When you’re burned out, every single thing seems harder. Tasks you once considered simple can become Herculean, complex responsibilities can feel insurmountable, and it takes more than just one good night’s sleep or a little treat to recover.
Coined to describe the severe exhaustion and overwhelm that can result from work in caregiving professions, “burnout” has come to describe the state of chronic exhaustion, often experienced both mentally and physically, that results from persistent stress and overload. While many people still associate “burnout” with the workplace, it can arise from many areas of life.
If you have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the mental load of your symptoms and the energy it takes to manage them can make burnout more likely. The interaction of burnout and OCD can also make it harder to recognize and more complex to recover from.
Learning how to recognize what burnout feels like as it’s beginning, how to understand how burnout and OCD interact, and how to manage both can help you regain the sense of balance and control that you deserve.
What makes OCD burnout different from other types of burnout
Anyone can become burned out as a result of a situation that continually pushes them beyond their capacity. But if you have OCD, chronically overwhelming situations in your work or personal life are often layered on top of the stress already being caused by your symptoms.
OCD symptoms can have an intense mental and physical impact. You might experience nausea and stomach pain due to heightened anxiety or compulsive behaviors related to your dietary habits, skin conditions from excessive washing or hand sanitizer use, or exhaustion and pain from a lack of sleep or a health OCD-driven compulsion to over-exercise. Being physically vulnerable and overtired can push you closer toward burnout.
Moral distress is a common facet of burnout, especially for those whose overwhelm is centered on a desire to fulfill a role or task that feels important and righteous. If you have scrupulosity OCD, which causes anxiety or fear about your morality and doubts about whether you’re a good person, or have the feelings of hyper-responsibility that are faced by many people with OCD, these experiences can compound one another.
And because OCD tends to latch onto the parts of your life that feel most important to you, obsessions can sometimes zero in on things you care deeply that are also be leading you toward burnout—for example, the intense, exhausting, and emotionally high-stakes demands of things like parenting, work, or community organizing.
Just as OCD can hasten and worsen burnout symptoms, burnout can exacerbate OCD symptoms. Your brain believes—wrongly—that compulsive behaviors keep you safe. If part of your life has come to feel so out of control and stressful that it seems threatening to your well-being, compulsions can feel like a genuine path toward regaining control and protecting yourself. But in reality, engaging in compulsions only teaches your already burnt-out brain that the focuses of your obsessions really are threatening.
Why general advice for navigating burnout can feel so confusing
Look up ways to recover from burnout, and you’ll likely encounter a lot of advice about letting yourself rest and not pushing yourself too hard. And while it’s true that you deserve rest, the reality of managing OCD is that doing the hard work of confronting the things that trigger your obsessions is key to ensuring that your thoughts have less power over you, your time is less consumed by compulsions, and you can actually achieve true rest.
For example, if you experience intense intrusive thoughts about contamination whenever you’re shopping for groceries, you may start compulsively avoiding the grocery store in an attempt to give your burned-out brain and body rest from the distress and compulsions that those thoughts seem to trigger. However, not shopping for groceries does two things: One, it teaches your brain that when you buy a piece of food, the low risk that it may end up being contaminated is still too great to tolerate—strengthening these thoughts and resulting distress that arises when they enter your mind; and two, it makes it harder for you to nourish yourself, at a time when that’s especially important.
If you feel burned out, it may seem like the answer is to order takeout so that you can rest, avoid a stressful situation, and give yourself a little treat—and doing so out of the genuine desire to eat from a favorite restaurant or give your body a rest from cooking might be a good idea. But if you’re giving in to the urge to order instead of buying groceries out of fear of experiencing any intrusive thoughts, you’re not actually on the right path to healing your burnout. Instead, you’re teaching your brain that the grocery store really is dangerous, and truly must be avoided. In the long run, it’ll only intensify the cycle of obsessions and compulsions and make your OCD worse.
How to manage burnout from OCD
One of the most important steps you can take to manage burnout resulting from OCD is pursuing exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy. ERP is the most effective form of treatment for OCD, and it works by gradually teaching you how to handle your obsessions without performing compulsions.
Like all effective therapy, ERP can be hard work. If you have OCD and you try to recover from burnout by “just relaxing,” you might briefly feel better—but because you won’t be addressing your OCD, you won’t ultimately be improving your burnout. Of course, you deserve to unwind when stress is high, but you also deserve to genuinely recover. You might feel like you’re too burned out to start ERP, but if your OCD has contributed to your burnout, then starting ERP is the best step you can take to treat it. ERP should also be flexible and tailored to your life goals and needs—a good ERP therapist will help you find ways to give yourself the grace and self-compassion you deserve while also working steadily to improve your symptoms.
An ERP therapist might encourage you to focus on managing the symptoms that are most significantly driving your burnout—and if you’re extremely overwhelmed, they might do this very slowly. For example, learning to tolerate discomfort around the intrusive thoughts that make it harder for you to fall asleep, or reducing the routine of morning compulsions that consistently makes you late for work. Working with a therapist also means that you don’t need to disrupt the toxic cycle of burnout and OCD all on your own.
In addition to ERP, you can also make other lifestyle changes that support your mental health and give you more resilience. Prioritizing getting consistent, high-quality sleep and eating nutrient-dense foods that you enjoy will make you feel better overall, so that you’re more capable of resisting burnout and your OCD symptoms are less likely to flare. You can also work on creating a schedule for yourself that incorporates both a type of daily movement that you truly find satisfying (for example, walking, yoga, or playing a team sport) and specific periods of downtime when you’re not trying to be productive. Just make sure that any wellness-focused routines you build have room for flexibility, and that you’re not relying on exercise or meditation to distract from intrusive thoughts when they arise.
If you’re experiencing symptoms of both burnout and OCD, you don’t have to just wait until you feel better, because you may be stuck waiting. You can take steps that bolster your emotional and physical resilience to help you break free from the OCD cycle.
