Burned out on multiple stressors — where do I begin?

April 9, 2023 6:14 PM

I’m having a pretty rough time. My relationship and housing situation are uncertain, I don’t have much of a support network and I’m struggling to cope. Where do I start to move forward?

1. RELATIONSHIP: I’m currently separated from my long-term cohabitation partner to “see if we can work it out.” My partner has many excellent qualities including loyalty and devotion, but drinks a lot more than I’m comfortable with at this age (we are both in our mid 30s), and we have a lot of stressful arguments.

When I am being honest, I struggle to see a future for us together, but am struggling to move on without much support system of my own. Unlike the typical cliche, he’s the one with a big circle of supportive friends; I have a few friends who can only offer limited support and are too busy to, like, talk to me on the phone when I’m in hysterics…which is pretty often these days.

2. HOUSING: I left my partner our shared apartment, as it was quite cheap and I make more money. However, the market is terrible in my city, worse so because I have a dog. I ended up in a place that I wasn’t loving but grew to tolerate…until I realized it has a severe dampness problem and likely mold which is aggravating my allergies. It’s a stretch to afford even this and I am a successful professional.

I feel I probably have enough cause to break the lease with the mold/allergies situation, but I don’t really know where else to go — I really can’t deal with the stress of finding a new place right now, and I know my stress and mental state contributed to my making a bad choice with this one. I’ve thought about temporarily moving in with my parents, who live in a nearby suburb. My parents are kind and supportive, but my mom is quite anxious and overinvolved so I am hesitant to let her know I’m struggling. It would also be a pain for me to go to work or anywhere from my parents’ house, I’ve lived in the city my whole life and I don’t have a car or drivers license.

3. WORK: I have a good job where I am well liked, but my stress is starting to come out at work. I’m seriously considering going on some kind of stress leave, but I don’t know how stigmatizing or damaging it would be.

4. MENTAL HEALTH: everyone is going to say…go to therapy. Well, I’ve been going twice a month for years. I basically pay to vent to my therapist and I don’t feel like anything has gotten better. I know I have some kind of anxiety and depression, but I had big problems taking SSRIs. I am waiting to see a psychiatrist but it will be a few months at least. I constantly fantasize about going into some Girl Interrupted style facility where I could get away from life and other people could take care of me while I get back on my feet, but I don’t really think anything like that exists. The mental health system is strained here and can barely manage people with more serious problems like schizophrenia.

5. SHAME: I feel like everyone around me is succeeding right now — getting married, buying property — or just settling into a calm, comfortable life in their 30s. Meanwhile I feel like a complete disaster and I’m struggling to find any hope.

Where do I start with tackling this all?

posted by sibylvane to Health & Fitness (14 answers total)

That is a lot to deal with at once. I'm sorry you're going through this. It's extra hard when it seems like everyone around you is doing great.

First of all, there is no shame in being in this situation. You're experiencing a lot of stressors all at once - that's unlucky timing and no reflection on you.

Second, have you considered ways you might ask your support system directly for help? Maybe they have a hard time being available for random chats, but they might be able to help with pre-planned activities: bring you some food, help you look for a new place, or recommend a different therapist? Perhaps your parents could direct their anxiety into concrete steps to help you (Take your dog in for a while if you can't find a dog-friendly place? Drive you around house hunting?). They may not be perfect supports, but it sounds like they could be good supports, and that would lighten your load a bit.
posted by jknx at 7:13 PM on April 9, 2023

FMLA leave is the achievable equivalent of the “Girl Interrupted” style break you want. If your employer is large enough that they have to do FMLA, talk to your doctor and get the paperwork going. The fact that you’re not performing well at work and are waiting to see a psychiatrist point to a temporary break being helpful. Take more time than you think you need. Your supervisor shouldn’t get told your diagnosis.
posted by momus_window at 8:02 PM on April 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

(It looks like you’re probably not in the US, but please look into whatever stress leave you’re entitled to. This is what it’s for!)
posted by momus_window at 8:05 PM on April 9, 2023

Well first of all, a lot of those people "succeeding" right now are making terrible mistakes that will start expensively unraveling in 15 or 20 years. Uhhh, take it from me. Ending a relationship that's wrong is my very definition of success. It's HARD and that's why so many people lack the courage to do it.

Is there any kind of transportation solution if you move back home for a while? It seems like you have a pretty good relationship with your parents and could use the support, and it would also save you a lot of money so that you could hopefully be able to afford a non-moldy place when you venture back out into the world.
posted by HotToddy at 9:14 PM on April 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

I’m so sorry you’re dealing with all of this and all od this at once! You are struggling but you’re also getting through!! So you’re on the right path already!

