Feeling sick and relieved

A few weeks ago I caught covid.

It was a Sunday and I woke up with a itty bitty little cough. When it didn’t get better by late afternoon I finally tested. And by that night I had a fever.

When I woke up Monday morning feeling terrible, I knew I had to call in sick to work.

I had a fever and felt terrible, but I also felt so relieved.

Just to be clear, this is not a blog post about how my company made me rather be sick than go to work. That used to be how I viewed it, back when I didn’t view my work life balance as something in my control.

I work at a company where you can choose to have a work life balance much of the time. I just hadn’t been choosing to recently.

Which leads me back to feeling feverish and so grateful that I had an excuse to not fix all the remaining bugs for my feature that week.

How I got here

I have a long history of burning out at work, then getting support, building back up good habits, healing, and then repeating the pattern. This pattern – and all the coaching and training I’ve gotten during my burnout phases – is a large part of why I do career coaching now.

Writing this blog is part of my way of acknowledging that I’m back in the burnout cycle and helping myself to start the steps to heal again.

I am good at delivering features on time. I didn’t used to be, but in the last few years I have built a reputation for estimating reasonably well and then working extra hours near the end of a feature to catch up on whatever mistakes I made in my estimate early on.

My partner is also out of work, so I am the breadwinner of the household. And I am absolutely terrified of losing my job.

And I have a fixed mindset that I have to keep being exceptional at work – regardless of my work life balance – to keep my job.

PS – If you don’t know what a fixed mindset is, checkout my two recent blogs about behavioral change science!

In the month and a half before I got sick, I was fully in ‘deliver this at all costs’ mode. I hadn’t had a weekend where I did no work in several weeks. I’d also frequently gotten online in the evening to merge changes and fix unit tests.

I’d also managed to make it not just about me. In my mind, by taking on the extra work I was protecting the other people on my feature from having to work overtime.

In short, although I know my manager didn’t expect me to, I steamrolled over all the boundaries I’ve built over the years to protect my mental and physical health in the name of delivering this feature.

My healthy boundaries

Something I frequently talk to my career coaching clients about is building reasonable boundaries around work and life.

I don’t usually recommend extreme boundaries, like deciding to stop work at 5:30pm every day no matter what. In my experience those boundaries end up being impossible. And impossible boundaries don’t have staying power.

What I usually recommend is trying to stop work at 5:30pm (or whatever a reasonable end of day is for you) 2-3 times a week. That way if there’s one day that you really have to get something done, you can do that without feeling like you’re choosing work over yourself.

Here are some of the boundaries I’ve tried out over the years:

• No working on the weekend. Having a mental break for those two days really helps rejuvenate me for the next week.
• Having a morning routine. I get up at 7:40am every morning and take a walk with my partner. Then I listen to an audiobook while making breakfast.
• I try to reserve an hour from 9pm to 10pm most nights to read and wind down. This is extra important since I often have career coaching clients after work, so my workday can extend pretty late.
• I haven’t been managing this one lately, but I try to stop work completely by 6pm and not open my laptop until the next day.

Healing from sickness and then healing from burnout

The feature I’m on is past the ‘peak output’ point – by the time this posts it’ll be delivered to customers. So I’m hopeful that work will be calmer.

And while it would be great if I could say that once I’m aware that I’m in a burnout cycle I can modify my behaviors even when work is crazy, that’s not always true for me.

My first step is towards healing is to honor my boundaries again. Here are the steps I’m going to take in the next week to start that process:

• Put supportive time blocks on my calendar:
  • 12pm-12:45pm: Take a lunch break
  • 5-5:30pm: Write down accomplishments for the day and review to-do list for next day
  • 5:30pm – 5:45pm: Shut computer and take a short walk to start the evening
  • 9pm: Relaxing time before bed

The hardest part for me is usually being able to dial down my sense of urgency about tasks at work. When I’m in a burnout phase, everything seems dramatically urgent and important. When I’m calmer I’m much better at knowing what can wait.

In summary

If you’re going through a burnout phase, I hope my reflections help you figure out a healthier path forward for you.

My biggest recommendation is to give yourself a whole lot of self compassion. Corporate culture teaches us that are worth is measured in our time and effort, regardless of the cost to our physical and mental health. This didn’t happen just because of you – the world helped a lot.

And it can get better. I know this story today is a sad one, but overall I have a MUCH better understanding and handle on my burnout tendencies than I used to. The fact that I saw this one coming and started to react this early is honestly huge.

I can heal and still have a pattern of burnout. Especially given that I run a small coaching business on the side, keeping a healthy work life balance is really challenging. So I don’t expect perfection. I just do what I can to heal when I need to and help myself stay healthier in the future.

Wishing you a fulfilling career full of ups and downs and learnings,

Rachel