I haven’t been feeling like myself for the last 5 months. Actually, that is a bit of an understatement. I have been so absolutely, utterly exhausted that it affected everything. I had to slow down considerably in all areas of my life. Work, hobbies, house chores, everything. There was no chance in hell I could attempt something like exercise. Just getting through a normal day would leave me so exhausted I had to sleep for most of the next day. I have been frustrated, scatter-brained, unmotivated and unfocused. Often irritable, often feeling down.

It started in early December last year, when I went through my third round of Covid. While the infection itself was very mild, it jump started whatever is going on with me now. Apart from the ridiculous exhaustion and the other signs of burnout, my immune system got all messed up. Any tiny little infection drags on for weeks, while my autoimmune issues, which have been dormant for the last five years, came back with a vengeance. Thankfully, I am slowly getting better.

I have been trying to “fix” myself from all angles, frustrated at the slow progress, at the two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back dance of recovery. But I have finally accepted where I am and started appreciating how much has improved since last December.

I thought I might share some of the things that helped me with you.

Btw, none of the links here are affiliate links, nor is anything sponsored. I have just been reading a lot lately.

There is no border between the mental and the physical

You might be wondering why I used burnout in the title of this article, but then proceeded to talk about Covid. There are several reasons for this.

Truth is, I was never diagnosed with long Covid. When I first went to a doctor, there were a few things that were off on my blood tests, like inflammation and electrolyte imbalances, but those could be explained by the string of never-ending infections I was having around that time. They also all returned to normal within a month, while my exhaustion, while improved, continued on. My doctor found nothing wrong with me physically. She attributes my symptoms to stress.

The other thing is, this is not my first rodeo. I have been burnt out before. Granted, it has never been this bad, but I have been dipping dangerously close to burnout ever since I was in high school, and falling straight into it at least twice before. It didn’t feel much different, although this time it feels more acute than ever before. Whatever the cause, the symptoms I am experiencing are those of a burnout.

And finally, in my search for answers and ways to restore my health, I found out that all mental illnesses are actually metabolic ones. In his book Brain Energy, a psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer outlines his theory about the origin of mental illnesses. It’s an incredible, paradigm-shifting book, written with great compassion and profound insight. Dr. Palmer gathers convincing evidence pointing towards a common pathway behind every single mental syndrome, from anxiety and depression, through ADHD, autism, OCD, eating disorders, substance abuse disorders and bipolar, to schizophrenia, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. All of them, absolutely all, can be explained by a dysfunction in the mitochondria. And so they can all be improved by improving the function of the mitochondria. How do you improve the function of your mitochondria? Since mitochondria are so central to our metabolism and basically all that is happening in our cells, they are affected by almost everything happening both with our bodies and our minds. What we eat, how much we sleep, light exposure, stress, inflammation, loneliness,… you name it.

Is it “real”?

I have now spent several months trying to figure out whether the root cause of my issues was physical or mental. Is it really stress? Is it lingering inflammation from the Covid? Am I maybe missing some nutrients? Is it my autism catching up with me? Is it autoimmunity?

I think I wanted to know whether what I was experiencing was “real”. Whether I should give myself some slack, or whether I should try to “pull myself up by the bootstraps”. I feel a little ashamed typing it, because it is a really dumb way to think about it, and I would never ever apply that kind of thinking to anyone else. Yet somewhere deep down, I felt like “physical=real” and “mental=I just have to work on my mindset”.

After reading Brain Energy, I realised the question of whether it is physical or mental does not make sense. Physical stressors can lead to mental symptoms and mental stressors can lead to physical symptoms. After all, we are one body. Our mind resides in our brain and that brain is intimately connected to everything else in our body. How could it be otherwise?

I decided that whatever is happening with me, I might as well call it by what it feels like. And the way to fix it will necessarily involve working on all levels – physical, mental, emotional.

So without further ado, here is the top four things that are helping me recover from burnout.

1. Sleep

While most of us know that sleep is important, at the same time it feels so painfully unproductive. It is so easy to stay up “just a little bit more” to do this or that, either for work or for leisure. I know I myself am often guilty of the revenge bedtime procrastination – staying up later than I actually want to, taking control of my time, because between work and kids I feel like my time during the day isn’t quite mine.

I know I am not alone. We have a sleepless epidemic. Yet sleep is so vitally important. This time of rest is especially important for the brain, which is not actually resting that much. There are a lot of processes of clean-up and repair going on, as well as consolidating all the inputs from the day.

Sleep is crucial for memory, focus and even creativity. The extra sleep actually makes narcoleptic people more creative! But getting too little sleep also makes your blood pressure go up, makes you more hungry and exacerbates all mental and metabolic disorders. Body and mind, sleep affects it all.

