What a relief this morning to come across this HBR article about Burnout. For at least four and a half years, I’ve been going to therapy once or twice a week to talk through some of my issues around anxiety and burnout. Finally, there is some evidence and academic research to show – hey, it’s not me afterall. It’s (mostly) the cultures of the companies I’ve worked for!

What’s most interesting to me is that the World Health Organization classified Burnout as “an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition… reasons for which people contact health services but that are not classed as illnesses or health conditions.” Again, I feel myself have a full body relieving exhale, because what I’d been characterizing as the constant need to find another gig, an anxiousness that just won’t quit…is more of a symptom of the gig I’m running from at the time than it is of my general state of being. More than once throughout my twenty year career in ecommerce, I’ve been the coughing, spattering canary emerging from the coal mine.

My shrink has, once or twice, referenced me as the canary in the coal mine, if only to get me to see that I’ve done the right thing by leaving. (ahem, – when I had a choice) But what really truly sucks – and worries me moreso, is watching them just send a new canary down into the same mine. Again and again.

Is this what Marissa Orr is trying to address in her new book Lean Out? I am getting ahead of myself because I haven’t finished it yet, but as you can imagine, it is the conversational antithesis to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Stay tuned for more thoughts on both….

Personally, this will be a test in exploring, excavating and unearthing where my own beliefs lie, which will certainly be somewhere in between the two extremes.