On Recovering from Burnout Despite Your Anxious Attachment

This week feels like I’ve had a real breakthrough with managing my current burnout level. It seems fitting to talk a bit about burnout, and also how important your support network is to finding and escaping it through those little pockets of possibility we might otherwise miss. 

As I mentioned on our Instagram a few weeks back, it’s been truly hectic since launching. I had been traveling, gotten sick, started a few other side projects/gigs, and was still holding myself to some pretty high expectations at work. I’ve experienced deep burnout before, so I’m disappointed in myself for not catching it sooner. The signs of work-induced burnout are fairly consistent for most people: irritability, thinking about your job duties obsessively well after the workday has ended, stress dreams, outsized reactions to stimuli, full body exhaustion. One key sign for me is that my brain starts to hurt when I need to make a decision. It doesn’t hurt in a headache way, but in a way that feels similar to when you’re exercising and have reached the limit of your repetitions for the movement. But even that didn’t clue me in. Instead, it was when I started sobbing at my desk because of a repeat error that happens despite my ongoing advocacy for one small change in a process. Is the error annoying? Yes. Is it worth sobbing and shaking over? Unequivocally no. During my next 1:1, I explained to my supervisor how not okay I was, and we discussed some options for getting me through the end of the year. 

I cannot express how important the way you as a supervisor respond to an employee telling you they’re burnt out is to:

a) Ensuring they’ll use the recovery time to recover and not look for a new job; and 

b) The person’s ability to actually recover. 

Despite mutually agreeing on a solution, I still haven’t been able to move past much of what has been driving my burnout. Instead of leaning on systems and people I have in place to maintain my mental wellness – exercise, cooking, spending time with my loved ones, lessening screen time – I was closed off. I spent my precious energy being hyper-vigilant at work, and striving for near perfection in my other responsibilities outside of work. Cue my incredible girlfriend, whose generosity and perspective helped reshape my own limited one. 

I also cannot express how important it is to be willing to be vulnerable and ask for help from your support network when you need it. This is a scary thing to do in general, and even scarier for those of us with anxious attachment styles. 

If you’re looking for a brief overview of attachment styles, and the anxious attachment style in particular, The Attachment Project is a great place to start. How I understand this in relation to my life experiences is this: I am so worried about being left by people I love and care about that I can’t help but look for all the evidence that they’re going to leave. In order to counteract the evidence, I overachieve: I strive to be the most helpful, most understanding, most forgiving, often at my own expense. It’s been an ongoing thought experiment to bring what I understand about how my anxious attachment shows up in my personal life to bear on my experiences at work. And it wasn’t until I finally talked with my girlfriend that I fully understood it. 

Up until recently, there have been a few folks along my professional journey who I’ve looked up to, and who have also let me down. I strove to be the best in order to not lose them, and when I needed their guidance and support the most they unfortunately weren’t available. Sometimes it was because they perceived me as not needing help – I was so confident and capable in their eyes! And sometimes, it was because they weren’t the role model I thought they were. Whichever the case, it tugged on those childhood wounds. This, in turn, led me to work harder to be impressive to anyone I saw as a leader, and the cycle continued to repeat. As my girlfriend and I talked through how those painful experiences encouraged me to be reluctant in seeking help, I remembered something about the agreement my supervisor and I had landed on. We had agreed I’d “work light” through the end of the year. In addition, my supervisor wouldn’t check in on any deliverables, and generally leave me to prioritize on my own and shift things accordingly. This was the opposite of what I needed. I didn’t need someone to leave me alone (which, if you’re following, I was experiencing as being abandoned). What I needed was someone to walk beside me and collaborate so I could turn more of my focus to improving my wellbeing.

We spoke again this week, my supervisor and me. The conversation has left me cautiously optimistic. I’m proud of myself for taking the time to thoroughly understand my needs. I’m also proud I voiced them in a way that invited collaboration, not judgment or critique. After all, someone can’t offer the appropriate help if they don’t know what you need. What I’m still curious about, though, is how else my attachment style is holding me back from achieving my professional goals. While I’ve made significant progress over the years in managing how it impacts my intimate relationships, I’ve still got much to learn. In the meantime, I’ll be focusing on reinvesting in myself so I can be the romantic partner and teammate the people in my life deserve.

Stay curious -

Rachel