Burnout Recovery Starts When We Stop Hiding the Strain

 

By Martha Fernandez, LCSW

 

There is a particular kind of tired that does not come from the work. It comes from pretending the work is fine.

I hear it in the therapy room most weeks. A woman who runs a busy surgical department describes her day in perfect order: the cases, the staffing gaps, the meeting that ran long. Then she says, almost as an afterthought, that the hardest part is not any of that. The hardest part is the forty seconds in the parking garage before she walks in, when she rehearses the face she will wear. She is a composite, drawn from common patterns I see in my work with executives, physicians, attorneys and founders. The forty seconds are real enough. Many people know them.

We usually talk about burnout as a problem of too much: too many hours, too many demands, too little rest. All of that is true. But for capable people, burnout has a second engine that gets far less attention. It is the effort of hiding it.

What concealment costs

Hiding strain is not a neutral act. It takes attention, and attention is the one resource a depleted person has least of. Psychologists Jane Richards and James Gross showed this more than two decades ago: when people were asked to keep their emotions from showing, they remembered less of what happened while they were doing it. Suppression is not a single decision. It is a continuous act of self-monitoring, running quietly in the background of every conversation.

CEREVITY, a business I co-found and a private-pay concierge network of independent licensed clinicians, found 62% of High-Achievers Report Worse Decisions While Hiding Strain, and reviewed 261 high achievers who sought therapy through the our network. 62% said their decisions got noticeably worse during the stretches when they were actively concealing how they were doing. Their results often held for a while. Their judgment did not.

Anyone with a meditation practice will recognize the mechanism. Practice asks us to bring attention back, again and again, to what is actually here. Concealment asks the opposite. It splits attention in two: one part living the moment, one part managing how the moment looks. No wonder the cushion feels harder when life feels like a performance. We are asking the same mind to be present and to be on guard at once.

The vow of the steady one

Many of the people I work with took an unspoken vow early in life: I will be the one who holds it together. It was often a wise vow. It kept a family running, earned a scholarship, got a team through a crisis. But vows taken at 14 are rarely revisited at 44, and the more effort the hiding takes.

This is where burnout recovery so often stalls. A person takes the vacation, buys the better mattress, adds ten minutes of morning practice. These things help. But if they return to the same split attention, the same rehearsed face in the parking garage, the engine keeps running. Rest refills the tank. Concealment keeps draining it.

Letting one person see the real picture

Buddhist tradition offers three refuges: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The third is the one high achievers tend to skip. We are comfortable with teachings and with practice, which can be done alone and done well. Community asks for something harder. It asks us to be seen before we have fixed ourselves.

Recovery from burnout rarely begins with a grand confession. It begins with one person seeing the real picture. That might be a teacher, a friend, a sangha, a spouse, or a therapist. What matters is that, for at least one hour, the person does not have to manage how they appear. The attention that was going into the performance comes back. Often the first thing people notice is not relief but exhaustion, the tiredness that was there all along, finally allowed to show.

A few gentle questions can help you notice whether concealment is part of your own fatigue:

1. Is there anyone in my life who knows how I am actually doing, not the summary?

2. Do I feel more tired after conversations where I am performing fine than after hard work itself?

3. When I sit to practice, how much of my attention goes to managing what I feel rather than noticing it?

4. What would I lose if one trusted person knew the whole truth, and is that loss as large as it feels?

The practice of being seen

The woman with the 40 seconds in the parking garage did not quit her job, and she did not announce anything to her department. She did something smaller. She told one colleague, over coffee, that she had been struggling. She told me the next week that she had slept through the night for the first time in a month. Nothing about her workload had changed. Something about the hiding had.

Being seen is a practice, like any other. It is awkward at first and easier with repetition. It does not require a stage or an audience. It requires one honest sentence to one person who will not look away. For many of us, that is where burnout recovery truly starts.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States.

 

Martha Fernandez, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker and co-founder of CEREVITY, a private-pay concierge network of independent licensed clinicians built for high achievers: executives, founders, physicians, attorneys and finance leaders. She is the author of Wired to Burn: A Therapist’s Guide for High Achievers Running on Fumes and writes about when a mental health retreat for executives helps and when quieter, ongoing support does more.

 

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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