Create space through Micro Actions
When you're burnt out,
In Jiu-Jitsu, both grapplers are trying to put the other person in some kind of chokehold. Once the choke is in, the attacker’s job is to tighten the choke, removing as much space as possible while the defender tries to escape. The job of the defender is to create space for themselves to allow for the escape.
Space buys time, creates leverage, and makes the escape possible.
Burnout, when it evolves to into survival mode, feels the same way.
You’re no longer just “tired.” You’re expending energy just to mentally prepare yourself to get through the day. By the time you get home, there’s nothing left to build your escape hatch.
If you want to escape burnout, your first job is to create space. Only then will you be able to focus your resources on building the life you actually want.
When you’ve tried all the common antidotes — taking a vacation, picking up a hobby, even changing jobs — and nothing works, burnout turns into suffocation.
When you’re running out of space to breathe, every decision becomes biased towards immediate relief.
You trade away your long term vision for short term gains. You sacrifice authenticity for what’s currently trending, optimizing for speed to monetization so you can quit your job as soon as possible. That might feel good in the short term, but you end up sowing the seeds for another form of misalignment – one that leads you back to where you are now.
If you don’t create space first, you might successfully escape your job but you might not actually escape burnout.
That’s how I thought about my predicament when my burnout turned into survival mode.
I told myself I didn’t need a perfect plan. I just needed to stick something between me and the job in the interim. I needed to buy myself some time.
My north star goal has always been to build a business of my own one day. But that will take time – time that I don’t have if I stayed in survival mode in my current job. It’s not sustainable and I needed to find an interim solution while I gave my business the time it needs to grow.
A few ideas came to mind:
Taking a sabbatical
Taking a leave of absence
Finding a part time retail job that comes with benefits
Finding a slower paced full time job
The first two sounds scary because I don’t have anything prepared for what comes after. If I wasn’t able to build up my business by the end of the LOA or sabbatical, and was forced to return to the same job, the burnout will just return.
Finding a part time job in retail seemed slightly more palatable, but even that has a ticking clock. Some people perform well, or even better, when there’s external pressure like that, but that’s not me.
The last option of finding a slower paced job is most realistic because it would allow me to actually spend my 5 to 9 productively towards my north start goal rather than spending it feeling anxious about the next work day. However, there’s costs to this too. (1) It takes time and energy to find a job which is time and energy away from building my own business. (2) There’s no guarantee that the job I find will be slow paced as expected – no job will advertise as such. (3) The job market in my industry is horrible right now.
While thinking through all of this, there’s three time horizons that I’m focused on: the immediate day to day, the intermediate while I build up my north star, and the long term north star goal. I need to (1) work to relieve the immediate pressure of my current job so that (2) I can find something sustainable in the interim that will allow me to (3) take the time I need to build up my north star goal.
It all comes down to finding psychological safety in the immediate and intermediate timeframe. Only then will there be enough mental energy left to focus on building a business for the long term. (I should note: this is my own personal experience. Like I mentioned before, I’m sure there are people who actually use the suffocation from their 9 to 5 as motivation and actually perform better. That’s just not me. Getting to know yourself, your strengths, and your tendencies is incredibly important, but that’s a topic for another letter.)
Psychological safety starts with taking micro-actions. In my letter on Survival Mode, I suggested cutting expenses immediately. It’s an immediate signal to ourself that we are working towards a solution. Micro-actions might not have an immediate tangible impact, but it kick starts a positive feedback loop which reverses the negative one created by the burnout. When you start to cut expenses, your savings go up. When your savings go up, you feel less dependent on your paycheck. This momentum often leads to more micro-actions that point to the same direction of escaping burnout.
Coming up and thinking through the four options I listed above was a micro-action for myself. I switched my mental gears from focusing on surviving the next work day to figuring out how I can create space for myself. This de-emphasized the importance of my day job in my mind as I looked for an alternative while working towards an intermediate solution.
Micro-actions might not feel like much in the beginning but it shifts the mindset to finding and working on solutions. Eventually, the momentum will snowball into tangible results. Cutting expenses might start with a few dollars here and there that doesn’t seem to move the needle. But once the momentum builds up, cutting expenses and saving will become a habit that actually allows you to build a cash runway that completely detaches your dependency from the paycheck, at least for a period of time.
When you’re in survival mode and feel stuck because you’ve tried everything, try shifting your focus towards micro-actions. This might be cutting expenses, applying to other jobs, or putting a vacation on the calendar to buy time in the immediate future. When you’re stuck, it’s all about creating enough space to not only survive, but also to have enough space to come up with the next step. Eventually, these “next steps” will lead to tangible outcomes that create more and more space.
When I realized I was really burnt out last year, my hope was that this would be my last corporate job, at least for a while. I thought I’d be able to build a business that replace a good chunk of my income in a few months’ time. What I learned is that building a business takes time and I need to figure out a way to give it the time it needs sustainably.
Everyone’s journey is different, so what I wrote may not apply to you completely. You might be able to build your business in a few months time. You might thrive in the pressure of the survival mode and use it as fuel to build your own operation. If that’s the case, more power to you. If not, know that that’s okay too. You can still be an entrepreneur or whatever it is your north star goal is. Good things take time and they’re worth the investment.
this point is crucial. I stumbled into a move that ended up making space for me a year ago when I started taking GLP-1's. I am not trying to go down a rabbit hole on what people think about them for weight loss or whatever, but the unexpected consequence for me was that it took away the interest and satisfaction from nearly any oft he unhealthy things I was doing out of desperation to cope in the short term meaning food, alcohol, weed, whatever. In the absence of that easy fix, so to speak, I had to start building alternative healthier methods of coping including writing and trying to build something outside of the doldrums of the day to day. I had wanted to do that for the previous 15-20 years and didn't. It took the brain space freed up by that drug to make it possible.