Everyone thinks burnout means you're tired. Like you just need a weekend off, a nap, a vacation. If rest actually fixed burnout, nobody would have it. Because burnout isn't about energy. It's about erosion. There was a point when I realized I wasn't exhausted anymore. I was past that. I wasn't stressed. I wasn't overwhelmed. I wasn't even frustrated. I just didn't care. Burnout is when you're not even tired anymore. You're just empty. And once burnout starts, it doesn't stop with sleep. Welcome back to Brain vs. Me. I'm your host, Joshua Erickson. Today I'm going to talk about something that I have probably experienced far too many times in my life. And usually it is self-inflicted. What am I, who am I kidding? It's always self-inflicted. We're going to talk about burnout and what people misunderstand about it. Burnout is not the same thing as being tired. It's not, it doesn't mean you just need motivation. What it means is you're emotionally depleted. And it does sneak up on you. You don't always notice that it's happening. I was going live in front of dozens, a hundred or more people, two to three times a week for two to three hours a day for a couple years. And I was chasing something. I had a goal. And everything that I did was in pursuit of that goal. I don't know even now if I knew why I wanted it, but that's that's irrelevant for this conversation. The point is, I did everything I could to get there. I did everything perfectly. But I was killing myself in the process of trying to achieve this goal. I was working harder and longer than everyone I knew. People would say to me constantly, how do you have the energy to do this? And honestly, I don't know. Well, maybe I do. Maybe I did then. The answer is I don't have the energy to do this. I don't know how my body is still functioning. I was working 40 plus hours a week at my job, and I was doing this content creation 50 plus hours a week alone. At least, between all the different things that I was doing. I don't know how I functioned. But I didn't feel it at the time because I was so focused on achieving a goal. I didn't feel it. I knew I was a little tired, right? I knew I was a little tired. But I didn't feel emotionally depleted because this this passion or obsession to achieve something was kind of masking this emotional depletion I was experiencing. So I didn't notice it. And when it actually starts actually happened, yeah, it felt like it came out of nowhere. And it took me a while to realize that wasn't the case. But getting to that point probably took me two years before I realized what was happening. And even when I realized, man, I'm getting burnt out. I didn't want to stop. The funny thing is, a lot of the content I created was similar to what I do now, to this podcast, it's similar to the books I write about mental health. Again, always using myself as an example. And I don't know how many times that I gave a talk about burnout and recognizing it in yourself and giving yourself a break, stepping back so it doesn't happen. Because if it does, you're just gonna crash. You're not gonna fade, you're gonna crash. And I gave I gave talks like that a dozen times over a few years. All the while I was burning out. I just didn't truly accept it. I think I noticed it. I think I noticed it. But I didn't I didn't accept it. And I felt like I was doing everyone a service by giving them all of this help. And I couldn't take a break because people needed my help. So I didn't take a break. I just worked harder. When I got tired, I worked harder. Now, as I said, there wasn't a big crash immediately. I faded away. I became less motivated. Right? But I didn't really notice. I said, oh, I just I'm not not that I'm less motivated, I'm just a little tired. Let me maybe I'll get a little extra rest this weekend. But the problem is sometimes that didn't work. Maybe the excitement of what I was doing started to dissipate. All the things that I was doing to make this goal happen started to feel heavier, harder. Not quite insurmountable, but just more difficult. After a while, you go into autopilot mode. I went into an autopilot mode where I was functional, but there was nothing inside. It was hollow. But I still showed up. And I was different. And I worked really hard to make sure people noticed, didn't not notice that I was different, that I was feeling different. I didn't stop moving, but I did stop feeling. And as that was going on, I tried to deal with the fact that things seemed harder. I tried to deal with my motivation waning. Every now and then I would catch myself thinking, why am I really doing this? What am I really getting out of this? This goal that I'm going after, what is it really going to do other than prove that I can do it? And what's the big deal with that? I started to get more emotionally numb than I usually was. I started to get more irritated, even at small things, than I ever had been before. I was no longer really excited about what I was doing. And when I look back at some of the work that I made, I can see it in my eyes, I can hear it in the way that I talk. That excitement was fading. That the hollowness inside me was growing. I was I was just on autopilot mode, honestly. There was no dramatic change in my behavior. It was just a quiet fade. I wore this mask of I'm fine. Right? And that's not hard to do when you're in the initial stages of burnout. Because burnout is a chameleon. It hides itself well, even from you. You still perform, you still function, you still show up, but it costs more every time. You begin running on fumes. Right? You still do all the things you did. But it's not the same. And eventually, even if you think you're still doing well and