My story

Sliding further in

I generally had too much on my plate. Which I have to admit I was handling okish as the first signs above show. I had a fulltime job, am married and have twins. I was president of a sportclub and was politically active in the local parliament. This all worked fine until 3 external incidences happened. My father had a stroke, war in eastern Ukraine (were my wife is from) and my work life balance got screwed up by a new manager. I couldn’t process that I couldn’t do anything about my fathers stroke nor about the war in eastern Ukraine. Both outside of my influence sphere. I wanted to be there for my mother and somehow help out my in-laws. So I put even more stuff on my plate. And then the stable center point which was my job, that secured my family’s life standard, started to be unstable. Suddenly I had a boss that didn’t rate me. I started to have existential fears. Afterall we just bought an apartment with a mortgage, we had young twins and I was the sole bread-winner at the time. It didn’t occur to me that I could look for a different solution. I thought I was stuck in the situation.

The signs I describe in the first part obviously got much worse. Sleeping was maybe 2-3 hours a night. Not being able to fall asleep and if I finally did, I used to wake up in the middle of the night and wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again. On top of that I had a few incidences when I woke up and couldn’t breath and had a chest pain with my heart pumping like mad. When I went to the Doc and had my heart checked, he said my heart was fine. For the first time I was asked if I feel under pressure/stressed. The important message here is that yes outside circumstances (within my influence sphere or outside) contributed to my burn out, but it was my personality that prevented me from dealing appropriately with what life through at me. Coming soon, I’ll write a blog post about this topic. Contact me to make sure you don’t miss it.

Fighting my way out

After describing my situation to the Doc he immediately said, that he will give me a sick note for a month. This then was prolonged every month for 6 months. He said to me that I shouldn’t do anything for 2 weeks but then very importantly to bring a structure and routine to my day. The feelings that I had was one of relief. The next step was to find a therapist. We did some very simple but substantial exercises that helped me get better. These were among others:

1. Setting my priorities in life.

2. Know your personality & embrace it.

3. Learning to accepting that with some things, there is only so much you can do. Focus on what you can do. 

4. Learning that some things are outside of my influence zone and therefore you can’t change them. Focus on your sphere of influence. 

5. Reviewing my past and education.

6. Learning from the 3 previous stages. As example: Shit happens and sometime it’s outside of your sphere of influence. It’s how you react to shit happening that counts.

7. Stop blaming others and take responsibility for my own life.

Another part of getting well again was my reintegration into the work process. After about 5 months of being on sick leave I was starting to feel well enough to considering going back to work. Luckily I had a large network and found a department within the same company that was willing to help me with my reintegration. I started of with working 50% and was given simple tasks in excel that I could manage. Building up my self-confidence step by step. I lot of folks I spoke to thought starting off with 50% is a bit steep. But it worked out for me well. Coming soon, I’ll write a blog post about this topic. Contact me to make sure you don’t miss it.