‘I didn’t see how I could ever get back to a normal life’: how burnout broke Britain – and how it can recover
First smartphones made work inescapable. Then came the pandemic and the cost of living crisis. We are more overstretched and stressed than ever before – but there’s a way out
Amy Gandon rarely does things by halves. Naturally energetic, she thrives on feeling as if she is making a difference at work. When the pandemic hit, she was working in Whitehall as a senior civil servant and found herself putting in 14-hour days on the government’s Covid response. At first, she thought it was normal to feel constantly exhausted.
“When you’re working in an emergency situation, lots of feelings that might prefigure burnout – constant adrenaline, racing thoughts, racing heartbeat a lot of the time, feeling I couldn’t switch off at night – are indistinguishable from what I thought I should be feeling in that context,” says Gandon, 32. “I thought that was part of being professional and responsible. I do care a lot, I want to work hard.” She found it difficult to let go at the end of the day, worrying about whether there was something more she could have done. “There are big consequences to this stuff. It’s not easy.”