“It felt normal because everyone was doing it.” ‘When everyone is busy, you start measuring yourself against others.’ ‘What should I do, who should I text, always that to-do list in my head.’
How come so many young adults get burned out, Bo van der Meer and Roswitha de Boer-Zuiderveen wondered. In their short documentary Fuel, broadcast on NPO 2 on Tuesday evening, various people formulate an answer. They all report on a period when stress took the upper hand in their lives. The result is a mosaic that transcends the personal: a portrait of a shared unease.
It is striking that every character sees a burnout as ‘nothing for me’. Although they are stressed, it still overtakes them: the point that they really can’t anymore. Some can no longer pick up a placemat from the floor; another is totally estranged in the supermarket. Although the moments are different, they are fundamentally similar. The world becomes too much, senses become overstimulated, shut down. ‘Like there was nothing. Too much of nothing. Caught in a desert.’
Earlier this week, psychiatrist Christiaan Vinkers was a guest at Radio 1 to talk about his book Under the spell of burnout. According to Vinkers, ‘burnout’ is a trend name for stress complaints, in the tradition of ‘overworked’ and ‘overworked’. The burnout is primarily a depression diagnosis for people who don’t want to be depressed, he said. A statement that he substantiated with the fact that especially highly educated people get burnouts and low-educated depression, while the symptoms are similar.
I am not a psychiatrist, but it strikes me that the burnout seems to be related to the feeling of not being able to participate in the social marathon, while others do finish it. A young woman tells very sympathetically in Fuel how she always felt pressure to get her life back on track. “Now is the time to show what you can do. Find a steady relationship. to complete your studies. You have to go on stage, the curtains are opening.’ But once she stood there, on that ‘stage’, she couldn’t do anything.
She now considers herself to be someone who “maybe shouldn’t have a too stressful job.” She gets emotional. “I find that so hard to admit.” A Surinamese woman says that she did not dare to call in sick, because people often make jokes about lazy Surinamese. “They would think I was going to take benefits.”
According to Vinkers, we should ensure that people do not continue working when they experience a lot of stress, instead of focusing on psychological trend names. Great plan, but Fuel shows how much we are permeated with the idea that stress is part of it, even proof of social relevance. Admitting that the towering demands of modern society are too much for you feels like personal failure. When it comes to burnout, probably the most important question is how we’re going to eradicate that idea.