Quiet Girls Can Run the World by Rebecca Holman

Author:Rebecca Holman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

8.

Burnout: A Modern Malaise for Modern Ladies

You know how some people never seem to get worn out, never run out of steam, and never lose enthusiasm for a project? Yeah, I’m not that guy. I love my job, but when I’m tired, or stressed out, or doing something I don’t want to do, I have to remind myself that I love it. That I’m lucky to be there. And that my job can be as enjoyable as I make it.

But I’ve had to learn these things the hard way. It took me a decade to realize that the more you put in, the more you get out—but that sometimes you simply can’t put in any more without facing diminishing returns. And that’s okay too.

In my twenties I constantly felt stressed, as if I never had enough headspace. Remember the story about the migraine tablets? This happened—as you can probably imagine—when I was going through a tricky work period with very little support and a boss I didn’t really get (and who, no doubt, didn’t really get me either). I started getting migraines three or four times a week. They weren’t particularly severe, but they knocked me out for half a day at a time, putting me further and further behind in a job I already felt as if I couldn’t cope with. After a month or so I was spending any time when I didn’t have a migraine staring at a computer screen trying to catch up—which gave me more migraines.

In the end I stopped. I went to see a Reiki healer and life coach (don’t laugh: it was the best money I’ve ever spent) who got all Captain Obvious about it and suggested that I make an appointment with my GP, another with an optician, and strongly suggested that I find a way to Chill Out. In the end, I discovered that the migraines were a direct result of too much screen time and not enough sleep (because I was averaging about four hours a night, and spending the rest gazing at a wall, my body coursing with adrenaline and nervous energy).

There were any number of problems with my job scenario, some of which I could control, and others that I couldn’t. The main one was that I was working in an environment where I could not get the headspace I needed. It was an American company where it was perfectly acceptable to come in at 11:00 a.m. or not at all (working from home was encouraged and regular hours weren’t monitored). However, taking a couple of days off sick and being completely offline or (the horror) going on vacation were completely at odds with the culture. I almost canceled a two-week trip to Asia that I’d booked before accepting the job because they were so baffled by the concept of twenty days’ guaranteed annual leave. In the United States, there’s no minimum statutory paid vacation, and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 77 percent of private employers offer their employees a paid vacation of ten days per year, on average, after one year of service.

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