Burnout Doesn’t Stay at Work

My husband of almost 10 years looked at me and said, “I’m not sure I want to do this relationship anymore.”

I knew I was deep in burnout. I knew I hadn’t been the nicest person to be around. But I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until he said that.

I was an IT Project Manager in a highly stressful, toxic environment, and my energy had been draining for years. After a full day of meetings, all I wanted was the couch and silence. I used to be the one who cooked (he does the dishes), and I loved experimenting with new recipes. Now I couldn’t even muster interest in the basics. And when he asked me a simple question, I snapped at him like he was an idiot.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care. I just had nothing left.

He wanted to talk about our days over dinner. We used to have deep conversations about all kinds of topics, the kind that challenged our thinking. But my brain was fried. I spent all day guessing which problem would blow up next and how to raise it without bruising a senior manager’s ego. Whatever energy was left went to lying awake, hunting for what I’d overlooked so I could log in early and fix it before it blew up in my face.

There was no energy left for my husband. (Or my friends, or myself, but that’s a story for another day.)

If you’ve ever snapped at someone you love over a simple question, then sat there wondering where that came from, you know exactly what this felt like.

I had already tried the usual fixes

Quitting wasn’t financially possible at the time.

Finding a new job took energy I didn’t have. And my last few jobs had ended in burnout too. Another job just looked like burnout with a different company name on the paycheck.

I already exercised regularly. (Although the evening walks with my husband had faded, because I was on the couch playing mindless games.)

I tried yoga and meditation. They helped me fall asleep faster (usually). But they did nothing for the 2AM wake-ups with my brain swirling about work.

What finally helped was working with a coach to figure out which boundaries I could set at work and actually hold.

The boundary that felt like defiance

There was a director who sponsored many of my projects. He liked to start random chat threads demanding detailed answers about decisions made months earlier. He usually did this just days before a project was due to be certified to go live. He had a reputation for being harsh and impatient, so most people dropped everything, dug up the answer, and replied as fast as they could.

My boundary: I would acknowledge his message and tell him when I’d get back to him. Then I’d answer at my next calendar opening, usually at the end of the day, after he’d logged off. I wasn’t going to stop what I was doing to answer a question already documented in the project meeting notes.

I was terrified. Terrified he would yell at me. Terrified he would complain about me. Terrified he would work behind the scenes to get me fired (he had that reputation too).

The reality? Once I gave him a time frame, he often told me he didn’t need it until the next day. Sometimes he found the information himself, or someone else sent it to him. As far as I know, he never once complained that I wasn’t responsive.

The urgency was never his. I had created it in my own head.

That boundary made room for the next one: putting 15 minutes on my calendar after key meetings to do the critical tasks from that meeting while they were fresh in my mind. That one felt a bit scary too, but it made my to-do list so much shorter, because I just did the task instead of saving it for later. Since the second boundary worked, I added another. And then another. Slowly, I started to recover. While I was still burned out at work, I was able to contain it more to the office, which allowed me to begin to find my life outside of work again.

What I got back

I remember the first night we had a real conversation again. I had come downstairs from my home office and bypassed the couch to go to the kitchen. I didn’t cook anything elaborate, but as we ate, my husband and I discussed current events and talked about our opinions of what they meant. We hadn’t done that in over two years.

Boundaries at work weren’t the only thing that saved our marriage. But they gave me back the mental and emotional energy I needed to show up for it. I learned to put work in a box so I could actually be present with him. I started looking forward to our time together instead of resenting it.

I never resented him. I resented what work was taking from me, and he was the one standing closest.

This is the first in a series on what burnout really costs. For me, it cost me at home first.

What has burnout taken from you at home? Dinner conversations, evening walks, your patience, or something else?