Burnout and the Stages of Grief
Before I ever worked in tech or started Threadsmith, I studied psychology. I didn’t know, at the time, how useful that would wind up being in my daily life. But, as part of my studies, I came across the works of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, famously known for coining what’s known in pop psychology as the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. At the time, I thought, surely that can’t be accurate for all experiences of grief. And maybe, for some, it’s not, but in all of my experience either personally experiencing grief or being with people going through it, she was definitely onto something.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the big burnout experience that changed the trajectory of my life. I cover it in a three part blog post, here, here, and here. But the gist of it is, I was crying every day from a miserable job, trying to convince myself it would all get better if I worked hard enough, and wound up discovering what I actually needed was a work environment that wasn’t actively toxic and interested in working me to the bone.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I hit rock bottom in that miserable job, I was cycling through the same stages people go through when they lose something they love.
Now, I do want to make a quick note before I get into this: the stages of grief are not linear. They got packaged that way, but you can move around the stages, experience multiples at once, only experience 3 of the 5, etc. It’s a FAR more flexible system than anyone really gives credit for.
Ok, moving on to the job thing.
I experienced denial and bargaining at the same time. I told myself it wasn’t that bad. Everyone’s stressed. Everyone hates their job sometimes. In fact, they probably even all hate their jobs most of the time. Surely I just needed to keep my nose to the grindstone and WORK, and if I just did enough, if I was good enough, I’d get recognized and I’d be given the resources I desperately needed. I kept showing up, smiling in meetings, convincing myself that this was just a season.
Depression followed. I found myself crying at my desk, every day at 2:30. I went through the motions, barely. I lost interest in the parts of myself that existed outside of work too, because I didn’t have anything left to give. That’s the part no one warns you about: burnout doesn’t just take your job, it steals your joy everywhere else.
Next was anger. Not just frustration, but full-body rage — at the company for gutting my team, at the system for making me believe crying at my desk was my fault, and at myself for thinking if I just worked harder, I’d “earn” help. That anger turned out to be fuel. It’s what pushed me to quit, even though job hunting while burned out is its own particular circle of hell.
And eventually, acceptance. Not the tidy Hollywood ending kind, but the grim clarity of realizing that nothing was going to resurrect the corpse of what I thought this job could be. No reorg. No new leader. No promotion. Just the decision to walk away.
Once I started seeing burnout as grief, I saw it everywhere. I had friends stuck in jobs they hated, trying to convince themselves that if they worked harder, they’d have a better experience “later”….well hey there, mirror into my own denial and bargaining experience. I saw colleagues with absolutely no hobbies, blankly looking at me when I asked what they do outside of work, as if the concept of doing things that weren’t work was a foreign concept. I’ve mentored people through every stage of the burnout and grief process, and I become increasingly convinced that burnout is another name for grief.
Now, I don’t live in academia anymore, so there’s not going to be a fancy research paper, just one psych enthusiast’s musings on her own company blog. Sorry to the fancy research paper fans out there.
If burnout is grief, then the gift of it is clarity. I had to lose the version of myself that thought I could earn care by working harder. In that loss, I found the version of me who could walk away, who could find work that didn’t make me miserable and could build something better. That’s the version of me who built Threadsmith Group, and the one I trust to keep weaving something extraordinary.