Mom, tell me, who causes the burnouts?
A burnout often happens when you get crushed between expectations and possibilities. Your own expectations and those of others. Your own possibilities and those imposed from outside. Figuratively speaking, you stand with your back against the wall and a truck is speeding towards you. If you then freeze, it’s an almost certain sign of burnout.
But you don’t have to freeze. You can still take an elegant step to the side. I can say this so casually because I was foolish enough to freeze myself. And in hindsight, it was exactly that simple: I just had to take one step to the side.
Table of Contents
Stress, sleep, and the first signs of burnout
Burnout has become a societal phenomenon. Time around us rushes by. Demands and competition grow ever higher, along with the inner pressure to meet them all and stay on top. Men are expected to have careers, be good fathers and husbands, have time for hobbies and friends, and stay well informed about world events. Oh, and then there’s the matter of physical fitness. Where am I supposed to fit in exercise now?!
A lot of stress and little sleep have become status symbols. Stress means you're obviously making a career. Sleep costs time. Nowadays, you just don't have that time anymore. It’s taken to the extreme with sleep models like the Uberman: six times 20 minutes of sleep. That leaves 22 hours a day to be productive. Great! Even if very few go that far, if you say you slept 8 hours last night, you no longer belong in the office in the morning. If you have time to sleep 8 hours, you somehow don’t have goals.
What gets lost along the way is peace. Even the smartphone alone prevents it. Emails, social networks, messaging services. Oh, and you can also make calls with those things. We are always reachable, always connected, always overloaded with information. Social pressures make us write equally pointless comments under the most pointless posts.
The body begins to adopt this frantic rhythm. The heartbeat no longer calms down, concentration decreases because you jump from one task to the next, nervousness spreads, and sleep is out of the question. These are signs of burnout.
The Stone Age fool in the digital age
The problem with this story is the following: humans are not designed for this kind of speed. You can’t surf the internet with a C64. Our bodies and minds are still programmed for the Stone Age. The developments of the last 30 years have left Fred Flintstone far behind. For the 200 years before that, we were already running on reserve. We can neither handle the mass of information nor the lack of rest phases.
Our concentration capacity is not enough for that. No matter how much anyone believes otherwise: humans are not multitaskers. No, not even women. Our brain has an ancient processor. With a single core. Parallel processing is impossible. An upgrade in the next few centuries is probably not planned by nature.
Constant distractions have caused the human attention span to fall below that of a goldfish in recent years. No joke. And the goldfish also has water cooling.
Humans do not. We push thousands of tasks through our processor without letting it cool down. Result: the processor becomes overloaded and is no longer able to make the simplest and most obvious decisions.
For example, simply stepping aside when you have your back against the wall and a truck is rushing towards you.
What does this have to do with beards?
Actually, very little. And yet a whole lot. The way out of the rat race and burnout spiral are small moments of calm in which the processor can cool down. It’s about integrating small rituals into life that force you to rest. That give space and time to cool the processor, look yourself in the eye, and ask: "What the hell am I actually doing? And is this still what I want and what makes sense?"
Whether you start painting your toenails or growing a beard is up to you. But do something! The beard has the added advantage of boosting your ego. If you manage that with toenails too, then buy yourself some fancy flip-flops. That’s perfectly fine with me!
Beard care to unwind
It is completely impossible to care for a beard without simultaneously stroking the ego beneath it. Even if the beard doesn’t grow as thick as you’d like at first. Give it time and rest and it will grow. And on the way there, it will already start giving you time and rest. And that very rest is what you need not to be crushed in the digital age.
Get used to not taking your phone into the bathroom. Turn every shave into a ritual you can consciously experience. Enjoy the different rhythms, for example when whipping up the shaving foam and stropping the straight razor. Make sure you truly like all the tools that belong to this ritual.
You have to want to look at it, touch it, and smell it. Blasphemous or not: this is exactly how every single step of your beard care becomes an almost religious ritual that celebrates you. In these moments, which belong to you and your beard, you become the center of the universe.
And at the same time, the processor empties. The longer you maintain this ritual, the more natural it becomes. It then requires no conscious attention and turns into a subconscious pleasure that gives you peace and helps you focus on yourself.
Beard care as a driving force
Exactly this mood is a driving force with extraordinary power and strength. Even if you should never say it out loud, it is a form of meditation. Things suddenly become clearer when you focus solely on your beard and your mind empties. You recognize connections you hadn’t seen before and find solutions to problems you hadn’t even noticed.
And you might even notice how pointless it is to stand with your back against the wall while a truck is rushing towards you.