Could My Increasing Depression be Something Else?
How Many Signs of Burnout Do You Have? I Check All the Boxes.
I have known that I am depression has been getting worse for some time. Nearly all the enjoyment in my life has fazed itself out, bit by bit, more after week.
Lately, I have begun finding myself staring at a blank screen for long periods of time, unable to form thoughts. As I sit and stare, I eventually find my thoughts wandering back to work, the tasks that will await me the next day when I arrive, the tasks I did not have time to accomplish due to expecting too much of myself and what I will be unable to complete the next day.
The self-destructive cycle spirals into wondering why I even try. It isn’t like I actually matter. If I were to disappear forever, people would forget I had even existed before the end of the week.
Medication has helped a little, but I am far from being the happy person I was a couple years ago. While it has mostly taken away my desire to die, it has not brought back the enjoyment of life I once had.
I had begun to wonder if there was any hope that I could ever get back to being a truly happy person who enjoys life, a random issue a person I work with had an issue they needed assistance with. Not a personal issue, but rather a technical issue they were assisting someone else with.
A different department was looking to do team training on recognizing the signs on burnout. In the process of preparing for this training, the presentation they had been working on became corrupted, leading them to request assistance from my team to see if we could resurrect the corrupt document.
Somehow the PowerPoint document had been converted to a .pdf document, leaving it unusable in either PowerPoint or Adobe.
After some time trying to figure out how to get Adobe to display a slideshow that had been created for a different program, my team asked me for my thoughts.
Moving a copy of the file to my laptop, I began to dig into the file, extracting each slide and rebuilding the PowerPoint presentation from scratch.
While doing so, I could not help but see the contents of the presentation. A presentation the seemed to be describing me way to closely for me to avoid taking notice. I was almost as if they had used me as their study subject without my knowledge.
Reading over the stages of burnout, I quickly realized I was in stage 11 and in the process of moving to stage 12. The physical exhaustion has left me unable to function more often over the last few months.
For the first time since I had been diagnosed with depression, I felt like I may have discovered the root cause of my depression.
Shortly after coming across this information, a second list I found on a random story on my new tab page confirmed this for me.
This site listed the symptoms of burnout. A list of symptoms that, on first glance, seemed to apply to me.
Symptoms of Burnout.
Physical exhaustion
Digestive issues
Detachment or isolation
Increased irritability
Avoiding social interactions
Brain fog
Negative expectations of the future
Feeling hopeless
Increased anxiety
Feeling cynical or apathetic
Not enjoying your personal or professional life, no matter what you do.
I went down the list, slowly seeing if any applied, checking off each that did.
Physical exhaustion - check. I find myself spending much of my non-working hours sleeping, unsuccessfully trying to overcome my exhaustion.
Digestive issues - check. I have lost over twenty pounds in the last two months due to an inability to eat without getting sick.
Detachment or isolation - check. If I didn’t have a family that lived int he same house as me, I would have no human contact outside of work. Even I have noticed that I avoid interacting with other people. Even when visiting my local brewery, I use it more as a place to provide background noise than a spot to partake in social activities.
Increased irritability - check. Just ask anyone who knows me and has to spend time around me.
Avoiding social interactions - check. I have found it much easier to sit on the couch and avoid leaving the house that doing anything that I don’t have to.
Brain fog - check. I have zoned out more times that I can recall just writing this post, finding it harder to draw myself back each time.
Negative expectations of the future - check. All I can see is the company I work for deciding I am no longer needed, war breaking out over the lack of leadership from our thin-skinned president, the economy collapsing, a global depression unavoidable.
Feeling hopeless - check. I feel like nothing I do matters to anyone other than myself.
Increased anxiety - check. While the medication helps a little, it is far from a cure.
Feeling cynical or apathetic - check. I see no reason to try due to my lack of interest in life and the knowledge no one cares if I succeed or fail other than me.
Not enjoying your personal or professional life, no matter what you do. - check. Nothing seems to bring me enjoyment at this point in life. My personal life has become self-imposed isolation behind a screen, and my professional life has become an endless cycle of hating myself for not being able to accomplish everything I feel I should.
So, after having gone through the check list and acknowledge all the signs and symptoms that apply to me, what do I do next?
Most likely, I will continue to do what I have been doing. Wake up, go to a job where I feel I no longer matter, try to ignore the physical symptoms of burnout, stress and over exhortation while hoping somehow, without me doing anything to change the situation, things magically improve.
The best I can hope for is to have a heart attack in my sleep and not wake up if I don’t do something sooner rather than later.