Welcome to IVF This, Episode 48- Infertility Burnout

Hello my beautiful friends. I hope you’re all doing very well, today.

I hope you’re all doing well. I’m starting to feel better from my time off- thank you all for the sweet messages and emails wishing me well. It really meant a lot to me. 

I want to get right back into it and talk about something that is rarely discussed, if at all in infertility circles, and that’s burnout. 

We are seeing a lot more information coming about around the effects of burnout- certainly more than ever over the past 5-10 years. 

We saw a HOST of information come out around burnout as it pertains to the COVID19 pandemic. 

So why don’t we hear anything about infertility burnout. Well, that’s because if infertility is rarely discussed outside of the infertility community, then it stands to reason that some of the facets of infertility wouldn’t be discussed or even acknowledged, areas like:

Trauma

Grief and loss

And, of course, burnout

We talk about burnout in the workplace all the time; that's where most research around burnout has been conducted. 

You can do an amazon search for burnout and pull up no less than 20 pages of resources referring to burnout and resiliency. 

Burnout is now regularly used in our cultural vernacular. 

I’m kind of harping on this point because I want to make sure it is understood that it took us YEARS to begin acknowledging what the symptoms of burnout were, to name it, and to begin really researching it and ways to mitigate, recover from, or avoid the potential entirely.

When I was working on my masters in social work, this was over a decade ago, we had really just started talking about things like “Compassion Fatigue” which although has similar aspects to burnout but not exactly the same thing. BUT the point is that is had really just started to be researched about 5 years before.

As such, this means that simply because something is not acknowledged, named, and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles written about it, does not mean that it doesn’t exist. 

Burnout was real long before it was acknowledged. 

I believe infertility burnout is JUST as real.

The hallmark signs/ symptoms of burnout according to the World Health Organization (WHO, June 2019) are:
🔹Feeling a depletion of energy; exhaustion
🔹Increased mental distance from one's job, or feeling negatively towards one's career, and
🔹Reduced professional productivity

These are what are commonly associated with burnout and what are normally discussed and acknowledged in research. 

So, here’s my version for the signs and symptoms for 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐁𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐭:
🔹Feeling a depletion of energy; exhaustion
🔹 Increased mental distance from TTC or fertility treatments or feeling negatively towards TTC or fertility treatments
🔹Reduced personal productivity (whether it is doing the things you've always loved to do, inability to focus at work, etc.)

How many of you can relate to this list?

I know I can. At so many different points in our 9 year journey. 

Experiencing infertility takes a toll on mental health as a couple and as an individual. 

We often find ourselves in a constant state of disappointment, anger, exhaustion, loss of interest, social isolation, despair, resentment, and many more emotions. 

And those, my beautiful friends, are signs of burnout. 

Let me take a sec and quickly delineate the difference between burnout and stress- I’ve gotten this question from a client before so I want to make sure I address it here.

It can be difficult to differentiate between burnout and stress. I think that’s a very common thing.

Stress is (generally) tied to something specific- a deadline, a project, or a cycle. 

You might be anxious or stressed about starting stims, or a transfer, or awaiting test results- that is completely normal and, I would offer, very expected. Not inevitable but expected.

However, if you feel dread when you walk into your clinic, if you feel completely detached from your current or upcoming cycle, or you're telling yourself that treatment has become impossible or useless- you are likely nearing or at burnout. 

Burnout is a byproduct of the emotional and emotional weight of any given experience. 

Infertility provides us plenty of opportunity for those experiences. 

Now, if you’ve listened to me for any amount of time you know that I do believe, very strongly, that our thoughts create our feelings. This is a basic tenant of my coaching practice. 

But that does NOT mean that I believe that burnout is solely created in our thinking. 

I don’t believe that one day you start thinking thoughts and boom! You’re in burnout. 

Not at all, burnout in most cases, is a gradual process. I believe that the trauma that we experience both Big T and little t traumas, the social isolation that many of us experience, just all the crap-tastic aspects of infertility create this gradual buildup towards burnout. 

When you couple that with our cultural expectation that we should feel shiny and happy all the time, and if we don’t feel that way then we are doing something wrong, our resistance and avoidance of emotions, it, seriously, it’s a wonder how everyone on an. Infertility journey doesn’t feel burnout. 

I guess that’s hyperbole because most every woman that I’ve spoken to has shown signs of burnout. 

