Susan would complain that the present, the life she was living moment to moment, felt unreal to her. Only the future really mattered, for that was where her ideal life resided. “If I just wait a little longer”, she would remark in a tone of wry despondency, “there’ll be this magically transformative event and everything will come right.”

This belief, she had come to realise, had taken a suffocating hold on her life: “the longer I live in wait for this magical event, the more I’m not living this life, which is sad, given it’s the only one I’ve got.” Forever anticipating the arrival of the day that would change her life for ever, Susan had come to view her current existence with a certain contempt, a travesty of the perfect one she might have. Her house, her job, the man she was seeing – all of these were thin shadows of the ideal she was pursuing. But the problem with an ideal is that nothing in reality can ever be remotely comparable to it; it tantalises with a future that can never be attained.

Feeling exhausted and emptied by this chase, she would retreat into two contradictory impulses: the first was a compulsion to work, asking the hydra-headed beast of the office to eat up all her time and mental energy. But alongside this, frequently accompanied by chronic insomnia, was a yearning for the opposite. She would fantasise in our sessions about going home and sleeping, waking only for stretches of blissfully catatonic inactivity over uninterrupted, featureless weeks. Occasionally she managed to steal the odd day to veg out, only for a rising panic to jolt her back into work. In frenzied activity and depressive inertia, she found a double strategy for escaping the inadequacies of the present. Susan’s depressive exhaustion arose from the disparity between the enormous effort she dedicated to contemplating her future and the much smaller one she devoted to discovering and realising her desires in the present. In this regard, she is the uncanny mirror image of Steve: Susan was frozen by the suspicion there was always something else to choose; Steve was shackled by the incapacity to choose at all.

Psychoanalysis is often criticised for being expensive, demanding and overlong, so it might seem surprising that Susan and Steve chose it over more time-limited, evidence-based and results-oriented behavioural therapies. But results-oriented efficiency may have been precisely the malaise they were trying to escape. Burnout is not simply a symptom of working too hard. It is also the body and mind crying out for an essential human need: a space free from the incessant demands and expectations of the world. In the consulting room, there are no targets to be hit, no achievements to be crossed off. The amelioration of burnout begins in finding your own pool of tranquillity where you can cool off.

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Is there more to burnout than working too hard?

https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/06/29/is-there-more-to-burnout-than-working-too-hard

Jun 29th 2016

By Josh Cohen