In the first weeks of my acute burnout, I was not really left much choice. I was so tired that I couldn’t do much else, so I slept 15 hours a day. But it didn’t take more than a few weeks before I started feeling much much better and was able to return to some of my normal activities.

Since then, I am finding sleep to be the number one factor that decides how I experience my day. Now, by most people’s standards, I was never sleeping that little. Even before all this, I would average 7 or 7.5 hours a night. It’s hard to know whether it was enough back then, but I can clearly see it is not enough now. There are a number of things that will increase our need for sleep, like inflammation or stress. So while I don’t like “losing” even more hours to sleep than before, I know that it will make the waking ones much better.

And I remind myself of the wisdom that was hanging on the wall of my classroom in high school: “Sleeping is living too.”

I actually found the poster we had hanging in my high school classroom. It seems like it came straight from France from some 90s campaign for better sleep. I remember how its message: “Sleeping is living too” felt meaningful in those days when we were staying up late with homework.

2. Diet

Nutrition has everything to do with everything and is probably the number one thing to fix when dealing with, well, anything.

There is now a whole new field – nutritional psychiatry – that focuses on dietary solutions to mental illnesses. Dr. Georgia Ede is a psychiatrist specialising in nutritional psychiatry and her book Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind (link to Amazon) is one of the best books I read not only on nutrition for mental health, but on nutrition as such.

She uses the physiology of the brain as a starting point to figure out what the brain needs in terms of food and how to keep it happy. Thankfully (and logically), the brain requires the same kind of nutrition to thrive as the rest of the body. The book is engaging, accessible and actionable. It offers different dietary approaches that one can tailor to their needs. I really enjoyed it.

Some of the biggest take-aways are the need to be careful with carbohydrates and plant toxins. Humans are quite prone to becoming insulin-resistant when exposed to larger amounts of carbohydrates over time. In fact, in the US, 88% of people are already insulin-resistant. Insulin resistance means that the various organs in the body stop responding to insulin. While one of the biggest roles of insulin is to trigger cells to take up glucose from the blood, it does much more than that and so insulin resistance can lead not only to type 2 diabetes, but also to cardiovascular disease, polycystic ovarian syndrome and more.

What does insulin resistance do in the brain? It actually prevents glucose from getting to the brain cells at all, as it gets stopped by the insulin resistant blood-vessel cells at the blood-brain barrier. It means the brain isn’t getting the fuel it needs and is basically starving. It’s not surprising this can give a range of symptoms, and in worst case lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

While I personally was already good on the carbohydrate part, I had some room for improvement in the other big area, namely avoiding toxins and compounds I might be sensitive to. After the Covid infection, I started reacting to egg whites, something I didn’t want to admit to myself for a while. While the reaction seemed small on the outside (a tiny rash), it’s clear it was triggering my immune system and causing trouble on the inside. Inflammation, whether due to an infection, allergy, autoimmunity or injury, is metabolically expensive and demands a lot of resources. It is very likely that it was contributing to my lack of energy and burnout.

3. Clarity of mind

You know that feeling of having too many tabs open in your head? It’s one that I have been periodically experiencing for years. It feels like no matter what I am trying to focus on at the moment, there is large, but unknown number of other thoughts in the background that are trying to come to the forefront. Some of them are clear, some of them only guessed at. And it is utterly overwhelming.

It’s also fair to say that being tired and burnout did not make this any better.

I wasn’t sure at first what it was that I was missing, until I read Getting Things Done by David Allen. I have heard about GTD (as people call it) before, but wasn’t quite interested in getting more things done. But that is actually not what the method is about. It is about exactly the thing I was seeking – clarity of mind.

GTD is a method to gather, process and organise all your open loops. Open loops are all of those thoughts hiding in the tabs in the back of your mind. Using the GTD method, you get them out, onto a paper or into an app, so your head can let go of them. And while I haven’t been using it for more than a month yet, it works. It is simple, easy to get started and ingenious. The output of the method is just a bunch of lists that you can keep track of in whatever way you want. I won’t go into details about how to use the method, since there are a lot of resources online, not to mention the book itself.

But I will say that if you constantly feel like you are forgetting something important, like you should probably be doing something else than what you are doing, but you don’t know what, if you feel like you have too many tabs open in your mind, then this helps with exactly that.

I have been very much enjoying implementing GTD in my life. I am finding myself experiencing mental clarity much more often, as is the expected outcome. But I have also gained a better overview of my days and my life. By catching every thought that feels like it might be important yet unfinished, I have been able to realise how many new interesting things and ideas I ran into on a daily basis. I am no longer surprised by my previous feelings of a crowded head-space. And what is more, this overview really helps me prioritise. Prioritising is not something I am naturally good at, and being clear about my vision, goals and principles rarely helped me with that in the nitty-gritty of the daily life. But having the GTD lists in front of me does.

