06/15/2021

What Burnout Really Means

What leadership can do about it

Summer Sides is a 'go, go, go' type of person. But by late last year, all the fitness instructor wanted to do was pass mindless hours in her home, undisturbed — venturing no farther than her backyard. She was suffering, she said, from massive burnout.

Sides, 37, who lives in Greensboro, N.C., had opened a yoga studio March 1, only to shut it down 18 days later and pivot to the Wild West of online programming. At the same time, she was taking care of her dad, who had suffered a stroke the previous year.

She started getting migraines, and brain fog clouded her days. By winter, she was utterly depleted. “I didn’t mentally have the capacity to figure out another piece of spaghetti to throw at the wall,” she said. “It was like a pressure cooker: One thing after another kept getting added in, and all of a sudden there wasn’t enough space and the lid was going to blow.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.