We think we need lots of support people and that’s certainly ideal but we can get through it all on our own or mostly on our own. Your boyfriend sounds like more of a cause of stress than a help. For starters, big arguments that leave you scared and hopeless are awful: you deserve better! But if you need more time to decide, I understand: that’s ok too.

Take that time off from work if it’s available to you!!! I guarantee you that almost everyone or everyone will understand, not care or not even notice. Your well-being is essential.

You are doing things right in terms of therapy and I wish that access were better but that’s beyond your control. While you are not wrong to call your friends crying hysterically, that’s a huge burden to place on someone more than once or twice. I say this not as a critique bc I have done it too but as perhaps the first thing to address. Their support may be limited because they too are exhausted and it’s hard to help someone in constant crisis even when we want to due to our limited abilities. You were brave to separate from your boyfriend. You can maybe find a way to get these feelings out before calling your friends so they can support you better. What cathartic activities could you do like exercise or journaling?

It’s good your family is available to help even if it isn’t ideal. If your apartment situation is so bad that your health is worsening, that’s reason to stay with family for a bit. Is there transport to and from work? For now that’s all you need. If you move in, give yourself 3-6 months of just doing that plus exercise and see. Not sure at all this is appealing but the question is what is most imported to you right now? Think about what’s most essential or most important rather than what’s the biggest problem and that will guide you towards next steps!
posted by smorgasbord at 9:19 PM on April 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, like HotToddy said: we want the best for your friends but shit often starts unraveling even 5-10 years later and it’s so sad and hard. In 5-10 years you’ll be doing great or at least better than now and all the hard work of sorting through shit now will pay off. Trust me!!

Also, I live in a high cost of living area in North America too and it’s incredibly disheartening how expensive life has become. You’re not alone!! You’ll find options with time but for now it’s about surviving. I feel your pain!
posted by smorgasbord at 9:21 PM on April 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Can your parents take in your dog? It sounds like they would love a concrete way to help you out, and visiting your dog would be a great excuse to go visit them on weekends and get a little TLC. If your mom is anything like my parents, she is going to be anxious no matter what, so being up front with her and laying out specific things she can help you with might be for the best regardless. Then you can look for a short term place that doesn’t allow dogs to recover in.

I’m not sure if I’ve read things correctly, but you seem to have some flexibility in your budget, just maybe not quite “break lease and lawyer up” money. Could you throw some money at the problem of making your current place safer for you? Air purifiers are expensive but worth it, I find, and most double up as dehumidifiers. Could you get a regular cleaning service to combat the mold? Could you talk to your landlord about working with them to pay for mold mitigation or a plumber or whatever kind of pro is needed to actually fix the problem? If you can make your place somewhere you can actually breathe and sleep in, you might feel drastic changes to your stability and energy and be able to tackle some of your more looming challenges. Honestly I think this should be your priority. Maybe one of your friends could help with this, if you lay out your specific needs?

Do investigate what kind of time off you can take from your job for stress related medical leave. You might not be able to pull off a full rehab spa experience or whatever, but it is better to find out your options than be afraid of possible stigma and end up spiraling even worse. Once you’re informed, you can make a better decision.

Please take a moment to challenge your language choices about yourself. The descriptor hysterical, for example, has historically been used to shame, devalue, and ignore women through lies and gaslighting. It’s really easy to feel bad and then double down on that badness by thinking of ourselves in bad ways. But you’re not in hysterics. You’re in crisis and are reaching out for help. You’re smart enough to know you need help right now. You’re connected enough to people to go to them for comfort. You are capable enough to hold down a job and care for your dog during this big life change. You’re articulate enough to write this highly coherent AskMe that clearly enumerates your situation.

As for the everyone else being happy and successful in their 30s thing, hooboy, that is not the case for me and my circle. Everybody is having one situation after another. Ailing parents, troubled children, shattered relationships, messed up medical stuff, pandemic ramifications, it’s a bunch of screw ups every direction I turn. I’m no better, really. Maybe what you could work on, after you’ve got your living situation wrangled, say in a year or so, is making some different friends and joining different social groups where people are more genuine and open about their ups and downs. Expanding your support network to include people who don’t feel the need to carefully curate their public lives to be wholly positive can help with the shame you feel as well as give you motivation to keep trucking.
posted by Mizu at 10:12 PM on April 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

Best answer: In reading through your post, the biggest theme I see is fear.

