I want to share a personal experience because I am sure some of you will relate and be helpful to you at some point in your life.
Over 30-ish years of career, sometimes, I experienced this uncomfortable feeling of mental exhaustion.
Since I started working at 17, whenever I heard someone complaining about stress or exhaustion, I said, “Stress doesn’t exist; it is just an easy excuse for lazy people, blaming stress for their laziness or mediocracy.”
But later on, when actual stress knocked on my door, I realized that when I said that, it was my inexperience talking.
At some point in your life, you might feel an awful sensation of extreme mental exhaustion, even exceeding your working hours. It’ll affect how you wake up in the morning, face your day, and up to the long hours struggling to fall asleep.
Impact on my professional life
My personal experience was that I started having burnout episodes without noticing it. When they started to be more frequent, I started to notice, and then it was pretty obvious to me that something was happening.
Eventually, I came across the term “burnout,” and I recognized it describes exactly what has happened to me many times already. However, I wasn’t sure since I’ve never consulted a professional to get a proper diagnosis. At my lowest point, I felt extreme exhaustion. I could barely function as a person, not even as a professional.
What I realized then, is that I was spiraling on unhealthy patterns. I was so worried about not reaching goal’s at work, that I spent endless hours working, even when it was clear it was pointless, because when burned out, your performance decreases massively, so extending your working day is worst than counterproductive, its self-destructive.
Quite often, I was sitting in front of the computer feeling guilty because I hadn’t achieved any important milestone during the day. So I stood there, it was completely counterproductive because by putting more hours at the office, the only additional goal I was achieving was reducing my resting time, my family time, and the cherry on top… my goals stood the same: unreached.
Impact on my personal life
Working that many hours changed me, making me cranky and short-fused and leading to stupid discussions with my family, particularly with my wife, Melisa. It was awful.
Note from the editor
Gaston is one of the most ethical persons I’ve met in my life. He has this sense of justice that only rivals his capacity to be rational. He feels no fear or being disturbed by anything except for one person, the person he chooses every day to be with him, Melisa, his sweetheart for almost 30 years.
Since I spent so much time in the office, my caffeine ingestion rose rapidly, I lost track of how much I consumed, and I consumed a lot while not drinking any water. It affected my sleeping patterns, sleeping less and less as this problem grew.
I woke up every morning sore and having back and neck pain, the mental exhaustion and the physical pain took away any intention I may have had to exercise, so I started procrastinating my morning sessions, and often my nightly ones too. For years I went to Taekwon-do practice twice a week, but then, Taekwon-do training sessions became once every other week at best.
And as you would imagine, less training means less energy which leads to less willingness to train, impacting my clarity of mind and diminishing my working sharpness and ultimately affecting also my weight.
My weight gain made me feel awful, and I resorted to eating unhealthy snacks and drinking beer to get any sense of joy. Again, feeding that spiral effect on my weight and my mood.
I could go on for hours and hours, but I think you get the gist. Let’s move on to the part where I share my experience handling it.
Important
My goal with this article is to share my experience so you can recognize the problem early. I’m not a health professional, so don’t take this as professional advice. The only true advice I can give you is to seek professional help. You don’t have to deal with this alone. It would have been much easier for me if I had sought professional help earlier.
How I got out (sort of)
It took me quite some time, but at some point, I couldn’t bare it any more. I saw myself in the mirror, and I did not recognize my face, and I had an epiphany: “enough is enough.” So it started, my recovery began.
I live close to the beach, and I love it, so I started with the easiest step I could, I rode my bicycle to the beach without pushing myself too much but enough to feel I was doing exercise. In my case , I rode around 20kms a day (13mi) early in the morning, stopping to contemplate the beach and sun over the sea. Then I come back and start my working day with filled with energy. I’m working on making it a daily habit, which is not easy, but I’m working on it.
Changing how I started my days completely changed how I face my daily challenges both at home and work. The secondary effect of exercising is that I get physically tired at the end of the day, making me sleep better and faster.
If you find yourself in this situation, find the motivation to break your pattern. For me, it was biking to the beach. For you, maybe it’s a yoga session, meditating, surfing, hiking, or going to the gym. It doesn’t really matter; the important thing is starting your day with something that you enjoy. It will charge your batteries and take your mindset out of the destructive pattern you are having today.
Just to make it clear, is not easy, but it can be done.
Credits
Writer: Gastón Valdés
Editor: Luis Vinay
Illustrator: Dai Fiorenza
Disclaimer
In this article, AI was used to check grammar and syntax.