50 Miles from the Freeway: Burnout

Linda Stansberry is a writer and journalist from Honeydew, California. 50 Miles from the Freeway is her syndicated monthly column about rural healthcare. Send questions, comments and news tips via her website, www.lindastansberry.com. You can also follow her on Twitter: @LCStansberry

Burnout is like a bad relationship, the kind you keep finding yourself in again and again despite being sure you knew how to avoid it this time. 

“Oh no, this again?” You might think to yourself one Sunday night as you realize for the thirty-sixth week in a row that you’re dreading the morning, that you don’t feel like you’re rested at all, that the thought of going to work the next day makes your body flood with stress. Yeah, you’ve been here before. There’s a word for it, one your friends or your spouse or — if you’re lucky — your boss said when they saw you slowly losing it: Burnout. Maybe you listened to them and took a vacation or maybe your body decided for you and hit you with a migraine or back-to-back colds, and maybe after taking that rest you felt temporarily better, but here it is again. This constant state of wariness and weariness. Telling your friends that you’re too busy to hang out because you just don’t have the energy to talk to another human. The feeling that a giant to-do list is hovering over you at all times, not just your work tasks but the house that must be cleaned, the family that needs your care, the walk you haven’t taken or yard you haven’t mowed. Just thinking about it all brings on a wave of exhaustion.

What does burnout have to do with rural healthcare? Only everything. In the absence of adequate systemic support, we rely on a patchwork of professionals, neighbors and volunteers to take care of us. Volunteer firefighters protect our home and communities. Rural community centers keep us fed and offer access to services. Non-profits work for economic and ecological stability. Clinics try and fill the gaps of our inadequate healthcare system. Teachers are the first responders to children who are abused, neglected, impoverished, malnourished or intellectually disabled. 

And you know what? All of these people working in your community are tired. They’re all trying to do a lot with a little, and I haven’t met anyone recently who feels like they’re killing it. More often than not, it sounds like their work is killing them. This is especially true for my parent friends who are trying to work and raise, you know, the future of our country at the same time. Oh, and, also — my farmer friends? I see you. This sucks.

Burnout is essentially a state of long-term exhaustion that occurs when the demands of a job or situation outpace your ability to cope with it. You become physically tired, emotionally drained, cynical, disheartened. It wrecks your health. Your literal brain chemistry changes, in part scientist believe due to sustained levels of cortisol. Cortisol is that fun stress chemical that our bodies are supposed to use to help us run away from mountain lions but in the modern world causes our heart to start racing when we see an email with a passive aggressive subject line. And when your body is full of fight-or-flight chemicals all the time, sometimes you start doing dumb things to regulate. Like drinking too much. Or smoking too much. Or eating too much. Or saying “yes” to more work (my favorite) because…well, I’m still not totally sure why I do that. Because I’m an approval-seeking machine? Anyway. When you’re eating, smoking, drinking and/or working too much and instead of taking time to do kind things for your brain and your body like exercising, meditating, eating real food and resting and you’ve got a bunch of chemicals on board that are wreaking havoc on your heart and immune system, you’re going to screw up your health. And, in case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have great access to healthcare here. Also, like it needs to be said, our local healthcare professionals? Super burned out.

So, what do we do? Well, let’s start by facing the obvious: Working yourself to burnout makes your work worse.

In 2018 I took a hiatus from journalism to work as a communications professional. It was a decision I made for a lot of reasons, not least of which being that I had been covering a local healthcare issue that had made me rage-weep in my car several times and was tired of rage-weeping. About six months into my new job, I got a call from a friend, an ex-cop, checking in.

“You know,” I told him. “It’s the weirdest thing…I’m actually starting to give a shit about things again.”

“Compassion fatigue,” he said immediately. Huh. I’d never compare the stress of being paid to cover city council meetings to the stress of being a cop, but I’ve seen a lot of parallels in our professions in terms of what happens when we’re not able to handle the stress. We either figure out how to shut down the part of yourself that cares, deal with it by doing a lot of unhealthy things in our off-time or find new jobs.

He and I both found new jobs, at least temporarily in my case. Because I’m back to journalism. And I’m covering stories that make me cry. I’m really happy about that. I wish the situations that make me cry didn’t exist, but I’m happy that I still give a shit. And I’m trying to take better care of myself, because like a lot of people who get into caring professions — cops, nurses, counselors, teachers — journalists often have a hero complex about our work. Somebody has to do it. If I don’t do it, it won’t get done. And if it doesn’t get done, I’ll be letting everybody down. Which, you know, is true. Caring is sacred work. But you don’t have to be a martyr to do sacred work.

I’ve been interviewing a lot of cops recently for a story I’m working on (not the one that’s making me cry) and learning about the reckoning their profession is having with mental health. The book Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement by Kevin Gilmartin has been recommended to me several times. Gilmartin outlines the emotional deterioration that can occur from being in a constant state of hypervigilance and how to address it. I’ve also been reading a book that I highly recommend titled How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis, which suggests a “morally neutral” stance on life maintenance that is the perfect antidote to the ultra-productive, Pinterest-perfect approach which dominated our pre-pandemic life. And I’ve been reading a lot of things that make me cry, you know, for work.

What I’m doing differently, what we could all do differently, to combat burnout and compassion fatigue, is embracing community care rather than self-care. So I’m emailing my editor and telling him the truth.

“This is really hard to read, I need to take a few breaks, it’s going to take a while to finish this one,” I told him. Then I took a break and went for an extremely slow and redeeming jog. I talked to my coworkers who are going to read the story once it’s finished and discussed how we’re going to take care of ourselves. We developed a plan. 

These are all best practices I learned from my work on a documentary about suicide prevention. Somehow, before it was suggested to me by the agency I’m working for, I’d never thought about developing a plan, or talking to other people about developing a plan to help us get through the hard parts of our work. What are we going to do when we’re triggered? What are we going to do when we find ourselves slipping into bad habits that don’t serve us or our health? How can we help the people we’re interviewing prepare for the hard parts too? What are we going to do when the stress or the emotional impact of our work outpaces our ability to cope with it?

So, my beloved community, my volunteers and teachers, cops and nurses, farmers and journalists, what’s your plan? Are you going to create space for a little rest? Are you going to leave those dishes in the sink and put your feet up? Are you going to join me for an extremely slow jog? You can rest without stopping. You can keep going once you’re rested. I’m counting on you.