Fear of the future, fear of failure, fear of making the wrong choices. And then it's snowballing into feeling paralyzed.

You've actually made really good progress by writing it all out for us, because now you're laying it out for yourself.

So I'm going to pass along advice I received from my own therapist:

When you have a bunch of fear-based tasks in front of you, arrange them from most to least scary, from your own perspective. It doesn't have to be totally "rational" (I put a dental checkup as "most scary thing" above a potential surgery).

Tackle the least scary thing first, to build up your resilience, then go up the list.

What's the least scary thing on your plate right now? Can you do one scary thing a week? Is that a reasonable goal?
posted by champers at 3:24 AM on April 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think you start wherever you can. It sounds like you're in a therapy situation that could be clarified in terms of your goals and trajectory, so that's a straightforward place to begin. If you can communicate to your therapist that you feel like you're paying to vent and that's it... I imagine there's a conversation to be had there. And that's a good starting point, because therapists generally want to have ocnversations in which you feel like a confident participant. A constructive, heartfelt, good faith discussion with a counseling professional is a pretty sure step toward feeling some agency over your situation.

On the shame thing, you might be well served by putting yourself into an environemnt that gives you a bit more perspective. A support group might be good to consider (and if you haven't been to an Al-Anon support meeting, you're missing out). When I was going through this upending of my world, I went to a support group for partners and families of people with traumatic brain injuries. It didn't solve any of my problems but, dang, it very truly did make it clear to me that I'm part of an unimaginably large family of people struggling and not, as it sometimes can seem, the only one struggling.

Getting out into the community, your community, a new community, any community is worth considering. You might make new acquaintances and friends who can fill the gap that your close friends can't help you with right now. That's a good thing, because sometimes it's really critical to get some co-regulation even when our closest people for whatever reason aren't available to us.

Not to say that you should move back in with your parents, but you shouldn't cross it off the list. It doesn't have to be permanent nor long term, but the experience may have benefits that are difficult to anticipate. I had to lean hard on my mom and sister when my relationship was ending and that meant they were exposed to raw emotions (and relationship details) that I never imagined I would share with them. And you know what? They really came through for me. We're closer as a consequence, and my respect for them has magified to an incredible degree. Sometimes there's just nothing like being surprised by compassion from the people whose compassion we most take for granted.

Hang in there.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 4:48 AM on April 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Can you get a sublet or airbnb for a month? It isn’t always that expensive, especially on short notice.

In your city there may be some FB groups where condo owners sublet their units clandestinely if AirBnb isn’t allowed in their building. On Facebook, search “city + sublets” or “city + short term rentals” etc. I’ve been able to find gorgeous apartments for very cheap. Visit the unit and talk to the person before sending any money of course, and send it in instalments - a deposit to hold the place, half the day you move in, half the day you move out, for example.

I would move to a non moldy place for a few weeks (or take a relaxing trip) and regroup from there. It’s expensive but sometimes you need quiet to recover and make a good decision.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 6:30 AM on April 10, 2023

They have psychosomatic clinics in Germany and that’s probably what you would like. If you were at one of those you would get 3 healthy meals a day and you would then do about 3-4 appointments a day doing various things.

Besides seeing a therapist and doctor you would: do breath work, body relaxation where someone reads a relaxing scene while you lay there, outdoor exercise/walk 2x a week, physio and coordination exercises to get your brain hemisphere’s communicating again 2x a week, and support groups. And some weight training and art therapy. There are also some therapy apps now, right? Oh and book one massage a week.

I imagine that if you got up early you could do some of this with the help of YouTube and maybe a meal delivery service and then call your friends to say hi and chat, not to cry.

Just wanted to share that with you about how it would work in one if those places, they’re there to teach you the healthy habits so you can cope when you go home and that’s about the balance of it.
posted by pairofshades at 7:29 AM on April 10, 2023

You just pick something, that's how you begin. Pick ONE thing. Given that you have 92% broken up with your boyfriend already, I recommend finishing that job as it won't take long. I promise you that taking that source of stress out of your life - and removing all the fences it has put up in your life - will improve it, and you're not receiving enough true meaningful support to justify that stress.

For this item: I basically pay to vent to my therapist and I don’t feel like anything has gotten better.

So stop doing that. Tell your therapist at the next appointment: you aren't getting anything much out of paying to vent to them and you are looking for a structured treatment plan for your anxiety and depression; is that something they can do or do you need a referral to someone else?

