Climbing Out Of Burnout

Stop normalizing stress, start imagining other options, and other first steps out of burnout

Illustration by Stephanie Davidson, written by Rae Katz

It’s hard to write about hot topics sometimes, because it feels like everyone else is already on it, everything has already been said. But then again, hot topics are hot for a reason. They are hot because people feel a spark of association, recognition, feel like something is finally being said that needed words. This is the case with burnout, a hot topic that is also, for me, a personal and life-altering experience, and a topic that I think defines my generation in many sorry ways. So let’s talk about it, even more.

First thing I’ll say is that at my point of peak burnout, in the summer of 2018, I wasn’t just tired, or lethargic, or uninterested in work, I was ill. I was mentally and physically ill, and the cause was primarily the stress of work, and in this way I think the word “burnout” does not go far enough, or else has been diminished in colloquial use. At that point in 2018, the only way I could get through a day was to wake up, show my face at a meeting, and then get back into bed and lie there for an hour with a blackout mask over my eyes. As I have written about before, by that time I was experiencing chronic sinus inflammation, coming and going every two weeks or so, chronic diarrhea, and a heavy fatigue that no amount of sleep was able to clear. In the ensuing months I would start getting itchy rashes all over my legs and butt multiple times a week. I had periodic heart palpitations. I had lower back pain. I had scars on the insides of my cheeks from chewing them.

Besides that, I cried, a lot. I cried in the morning while my fiancé drove me to the subway. I cried at night when I was so tired that I couldn’t bear to clean up after dinner. I had a resurgence of obsessive thoughts about hurting myself, a vestige of the OCD I had been diagnosed with in childhood. I had failed to find a new long-term therapist since moving to San Francisco many years before, and so I thrashed around looking for a psychiatrist to prescribe me medication. I found one, and cried in her office, and got medication.

And so, in some ways, “burnout” describes this state well: my body was fully in flames, my mind had been burned through and reduced to a pile of ash. But really, to call it what it was, I was sick.

It still shocks me that I could have possibly let it get that bad, it irks me. But, then again, that is the degree to which our culture normalizes stress, particularly the Silicon Valley culture in which I was immersed. I take responsibility, and I also acknowledge the forces at work around me; to be influenced by our culture is to be human.

The first rungs

I imagine myself at that time in a deep, deep hole, one with sheer walls, the light of the sky only visible as a little dot above. Getting out of that hole is completely impossible and also your whole life depends on it. What on earth do you do? I want to tell you about the first things that I did to begin my climb out of there, a climb that continues to this day. My path did not involve an immediate, wholesale quitting of everything I was doing—though I often wonder if that would have been better—but it did involve big changes and, most importantly, help. You just can’t climb out of that hole alone. Someone needs to throw you a ladder.

It was September 2018, and I was on the verge of collapse. As sometimes happens in these moments, the powder keg fully stuffed, everything on the verge of exploding, help arrived from nowhere. But—also typical when help arrives—I almost didn’t recognize it. My co-founder Steve had a friend from our college days who was starting a new type of team-coaching organization. The idea was that she would assemble a group of coaches for leadership teams: a somatic coach, a business coach, a nutritionist, and more, and together these people would be help individuals and the team as a whole become more healthy and cohesive, serving individuals in different ways according to their needs. She wanted to test out the idea and was offering the service almost free—did we want to try?

My reaction was swift: we don’t have time for this. But Steve gently pushed: it could be helpful, it wouldn’t be too much time, it is really cheap…might be worth trying it out?

And that is how a ladder was thrown down to me, in the form of one of those coaches, Tom. After a brief and unmemorable first meeting, and only because I felt pressure to keep talking to him per this bizarre free coaching agreement, Tom and I began to develop a relationship that would provide me the tools and support to get up those first few rungs and begin my ascent out of the hole.

I want to tell you about those steps.

Step 1: You can’t keep doing this.

The first thing Tom did was very simply, very clearly articulate back to me exactly what I had told him in so many words: that I obviously was done. For a business coach talking to a CEO, this was pretty unique advice. We think of business coaches as visioning and pushing and helping you be everything you can be, and what he did instead was play back what I was saying: I’m done, I’m so fucking done. Just having someone say this back to me, calmly, clearly, with authority, was surprisingly transformative. Tom carried a certain authority: he was older, he had more experience, and he looked like the guys in Silicon Valley. I needed someone older and with more authority to validate what I was feeling before I could take it seriously. Though I wish it hadn’t been the case, though I wish I had been able to feel that confidence on my own, Tom’s validation was an important first step. Hearing Tom say, “you clearly need to stop,” helped me say, “I clearly need to stop.”

Step 2: Let’s make an exit plan.

Then Tom helped me make a plan for getting out. This was not a drop everything and burn everything down plan, and it was not a fuck this all I’m leaving tomorrow on a ten-day silent meditation retreat plan, it was a real, considered plan to leave while acknowledging how hard it is to leave something you built along with all the responsibilities and complex feelings and other people involved in that decision. This was September, and the plan was to leave at the end of March.

