The Totally Unsexy Things That "Cured" My Burnout

(It's not meditation, therapy, or journaling)

I’m so glad you’re here! I’m Sarah Von Bargen, a long-time online writer, educator, and coach. Every week we’ll be exploring ideas around spending our time, money, and energy on purpose + how to build a life we love that doesn’t make us broke or exhausted.

On October 29th, 2021 I posted - rather dramatically - that I was “quitting the internet.”

After 14 years of content creation I was buuuuuuuurrrrrnt out.

It took me 3+ years to recover from that burn out and during that time I’ve talked to soooo many people who went through something similar - with their careers, with a hobby they’d gone all in on, or even with the pace of their social life. (I talked about it on this podcast episode!)

At the peak of my burn out I spent an inordinate amount of time googling “Burn out cure” and “I hate everything now what” and “How to quit everything.”

Most of the answers I found were some variation of

• Try meditation

• Journal about your frustrations

• Get a therapist

And, like, yes sure. But also: I suspected that meditation wasn’t going to “cure” 14 years of overwork.

Now that I’m on the other side of burn out I can see what actually helped (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t meditation.) If you’re burnt out - or just lightly exhausted or unusually grumpy! - this might help.

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Why I burnt out

2020 ate me for breakfast

Did you know that when you look at a tree’s rings, you can track not only the tree’s age but the years the tree experienced something traumatizing? If you sawed open my femur, I think you’d be able to see the scars of 2020.

Spiritually, this is me.

There were some big custody changes with my stepsons and all the legal entanglements that go with something like that.

There was that whole worldwide pandemic thing.

We lived in South Minneapolis when George Floyd was murdered - there were two nights in a row when my husband and eldest stepson sat up all night on the porch with baseball bats. Our post office burnt down. Our gas station burnt down. Our pharmacy burnt down.

We bought a 123-year-old duplex. 8 days before we closed on said duplex we learned that the seller had used the basement to shoot up and would leave his needles around. And also? He had hepatitis.

We bought it anyway and moved in. While we waited for my mother-in-law to sell her condo and move into the lower unit, we figured out how to be landlords. We rented the lower unit as a furnished month-to-month rental and over the course of the next year we rented to four different sets of tenants.

It was a lot.

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I was exhausted by the “perfection trolling”

Is this a real term? I don’t know, I made it up! If you’ve ever posted something on social media, I imagine you’ve encountered this.

It looks like …

Posting about a $5 mascara that isn’t tested on animals and getting DMs about how that mascara has bee’s wax in it so it’s not actually animal-friendly.

Sharing that the Capital One Venture Card reimburses you for TSA Precheck and getting chastised for encouraging people to fly.

Mentioning that you try to buy things second hand and being taken to task because not everyone has time to shop second hand and some of us really need to be able to order things from Amazon, okay?!

All of this added up to, honestly, being afraid to post.

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My business model decimated my mental health

I know I’m not the first person to say this but self-employment and entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone (because it’s incredibly difficult mentally, emotionally, logistically, and financially.)

By 2021, I’d be supporting myself exclusively through online means for 11 years. As the internet changed, the way I made money changed - I sold ad space on my blog, I sold $15 ebooks, I did sponsored posts, I consulted and coached, I sold online courses.

But every year the algorithms changed and old platforms disappeared while new ones popped up - along with new learning curves and different algorithms.

I put most of my eggs in the “online course basket” and pulled everything I knew from 7+ years of classroom teaching and a M.A. in Applied Linguistics into creating truly helpful courses about things like money, habits, and goal setting. I ran my courses live and priced them at $95 - $125 for 6 weeks of live teaching and support.

And here’s the thing about launching any product: You can create a product you’re proud of and do your absolute best to promote it … and that doesn’t it mean it will sell well.

Not having stable, reliable income? That shit is stressful. It keeps you awake at night and eats into your confidence. It prevents you from planning for the future because who knows if you’ll be able to afford that vacation or even that haircut?

The unpredictabilty of my income was the nail in the coffin during an already challenging time. I was done.

What helped “cure” my burn out