Recovering from burnout

Thu, 20 Apr 2023

‘Even the youths shall faint and be weary,’ Isaiah 40:30 NKJV

Dr Richard Swenson says, ‘You can go into the woods, select a ten-foot sapling, bend it over, and when you release it, it will return to its normal height. But if you keep bending it further and further, it will stay down. With stress, first, you bend, and then you recover. With burnout, first, you bend, and then you break, and you stay broken. Burnout is not a figment of your imagination or a sensationalised diagnosis by psychologists. Exhaustion is real; it’s common, and it’s dangerous. It leads to irritability, anger, paranoia, headaches, ulcers, depression, and suicide. Burnout causes something inside you to break; you don’t care who sees or hears; you just want out. The good news is you can recover your passion, enthusiasm, productivity, and excellence, but it takes time, and the healing is mostly by scar formation. Burnout is common among the spiritually minded who are sensitive. They see pain and internalise it. They want to help the wounded. They don’t realise they were never designed to carry the world on their backs.’ So what’s the remedy? Lean on God (see Psalm 91:1). But to receive the benefits of Psalm 91, you need to meet its conditions by making God your dwelling place, abiding in Him, and submitting to His authority. ‘I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress … in Him will I trust’ (Psalm 91:2 KJV). Note the word ‘say’. What you say can mean life or death (see Proverbs 18:21). It can put you over the top or put you under. So today, read God’s Word, internalise and personalise and verbalise it, and your life will take an upward swing.