Burnout

During these interminable pandemic months, some folks have been cooking far more than they ever dreamed. Sourdough was big for a while. Three meals a day at home became the norm for many who were working and going to school from a computer on the kitchen table. Grocery shopping felt like an obstacle course: finding the store with good mask and distancing protocols, reserved hours for those at high-risk for the virus, planning on-line lists for curb-side pickup. I enjoy cooking, and most of the time, we all eat at home anyway, so the pandemic did not change much in my kitchen. I have not been grocery shopping in person since early March 2020, but with advanced planning, my kitchen routine is much as it was in the Before. And I still enjoy cooking. But that is not true for everyone. 

I recently read an article about burnout in the kitchen. Tired to the bone with planning meals and prepping and cooking and cleaning up, the author spoke by phone with a psychotherapist who explained what she was feeling this way: 

“Burnout is not the same as stress. …We experience stress with the adjustment to any life change, positive or negative. Getting married causes stress. Job promotions. But with burnout, you stop functioning. You stop doing the things that you typically care about, or you do them, but not very well, or without much feeling. You begin to lose touch with who you are. The most painful part is that burnout attacks things that we typically love so much, the activities that used to bring us joy and pleasure.” 

I think this explanation applies to much more than the kitchen. And I wonder, too, if some of what we label “stress” is really burnout – or a pressure cooker combination of the two. Things we used to look forward to, like getting together with friends, now produce anxiety and dread. We have bowed out of weddings and vacations and ordinary get-togethers. We have even bowed out of our careers. Health-care workers, teachers, ministers, and others are leaving their posts because there is no joy and pleasure. They have found themselves going through the motions. They have lost touch with who they are. 

One of the remedies offered in the article is a kind of mindfulness – setting aside space and time to be intentional, doing something simple but with care and focus, paying attention to the work and its sounds and sights and smells. And sitting with “the memories that come with those sensations. Even if they’re uncomfortable. Even if you begin to feel grief about the day and the year you’re having instead of the one you’d hoped for.” Rather than bucking up and carrying on, this approach welcomes the present reality for what it is – good and bad, beautiful and hard, fragrant and fatiguing. But the experts quoted in the article both emphasize the importance of taking a break. 

“When you’re depleted and running on fumes,” one of them says, “you can start to feel resentful: you’re doing something you don’t have the reserves to do.” It’s okay, she [says], to not feel okay. And it’s okay to eat toast for dinner. 

And for some, it is okay to walk away, to close the classroom door, to step out of the pulpit. It is okay. Better that than become toast….