you're on autopilot because you functionally know how to do all this stuff, the quality will start decreasing. And if there's any kind of negative setback with what you're doing, as it was for me, that's a killer. It just truly is. And you're going to finally start to hit that wall. And as you're getting to that point, burnout will keep stealing parts of you, your creativity, your joy, your patience. Like I mentioned before, everything feels like effort. You stop caring about things you used to love to do. In this example that I'm giving you, I added this content creation piece of my life to all the other hobbies that I was doing. Alongside my friends that I like to hang out with. But I became so obsessed with chasing something that I stopped spending time with people. I stopped caring about other things that I did. This was all that I wanted. All that I needed. I just needed to keep working harder. I needed to outwork everybody. And that didn't help me from a mental perspective at all. Burnout wasn't there screaming at me when I was doing this. It was eroding me. Now, if I had taken my own advice during those years, I would have stepped back. I would have paused. I would have scaled back what I was trying to do. I would have had a little bit more self-awareness and changed some things I'm doing so I wouldn't actually just want to quit. So for me, there was no miracle cure. There was just the realism that one day I woke up and I said, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. And I stopped abruptly. Exactly the way that I cautioned people against happening all those years. That's exactly what happened to me. Because I didn't take my own advice. I refused to listen to the parts of my brain that were being helpful and telling me to slow down. I didn't listen to people around me in my life who said, Are you doing okay? Are you doing okay? So I didn't fix it. I didn't even really slow down that much. I did try to lower my expectations for a while. I did start changing some things I was doing. So I wouldn't have to work as hard, but I didn't let myself be human and just accept the fact that I'm tired. I'm tired. The way I'm going about this trying to outwork everybody. It's not gonna last. I needed a break that I didn't take. So for me, burnout is all too real. And now when I give a talk about it, as I am now, I know what it feels like. Truly. And I know I never want I don't ever want to feel like that again. Even making this podcast and writing my books, I don't work the way that I used to. I don't let it become the number one thing in my life. It's an important thing to me that I make sit next to everything else I'm doing. When I find I sit down to write a book, write a chapter, record an episode, and I'm just not feeling it. I'm not mentally in the space where I can give it my all. In the past, I would just fucking push through. I don't do that anymore. I stop. I stop. I could be in the middle of writing a chapter. Struggling to figure out how to how to end it. Obsessing over how to get a character out of a situation. And I just can't think of it. I just can't. It's not just writer's block. For me, it starts to get in my head. I start to doubt myself, doubt my abilities. No, I just gotta push hard, I gotta keep thinking about this. And I'm like, you know what? No, I don't. I gotta step back. I need to step back. I need to rest, do something else, come back to this when I'm feeling energized, when I'm feeling ready. So I've written a number of books. Some aren't released yet because I'm still in the editing process. But there was a period of about 18 months where I was writing or planning, outlining, probably 10 to 12 hours a day in addition to working. And I started to find myself getting into the same bad place where I was when I did the other content creation. Not as bad, because I knew what it was like and I was trying not to get there, but it was still bad enough. And so I stopped. I stopped recording episodes of my podcast, and I stopped actively writing books for probably about three months to the point where I wondered, am I getting back into it or not? And then something happened one day, I don't remember what it was, but I saw something out in public, and I just got an idea that would help propel a book that I was writing forward, and I'm like, yeah, that's it. And I could tell at that moment that motivational switch had flipped again. And I was right back on it. So I kicked everything back up. Well, not everything. I paced myself a little better, and I wrote a little bit, and then I stopped. I didn't force myself to keep going when I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I didn't force myself to record podcast episodes when I wasn't sure what I wanted to say. I didn't have the energy to really deliver a message, a real message to people like I like doing. When I'm in a negative headspace, I can't come out here and give people advice. I can't come out here and tell you what I went through so you don't have to. Because in those situations, I'm still going through it. So I can't obviously tell you how to deal with it. I gotta wait till I'm good. Right now I'm good. So I'm trying to help. So what I wanna I want you to remember is burnout isn't weakness. It doesn't mean you failed. It means you've been carrying too much for too long. You don't need to push harder, you need to listen better to your body, to your mind, to yourself. You're not lazy, you're not broken. You just you're just tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Thank you for listening today. I'm Joshua Erickson, this has been Brain vs. Me podcast. Be kind to yourself. Burnout is not a personality flaw. Until next time.