Burnout Didn't Just Exhaust You. It Stole Your Physical Will

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I was trying to recover…

I remember the scene vividly: I had just worked a long week (following a previous long week) and had finally gotten a much needed day off. I had cleared my schedule, declined any social commitments, and was ready to focus on myself, on my wife, and on God. I had gone to bed the night before without setting an alarm, giving myself the permission to wake up as my body allowed.

I came to that Saturday morning, waking up to a day full of possibilities. Possibilities were all that it would remain.

That morning, I never even left the bed.

I had reached for my phone, that adult pacifier, and began languishing in the hours of wasted “rest”. The search for a reason to get up was a thought relegated to the backseat. All of my available attention and energy was given to the next hit of digital dopamine I could experience. That day, and plenty others, were days of quiet desperation: though the heavy covers were a reason enough for me to stay in bed, it was the weight of my entire weary soul that kept me.

I had lost touch with my ability to choose what I wanted from life. Relinquishing myself to the almighty-algorithm was clearly rotting my brain, but it was liberating me from the burden of choosing, especially when choosing also required action. I was so exhausted I couldn’t even rest. Waste was the only thing of which I seemed capable.

Finally, in a surge of anxiety and shame, I threw myself into a late afternoon to soak up the fading hours of a day gone by. I recognized, even then, that the very next day was Sunday, the busiest day for a pastor. Dread overtook me as the sun slipped away and I became profoundly guilty of my wasted weekend. In the night, I attempted to cram in a time of meditation and prayer with the Lord. But sitting down at that table, I recognized that I could hear nothing but the static of my own soul as I reached in seeming futility for heaven. The words on my Bible seemed to dissolve into the pages as I tried to read, and my own dopamine drugged brain lulled between distant thoughts and previous memories in an unfocused daze.

This scene is so vivid to me because it hasn’t been just one day. There have been many.

This day, and other versions like it, have repeated so often in my life that it is a familiar, well-worn pattern. When we are tired enough we lose touch with ourselves and God.

Why can’t we rest well when we’re so tired? How do we fight this? How do we get our will back?

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How did we get here?

As I’ve laid out in this post, (two weeks ago post) burnout is a process of losing ourselves to work, a process we are complicit in. It is a slow, but decisive, transfer of our identity from the internal compass from within and the transcendent direction from God to the external demands that others place upon us and the extortion that human systems place upon us.

Burnout doesn’t just drain your energy, it outsources your will.

We listen less and less to our God-honoring internal convictions and increasingly to the raw output and results of our labor for others. We look less and less to the transcendent inspiration from God’s unconditional acceptance of us and increasingly to the banal opinions, priorities, and affirmation of others in our workplaces and our families. This deception is often so subtle at first that we scarcely notice it. And even when the bottom falls out from under us, we are clueless as to how the worms first snuck in.

What happened was that we traded away our individual agency, our true God-honoring will and wishes, for the will and wishes of someone else. In the pursuit of approval, we sacrificed who we truly were. In the pursuit to prove something to ourselves and others, we traded away our identity.

It’s only when we have a day off, and we discover we have no ability to choose or focus, that we discover there’s a problem that we can’t detect any other time or day. Our strength has been sapped and our direction has been derailed.

We seemingly lose our taste for life along with the means to pursue it, even if we could. This is why so many of us waste away on the couch in front of our phones or TVs when we don’t even really want to. The pleasures of having leisure chosen for us is a relief from the anxiety that lies just below the surface that we have lost the ability to choose what we want out of life.

A symptom (though not the source) of this loss is in the loss of our hobbies. It is as if the roots of our desires have been sapped, such that when our interests begin to whither we scarcely find the means to even care. We can likewise lose the ability or the interest to assert ourselves, our preferences, or our interests. Just like in work or in life, we prefer others to make those decisions for us, because it at least prevents the shame that comes with wasted time and a lost will.

Even more profound is the loss of our individual calling. We increasingly find our purpose in the reductionist roles that our place of employment offers, growing jealous and paranoid of how we are perceived in the pecking order of organizational influence and politics. We lose the quiet, calming, but emboldening assurance that came when we got our marching orders from God alone.

This is what leads us to waste and wither on the vine; given every opportunity to rest, but having lost the will to use it.

What is Agency?

In order to live, rest, and work well human beings require a dignified and empowered sense of agency. Our working definition of this is our true God-honoring will and wishes. We may be fully committed in life, both in and out of work, but having agency makes our lives feel free! You may have almost no margin in life – but if you have agency in each of the areas of life you are fully alive you don’t mind it!

Our agency is reflected in everything from our life-decisions, career ambitions, relationships to our hobbies, interests, and personality. When we have a vitalized sense of agency, living life becomes a pursuit of self-expression, worship, and joy. But without it, even the days off can feel uninspiring and deadening.

Often, many of our meaningful relationships in life came from people we met along the way of our sense of agency. We followed the inspiration to get into a hobby, an interest, a career and we met some of our best friends in the process. But a loss of agency also brings it the loss of many of those meaningful relationships as well.

In counseling those who suffer burnout, John Mark Comer recommends attending to the body first before attending to the soul in burnout: “Attend to your soma [body]. Your spirit is willing, but your soma will fail.” For our purposes of restoring agency this is profoundly helpful advice. Often the weight of our spiritual ambitions are at the cost of our physical and mental capacity. “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).