Thinking about it, I might have even gotten a little more productive, especially given my limited energy these days. And I have even tackled some tasks that I have been putting off for more than a year. (For real. I was planning to get frames for some of our pictures and hang them up, but I just kept rewriting the task from one to-do list to the next for over a year. Until GTD.)

The other practice I find immensely useful for mental clarity is journalling and especially morning pages. The morning pages were popularised by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way (which I haven’t read). Morning pages simply mean writing down 3 pages by hand, first thing in the morning, of whatever comes to mind. It’s pure stream of consciousness. I find it to be incredibly useful to find any “tabs” that have been left open in my mind, to figure out what I think and feel about different things and what is lurking in the back of my mind. I often write little note in the margins of my morning-pages book that I then transfer into a GTD inbox.

4. Taking off pressure

I have to admit that this forced slowing down was not something that I adjusted to easily or happily. I didn’t think I was doing particularly much before, so I was not keen on doing less. Plus, as I said earlier, I half-thought I just needed to pull it together.

I was terribly tired and refusing to act like it, and so, unsurprisingly, I was not performing my best in my job, all the while pushing myself as hard as I could. As a result, I felt guilty and mad at myself. I started feeling like I was bad at what I was doing. My impostor syndrome was blooming. I lost all interest in my work. I felt unfocused and unmotivated. I considered changing jobs many times in the last months, but I couldn’t really see how I could find anything better. I felt trapped.

Finally, I admitted to myself that I am not in top form and that that will quite naturally affect how much I can do at work and how I will feel about it. And so I stopped pushing so hard.

I decided to stop forcing myself to do work that I felt completely uninspired to do.

Now, I am very lucky in that I can afford to do this at my job. The projects I am working on are very long-term ones and I have a lot of freedom in how and when I work. This will definitely not work for many others.

I know though that waiting for when I will “feel like it” is not a viable option either. Feeling the way I did, I would probably never “feel like it”.

So I started doing two things: working on my motivation for my work, and using a visit-based work system.

Sharpening the axe of motivation

This is an idea I heard from Elizabeth Filips (link to Elizabeth Filips’ YouTube). When you lack motivation, tasks, especially ones that require creativity, learning and synthesising knowledge, will take much longer than they would otherwise, and the result will likely be much worse.

You wouldn’t see time spent sharpening your axe as wasted, just because your main goal is to chop down a tree. It makes just as much sense to spend some time building up motivation for a task, when we know it will make it much easier and faster to get it done.

And so I started doing that. I brainstorm all the things I like about my job, all the skills related to it that I would like to learn, all the side projects I would like to try. When I really don’t feel like working on my main task, rather than feeling guilty and forcing myself to stare at it, uninspired, I work on something else.

All this might sound quite obvious to some, and it won’t be applicable for others at all. For me it was a game-changer that restored my enthusiasm for my work.

Visit-based instead of force-based planning

While I was going down the GTD rabbit hole, I ran into the work of Kourosh Dini. As a pianist, he is very familiar with tasks that require regularity and motivation at the same time. One of the main things I adopted from his approach to organising work is the idea of a Visit.

Most of us are used to leaving orders for our future selves. Inevitably, there are times when the future isn’t the way we imagined it and our future self has to skip or modify the job we left for her, often leading to feelings of guilt and failure. This is the force-based system.

One the other hand, you have the Visit-based planning. A Visit means sitting down with your work and considering it. Kourosh Dini says to remain with it at least for the length of a single breath. It gives you the space to consider the task, to start it, if that feels right, and to do as much of it as is right under the circumstances.

The only thing you plan for your future self is to visit the work and you trust her to make the right decision in that moment. It is about creating space, rather than obligations.

Obviously, this is not something that is suitable for all types of tasks, but I found it invaluable for those that if fits. I use it a lot for my creative writing at home and for big coding projects at work. I plan a daily recurring Visit, which more often than not turns into a nice flow-filled work session. But if it doesn’t, that is OK too.

Getting better takes time

These last five months have been a journey. The road here was bumpy and winding and frustrating, and I know I am not quite were I would like to be yet. But looking back, I can see how much better I have gotten, and I am very grateful for that.

The strategies I outlined here are just some of the things I have tried. I have also been practising more meditation and hypnosis (I had great results from hypnosis previously), doing breathing exercises and lately started experimenting with fasting. Sometimes it’s hard to know what works (or how well), but I chose to talk about what I think made the biggest difference. It obviously won’t be applicable and helpful for everyone, so take what makes sense to you and leave the rest. I wish you all the best.

Image by Nataliya Vaitkevich via Canva.com