Contemplating Life’s Choices

** Heads up, I have a lot I want to discuss and share around my experience with burnout so this will end up being a series of posts. For ease, I will label the posts in the title like you see here. Welcome to season 1, episode 2. If you missed episode 1 you can check it out here.

When I hit the wall of burnout on the day I cried in front of my team members I knew I had to do something. I immediately reached out to my HRBP (human resources business partner) to get the details on our EAP (employee assistance plan). I knew I’d seen something about therapy and resources for people going through stressful stuff so I figured I would start there. I’d talked to my HRBP in the past so it wasn’t hard for me to ask for these resources and in the end they were available on our intranet site so I could have dug around and found them but at the time I wasn’t feeling up to digging around myself.

I found our plan included five free therapy sessions on Talkspace so I went ahead and signed up for that. At that point I wanted to talk to someone right away because I knew if I didn’t do it right away I’d make excuses to not do it at all. I figured with Talkspace since they connect you with someone I’d roll the dice and just see what happened.

The other thing I did right away was call my primary care doctor and get an appointment. I knew my blood pressure wasn’t under control, my hair was falling out, my body hurt all the time, I wasn’t sleeping well, my stomach/digestion was constantly acting up, and that ongoing feeling of deep exhaustion was too much.

Luckily I was able to get in to see my doctor quickly. Not so lucky was that my BP was too high at 199/136. If you don’t have heart issues the norm is around 120/80. On the chart from the American Heart Association you can see where my BP fell that day. They took my BP probably 5-6 times to be sure it wasn’t a fluke. My best reading that day was 180/125.

I got back on BP meds and have followed up with my doctor multiple times to make sure things are trending in the right direction. I even had to take my BP cuff with me on my last work trip before I took a medical leave to make sure if the meds weren’t kicking in that I could seek medical attention right away.

In addition to these steps I did decide to take a medical leave to ensure I had time to process what was going on, to seek all the care I could for myself, and to give myself some distance from work to see if I just needed some truly disconnected time away and could bounce back or if bigger changes needed to be made.