Exiting a career can be almost unimaginable, and that is why so many people, like me, go to such lengths and make such sacrifices to stay. But Tom helped me imagine leaving, really imagine it. And I did, sometimes. Did I actually think I was going to leave? It depended on the day. But I thought I would leave enough that I felt a sense of optionality.

And this, I suspect, was Tom’s goal all along, to instill a sense that I had a choice here. That alone opened up a tiny space for creative thinking about how I might help myself heal, just a little bit.

Step 3: In the meantime, how little can you work?

And that’s exactly what the third rung involved, creative thinking. By November, we had worked through the leaving plan, and I had talked to Steve about it, and it was all sort of real—terrifying and liberating at once. I remember around then Tom said to me,

“It’s almost the holidays, nothing really gets done between Thanksgiving and Christmas, no one really gets going again until the second week of January. How little can you work?” This challenge—how little can you work?—combined with my leaving plan, prompted a new type of thinking. How little could I work? Could I do a four-day work week? No way, I was a CEO! But, then again, maybe I could…

I landed boldly, with Tom’s help, on a three-and-a-half day work week. I did not work on Wednesdays, and I took Friday afternoons off. I kept this schedule a secret—it was obviously shameful and would obviously be demotivating for my team and was obviously a sign of failure and weakness, or so I thought. The secrecy was enabled by our hybrid work-from-home schedule and my general autonomy to schedule meetings when I wanted, all of which were huge privileges that I had but had never used.

What I remember most from that period is the sudden coming-out-of-the-woodwork of a community of people who also worked way less. As I spoke about my current “work less” project in whispers to close friends, I got connected with other people doing a three-day workweek. I remember one of these women, who ran a crypto startup of all things, sent me an email that went something like this:

“Hi Rae. Every other Wednesday I get a scrub at the Korean spa, then I get boba tea at the mall in Japantown. Let me know if you want to join. I will be naked, in case that makes you uncomfortable.”

The next Wednesday around 11 am, I met her naked in the steam room, and she chatted about how she thinks the number of hours people think they need work in tech is a grand lie. She wanted to run a comfortable, sustainable business and work three days a week. In Silicon Valley this is called a “lifestyle business,” a pejorative term that conjures an image of lazy and vision-less founders in most of the tech crowd. But she was saying: who wouldn’t want a lifestyle business? Who wouldn’t want a good life?

I did not join her every other Wednesday at the spa—that was a bit much for me—but I did get a little view into another way. Those two months of how little can you work? helped me emerge just a little more from my hole. The dot of sky expanded a little and let in more light.

Trick of the mind

Spoiler: I didn’t leave my startup at the end of March. By March, while I was still definitely struggling, and I was still definitely sick, I was notably less so. I had regained something of a spark, and I had pulled out of the deepest depths of illness and sadness. March 30th came and went without fanfare, and my three-and-a-half day a week work scheduled morphed in to working more, but not a full five days. That year there were better periods and worse periods, but I never sunk back to the same low.

I will never know what would have happened if I had left on March 30th, or where my path would have led, or how I would view it all now, and I often wonder if that would have been a better decision. How much of my mental and physical health might I have salvaged? It’s not worth dwelling on, though. What is sort of incredible is that I was, in the middle of running the startup, able to recover a little. That recovery was mostly thanks to a general feeling of permission: permission to say “I’m done,” permission to make plans to leave, permission to work much less than I was “supposed to.” Because of that permission, even when I didn’t leave, I felt that it was always an option on the table. That little feeling of having options was a bit of magic relief, and it allowed me to make other changes that I needed to make that had seemed inconceivable before.

Whenever I write about that time, I struggle with one specific nagging thought: I was so goddamn lucky. I was in a position so many envy: raising millions of dollars in Silicon Valley, being my own boss, controlling my own schedule, seeing my own ideas brought to fruition. That was all enabled by stable, loving parents and a lot of top-tier schooling, and generally the whole bundle of privilege. And that makes me feel deeply guilty: how could I be so privileged and also so miserable?

But the reality is, this is a common story, and the fact that this so-called burnout regularly happens to privileged people only makes it more perplexing and important to investigate. Is this—crying in the office bathroom three times a week—really the pinnacle of our cultural goals? And what would the world look like if the people going for these traditional, “ambitious” goals actually all worked less and wanted less? What kind of room would that make for other people in the world? It’s a complicated topic, but, to me, it’s one of the burning questions of our time.

Burning, yes, the word is actually quite apt. Burnout, to me, means burning our bodies and minds. It involves burning other people. It involves burning the world. Unfortunately, the climb out is long and slow, and filled with backslides. But the good news is, it’s possible.

I’d love to know…

1. Have you ever had a similar experience with permission, where you didn’t know you needed it, but once it came it felt so empowering?

2. Do you ever feel guilty for being exhausted or depressed when you are in a privileged position? How do you hold both truths, that you are so lucky and still suffering so much?

3. What are the very first steps you’ve taken to get yourself out of a dark time, burnout or otherwise?