If you don't tell them you're looking for some specific course of action, you won't get one from most therapists. They will assume you just want to pay to vent. They can't MAKE you do anything else, so you have to say you want to.

In the meantime, pick one of these and set aside a few hours a week to work on it:
The ACT Workbook for Depression and Shame
Retrain Your Brain: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in 7 Weeks: A Workbook for Managing Depression and Anxiety
The Anxiety and Depression Workbook: Simple, Effective CBT Techniques to Manage Moods and Feel Better Now
The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety: A Step-By-Step Program
Acceptance and Mindfulness Toolbox for Children and Adolescents (this is for keeping in a back pocket to have a smaller less-challenging exercise to do when you feel extra stuck)

As far as the sense you are being left behind by your peers, all I can tell you is the same as at least one other commenter said: some of those people are doing these things for the same reason you feel like a failure not doing them, because you're "supposed to". At least some of those people are making terrible mistakes, overextending financially, getting locked into situations and relationships that may already be unhealthy or will sour eventually. You won't see any of this play out for probably 6-10 years to get any sense of satisfaction that NOT doing those things right now actually turned out to be right for you, but trust that none of this is automatic regret territory - you may well be racking up wins right now that you won't realize until a day when you really need the flexibility you currently have. In THIS economy/pandemic/fascism? No guarantees anymore - do what's right for you right now and just trust that you'll do those other things if/when they're truly right for you.

To that end, you need to take any healthy opportunity you can to build up your emotional resilience reserves, and right now that means thinking broader than a romantic partner. If you can't improve connections with your friend support system, maybe find ways to meet new people especially in environments that themselves give you a power-up. Typically those are some kind of social good project, something that moves your body to whatever extent is safe and comfortable for you, and something that lets you work in teamwork with others. All the better if it's very local to you, so maybe see if there's volunteer work or community support groups in your neighborhood.

I can remember how hard this was to do in my two serious rounds of burnout in the past 4 years, but it was critical to my recovery that I stop, every day, and take a few minutes to dig deep down and evoke the whole-body sensation of gratitude and joy, and at first the ONLY way to do that was while petting one of my dogs, being incredibly grateful for the life I'd shared with them (maudlin, but they were getting on in years at this time), and if the only joy I could drum up was throwing a toy or feeding them a blop of peanut butter on my finger, that worked well enough. I found very small things to appreciate and over time I made them bigger. This is not just woo, this is you re-teaching your brain how to better make and use the feelgood juices. Some people do require some kind of SSRI to re-attain functional levels, but whether you try that route again or you don't, you can also do this work to help your brain DIY them. It sounds like you have to go outside and walk to get general life tasks done, but if you're mostly missing daylight hours because of work try to get out and get sunlight to your retinas around mid-morning or lunch if you can, and learn some stress-reduction stretches from a youtube physical therapist - these also help manufacture the good brain chemicals.

The hardest part of this is the housing, and it may be that all you can do right now is buy a dehumidifier and an air purifier and get by as best you can until you figure out a Plan B. This one will take the most logistical work, but I would say do your best to tough it out as healthily as you can for another month or two while you implement some of these easier solutions.

At the worst of my burnout I don't think a long stretch of time off would have been as productive for my brain-body as a reduced working week. What your options are will depend on location and employer probably, but a string of 3- and 4-day weekends did me a LOT of good.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:31 AM on April 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

I went through this exact same thing in my early 30s, dog and all. The advice above is really good but one thing I wanted to add that helped me - I got a roommate. It saved me a ton of money (I also live in an insanely expensive city) and it was nice to have someone around. We weren't close enough for me to unload on them all the time but that was also probably good - it kept me from spiralling and got me back into a normal routine. Plus they helped me out with my dog once in awhile (though of course this would totally depend on your roommate).

I'm really sorry you're going through this, I know how hard it is. Just want to let you know that I was you (really I can't stress enough how similar the situations are) and there definitely is hope. If you need to chat, feel free to MeMail me.
posted by thebots at 9:56 AM on April 10, 2023

I was just thinking that too. When I went through this similar stuff when I was younger in my 30’s I often had great roommates or I would rent a room in a great house, or condo in a good location with a decent person who was happy to include me in their social gatherings and trips to yoga class etc. I made great new friends that way. I have many fond memories of that, especially since it was after leaving my first long term serious relationship. That was 15 years ago and we are still friends. I would be doing that RIGHT now except I have kids. If your parents could take the pup for a while maybe that’s worth considering.
posted by pairofshades at 10:14 AM on April 10, 2023