When I left my full-time journalism role last fall to launch a life and leadership coaching practice, I knew I was recovering from burnout. What I didn’t know was how often I’d see my own fried crispy edges reflected in my clients.
I work with a fair number of journalism job seekers and career changers — including folks who left their last roles by choice and those who didn’t. The circumstances are different, but the financial and emotional strain can be the same: They’re facing grief, shaken confidence and fear, navigating what feels like a neverending loop of looking, applying and waiting to hear back.
Burnout is often considered a workplace issue, but I believe it’s possible to burn out while you’re searching for your next workplace, too.
It may sound counterintuitive but I, and the experts I consulted, believe some of the very tools that contribute to burnout, especially during a job search, can help us recover.
Am I burnt out, and is it my fault?
If you’ve lost the “why” of your job search or your place in the industry, if you’re applying for roles reflexively and out of obligation rather than excitement or alignment, you may be burning out.
“Early signs are emotional flatness rather than distress, cynicism or detachment, reduced sense of efficacy, going through the motions. Burnout is less about how much people are doing and more about how little control and meaning they experience while doing it,” said Leonard Jason, clinical-community psychologist and director of the Center for Community Research at DePaul University.”
“Burnout is often framed as an individual resilience problem, but my work focuses on system design problems, fragmented care environments, chronic stress exposure without recovery structures and lack of participatory control,”Jason said.
I’m not saying this is you, job searcher, but I’m not not saying it either.
Samantha Ragland, senior vice president for the American Press Institute, is the first person in journalism I heard talk about the dangers of chronic stress.
“No one is immune to burnout,” Ragland told a class of fellows I was mentoring. She laid out four anti-burnout guideposts: identifying the support you need and how to get it; being honest about the “tiny betrayals” in your life — I think of these as saying yes when I mean nah; visualizing a thriving you; and making time for intentional pursuits that fuel you.
How can you use technology to treat burnout?
You didn’t burn out overnight, and won’t heal immediately. For me, using technology for burnout treatment is about grounding and increasing connection.
Meditation, journaling and talk therapy all help me get grounded and stay connected to why journalism is meaningful. Calm is my go-to meditation app for quieting my mind and letting solutions and insights surface. Many of my job-seeker clients face decision fatigue — Should they apply for that role? Is it worth it to reach out to that contact? What’s the best way to structure their days now? — and they often benefit from giving themselves space to say less and listen. If sitting still to meditate isn’t their jam, I also recommend going for a walk as a form of moving meditation.
For journaling, I like Notion so I can access notes on my phone and on my laptop. And after geeking out on template how-to videos, I give each journal entry its own look and feel with icons and covers. And then there’s Zoom for therapy.
Connection, even the kind forged through screens, can remind us that we aren’t alone, especially when so many people are looking for work. Rather than viewing those folks as competitors, consider at least some of them as comrades and possible collaborators.
I recently facilitated a coaching cohort via Zoom that participants dubbed “Career Club” because of how many of them were staring down searches or pivots. The caring camaraderie was a consistent benefit they mentioned; they also sent each other job leads and connections.
LinkedIn and its endless scroll don’t just have to be how you look for a job, it can also help you find your people. “Even a small message can go a long way,” said Jennifer Bradtke, a licensed clinical psychologist with ChangeWorks Psychology who specializes in burnout.
The bottom line is to use technology to tap into what makes us most human, especially during the sometimes dehumanizing process of looking for work in the AI era.
“We live in community, we heal in community,” Bradtke said. “You are more than just your job.”
