The Strange Lessons You Can Learn About Dealing With Stress & Anxiety From Shakespeare's Experience of Burnout

"Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed."

Do you ever get the feeling that however much you're doing, however hard you try, however fast you're moving, you feel like you're getting nowhere?

Sounds to me like you're (I'm) suffering from burnout. No this isn't one of those podcasty words like manifestation and journalling, burnout is a real medical thing with serious consequences if you don't deal with it.

Did Shakespeare suffer from burnout? How could he, the bloomin thing was only invented in 1974? I'm not going to go there and try and take modern things and impose them on his life - although today's quote at the start comes from one of his sonnets so even if he didn't suffer it he sure as heck knows how to describe the feeling.

If you can manage for a moment to lift the duvet from over your head and peep back into the world that made you weary with toil in today's episode I hope to ease you gently back to a place where you can at least feel strong enough to step back in and win back your life.

No one will ever be able to say what Shakespeare was going through, but strangely everything that happened to him in a crucial five year period maps perfectly onto the classic definition of burnout, from massively productive honeymoon period down to total crashout, and everything in between. The way he gets out of it as well mirrors what we can do in our own lives to escape its clutches.

There are few plays looked at in this episode because I am daring to discuss only Shakespeare's life, but Twelfth Night gets a special mention because it falls slap in the middle of Shakespeare's 'burn-out/not burn-out' phase.

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