morning everyone I've been thinking a lot about burnout recently and this is something that on a grander scale I've experienced with some close family members I've watched them go through it and supported them through it you know the the kind of burnout that ends up being six months off school or work that level of burnout and I've met people who have been absent from work for two years I met someone last week who had experienced burnout and had to take two years off work and we're slowly gettin
g back into the idea of work by doing volunteer work um and I I I give you the kind of wor end of the scale so that you can truly understand the severity of it it's a word that gets bandied about quite a lot and in this context I'm thinking you know people burnout that occurs when people are on the autism spectrum or who have an ADHD profile and this kind of burnout is different in the sense that particularly undiagnosed people have been masking their whole lives and with the added pressure that
they you know the on top of the pressure that they may be feeling in whatever situation there in there's also the added pressure of having to mask all day every day of having to live in a world that has neurotypical expectations and doesn't recognize that a neurod Divergent profile may have much greater fluctuations in terms of energy and capacity and when we're at the top of our game we are at the top of the game and but then there are days that balance this out where we really need to take da
ys off we need time out we need all demands to fall away and you know it may be that our capacity and ability evens out over time or exceeds neurotypical abilities over time but there's a spikiness of the profile that isn't fully accepted in workplaces and many educational establishments um and so there's this more significant burnout where someone has been struggling and coping for a very very long time and has finally hit this position of I cannot cope anymore my body is broken I feel broken I
need to shut down and that is what it is it is a shutdown you know signs of burnout can include things like not having the energy or ability to shower to engage in personal hygiene not having the energy to eat or even contemplate food um you know it's very basic body functions that kind of shut down uh but also withdrawal from social activities inability to go to work or go to school um so you know the the consequences are really serious and in an Ideal World we would avoid this but unfortunate
ly we're not yet in an Ideal World so what we're faced with is how to support people who are going through burnout now these kind of burnout Cycles because it is a cycle these burnout Cycles can happen on a much more frequent basis so a weekly basis or a monthly basis or a daily basis even where as individuals we have an enormous amount of energy and this isn't true for everyone but it is true for a lot of people we have an enormous amount of energy and suddenly we find we're able to get all of
those uh telephone calls done all of the letters written all of the little jobs that have been on our to-do list for far too long we to get them done you know and I've experienced this myself I suddenly feel like I'm on fire like I'm Superwoman and I get so much done and this used to happened a lot more before I had children before my level of Demands before the level of Demands on me were greater um and people would say God you got so much energy where do you get your energy from and I'd be lik
e oh I don't know and I didn't at the time because what I hadn't noticed at the time is that I would then crash and I would have a few days where I just wasn't capable of anything and I was oblivious to these Cycles I went through I was was oblivious to the energy levels of my monthly cycle and I remember reading this book called uh red moon and it talked about the the cycles that we go through in life so everyone has this annual cycle and uh sorry life cycle but we also have this annual cycle o
f the different seasons and winter is of often a season of retreat and then in Spring we'll come out and we'll have Renewed Energy and we'll get all this stuff done but this same cycle happens on a kind of a mini burnout level as well where we have all this energy and then we have to go into Retreat and we crash and having a shower just feels like too much and making a fancy meal feels like too much it's going to be fried eggs on toast or maybe even just a bowl of cereal um and when someone is i
n this period of retreat it is not appropriate and this I can't stress too highly it is not appropriate to expect that person to be able to fulfill their regular demands now this this can be difficult for example with children who are going through school at the younger age you can kind of Miss six months and it doesn't matter even in your teens you can miss a year I missed a year of school through going to high school in croia when I was 13 and whilst I went to school there I didn't really unde
rstand what I was doing because I didn't speak the language for the first half of the year um and I came back to the UK and hadn't really missed out on much it didn't impact me at all negatively in terms of my final exams um and so it is possible to miss and I know this probably doesn't go down very well with the education system but it is possible to miss significant chunks of your education and not suffer massively as a result of it um but obviously if you're going through exams um or there ar
e more significant Milestones that need to be met or in the traditional sense need to be met this can put a lot more pressure on parents and their children um and you know I was brought up in a family where education was everything it was we just knew that we were expected to go to university we knew we were expected to follow the traditional educational route there was no option to deviate from that and I when I moved to Sweden and the education system is a much more gentle introduction at the
