Introducing Anti-Burnout Life!
What to expect from my new newsletter
Hi there, and welcome to Anti-Burnout Life, a newsletter about managing stress and healing from Hustle Culture!
My name is Chloe Brooks and I’m the writer behind this newsletter. I’m a journalist, turned content marketer, turned social media strategist, turned whatever it is you call this. Some people have even gone so far as to call me a Burnout Expert. Going by the 10,000-hour rule, they’re not wrong. I spent the decade of my 20s completely consumed with burnout, burning out 3 times before age 30 and constantly drowning in overwork, poor boundaries, and a crippling need for external validation.
By April 2019, I’d had it. I was exhausted by my own burnout cycle, not to mention the external factors that kept driving me to it. So I sat down and Googled, “How to fix burnout.”
In the four years since, I’ve read 18 books (ok fine, I’m still reading three of them) about stress, burnout, self-talk, neuroscience, meditation, care, creative living, resilience, friendship, and perfectionism. I’ve saved and highlighted 194 different articles and studies in my Evernote folder labeled Burnout, and another collective 76 under Productivity, Procrastination, Human Connection, and Mental Health.
I’ve attended lectures and workshops on boundaries, values, and purpose. I’ve studied my Meyers Briggs type, my Clifton Strengths, and my birth chart. I’ve worked with business and mindset coaches, and I’ve spoken on podcasts and at conferences about burnout recovery and prevention.
And all this info has got to go somewhere.
Naturally, I’m writing about it, because I have always processed life by writing about it — from my childhood journals that all start with a Capital-E Event like moving, to the sonnet I wrote about stress during our Shakespeare unit in high school:
Remember being in school and learning how to take good notes? You don’t learn by copying down the PowerPoint slides; you learn by listening and then paraphrasing. You don’t truly grasp a concept until you can explain it in your own words.
This newsletter is my space to process and share everything I’m learning about burnout. When I don’t have this outlet is historically when things start smoking a little. My edges turn brown and begin to curl in on themselves.
A quick tour of my burnout cycle
My first burnout, the high-achieving-millennial kind of burnout that Anne Helen Petersen writes about in Can’t Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation1, came the spring of my sophomore year at Arizona State University.
I was an honors journalism student in a 5-year combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree program. I was taking as many course credits as my academic advisor would allow. I was reporting for and co-managing an independent student publication. And I had just finished a temp position copy-editing for the Arizona Republic, the largest newspaper in the state.
On top of everything else, I was dealing with two major stressors in my personal life. My mom had been diagnosed with cancer just that summer; then, a month into the fall semester, my college boyfriend unceremoniously dumped me.
Now I was working an advanced reporting class/internship intended for juniors and seniors, which demanded multiple stories per day and took up two full days per week. I’d gotten into the class early as an exception, on my student editor’s recommendation. Unfortunately, I absolutely hated it. It wasn’t the kind of writing I wanted to do at all, and I struggled to produce so much about state politics on a beat I didn’t find remotely interesting.
I was too busy and too stressed to even think about writing for myself anymore (I’d long since dropped my Tumblr journalism blog). I constantly told people I was “swamped.” Everyone was always telling me I looked tired (rude!), and no wonder — I had raging insomnia and often couldn’t sleep until just before sunrise. The ungodly amounts of caffeine I consumed just to be able to function were neither the root cause of this insomnia nor a real solution.
Just a few weeks into the semester, I hit a breaking point.
One morning when my alarm went off — after a night of dreading going into the internship the next morning, followed by only a few hours of sleep — I turned it off, got up, and emailed my professor to say I would be dropping the course. Much, much later, I awoke to friends pounding on my dorm-room door. My alarm had been going off for hours now, and was I OK?
Reader, I was not OK.
I dropped the advanced reporting internship, failed an online class I forgot I was taking, alienated a bunch of friends, and begged my dad to let me drop out of school. Thankfully, he said absolutely not, but I still struggled through the rest of the semester.
There was no chance for recovery. That summer I had an unpaid internship for the j-school’s internal magazine, plus a part-time job to support the unpaid internship. Of course I was still too exhausted to write, so I produced absolutely nothing, and the internship became an “Incomplete” on my transcript. I started a new lifestyle blog and halfheartedly chronicled my pre-Instagram OOTDs and apartment-hunting woes.
But then August brought my junior year, and with it, the most demanding courses of my entire major. I began another miserable internship. I was promoted to a full-time management role at my job. The blog took a backseat.
I picked it up again a year later, in the fall of my senior year. By then, my GPA had fallen too low to qualify for journalism classes, so I finished my history minor, electives, and gen-eds. I studied memoir writing and the Tudor monarchy, and retook the geology course I’d failed, and gradually, I regained some of the mental and creative space I needed to write for myself again.
That blog carried me through the rest of my senior year, giving me space to explore new topics, collaborations, and writing styles. It served as my portfolio when I created my own blogging internship with a local organization that spring, and again after graduation as I started applying for content marketing jobs — the only way I could think of then to write blogs for a living.
The last post I ever published there was in October 2015, just before my second — and worst — burnout.
When I burned out the second time, I was working 60-hour weeks for a toxic Hustle Bro, doing four people’s jobs at once, and commuting four hours a day. I was freelancing in what little spare time I could scrounge up. I was planning a wedding. And then my mom died. And then I was fired! I’ll spare you the gory details here, but I didn’t pull any punches when I wrote about it last year for The Muse.
