Your Guide To Beating Burnout
If you consider yourself a high achiever, it's easy to focus on productivity to the detriment of your overall well-being. This may seem harmless at first: a few nights of missed sleep, pushing yourself to meet deadlines, skipping meals or grabbing low-quality fast food now and then, et cetera. Over time, however, all of these decisions can add up and lead to burnout. If you're feeling burnt out, it's important to prioritize your health and happiness and take steps to get back to feeling your best.
What Is Burnout?
In general terms, burnout is a feeling of emotional or physical exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. It is often associated with workplace stress, but can also be related to other areas of life such as parenting, caretaking, or relationships.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), burnout is characterized by:
Feelings of exhaustion or energy depletion
Increased mental distance from or feelings of negativity/cynicism toward one's job
Reduced professional efficacy
Some common symptoms include:
Fatigue
Body aches
Unable to exercise
Overwhelmed by small things
Irritability and easily annoyed
Difficulty concentrating
Forgetfulness
Disconnectedness
Fluctuations in weight
Digestive disruption
Increase in cortisol levels
New health issues
Rapid increase in wrinkles or gray hair
While some of these potential symptoms can be attributable to other conditions or stressors, it’s important to acknowledge that any situation in which we are not feeling or operating in our optimal way is an indication that something needs to be addressed.
Practical Steps To Beat Burnout
When looking for advice to beat burnout, you'll likely hear a lot about stress management. While this is undoubtedly important, it can be difficult to translate into practical next steps. To make it easier, it helps to break the process into three steps.
These are:
Stop burnout by slowing the spread of stress, freeing up more capacity to find tools and techniques to feel better.
Repair burnout by changing your behaviors and focusing on recovering from stress.
Prevent future issues by clearing away the conditions that led to your stress, or, if this is not possible, changing your perspective toward them.
Stopping
To stop burnout from spreading, we need to establish a containment barrier to keep stressors from overrunning us and to create enough distance for us to see and address each of the sources of stress. Using a task management tool (such as an app or physical planner) can help during this process. Include all aspects of your life, personal and professional, and determine what resources you need to feel more in control. This can help you identify what behaviors are contributing to your burnout, and what behaviors can help you fix it.
Repairing
To repair burnout, we need to look at the behaviors that spread stress and those that reduce stress and aid in recovery. To do this, mental and emotional resiliency are key. When our resiliency is compromised or exhausted, we feel the effects of stress more deeply and tend to reach for coping mechanisms that are often counter-behaviors to those that create and maintain resiliency. Mental and emotional resiliency are the byproduct of our self-care practices.
To get an idea of what self-care practices you can incorporate into your life, remember the acronym P.A.T.H. - People, Activities, Techniques, and Health.
People include the family, friends, and key relationships that deliver the emotional nutrients critical for self-care, support, understanding, and balance.
Activities include the physical and mental activities that stimulate and engage parts of the body and nervous system that replenish our energy reserves, equalize our emotions, and sharpen our mental acuity.
Techniques include the tools and practices that regulate mindset and lubricate mental and emotional elasticity, such as journaling, somatic check-ins, meditation, therapy, or bodywork. These are deliberate habits intended to calibrate perspective and create awareness of the present moment, which enables us to feel less overwhelmed and agitated.
Health includes care directed to our bodies through diet, nutrition, sleep, and illness prevention. While plenty of studies indicate how certain diets affect mood and energy, resiliency is more a function of consistency than quality. Wide fluctuations in sugar, alcohol, calories, and a host of other dietary aspects can quickly deteriorate resiliency and impact mood and perspective.
When we overwork and overexpose ourselves to stressors, we are likely to reduce the time and consistency we would normally spend on these vital practices, which weakens our resiliency and makes us more susceptible to burnout. P.A.T.H. practices can repair burnout the way a climate with steady and adequate rainfall is less likely to fall victim to a wildfire.
Preventing
Once we stop the spread of burnout and repair the damage and the conditions that lead to burnout, we are able to reflect on and change our perspective on the stressors that lead to burnout. One of the keys to doing this effectively is to slow down.
In our constant rat-race culture, we tend to adopt two interrelated perspectives that perpetuate burnout. First is the belief that we need to burn the candle at both ends. It’s the notion that when we are not working on one thing, we should be working on something else. Instead of burning the candle at one end, then letting ourselves rest, we treat the candle as if it needs a rest on one end, so we race to burn the other end. If we witnessed this behavior as an observer, it would be comically obvious.
Second is the behavior of rushing, in part to race from one end of the candle to the other, but also to rush around while expending energy. There’s a belief and culture within corporate America that we always need to work faster and more efficiently than before because there is an ever-increasing amount of work to be done.
Although the above beliefs may be common, rushing without resting is likely to result in more burnout. Instead, it's important to take the time to slow down and implement the self-care techniques that reduce your stress and help you manage your day-to-day life more easily.