The Beauty Of Burning Out: How To Reignite Your Drive & Passion

By: Taylor Pircey

Burnout may just be our greatest gift, our saving grace. It reveals a lack of balance and health, powerful enough to awaken us from the stupor and routine of our days, and motivate us to change for the better. Burnout also reveals a lack of balance and health, helping us realize we are not walking in the most powerful, beautiful, or generous versions of ourselves.  Because of this, it forces us to come to grips with our insufficiencies and redirect our energy towards more life-giving people and habits in the long run.

Sometimes we must let regrets and mistakes burn. To allow beauty to rise from the ashes and start anew, we must relinquish our old ways, patterns, and lives to embrace greater ones. Pay attention: what new patterns are trying to blossom in your life? Perhaps our burnout has less to do with our activity levels, and more to do with a lack of purpose in our lives and the endless ache we feel for something more.

Photography Credits: Taylor Pircey

Perhaps burnout is not always due to hyperactivity, but also the grueling haul of monotony and unaltering patterns of our lives. Couldn’t our boredom and lack of inspiration be an equally slow burn as a hurried activity? I believe the stress we undergo in hurried environments is caused not by busyness alone, but because that busyness doesn’t stem from things we truly care about or treasure. We experience tension when we are drawn toward certain values and responsibilities that our daily reality seems to contradict or oppose outright. This is by no means a call to shirk duty or decries the stability of faithfully working and showing up to our posts day by day; it is rather a challenge to ponder what drives us and why we’re doing what we do.

Could there be a shift made in your lifestyle that could align you with a greater purpose? That could re-introduce meaning, intentionality, and love into your life? If you have a purpose, you can endure anything, whether boredom or overwhelming pressure. Purpose is a buffer for burnout, directing your ship through the stormiest of seas. I don’t believe burnout is intrinsically a matter of hyperactivity or inactivity, but rather a lack of purpose and love. This is not to say we must always be doing something we love, but what we do should accommodate space for love to be present and flourish in our lives. It should align with some sense of purpose, a greater good, and service to others.

In my personal experience with my most recent job, the problem wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy my job or that I had too much on my plate to manage; there just wasn’t much to do because the pace had slowed down at my company. Meanwhile, my heart was becoming drawn to other passions that were fueling my soul and scratching my creative itch (but weren’t yielding an income). I felt a restless drive to do something, anything, other than embracing the monotony of my daily schedule; to avoid it, I would go on trips as often as possible and cram my weekends with places to go, activities to do, and people to see. My afternoons coming home from work were no different as I desperately sought to alleviate the deep-seated boredom I was experiencing at work.

Photography Credits: Taylor Pircey

I soon found I had no room to breathe because I’d filled every crack in my schedule with someone to spend time with, a project to work on, a book to read, an event to attend, or a place to visit. I believe we tend to think of burnout as becoming so overloaded and overwhelmed that we snap and everything falls apart at once; a long grinding down until we can’t handle the pressure anymore. In my case, it was not the presence of pressure, but the absence thereof that broke me.

I packed my schedule so tightly because I lacked purpose during my workday, so the moment I got off the clock, I would dive headfirst into a flurry of events to fill my days with purpose. I needed to feel like I’d achieved something or filled my soul with meaning and in the process, I faced burnout from sheer boredom. My boredom was inactivity I couldn’t help, which became a nagging torment, and it led me to fill my days with a flurry of activity until I was emotionally and mentally spent.

What is the source of potential burnout in your life? Are you overworked with no margin for rest or personal life and no purpose driven by love behind it? Are you underworked and wandering aimlessly, searching for a purpose to fill your time with? Are you bored and burdened by a lack of purpose? Or, do you have a solid purpose and simply need to learn to manage it better? It’s easier to recognize an issue in our lives and harder to grasp practical tools to help us address those issues. Now that we have acknowledged burnout, how do we address it? How do we prevent it from happening in the first place?

Photography Credits: Taylor Pircey

The ever-present dichotomy of rest and work is a balancing act—we must not overextend ourselves, and yet we must not under-engage ourselves. Laziness can be a quicker road to burnout than workaholism if we embrace it in an equal measure of unhealthiness. When my job ended, the burnout factor largely shifted as I realized the immense space that job had taken into my life. It had drained me of energy and purpose, crippled my sense of balance, and thrown off my cycles of rest and work. Work was never strenuous enough to warrant true rest after the day ended, so I never fully rested since all my free time was packed with activity. I was stuck in a cycle of work that didn’t feel like work and play that didn’t feel like play with no margin for rest between it all.

