How Not To Burn Out

• 19 November 2025
• politics

It can be really, really easy to let party political work consume you totally. The year I was a constituency secretary (in addition to branch secretary and a whole bunch of other things besides) I had three near-breakdowns (coinciding neatly with the three(!) elections that year) and I pretty much totally stopped writing, making music, podcasting, all the stuff I love. I didn't get to spend nearly as much time with friends and family as I would've liked to and I had a relationship end (at least in part) because of it. Life was work and politics and that was about it. It was bad and you shouldn't do that.

The external source of the problem is that there is more work than can be done, full stop—by one person or by many. You cannot do everything. The Work is a bottomless hole. You could always be knocking on more doors, delivering more leaflets, attending more meetings, whatever. If you are competent (or even just enthusiastic) the demands on your time will quickly become greater than the amount of time that you have. This is compounded by the fact that people in the party will very often not understand how much they're asking of you. No-one else has the full perspective of how much you're doing and what your current capacity is, but it all feels tremendously important, all the time: there's always an election coming up or a council meeting or something.

(You are also probably very immersed in the party, and surrounded by people who are also very involved and care and all talk about the party and politics all the time and do all these activities together and use all this specific lingo that outsiders don't understand and after a while you realise that, while it's not a cult, it does have some cult-ish aspects that make it quite sticky in that way.)

The internal source of the problem is that you'll want to say yes because you want to help people and you care, which is how you got into this position. This is worse if you’re a people-pleaser because you probably won't say no to anything unless you cannot do it due to some commitment your brain sees as more important, which will be quite a short list. The pile of work will keep getting bigger as you work harder and harder, you won't be able to work it down and you won't protect your time or rest as much as you need and you'll find yourself dropping the ball, putting in more time for less quality output, and it'll create a cycle of stress and guilt and eventually you'll burn out hardcore. The best-case scenario at that point is you recognise that and stop. If not, you'll keep pushing and grinding while burned out and just become more and more miserable.

There is obviously a degree of tradeoff: you only have so much time in a day—and because politics feels like you're working on something important (because you are!), it will take more and more priority if unchecked. It's also possible for you to work at or beyond your normal limits for a while. That actually feels good initially, because you're really churning through stuff in a way that can be difficult to do normally (especially if you have ADHD or something like me—you're "in the red" in a solve-it matrix sense) but it will catch up with you, but by that point you might have become masochistically addicted to the joyless striving and find it way more difficult to stop.

(There's an anecdote that comes from Derek Sivers, as I recall. He used to go for a morning cycle on a stretch of coastline near his home every day, and every day he'd push and push himself to get under 30 minutes. One day he'd had enough and decided to just take it easy, enjoy the sea air, have a good time with it. At the end he checked his time: 32 minutes. Try and have a think about what you're spending time on and see if any of it is pushing yourself way to hard for an extremely marginal benefit.)

You've got to put it in a box. It'll still probably be the biggest box in your life, but establishing boundaries around it is vital—and zealously guard against it escaping that. Work out what the most important things to do are and do those first. You will never be able to get to the bottom of the list, but you'll be able to do more good work if you're not holding yourself to the standard of "doing everything". Try to delegate as much as you can. This is really tricky! You may feel you should be doing everything personally, or that no-one else will do it well, but you cannot do everything and if something isn't so important it requires you, personally, to do it urgently, it's maybe something that someone else could learn something from while doing.

Make sure you take off at least one full day a week (it doesn't have to be the same day every week, but it really helps if it is). It might feel bad not to be able to make the Monthly Sunday Such-And-Such, but you cannot do everything, and almost any individual event is less important than your being able to continue to attend and contribute to things in aggregate, which will be significantly compromised if you never (or don't consistently) take time off. Time off also gives you time to spend on Things You Like, which can be really easy to lose touch with if you have no time for them! I would advocate for week planning here: plan in significant bits of work, create timeboxes for "infinite" tasks like emails, but also plan in time off every day, plan in, I'll say it again, at least one full day off every week.

Something that compounds all this is the absolutely relentless inputs. I remember an old party member once telling me that local party business outside of meetings used to be transacted by letters and very, very occasionally phone calls—when I was involved it was mostly email, now the meta appears to have shifted to WhatsApp^[1]. This means that you're constantly existing in an app that also likely is how you transact a good deal of your social life, which makes it difficult to put a box around it because if you want to go and get drinks with someone, well, there are 50 unread Other Messages.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received relates to limiting who has 'phone access' to you, and how. Back in the day, if you got made secretary of a constituency party they would just put the phone number they had against your account on people's membership cards as a contact and so any member with a current membership card would be able to just ring you up at random. I was warned about this, so I put my phone number on the system as the local party office's.

Obviously that's a particular case, but you can do something similar: getting a separate phone for Party Business, or for a slightly less extreme alternative, telling friends that for personal stuff they should go through Signal or Discord or some other messaging app, so you can hive off WhatsApp to an extent, and set limits on when notifications come through—ideally not at all, but if necessary then only at certain times. I used to have a specific time every day that I'd check email, and I'd give myself an hour. I'd run through everything, triage the important stuff, sort that, and then once all the important stuff was complete everything else got the rest of my time^[2]. No-one ever complained! No-one is holding you to the standards that you are.

Lots of the stuff I've said here should probably be... not enforced at a local party level, but certainly normalised at a local party level. "Normalising days off" and "normalising contact hours" inside the party itself would be enormously beneficial for everyone concerned, as almost anyone involved to a significant extent will be having the same problems you are.

Doing everything all the time without breaks will burn you out. I have burnt out, I have seen people burn out: it's miserable for them, and it's bad for the party because that person is then out of commission and they might never come back. And for what? The things that tip them over the edge are so often less important than they seem at the time. If something tempts you to break your day off, ask yourself will this matter in a week? a month? a year?. Things that genuinely important are very few and far between. If there's one thing to remember, it's that you are trying to play the long game.

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