Burnout Recovery Progress

Why, thanks for asking about how my burnout recovery is going. I don’t know what the cure for burnout is: burn-in? chill-in? chill-out? rebuilding?

I’m still parking the car at the station. This does cost money but I’m not doing it five days a week. And the place I used to be able to park is now jammed with cars and left overnight. Nobody lives on that road. So it’s either park at the station or walk all the way in. And back at the end of a long day. No thank you.

The person who can most frazzle my working life went off on paternity leave, and has now gone on holiday for a fortnight. This is what happens when you have a Higher Power looking after you.

I finished a long and fact-packed presentation about the customers of the business I’m in. It was a personal goal, I used any spare moment I could, I was wondering if I’d ever get it done. But I did, and now people are telling me how much they like it.

Exercise is going well. I’ve learned to forget what I’m doing next when I’m in the gym. Focus on the reps, then the set. I’m trying to get four times a week in. I have abandoned bench press for now. This means I have lost any claim to bro-tude as I don’t do deadlifts or squats either. I’m doing dumb-bell press instead, and I’m sure it’s easier on my nerves. (Bench, squats and deadlift are all exercises which can frak you up badly if you make a bad move. Hence they take a much larger toll on your nervous system than a fairly harmless dumb-bell based exercise.)

I’ve noticed that I feel better if I get to bed at 21:00 rather than 21:30, and even better if it’s 20:30. 20:30 is going too far.

I’m learning not to beat myself up when I don’t immediately do the ironing or the washing up. Chaos is not going to descend if I leave the sheets until a weekday evening.

I had forgotten how restful two or three episodes of a good DVD series can be. I’m still inclined to let one day a week go by with scraps of this and that and far too much You Tube. Maybe I can work on that now.

And I’m slowly coming out of my scuttle - which is what we should call the routine that takes us from home to work to gym to home without ever stopping in the middle to do something random like go to a film or stop at a restaurant. That’s going to take longer.

Still haven’t beaten that afternoon slump. Still experimenting.

On the other items, morale at work is not good. The office still sucks. My social support is still close to zero.

I took a week off at the end of August, a lot of which was about finally coming to terms with passing what I thought was going to be retirement, and yet having to carry on working. I’m pretty much over that, and over myself as an “old man”. I will meditate on coping with getting older in another post. It’s a subject on which vast amounts of horse-shit has been dropped.