Where do we begin with all of this? Allow me to propose a few tips for handling the work-rest balance in a practical way. Once a day, set aside an hour to do something you love – it could be a hobby, a self-care routine, a book to read, self-reflection practice such as journaling, meditating, walking, or even treating yourself to an indulgence (like a cookie, a movie, or a bath). The goal is to have one hour to do something life-giving that recharges your soul and feeds you, relaxes you, and gives you something to look forward to each day. Having this practice will recalibrate your heart to your purpose, values, and loves, keeping you on course and creating a buffer for potential burnout.

Photography Credits: Taylor Pircey

Once a week, have a true day off no errands, chores, meal prep, or catch-up items on your to-do list. Fill this day with life-giving things, by yourself or with people you love, that truly recharge your batteries and bring beauty, joy, relaxation, and refreshment to your life. Having this day off to rest will give space to reflect on the week and adjust any areas of potential burnout that have lingered. This time off will also allow you to be a better friend, partner, parent, and neighbor, as it will refuel you before you dive into another work week.

Once a quarter, make sure you plan a vacation of some sort where you can get out of town and go somewhere new. Our best reflection is often done in a foreign environment where the environment we are most accustomed to is no longer buffers around us. This will give you space to dream bigger, love more boldly, and think about how your life is aligning with your values. Use this time to gauge if you are truly being fed by purpose, or if it has come time to investigate a lifestyle shift.

Having an allotted time to rest and travel is a great opportunity to reflect on how you are balancing work and rest, and if life could be healthier with some shifts in schedule, vocation, or social circles. We, humans, are not static creatures; our lives are meant to shift and bend with time. Having this set-aside time to ponder the sort of people we have become and how our lives should shift with those changes is important and a great way to avoid burnout when what we feel called to no longer aligns with our lifestyle.

Once a year, I would highly encourage a day or weekend for a silence and solitude retreat. This is best done on your own as a solo trip. This can be as relaxed and easy as booking yourself a stay in a log cabin or beach cottage somewhere by yourself for personal reflection. It can also be as focused as signing up for a guided meditation retreat or a stay at a monastery with programs for self-reflection. This practice may sound odd considering the noise and bustle of our current culture, but I believe it is just for that reason that silence becomes even more valuable.

Photography Credits: Taylor Pircey

Taking time away from our hectic lives to be alone with ourselves and reflect on the past year will provide us invaluable insight into the next season. Who have you become? What have you accomplished? How have your experiences shaped you? How have your values shifted or grown? How might you want to make changes to your life to avoid burnout? Investing yourself into parts of life you no longer value, no longer serve you, nor align with your purpose will continue to cultivate that slow burnout. Self-reflection is an excellent opportunity to measure where you are, who you are, where you want to go, and who you want to become.

These are all practical ways for us to incorporate rest into our lives and provide space to reflect on what is causing friction and eventual collapse. What if the solution was simply to slow down long enough to check in with our hearts, and see what is serving us and what is draining us? What if we take time to determine what aligns with our values and what is set against them? If we check what is life-giving and what is drawing energy from us?

Perhaps it truly is the awareness we are lacking more than anything in our fast-paced modern lifestyle. Do we ever slow down enough to ask ourselves what we want, what we love, and how we can live lives that reflect those answers more strongly? Do we even think we can have a life full of what we treasure most dearly? A life with a beautiful balance of rest and work, purpose and fulfilling moments? To both give and receive, to pour out and be poured into—a beautiful symbiotic relationship of loving others around us and being loved by them as well?

Photography Credits: Taylor Pircey

If boredom is the issue at hand in your life, what is something you can add to your life that will beautify it, uplift others, and give you deeper meaning? It doesn’t have to be a huge change—it can be as simple as looking outside yourself more and serving someone around you.  It could be taking a hobby or activity you are good at and utilizing it to bless others. The drive to fill your life with purpose begins with becoming less absorbed in the monotony of your own days and seeing how you might be able to shed some light on another person’s darkness.

We need each other. Our burnout comes from misalignment in our lives where we are no longer connected to love, community, and purpose. We are needed and we need others. We have something to give to others and something to gain from them. It is good we can do and good we can receive. What if we stopped resisting the burn, allowed it to refine us, and walked into a new season full of hope, joy, and a more restful existence? Let burnout do its best work and refine your life until it blooms into something magnificent, something you can be proud of, something life-giving that will leave a legacy for years to come. □

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About the Writer

Taylor Pircey currently resides in Thousand Oaks, California where she works as a film photographer and mortgage processor. Taylor loves cooking, reading, road trips, hiking, and all things community-oriented.

Article Credits

Taylor’s Instagram: @t_prestininzzi

Taylor’s Photography Page: @seeking__sun