Creative Fuel: Choose the Right SPF to Prevent Burn(out)

The local forecast for the next ten days is typical summer weather for this part of the country this time of year — hazy, hot and humid with a chance of thunderstorms toward evening. I love it. It’s the summer school-vacation weather of my youth. It’s also the time of year I don’t step outside without first slathering sun block on my face, hands, arms — just about any exposed part of my body.
Being of Scots/Irish descent, I’m one of the pale creatures of the world who never gets tan. Moderate sun exposure makes me break out in cascades of freckles. Prolonged exposure without sun block means serious, nasty sunburn. When I was a child growing up in the South, before the days of SPF 50, my mother never let me out of the house in summer until after 3 PM.
I also spent the better part of every summer of the first 25 years of my life doing whatever I wanted. During high school and college years I had a summer job, but summer jobs are like ice cream cones — they’re only around for a short period of time and they’re not meant to be serious fare. They exist primarily to fatten the bank account before autumn rolls around and you have to spend the money on school clothes, tuition, and books.
Years ago I traded in summers for the rewards of a year-round career. It was a good trade given my age and the realities of a mortgage. But on more than one beautiful summer morning, as I’ve stood rubbing sun block onto my hands, I have felt the urge to pack a picnic basket or find the nearest hammock and spend the day doing basically nothing.
What do sunburn and summer vacations have to do with creative fuel? A lot, I think, because, you — like me — probably remember with longing the lazy summer days of youth when the biggest accomplishment of the day was shaking the sand out of your shoes. As I’ve mentioned in past columns, playing hooky from work once in awhile helps more than it hurts, but if you find yourself spending entire days or weeks looking at the door more than your desk, maybe it’s time for some serious refueling. Work, like sunshine, can be wonderful, but too much of either without adequate protection can give you a serious burn.
Rating Your Burnout Level
Even if you love your career and wouldn’t trade it for anything except maybe a winning lottery ticket, burnout can creep up on you like sunburn at a beach. Be on the lookout for early symptoms of burnout:

• apathy
• low morale
• cynicism
• headaches
• frequent colds due to a stressed immune system
• feelings of helplessness
• an increase in self-criticism
• a sense of impending doom or feeling besieged
• prone to irritation
• increased degree of risk-taking behavior
• not caring if you get caught doing something risky or wrong
• an intense desire to be somewhere doing something else — anywhere and anything else

If you suffer from one or more of these symptoms for more than a few days in succession, it could be time to get help. Certainly, if you feel this way for weeks or months or find the symptoms decrease or abate when you’re away from work for a prolonged period of time, your burnout level is dangerously high.
Let me give you an example of how a friend of mine knew it was time to get help for her burnout. The several incidents of absentmindedly turning up at work wearing her bedroom slippers didn’t bother her too much because she works with a bunch of eccentric creative types who tended not to notice what people wear to the office. Then, one workday morning, she parked in her regular parking garage, turned off the car engine, and without a second thought pulled a novel out of her bag. She’d brought the book to work intending to read it on her lunch hour. The next thing she knew, other people were getting in their cars and driving away — it was lunchtime! She’d been in the car reading for hours. She didn’t get reprimanded for the missing hours because her manager assumed she’d been at an impromptu off-site meeting, but she knew she was in trouble.
Getting Help
Vacations, especially summer ones, are great ways to stave off burnout, but Shakespeare was right — summer’s lease has all too short a date. It’s not realistic to think one or two weeks away from work is going to provide year-round protection from burnout. And who ever really gets away from work in these digital times?
Other, more everyday preventive measures are essential. In my friend’s case, she found ways to give herself more time to for recreational activities (such as reading science fiction) rather than giving up a well-paying job she really likes. To find the time, she had to change her household schedule and her workload. She’s also careful now to include unstructured time in every day.
Another friend takes a day off at least once every few weeks to do anything he feels like doing (that’s safe and legal). He might sleep late, go to a movie alone, or spend hours on the Web flitting from topic to topic. Sometimes he goes for a long walk or gets some other kind of exercise. The key, he says, is to let yourself do anything you want to and not judge or justify it.
I’m still discovering what works as burnout prevention for my equivalent of a daily application of sun block. One plan I have for this summer is to enjoy more do-nothing days. Another is to run errands on Friday afternoons that I would normally relegate to weekends. My entire weekend will be free for short trips or whatever else feels appealing.
This summer would be a great time for you to come up with your own plan for year-round protection from burnout. I wish you all an endless summer of burn-free days and a career free of burnout. Remember to apply protection frequently!
Read more by Molly Joss.