Balancing Burnout
Finding Resilience and Equilibrium
This week’s features Lucy Hinton. Lucy is a user experience designer, researcher, explorer, and advocate.
Burnout. The topic hangs in the background in team meetings. It mingles in meetups and networking coffees. It could be a filter on LinkedIn. Sort by flavor of burnout: entry-level, mid-career, senior, or in-between roles. It transcends skill sets and industries but seems particularly present in design and technology right now.
As someone who has experienced burnout in two different creative industries, I want to share my experiences in practicing resilience and finding methods to balance my desire to provide value without sacrificing stability.
Burnout has a spectrum
My first career path was in technical theatre and before I even finished my degree, I was showing early signs of burnout. My peers and I traded sleep and attending classes for rehearsal and late-night craft work, claiming that sleep was for the weak. It was easy to be physically tired at twenty years old, but I didn’t know how to handle the empty feeling that my hard work didn’t seem to benefit me. I was putting in more than I was getting back.
It took over ten years for that initial feeling to turn into complete and utter burnout. I wasn’t proud of what I produced, but I just kept churning out work. I thought I was burning out due to low pay, long hours, and because I was sick of trying to convince people that my approach to problem solving was valuable. I could feel the cynicism growing.
I tried skip-level meetings, over-documenting my process, and vocalizing my frustration to anyone who would listen — including my colleagues who felt the same. It felt like the people who marketed, sold, and managed our skills didn’t understand the effort and thought that went into our work. I felt underutilized, undervalued, grumpy, and disillusioned. I was totally crispy.
Burnout doesn’t end with the job
The pandemic lockdown forced me to stop and re-evaluate. I absolutely did not want to go back to theatre, so I finally dedicated time and resources to finding a new career. User experience design felt like a rush of energy for me.
So, it was a bit of a shock when I started to get that nagging feeling again, this time in a job that I adored, at a company that appreciated me. Once again, I was finding myself hoarse. The burnout didn’t end with the change of career or scenery because I never developed a way to recover from it.
New jobs don’t stop the fact that advocacy can be exhausting. Practicing empathy can wear you down. Trying new ideas while balancing implementation and cost is hard. Design thinking and creativity aren’t linear nine-to-five jobs, and they can consume your energy.
In a recent conversation with another designer, she asked, “Should we just always expect burnout? No matter where we are?” and I honestly don’t know the answer. Maybe. I do know that I’ve started practicing and preparing for that early feeling, like catching the warning signs of a cold and taking a supplement. Is it a perfect system? No, but here are some of the things I do to find a balance.
Talk to other people
Depending on where you are on the spectrum of burnout, talking about it can feel like shouting into a void or just adding one more voice to an already raucous crowd. Try to find meaningful connections.
I love talking to new designers. When I am feeling cynical and grumpy, nothing turns me around like hearing the excitement in someone’s voice. They may be frustrated by the job market, but they are often just thrilled to talk about what they’ve recently learned or how they are starting to view the world. Their enthusiasm is contagious.
Similarly, I often reach out to people I admire and ask them how they work through frustration and what they are interested in. I’ve derived so much comfort from kind people who have shared their time and insights with me. Instead of scrolling through an echo chamber for validation, I’ve found individual connections to be fulfilling for me.
Support your values
I care about the work I do and its impact. At the wrong company, I stick out and push too hard. Trying too hard to accomplish something that is not supported or valued by your colleagues and leaders will only hurt you. The times when I’ve felt the crispiest are when I haven’t been my genuine self at work.
It can be hard to gauge how deeply fatigue has set in when you are still actively trying to do what you do best. I try to regularly check in with myself. What matters to me as a designer? As an employee? As a person? Has it changed over time? Does my company care about it? I’ve found that spending time defining my values and checking that they are matched helps me plan and anticipate bumps along the way. A company doesn’t have to be a perfect fit, but we need to care about the same core things for me to feel successful.
Practice resilience
When I feel frustration coming on, I try to do things that scare me. Public speaking. Being vulnerable. Sharing my genuine self. It snaps me back to reality because it resets my frame of reference. It requires a level of confidence that takes effort and reminds me to keep practicing.
Figure out what you need to recover your energy and take time to bounce back before doing hard things again. If interacting with others wears you down, maybe you need to take the day off between social interactions. If you’re feeling uninspired, maybe you need to step away from your routine or bring something new to it. Find out what you need to support yourself and remember that only you know your limit.
Despite how I felt at the time, I didn’t fail when I quit my first career. I just learned a few lessons the long way. Finding the right balance between doing something that matters to you and taking care of yourself takes practice and personal investment. I can now (mostly) recognize when I need to make an adjustment, and I’m not afraid to start over fresh if necessary.
Where can you start to find a balance for yourself?
Lucy Hinton is a designer and researcher with deep experience in creative and empathy-based work. She’s fascinated by the things that people build to influence others’ behavior and loves talking to people to understand where these interactions fall short.
A former costume designer, Lucy is used to constraints that many UX folks don’t worry about (air temperature, portability, weight, ease of cleaning in a sandy environment), and she intuitively questions norms that others don’t see (“I want to try new ways of cooking a pizza”).
She currently brings her expertise to UX Design and Research at Fathom Consulting in Minneapolis, MN.