I didn’t write for myself again until 2017 when I was trying to recover from that burnout by starting my own freelance marketing business (I do not recommend this as an effective burnout recovery strategy!). Because I process life by writing about it, I wrote beginner-level advice for newbie freelancers like me. By now I had a few years of content marketing experience under my belt, so I drew up strategic editorial calendars, wrote a new post every two weeks, and got into all the right Medium publications.
Do you see where this is going?
By mid-2018, Medium had named me a Top Writer in Business, and two clients had hired me to write for their own Medium publications. I was a full-time freelance blogger and content marketing strategist charging way too little for my work, attracting allllll the wrong clients because of it, and working myself to death trying to keep them happy at all costs.
My fiancé and I were fresh off a cross-country move and an eight-month stay in his parents’ basement. But several months into our own place, the exhaustion and brain fog I’d felt after the move hadn’t eased up. It actually seemed to have gotten worse in the new setting.
The last Medium post I wrote for myself came out in November 2018. I published 13 more for clients between then and mid-April. And in April, everything clicked and I saw the pattern.
Well, maybe more like a faint outline of the pattern. It’s still a little blurry around the edges, because I’m working on my boundaries! But the more I write through it, the more it comes into focus.
I sat down and had a hard talk with myself. I was sick of the pattern I could see playing out, and I was tired.
Tired of always writing for my clients and never for myself. Tired of feeling like I couldn’t keep up. Tired of feeling like I had somehow let down everybody in the entire world. Tired of wanting to cry every time I heard a Slack notification. Tired of Hustling.
So I opened my laptop and Googled, “How to fix burnout.”
Capitalism and Hustle Culture and marketing best practices all tell us that “content” has to provide value to an audience for it to be worth anything: your time spent creating it, your money spent promoting it, or your audience’s energy spent consuming it.
But when you identify as a creative person, when you create as a means of navigating the world, and when you rely on writing through things to fully articulate your own thoughts, feelings, and opinions — it becomes dangerously easy to mistake the value of the content you produce for your own.
When your editor or marketing director passes on your exciting idea because it doesn’t provide enough value for their audience, what they mean is they don’t think the project will earn them enough money. But what you hear is that you are not valuable to the world, and are therefore unworthy: of time, attention, energy, love, or even the free real estate of the internet.
Your idea isn’t good enough because you are not enough.
My content-marketer brain desperately wants to justify the existence of this newsletter by presenting it as a service: My hard-won, deep knowledge of burnout for a mere $5 per month! But deep down, I know I’m really acting on preservation instinct.
Writing this newsletter is a self-serving exercise in being Anti-Burnout. With each edition, I’m practicing putting my needs first by allowing myself to process life aloud. This is worthwhile because the process of writing through it adds value to my life, regardless of whoever else might see or benefit from the final product. I am just as worthy an audience as any other, and I reaffirm that to myself each time I hit publish. YES, Chloe, you DO matter!
How will this newsletter work?
If you’re a free subscriber:
Expect to hear from me biweeklyish, or somewhere in the weekly-to-monthly range, depending on how much I have to say and how much energy I have to say it. I wanted to promise you a set publishing schedule with specific monthly themes and recurring features, but that’s not working for me. Every time I try to write that, there’s a block.
Instead, I’ll tell you that content will loosely follow the four-part Anti-Burnout framework I’ve devised for myself over the years. Together, we’ll Research and Reflect on our burnout risk factors, Reframe our relationship to burnout culture, Recharge the energy that burnout has depleted, and Reconnect with the communities that keep us grounded in times of stress. I might talk briefly about all four areas in one issue, or I might narrow it down to just one but expand it into a longer essay. Journal prompts, reading notes, interviews with experts, boundary-setting, birth charts, new studies, affirmations, personality tests, mindfulness, self-care, and more (definitely more) are all fair game here.
I’m giving myself room to have just fun!
If you’re a paid subscriber:
In addition to the free newsletters, for $5/month or $50/year you’ll also get access to exclusive content like:
Comments and discussion threads,
My anti-burnout reading notes,
Step-by-step rituals to help you reconnect with yourself and heal from Hustle Culture,
Sob Stories, a recurring peek into my journal to review the tears I’ve shed and the lessons they’ve taught (think Reasons My Kid Is Crying, but for adults who are relearning how to honor their body’s needs and signals),
And more!
Another way to support me:
So much of my burnout education and healing has come from reading books written by people who have studied it longer and more scientifically than I have. I REALLY engage with these books, highlighting as I go and referring back to them over and over, so library copies just won’t do. And buying them all gets expensive in a hurry!
You can support my burnout recovery, education, and professional development by gifting me books from my Anti-Burnout Book Registry through Bookshop.org. These are titles that directly relate to my study of burnout, and will all eventually end up repackaged into content here. And in a fun double-dip of Chloe support, Bookshop even let me set up this registry so that it earns me affiliate commission (this post contains affiliate links)! Thank you, Bookshop, and thank YOU, book-giver! Feel free to browse now and often, as I’m constantly finding more books I just have to read.
Thank you for reading this far! I’m grateful for your support and excited to share more with you in the coming weeks.
💜 Chloe
This is an affiliate link. If you purchase this book through this link, I’ll earn a small commission, courtesy of Bookshop.org!