Burnout-My Journey
I graduated from nursing school in 2001 from the University of Southern Colorado and immediately started working on a Med-Surg floor at a local hospital. I had my orientation period and worked with amazing nurses on night shift, but there wasn’t a direct mentorship for new grads which I feel is a detriment in assisting new grads become competent and confident nurses. We had mandatory overtime, working 3-12’s one week and 4 the next week (which I didn’t even know wasn’t the standard until I started traveling). Six months after graduating, I was called one afternoon before a shift and told to come in early as I was going to be charge nurse that night. I had no idea what I was doing. There was no training or guidance. I was grouping nurse assignments by their location, not by who the patient was and what was going on with them. It was a shit show. There was no acuity of the patient taken into account and the workload of that particular nurse. Nor was I prepared, as a young mid-20’s with no real life experience, to deal with all the interpersonal conflicts on the floor. I didn’t care if you felt the CNA wasn’t truly watching your patient that they were sitting because the CNA was sitting near the door and not next to the patient. Are we not adults here? Why are you coming to me about it? Especially since you both are 20 years older than I am. WTF
By the end of the first year, I was burned out. Couldn’t pay my bills with my degree, making only $4 more an hour than I did as a nurse tech while in school but now passing out narcotics and coding patients. Felt all I did was work and when not working try and deal with the chronic stress by drinking and partying (which also didn’t help paying my bills). No one talked about the stress, or what to do about it, how to manage it. Or what “it” really was. I remember once in nursing school, one of my instructors mentioned working in an ICU and when you take a vacation and walk back into that stressful environment, how you feel like how did you manage all the chaos in the first place. But I wasn’t in the ICU, I didn’t even realize that it was stress or how stressed I was until years later.
After the first year, I became a travel nurse. Went to San Diego then San Francisco. Change of scenery helped with burnout for sure especially being in a new town for several months. I felt I really got to know the place more than a tourist would. Again, met some amazing nurses and new friends. Learned to snowboard, played on an actual beach with real sand. But truly the mentality towards travelers is that you get the shitty assignments but our mentality is that we are only doing 3-12’s a week for 3 months and then we are out. I would have 10 patients on a med-surg floor, getting admits, seeing patients once at their evening meds and not seeing them again all night if there wasn’t any issues. Depending on the CNA to tell me if vitals or anything was wrong because I’m in another room doing a complex dressing change or dealing with a dementia patient or someone trying to go AMA. The other travel nurses I met from the East Coast or had gone to Florida told of even worse stories regarding the floors, so you always know it’s worse somewhere else.
Landed in Seattle as a traveler. Actually stayed on a renal transplant floor for a year, working day shift. Had my first manager that seemed to actually care about the staff and fix problems. But was still happy to be a traveler and not get involved in floor drama. During this short period of time, I would say as I look back, I didn’t feel burned out during this time. It certainly was not easy but I didn’t feel the chronic overwhelm and exhaustion that would come in the second half of my 20 year career.
Taking a staff job, as a clinic nurse in a pediatric facility that was union was a great move from a staff GI procedure/clinic nurse because living in Seattle, making $25/hour and getting a $.25 raise after one year, also doesn’t pay the bills. I stayed as a clinic nurse in the same facility for 13 years before I left nursing. Those 13 years taught me a lot about myself, about the system we work in, and how difficult it is to leave. The last 10 years of my career were probably the most difficult because of burnout. There is always this hope that things will get better at work. Doing this one project, a new manager, a new department head, someone has to be for the nurses right? No. Nope. Actually not. You will be told this will help, that you are supported and heard but the reality is much different. I learned what gaslighting is, how facilities want you to feel grateful you work for them and if you’re unhappy then feel free to find another job. Retention is not what facilities think about or put effort into nor do they want to do so.
We are expected to go above and beyond for our patients, their families, the nurses we work with, the docs who feel they own us and the clinic from the goodness of our heart. Everyone else needs us and to sacrifice our mental wellbeing, our physical health, our family and personal time in order to provide for everyone else. But here’s a free gift before the annual survey to make up for the other 11 months of hell. Let’s go MAGNET and then treat you even worse.
Even though my job wasn’t physically demanding anymore and I sat in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day, I left work every day exhausted, as did my coworkers. I would come home, get into my pajamas so I didn’t have to change clothes again, have a drink while fixing dinner. If dinner was just for myself, it was frequently a glass of wine and popcorn. Too tired to read a book, I would spend countless hours scrolling social media even though I had anxiety about not having enough time to get things done that I wanted to do. I was in this endless loop of exhaustion, chronic overwhelm, survival mode, anxiety, depression and borderline alcoholism. A friend and myself were trying to figure out how to escape nursing together, we knew we could be wellness coaches, but neither of us had the time or mental energy to get a website built or develop a concrete business plan. We had a website for about four years that I couldn’t figure out how to actually design. If I came up against a barrier, it would be weeks, months or years before I could come back around to a project or thought or plan.
I quit my 20 year career as a nurse in 2021. In January 2022, I launched my own business as a burnout wellness coach. It is so hard to remember that there is another way to live when you are surviving every day. When you have nothing else left to give but your work demands more. There is another way of being, of interacting and engaging with life. Creating space for yourself, to truly calm your mind and relax your nervous system brings you away from all that is burnout.