This time last year, when the darkness in the Arizona sky wouldn’t fade and my graduate homework felt insurmountable, I keenly recall that my overwhelming workload had begun to feel less like work and more like my entire life. I was in the beginning stages of complete burnout, and it was only my first year in the workplace. More than wallowing after a bad day or even a hectic week, burnout is a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” as defined by the World Health Organization. If you feel like you're losing control, experiencing isolation, or even turning to toxic coping mechanisms, you may be burnt out.
I would venture to say millennials generally are more susceptible to the syndrome than most. In a popular Buzzfeed article published last year, author Anne Helen Petersen dubbed millennials “the burnout generation”. The word has become so synonymous with millennials that it seems to be omnipresent in every company happy hour or whispered over lattes. So, what if you’re facing burnout? How can you move forward and start feeling like yourself again?