“I got up one morning and I couldn’t do it anymore.” In a video published at the end of November on his channel followed by 99,000 subscribers, the YouTuber Herodot’com announced on camera that he was taking a break from his career for several months. Despite his “passion that consumes him” for productions around History, the videographer explains that he has accumulated too many physical signs of stress since the start of his activity eight years ago. However, he refuses to talk about burnout and prefers to say that he “exploded in mid-flight”.
A week earlier, another enthusiast, Thibault Bourdin, dad from the channel La Folle Histoire, met his colleague during the preview screening of the film Napoleon. He notices that Frédéric alias Herodot’com is tired and together, they exchange a few words on this subject. His interlocutor seems exhausted. “Yet, to me, he was a model of someone who was not interested in performance, who released extremely long videos with no regularity. I thought he was detached from the subscribers and statistics side. In the end, he’s also on edge.” Among content creators, this exhaustion remains very common and if the term “burn-out” is often mocked in a profession described as “easy”, it has all its legitimacy in the debate, affirm the various specialists and psychologists contacted. Thibault, too, paid the price.
Overproduction and hyperperformance
A great lover of the subject, he created La Folle Histoire when he was in high school. Seeing that his channel is starting to work, the videographer decides to devote himself to it full time from 2020. “I put my studies on hold to focus on this. I’ve never taken them back since.” With one video per week and the lockdown helping, the channel even found itself among the top 15 of the best progressions on YouTube France that year. “At the time, I had a breakneck pace.” For Thibault, this rhythmic cadence is accompanied by a certain euphoria. “Especially when you spent years on videos that didn’t work. So we always want to do more, we become a little obsessed, we look at the statistics. As soon as it drops a little, we worry because we’re new, and we tell ourselves that it could drop again very quickly.”
However, at the time, Thibault managed his YouTube channel alone. “There were a lot of things to organize at once. Looking back, I tell myself that I was too young. I was 19 at the time.” So, the videographer puts more pressure on himself. Every week, he has to pull at least one all-nighter to ensure he finishes his work. “The video absolutely had to come out every Sunday at 2 p.m., which meant that I worked practically seven days a week. But I liked it.” Faced with competition, most content creators are aware of this outperformance. “We can actually be quite painful with ourselves. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves, but we still have deadlines to respect “.
But the first signs of weakness are starting to appear. “Even though I wanted to continue, my body resisted.” For work psychologist Pierre-Eric Sutter, this phenomenon of exhaustion is linked to overcommitment. “After a while, the level of personal resources that are mobilized in relation to the objectives achieved is so gigantic that the resources become dwindling. It’s like for the planet.”
A questioning of his work
We are now in May 2021, and a lot of things are accumulating behind the scenes of the La Folle Histoire YouTube channel. Professional projects fail, the work is more and more important, the pressure and criticism too. “At the same time, the content on the channel has evolved quite a bit in its seriousness, I went deeper into the subjects. The problem is that it never stops because, even when a video is ready and we can finally release it, there is the next one to prepare.”
Then Thibault breaks down and can no longer even write a line in the face of the feeling of fatigue and anxiety that he describes as permanent. “It’s a weird feeling not being able to work overnight,” he recalls. All kinds of thoughts go through his head: Am I legitimate? What do I really want to do with my life? “It was the only moment where I was really on the verge of giving up. I remember having anxiety attacks alone at home, even though there was nothing in particular. But I pulled myself together. It clicked when I told myself that I needed to get help, that I can’t continue on my own.”
Feelings that often arise during burnout, assures psychologist Pierre-Eric Sutter. “Mental exhaustion means no longer believing in the values that stimulated us before”, which can lead to “big bouts of depression”, or even “reactive depression”.
Spot weak signals
Today, the history buff assures him: He is no longer able to work as he did in the past. “It’s one of the rare advantages of burnout, you learn to know yourself a little better, to know your limits.” Last year, he even came close to a second burnout, but was able to slow down in time. “There were physical symptoms. I got up one morning and I had lost feeling in a whole part of my body which was numb.” Thinking of a stroke, his tests show nothing particular apart from a heavy dose of work. Now surrounded by a team on his channel, Thibault is learning to disconnect and feels a clear evolution.
However, the job of content creator remains too solitary and, for Thibault, isolation remains one of the reasons for unhappiness. “Even if, for the most part, we remain very introverted.” Certainly the YouTube platform warns them about their mental health… but is that enough? In addition to loneliness, the relationship with statistics can lock them into another logic of overperformance and therefore sometimes exhaustion. “There is always pressure from statistics and that is at every level, either a channel that is just starting out, or a channel that is starting to work or a channel that has been working for a very long time.”
“Isolation is an aggravating factor”
The subject, however, remains taboo among creators who are reluctant to answer questions about burn-out at the risk of sometimes knee-jerk reactions from their audience. “It remains a job of image and we must not have the image of someone who complains all the time,” underlines Thibault Bourdin. “There is the impression of an easy job, it is no more difficult than any other job, but, at a given moment, even if you do what you love, you can fall into depression.” For specialists, the subject is widely topical among content creators, as with any worker. “Burnout is the development of individual symptoms of stress from the moment we are confronted with stressful situations. Live, we cannot detect burnout among content creators because they only present the best side,” maintains Aude Selly, author ofAutopsy of a burn-out and coach.
However, the characteristics of this professional burnout can be numerous and mostly corroborate with Thibault’s testimony. “Intense fatigue, loss of pleasure in one’s work, the development of an addiction, change in behavior,” lists Aude Selly. And the work coach concludes: “For workers, isolation is an aggravating factor. This is one of the specificities of the sector which accentuates burn-out. Added to this are the pressures they must bear.” Continuous presence on platforms, competition or fear of not responding to audiences… all roads lead to exhaustion.