down to keeping the stress and work load as low as possible. Still, every time I fail to get up I know I'm probably pushing myself too much. 
• Not really having any fun. All the projects I embarked on started out as fun - but soon for me it always gets to the point where I'm just going through the motions and doing things to get them done and fun not only stops being a priority, it stops being a concern of mine altogether. It's so easy to slip into apathy I don't even notice when I'm no longer enjoying things I really really like and treasure. I kinda get stuck in a mindset of "getting it over with", even with things like watching shows and winding down. And it's hard to get out of it because it feels like the apathy helps you get more things done. But it's treacherous. We are wired as humans  to avoid pain and seek out pleasure. Not seeking out pleasure is a sign that you're living in fight, flight or freeze.
• Freeze. Do you find yourself blanking and just freezing up and going unresponsive at times? I do. Just sitting there for no apparent reason and my body feels so resistant to movement almost as though it's ignoring the impulses from my brain that tell it to move. And it's like I get so slow and lethargic even though my mind is on fire and take forever to do very simple things. Do not ignore this. Eventually it will become your normal. 
• Dissociation. Are you never really sure anymore who you are in any moment? Do you feel like you're floating like two inches above your body, see yourself from the outside, feel yourself fading out of consciousness an insane number of times every day? Does life seem like a video game or simulation? These are common things people experience in a state called dissociation. As my burnout progresses, I find that I lose any awareness of myself as a person and switch in and out extremely frequently. So if you dissociate more than normal, check your stress levels. 
• You look tired. Something seemingly so vain and yet so telling. When I was younger people never used to believe me when I said I was exhausted, burnt out, miserable and just generally not doing well. Then a person close to me let me know that I don't look unwell, even if I am unwell. By now I'm at a point where I glance in the mirror and all I see is the exhaustion tattooed all over my face. The dark circles and puffy eyes, that pale and lifeless expression. No emotion to be found in any corner of my face. I'd give anything just to hide it again. But that's the thing with burnout - it will catch up with you until you can no longer ignore it. 
• Everything is a chore. I said what I said. All the things you're used to doing in a day just feel like so much work. Having to get up to brush my teeth almost has me in tears sometimes. It's like I just don't have the strength to meet basic needs and I've cried over being hungry and the amount of energy it takes to prepare the simplest meal more than I care to admit. Somewhere along the way I just find myself feeling like I 'have to' do absolutely everything that on healthy days I would do without a second thought. I have to talk to people, I have to do something, I have to update my video, I have to eat, I have to shower, I have to drink some water. Everything feels like work all of a sudden and that gets old, fast. 
• Constant headache. I never used to get headaches and by now I've been low key living with one for over a week straight. I don't know what else to say, it's pretty straightforward.
• You pass out before you're ready for bed. At night Jack and I like to watch YouTube before we say good night. Lately I've been passing out in the middle of a video which to me is a telltale sign of just how tired I am. 
• You stop being affectionate. Can't be bothered to show love or affection or even emotion? You're probably extremely stressed. When I get burnt out, I am so resistant to affection to the point where I'd rather that not be expected of me in my relationship but I never say anything because I don't want this seemingly unfounded aversion to love and closeness to destroy something beautiful. Because the relationship is not at fault anyway, it's the burnout that's wrong and bad. 
• You get really lazy. Just feeling unmotivated and like you can't be bothered to do anything, even things you normally enjoy. All I want to do is absolutely fucking nothing and that's a warning sign. That's when I feel like I can't sustain the life I worked so hard to create and is probably one of the most soul crushing feelings in the world. 
• You can't  focus. It's like my brain is lagging like that one 1995 windows computer that's never been updated or defragmented since it's been installed that they made me use at work. I constantly misplace things because I can't remember where I just put them down 3 minutes ago, I go back and forth in my apartment looking for different things and then getting distracted by another thing I need and go looking for that instead without ever finding any of the things I look for. I instantly forget why I walked into the room and if I'm lucky I remember an hour later that I was gonna go get some water. I can't coordinate very simple things like pulling together a sandwich, forgetting about every 10 seconds what I was putting on it. I want to start doing something and then zone out completely for 30 minutes. It's like ADHD on steroids. Because I'm diagnosed with ADHD, I tend to overlook this sign because it's a blurry line between a few 'haha damn it ADHD' blunders a day and noticing that I'm actually struggling to live my life. 
• Worsened physical symptoms. I've had chronic ear infection for at least 6 months straight and most days it's just a little ear pressure, maybe a slight sore throat that I can live with. But when I get burnt out, it quickly explodes into full on sore inner ear to the point where fresh air on my head feels excruciating, tinnitus and a pressure level that's very uncomfortable and slowly triggering a headache. If your physical symptoms get worse, you get sick more easily or low key feel sick all the time - check your stress levels.
• Pessimism. I'm naturally a pretty negative person so I don't really notice this when it starts to come up. Because in my early life I had nothing to look forward to, I kind of learned to expect disappointment and assume the worst. Back in the day, that was called being well prepared. But nowadays I've worked really hard to get out of this mindset and to heal and enjoy life whenever possible. When I get burnt out, however, I am just unable to see any good in anything. And even if I can acknowledge the positives of something, I am unable to appreciate them. Everything is suddenly awful and I can no longer feel the happiness it once brought me. This is probably the most dangerous sign for me because from there it's easy to slip back into depression and suicidal thoughts. And it scares me because for the longest time, this has been my normal and I don't want to revert back to that. It still feels like I'm learning to swim and when I get tired I'm scared that I'll drown. I'm still practicing this whole "life is not pure misery 24/7" idea and feel like I can't afford to give into those negative thoughts. Because I still feel like they're part of me, I'm scared I'll lose everything that makes life bearable. If you experience this, it's time for an intervention. 

Please watch out for any of these signs and take a step back and take care of yourself. I want to save you a lot of trouble by providing this list for you and I want you to take it seriously because your health is a serious topic. Don't fuck around with it. I hope by being aware of these things you can make the necessary adjustments sooner rather than later - before it's too late. Thank you.