beginning in the first in the early years of schooling you know I was sitting there thinking how did I learn anything like they're doing nothing like they're so far behind the British kids but clearly everything balances out okay in the end and that in itself made me re-evaluate my approach to education and work um and um it made me realize how deeply ingrained I have within me this this idea that we need to be educated in a certain way and through having watched one of my kids go through burnou
t I had to challenge that those assumptions and realize that there are many ways to succeed in life different countries do things different ways you have all sorts of famous people who are now billionaires who failed at school um and are now highly successful and I I you know I really think it is worth reminding ourselves that there are different ways to be successful rather than the traditional one there are different ways to be successful when you think about what your criteria for success is
so if you're brought up thinking education educational achievement is the most important um Criterion for Success um as a child um you're going to be limiting yourself quite significantly because for some people it's going to be sporting achievements for some people it's going to it's not going to work for them they're not going to find themselves until they're in their 20s or 30s when they find their right paths and they find out what success really means to them and I've come to the conclusion
that for me a successful career is one that that I enjoy that has flexibility to allow me to attend to the rest of my life which you know I love my work but my personal life is more important to me than my work um actually let me rephrase that it's not that it's more important to me it's important to me in a different way so my work is important to me in terms of having Personal Achievement feeling like I'm achieving my potential my personaliz is important to me because it's my life it's it's w
here my heart resides um so just to just to kind of finish off um these thoughts around burnout I think sometimes it can be really important to really think about what success means for you at any given stage in your life is attending an important meeting really the most important thing to you is achieving certain grades really the most important thing to you is it more important to be happy um is it more important to have friends to have a social life and I remember my first year at Uni I had t
his fantastic lecturer he was my personal tutor uh for the first year and he was called Professor Jim reason very big in the uh field of high Hazard um human error the field of human error and he was a fantastic tutor and he said your first year is to find yourself I just expect you to get 40% and pass I want you to have a well balanced first year the second and the third years are for hard study and passing your getting your qualifications the first year is not so just make sure you pass and I'
ll be happy and that was the best advice I could ever have had in terms of you know my academic achievements because it allowed me to live a balanced life and I carried that through to my work so my first job was uh recruitment and I found it quite stressful and then I went to work for the civil service for four four years or so and the majority of those first years at work were developing policy on work-related stress for the health and safety executive and it really taught me about work life b
alance and I had already studied organizational psychology at a university but it it added to this sense that we need balance in our lives anything that's out of kilter is not going to make us happy so if you or someone you love is going through burnout it's really important to listen to them and to lift the demands on them so for example if your child is um trying to study for exams or is trying to make more friends they have an objective that they need to achieve lift the other demands off the
m and when I say demands I don't mean things like other activities in their lives that they enjoy I mean things like showers tidying their room doing household chores they can go for a while and you can revisit them in a few months when they have more energy notice where the biggest stress points are for your child so if they are most stressed first thing in the morning lift the demands in the morning hand them their clothes one by one rather than just saying get dressed make their breakfast for
them rather than expecting them to make their own breakfast think about where you can lift the demands off them to leave them free to do the things that matter and if you're child can't go to school accept that that is what needs to happen at this stage in their lives and that they will bounce back at some point in their own time I think the other thing that we forget is that when people are in Burnout there is still a level of awareness of of what what our own needs are for many of us and it's
really important to listen to someone when they say I can't do that encouragement if you encourage someone to do something when they're in Burnout you could be risking pushing them more deeply into burnout so you need to be very very careful and be very very sure that they really are capable of it and um you know as a parent I would say are on the side of caution if in doubt don't do it if in doubt cut them some slack if in doubt give them a Break um it's a year since one of our child hit burno
ut one of our children hit burnout and you know having come out the other side I feel like I have grown in strength and confidence in in my ability to deal with these things and in my knowledge of my own child and I think as always with any of these situations the most important thing is that your child or your partner or whoever it is that's going through burnout feels seen and believed and heard by you and is supported by you in the ways that they need to be supported I really hope this um has
helped it's a subject that's been really close to my heart for a year now um so if you have any more questions or you have any thoughts around this please do share I'd be very very interested and um hang in there if you're in the thick of it either yourself or someone you love just hang in there and it will get better sending you all strength and support bye-bye
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