The restoration of our agency is a holistically spiritual experience, but it is most helped by focusing on our physical needs before we attend to the overtly spiritual. It is possible for us to continue pushing our physical abilities with spiritual ambitions, and actually continue causing us to burnout rather than truly recover.

In order to resuscitate our agency amidst the ashes of burnout there are several regular practices that can make all the difference:

#1 - Garoku (臥褥) or ‘Bed Rest’

In 1 Kings 19:3-6 we read about Elijah, having fled in fear of his life, takes shelter under a broom bush in the wilderness. Oscillating between fitful sleep and bitter awareness, he is sustained by nothing but an angel sent from heaven to deliver bread and water. In laying as he does for that period of time, Elijah is given the strength to go on through the wilderness south of Beersheba for more than forty days.

This sort of precedent is one that believers have mirrored through generations. In our modern day, it provides the sort of inspiration that many who are truly exhausted physically and spiritually can follow.

A practical way of imitating this sort of event is seen in garoku, or bed rest. This extremely simple practice has been used for generations in Japan. Otherwise known as Morita Therapy, it was developed by psychiatrist Shoma Morita in the early 20th century as the “absolute bed rest” method to treat anxiety. It is a simple practice: lie on your bed with absolutely no distractions and do nothing. Simply lie down, look up at the ceiling, and wait. While this may cause you to drift to sleep (which is equally helpful in recovery) it is also meant to coax the natural, inborn urge to live and engage with the world on our terms rather than external demands and obligations.

As this drive surfaces again, the desire to live becomes irresistible, rather than forced. The counterintuitive wisdom of this practice is that it works with human nature rather than against it – instead of motivating ourselves to act, we create the conditions for motivation to arise organically. Again, it is vital that you do this without your phone or even a book. We want to sit in the present moment, maintaining stillness amidst our wandering thoughts and ranging emotions and allow them to pass us by while we commit to the safety of the present moment.

If you are married, be sure to coordinate this practice with your spouse such that they can give you a significant cushion to immerse yourself in this exercise. From here, we can move to a follow-up exercise:

#2 - Light Walk or Hike

The simple act of walking around the neighborhood, through a nearby bike trail, the community park nearby, or a light hike of about 15 to 30 minutes is a great follow-up to the absolute bed rest. We discover along with the Psalmist: “Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees of the forest sing for joy,” (Psalm 96:12) and likewise what Isaiah described: “You will indeed go out with joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands” (Matt Bloom of the University of Notre Dame calls it “restorative niches”. Tragically, we justify cutting these out of our life when things get busy because they offer us no real utility. We can afford not to invest in them. Indeed, we may even have good and honorable reasons for why we no longer do them. Prioritizing family, relationships, or other uses of our time are all praiseworthy reasons to shift our priorities.

However, very often we simply stop doing these things out of busyness and exhaustion. In trimming them from our lives (or leaving them unexplored) we also prune our joyful self-expression in life. Arthur Brooks once said, “What we elect to do when we’re not getting paid – that’s really who we are as people.” Likewise, Josef Pieper asserted that “In leisure… the truly human is rescued and preserved.” Solomon agrees: “There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil,” (Ecclesiastes 2:24).

If obligations, responsibilities, and demands are the only things that we respect with our time and focus, we hem ourselves into the slavery that comes with endless toil rather than a joyful pursuit of life. It’s vital that even as we rest, we also resuscitate our interests and pursuits outside of work if we’re to restore the ballast of our identities outside of our careers or family roles. While there may be seasons where we no longer do these sorts of things, they ought to be temporary.

If we never simply revel in the world the way God intended, then our only relationship with life is based on work! This not only narrows our perspective on life, but it also narrows our perspective on ourselves. We are far more prone to being deceived that our identity is based on our jobs when there is nothing else exciting going on outside of our 9-to-5.

#4 - Relationships of Mutuality

A person who has traded away their sense of agency has molded themselves to the needs and wishes of others. As a result they are running on the rat wheel of impressing others continually, and will veer that wheel towards relationships that make them feel needed rather than loved. This often takes the shape of overcommitting, dishonesty, playing a part, or otherwise seeking to match others expectations rather than honest self-expression. We essentially develop an addiction to being useful, helpful, or significant for the people around us. We can eventually begin being self-deceived into thinking this is who we actually are.

This is not just a matter of personal health, it’s a matter of discipleship! The New Testament is filled with at least 47 different commands dealing with “one another”. The Christian life is not a one-way street, it is a two-way brotherhood. In one poignant passage, Paul even commands us:

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2)

Likewise, James exhorts us to live in transparent, confessional, accountability with one another if we are to be freed from spiritual (and physical) ailments:

“Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” (James 5:16)

It is vital that we reestablish boundaries with those who place demands on us or from whom we develop undue significance – especially on days of Sabbath and rest. Be with people who are your equals, who do not expect (let alone want) you to be anyone other than who you are. Choose relationships where you cannot be only impressive, but be known as a full person with successes, failures, accomplishments, and limits.

Restorative not Just Restful

Notice how all of this changes how we approach our days off. We don’t just languish, we pursue. Rest is an intentional practice, and it involves various rhythms and protocols that enable us to have ourselves truly restored and not simply rested.