Beating Burnout
Are you on the road to Burnout?
Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest and motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place.
Burnout reduces productivity and saps your energy, leaving you feeling increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, and resentful. Eventually, you may feel like you have nothing more to give.
The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life—including your home, work, and social life. Burnout can also cause long-term changes to your body that make you vulnerable to illnesses like colds and flu. Because of its many consequences, it’s important to deal with burnout right away.
The 4 Steps to Burnout
You walk around feeling you are constantly under pressure; you wake with a nauseous sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.
You find it hard to switch off when you are with your family. You are constantly thinking about work, you are working on the way to work and you are working on the way home. You don’t take breaks during the day, you’re working at the weekends, you crash in the evenings, you get sick when you go on holiday. Physical symptoms – little niggles but it’s your way of expressing that you are always on and you are not switching off. It might be headaches, migraines, psoriasis, eczema, irritable bowl. However, your body expresses that you are always on, that’s what will bubble up. You may look like you are doing really well at work. It is in your personal life and at home and physically that you are suffering.
It starts to impact on work, you are not getting on with your colleagues. People are complaining, you might have clients complaining, the quality of your work starts to drop off. You become irrational, tetchy, irritable. physical symptoms become more severe. You start to feel exhausted and run down.
Collapse, burnout, clinical anxiety, depression. You may even be off work for months at a time.
Whether you recognise the warning signs of impending burnout or you’re already past the breaking point, trying to push through the exhaustion and continuing as you have been will only cause further emotional and physical damage. Now is the time to pause and change direction by learning how you can help yourself overcome burnout and feel healthy and positive again.
Dealing with burnout requires the “Three R” approach:
Recognise – Watch for the warning signs of burnout
Reverse – Undo the damage by seeking support and managing stress
Resilience – Build your resilience to stress by taking care of your physical and emotional health
If you are noticing the early stages of burnout, what can you do to feather the brakes?
Put some healthy strategies in place –
Start switching your phone off, don’t have it with you at night.
Start eating more healthily.
Get out into nature.
Drink more water.
Cut back on caffeine.
Laugh more.
Make more healthy choices.
Prioritise your sleep.
Burnout is an undeniable sign that something important in your life is not working. Take time to think about your hopes, goals, and dreams. Are you neglecting something that is truly important to you? This can be an opportunity to rediscover what really makes you happy and to slow down and give yourself time to rest, reflect, and heal.
When you’re burned out, problems seem insurmountable, everything looks bleak. It is difficult to muster up the energy to care, let alone take action to help yourself. However, you have a lot more control over stress than you may think. These positive steps you can take can help to deal with overwhelming stress and get your life back into balance. One of the most effective is to reach out to others.
Social contact is nature’s antidote to stress and talking face to face with a good listener is one of the fastest ways to calm your nervous system and relieve stress. The person you talk to doesn’t have to be able to “fix” your stressors; they just have to be a good listener, someone who’ll listen attentively without becoming distracted or expressing judgment.
Don’t suffer in silence