I do believe, and I’ll talk about it more in the part 2 episode, that our thinking can perpetuate and even exacerbate burnout. 

One of the most common aspects of burnout that is see in my clients, on the FB boards, and well anywhere on SM is that when we experience the symptoms of burnout, we all too often equate our emotional state to "not handling things well."

If we are experiencing the symptom of detachment, depersonalization, or emotional distancing, we often make that mean that we "don't want it enough" or that we're "not doing it right."

Essentially, when we begin experiencing the symptoms of burnout, we shame ourselves.

I mean the lengths that we will go to to beat the crap out of ourselves is truly quite impressive. Like we can make just about ANYTHING mean something terrible about ourselves. This is just how our brains are wired. So doing that doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong. It doesn’t mean that you are doing anything wrong. 

I mentioned earlier that I believe our thinking can exacerbate burnout and this is one of the ways. When we beat the crap out of ourselves for “not handling things well” or “shoulding” on ourselves for how we “think” we handle things then we end up feeling worse.

And by the way, if that is you, I want you to spend a little bit of time thinking about what “handling it well” even looks like? 

It’s a subjective phrase but we treat it like its objective- like there’s a specific, wrote, and universal way to “handle” things. 

Whenever I’ve asked my clients what that means, usually what I hear is things like, you just get back up. Almost like pick yourself up, dust yourself off, buck up, suck it up- I mean these are all phrases that I’ve heard time and time again. 

But for me, there are two things here. 

1. Handling things well, is such an ambiguous phrase. I do believe specificity is where we can combat a lot of our fears, our anxieties, and our judgment. And,

2. These phrases don’t really allow for any grieving, mourning, or really allowance of anything HUMAN in them. 

Now, I know that as a community, and society, grief and mourning is not something openly discussed or acknowledged. If anything, its mostly shied away from or outright ignored. BUT, it is a VERY human thing. It is an emotional experience just like any other, and just like any other, it deserves time and opportunity to be felt and experienced.

Now, I am going to spend a lot of time, next week, talking about how you can get out of burnout. 

But for now, what I really want to drive home for you is the same starting point for nearly all of the things that I talk about. 

1. Awareness

2. Compassion

Being aware that burnout is a POSSIBILITY- you don’t need to diagnose yourself, you don’t need to pathologize anything but being open to the idea that if you’re experiencing anything that I’ve talked about in this episode, or something else that you’re experiencing that is somewhere in the vicinity of what we’ve talked about, then it is entirely possible that you are experiencing burnout. 

Just opening yourself up to the possibility of it being something that DOESN”T mean you’re broken or that you’re doing something wrong- that’s gonna feel so differently. It doesn’t take away what you’re experiencing, there’s no magic switch that is flipped and all of a sudden your burnout is gone.

No, but it can CHANGE your experience of it. 

You take that awareness and you PILE on compassion. Compassion, compassion, compassion. 

You know one of my favorite things in this world is to humanize these experiences for you guys. 

Burnout is a human experience. Infertility is really, really effing hard. IVF is really, really effing hard. 

You are doing an amazing job handling some really, REALLY hard shit. 

There is no user manual for “how to handle infertility” or “how to handle IVF”

They are both incredibly individual experiences. So, if there’s no manual. If there’s no objective way, then you can’t POSSIBLY be doing it wrong. 

Crying isn’t wrong- even if it’s in the middle of a family get together, in a church pew, at work, whenever or wherever. It’s not wrong. Now you might choose to compose yourself based on the situation and then coming back to it when you feel more comfortable but that’s different from not allowing yourself the opportunity to feel that emotion, period. 

Being sad isn’t wrong- you’re not doing anything wrong

Now, I will add one final caveat, before I close out this episode.

I would be completely remiss if I did not address depression. 

If you do not feel like you can get out of bed, go to work, or if those things are a huge struggle for you- I implore you, contact your primary care doctor, your fertility dr, your obgyn- whoever you feel most comfortable with and talk to them. 

If you feel like you might be in danger of hurting yourself or anyone else, please call the emergency services line in whatever country you live in- int eh US we have 911 or the suicide prevention hotline.

The only thing, and I mean the only, thing I care about is your safety. 

The most important thing we can do is safeguard ourselves from burnout by recognizing the signs and taking steps to minimize or reverse your burnout.