‘I didn’t see how I could ever get back to a normal life’: how burnout broke Britain – and how it can recover
Amy Gandon rarely does things by halves. Naturally energetic, she thrives on feeling as if she is making a difference at work. When the pandemic hit, she was working in Whitehall as a senior civil servant and found herself putting in 14-hour days on the government’s Covid response. At first, she thought it was normal to feel constantly exhausted.
“When you’re working in an emergency situation, lots of feelings that might prefigure burnout – constant adrenaline, racing thoughts, racing heartbeat a lot of the time, feeling I couldn’t switch off at night – are indistinguishable from what I thought I should be feeling in that context,” says Gandon, 32. “I thought that was part of being professional and responsible. I do care a lot, I want to work hard.” She found it difficult to let go at the end of the day, worrying about whether there was something more she could have done. “There are big consequences to this stuff. It’s not easy.”
Even when she started to feel emotionally detached, she didn’t suspect burnout. It was only after a panic attack so severe she thought she was dying that she realised something was wrong. Ironically, she says, her doctor went off sick with burnout shortly after signing her off work.
Burnout used to be a furtive secret, something few dared admit to for fear of being judged professionally. Not any more. When the 28-year-old singer-songwriter Sam Fender cancelled several gigs last month, declaring “Me and the boys are burnt out”, he kickstarted a public conversation about burnout. Shortly afterwards, the 22-year-old Brit award winner Arlo Parks also scrapped some of her tour dates, announcing: “I am broken.”
Generation Z, raised to be open about mental health, may find it easier than older workers to
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