“Entire physical shut down,” the doctor asserted, a grave expression on his face. “You’re on the brink of total immune collapse.”
“Damn!” I sighed petulantly, slumping into his unwelcoming plastic chair.
“Why did this happen?”
Why indeed? I was in my late twenties. I had a thriving, rapidly expanding business to manage, two exuberant toddlers, a home to run, obligations everywhere and a defiant resistance to being told I was on the brink of a dangerous health malfunction. But, I also now had seriously noticeable hair loss, was a skinny wisp of a woman with hollow eyes and a pallid, blemished complexion. I constantly caught tonsillitis, conjunctivitis, bronchiolitis, every-itis. I was swarming with allergies, skin disorders, insomnia, IBS, PMS, you name it, I had it, and I was permanently oscillating between hyper wired and bone-achingly tired. I was, I reluctantly admitted, whopperly chopperly burnt out. I had hit my first rock bottom.
Many more of these impromptu health crises followed. Then, I eventually cracked the code. I uncovered how to commit vibrant and consistent impact to all the realms in my life that matter most to me, without burning out. Burnout is torture for the ambitious woman. It’s the nemesis of every high achiever. It’s crippling, harrowing and life-jolting. Burnout creeps up on us gradually, lurking, until suddenly, slap bang in the middle of one of our superbly productive output crescendos we collapse, floored into inertia, plans abruptly awry. There we lie, imprisoned in our own flailing bodies, tormented by the listlessness of unexpected life paralysis, bleakly lamenting our energetic, ambitious selves now forced into stillness, ashamed, useless, exhausted.
Almost 60 per cent of working women today lie there. Obeying medical instruction, I surrendered, took a break, healed and once strong again, went back to embracing my never-ending to-do lists with my usual gusto. Naively though, I hadn’t paid attention to the lessons within the crisis. I’d failed to notice the reasons I’d ended up so inconveniently incapacitated. I had brushed the incident off as bad luck, embarrassed to retrospectively dwell on my own vulnerability, inwardly humiliated by what I perceived as weakness. Foolishly, back onto life’s treadmill I rushed, donning my numerous hats once again, obstinately denying the blip’s occurrence. “Woohoo Life, I’m back!” said the mother, entrepreneur, techie, wife, daughter, boss, socialite, fitness queen, domestic goddess, erm no scrap that last one, you get the gist though, lots of hats, and on and on I jogged. Over the next decade, as my life, family, homes, businesses, busyness and hat collection expanded, I repeatedly broke down in similar circumstances, whacked by burnout episode after burnout episode; each unexpected calamity rendering me reliant on generous friends, family and colleagues to pick up the charred shadows of my unfinished work projects, uncared-for children and unfulfilled obligations.
Each crash sending me into a spiral of self-loathing, fear and frustration; “Why am I so weak? When will I recover? I’ve got so much to do. I need to be well!”. Gradually, I awoke to patterns at play, recognizing certain precursors to impending burnout cascades, and slowly I acknowledged my own inadvertent self-destruction. With interrogative self-awareness I came to understand the role I held in my frequent demises, which were not misfortune, but a toxic blend of overzealous productivity, incessant stress and suffocation in too many areas simultaneously. I respected that while some of the whirlwinds were squarely out of my control, there were vast aspects of my life and lifestyle that were 100 per cent within it.
And although my abundant ambitions were motivating, I was pushing too hard, too consistently, too reactively and careering relentlessly into my own breaking points time and time again, ignoring signals that could have been neat alerts to change route or halt. As pennies started to drop and I examined my behaviours, attitudes and circumstances, I bubbled with optimism and ever-expanding hope. I could see and feel the misadventuring afoot with increasing clarity.
The Myth of the Mastered To-Do List
We live in an age where it’s busy. Sure. There’s loads to do and loads to distract. White boards, family planners and diaries are chock-a-block. There’s public celebration in this as much as there’s private despair.
“Get you Girl and how much you accomplish, wowey!” and by sheepish contrast, “Thank you, Dentist, apologies if I nod off while you do the root canal, this is my secret spa time these days.” And within this twizzly polarity of “busy is cool but exhausting” pervades a naivety that assumes the magnitude of demands slamming into our multifaceted life realms are both manageable and happily satisfying.
Not necessarily, my friend, not necessarily. Perhaps, like younger me, you view life’s freneticism as a battle to be won, assuming you will eventually reign victorious over a utopian state of calm, where the to-do list is enticing, gently stimulating and delightfully untroublesome. For years, I ploughed through the mayhem of work, family and self-care, fervently trying to manage, sedate and control it all, to get to an ethereal tomorrow where I would no longer be exhausted or overwhelmed, but would still realize all of my tantalizing ambitions and goals and be the perfect mother, entrepreneur, wife, daughter, social butterfly, employee, and, and, and … But, as I repeated each day in an identical pattern to the day before, the stress and intensity never waned, that transcendent tomorrow never came, my fairy godmother never appeared and the cuddly nirvana of “Balance” never cradled me, instead those repeated burnouts did.
Excerpted from Big Impact Without Burnout: 8 Energizing Strategies to Stop Struggling and Start Soaring, by Bianca Best. Watkins Publishing, March 11, 2025. Preorder your copy here.