From Rage Quit to Relaxed

How to reduce burnout without quitting your current job

“I just want to rage quit!”

I hear this all the time from my clients and I used to say it myself frequently when I worked in corporate. But the economic realities of being an adult will often keep us at a job with a toxic environment, even if we like the work the we do. Add in the rapid changes from technology and quitting a job doesn't seem like the responsible thing to do. So we stay, trapped in burnout and chronic stress with no relief.

Every single day you dread going into work. The day starts when you check your email and chat messages in the morning and realize 12 fires popped up overnight, six of which aren't really fires except for the sheer number of messages with exclamation points. 

You go into the office and you are bombarded with questions before you can even get to your desk. By the end of your first meeting of the day you are not sure whether you want to beat your hands on the desk in frustration or cry in despair. Your stomach is in knots and you can't even enjoy your coffee anymore because it just makes your stomach more upset. 

You continue to power through the day, solving problems and finding answers to the questions that no one else seems to be able to answer. Your team can't solve any problem without asking you and your leadership team is continually asking you about information you've already provided them but they didn't read.  By 3pm, you have quietly told yourself that you just want to quit at least four times. You spend the 5 minutes you have between meetings daydreaming about what it would be like to turn in your resignation and walk out the door. Yesterday was so bad you actually started composing your resignation letter.

Conflicting directions and changing priorities seem to be the outcome of every meeting. By the end of the day, you are exhausted from trying to navigate the shifting path and your mind has gone blank. You are numb and drive home in a haze. You just want to curl up on the couch and watch reruns. But you still have to pick up the kids and get dinner on the table (including feeding the dog), then clean up and help with homework. Most nights, you have to log back in to redo a presentation that your boss was supposed to review three days ago but just got you the changes at 5PM for tomorrow’s 8AM meeting.

I lived this routine for years, minus the kids and homework. Each day seemed to be a marathon where everyone needed something from me, usually urgently. I would provide written reports and no one would read them. They would message me instead with a question I had answered in the very first bullet point of the report summary. I'd have meetings to provide detailed information and facilitate communication for the team, and then when someone went to do the task they would call me with questions. And those questions were usually about some technical detail that I wasn't the correct resource for so I would have to get someone else involved.

My days were a series of unproductive meetings, urgent requests that weren’t really urgent, and no time during working hours to actually do my work. The stress and burnout had crept into my life outside of work, impacting my health (hello chocolate peanut butter cups!) and slowly killing my relationships.

I had tried deep breathing, yoga, mediation, and running.  I used PTO to take mental health days where I never got out of my pj’s. But nothing seemed to help. 

So how do you break this cycle without actually quitting your job?

You pick one small boundary and hold it.  The first one I implemented was that I wasn’t going to check email or chats outside of working hours from Friday afternoon until Monday morning. That wasn’t easy when I was running a global project with resources across multiple time zones. It felt scary. What if we missed a deadline because I didn’t get online and answer their questions? What if my boss caught on to what I was doing and told me I had to be online?

I did it anyway. And no one noticed. Read that again: No. One. Noticed. 

I had been giving my weekends away and no one cared.  On the flip side, they didn’t notice if I wasn’t online. I fulfilled my responsibilities for when a system had a go-live over a weekend, but otherwise no one cared if I was or wasn’t online.  But my nervous system cared.

A recent client named Jamie came to me so burnt out that she could barely function at work or at home. She was “the answer person” for her company, even for projects she had never worked on. She chose a different boundary to set to try to recover from her burnout. Every time someone asked her “What should I do?” she used to provide advice. Now she chooses to answer with the question “What do you think you should do?” The first week her team responded by staring at her blankly. So she prompted them with “What have you already tried?” and then followed up with “What do you think should be your next step?” By week two, her team was coming with to her with options and asking for direction. By week three, they were letting her know what they thought was the best solution. Meetings were much faster and productivity soared, for her and her team.

Jamie also set this boundary with her boss. He would often come to her because he didn’t like to make decisions, so would ask her advice. She was spending hours quietly supporting him before he went into meetings so that he was prepared. Now when he came to her, she would ask him “What do you think you should do?”  Conversations became a productive dialogue rather than Jamie taking on the cognitive load that belonged to him.

Her boss did notice the change, but there were no negative consequences. He didn’t tell Jamie to stop asking that question or go back to the way she had been working. In fact, they offered her a promotion.

Jamie took the promotion and is still at that company.  But now when she leaves her desk at 5PM, she still has energy to go play tennis with her husband. She’s back to experimenting with recipes for dinner instead of ordering DoorDash. And she continues to add small boundaries to her workday to keep the burnout at bay.

If you are sitting in a job that is causing you chronic stress and burnout, what boundary are you going to set to start your recovery process?

My boundary was weekends. Jamie's was a single question.

The one that works for you has to fit your actual job, your actual boss, and your actual team. If you can't name it yet, that's exactly what my 45 minutes free strategy call is for. We'll look at where your days are leaking energy and choose the one boundary you'll start holding this week.

Book your free strategy call at https://www.movetojoycoaching.com/claritycall