5 Ways to Avoid Burnout
First, let’s talk about what burnout is before we move into how to avoid it. Picture a kerosene lamp, the old school hurricane style lamps where you twist the knob to raise and lower the wick, increasing or decreasing the flame.
You are this lamp, and during your day-to-day life, you burn with a steady light. In times of stress, anxiety, and overwhelm, the knob on the lamp is turned, increasing the flame and burning through the kerosene quickly.
When you engage in activities which distract you from the stress in your life, you turn the knob down low, keeping the light burning, but consuming less fuel than normal. However, it is only when you engage in self-care activities that you refill the lamp, adding kerosene in to replace the depleted reserves.
It is easy to picture what will happen if you are living out of balance. If the majority of your life is engaged in activities which burn the kerosene at a rapid rate, and you don’t take the time to refill it through self-care. No matter how big your fuel reserve was to start with, this pattern will eventually cause your kerosene lamp to run out of fuel and the light will go out.
This emptying of your reserves, that is burnout. With the kerosene lamp, as the fuel gets low the light may flicker and sputter. Similarly, as your energy reserves get low, you will also find daily life becomes more and more challenging. And just as the lamp is no longer able to function once it is empty, you are also no longer able to function once you fully deplete your mental, emotional, and physical energy reserves.
So how do I avoid burnout?
Put simply, to avoid burnout, you need to fill your reserves faster than you deplete them (or at least at the same rate). This means that when you are under increased stress, you also need to increase activities which fill you back up.
You can approach this balancing act from a few different angles. While these techniques all work best when used together, get started by picking one or more that resonate with you and start experimenting. Find ways to balance your output of energy with the refilling of your energy in a manner that works for you and your lifestyle. Here are a few places to get started.
Slow down the rate at which you are burning fuel
Think of this as the conservation method of avoiding burnout. By removing stress, anxiety and overwhelm from your life, you go through the energy you have at a slower rate. This is a great place to start working on your boundaries, using them to protect your precious reserves of energy. You can read all about how to get started on becoming a boundaries rock star here.
Another great tool to help you in utilizing the conservation method of avoiding burnout is to identify your own personal core values. By identifying them and then beginning to bring your life into alignment with these values, you reduce the things in your life causing extra stress and anxiety. You can learn more about core value work here.
And although you can get much better fuel efficiency in a Smart car than a Hummer, there is still only so far you can get with this technique. The conservation method is great as a starting point, but you will want to use it in conjunction with some of the other techniques.
Increase your self-care
Self-care is how you refill your reserves. The more self-care you have in your life, the more energy you add to your reserves. The self-care tools and techniques that work for you and your lifestyle are going to be different for everyone. To get started, check out this post on building a self-care routine you will actually use. Another great resource is this Masterclass teaching five essential and actionable self-care techniques you can implement today.
The other important thing to think about is the difference between self-care and self-work. While both are incredibly valuable and have an important role to play in your life, self-care is the only one which refills your energy reserves.
In a nutshell, self-care should leave you feeling rested, relaxed, nourished, and/or restored. Self-work will leave you feeling accomplished, rewarded, with a greater sense of clarity, and/or focus. To learn more about the difference between these two, check out this post.
Increasing your self-care would be a great solution all on its own if there were an unlimited number of hours in each day. However, given that there are only 24 hours in a day, just like with the conservation approach, you will get the best benefits by combining additional self-care with other techniques.
Reclaim time through productive procrastination
If you are not familiar with productive procrastination, check out this post which gives a ton of information on how to use this technique to reclaim time throughout your day.
By utilizing productive procrastination, which allows you to use the time you would otherwise have spent in mindless distraction, to take care of necessary tasks, you are able to free up time you can use intentionally. This time can either be spent in increased self-care, or taking care of projects on your to-do list which are causing extra stress and anxiety because you are unable to find the time to get to them.
This is a great technique to use in a mindful way along with the conservation method to avoid burnout and/or increased self-care.
Shift your perspective
First, here is a hard truth. You are only responsible for your thoughts and action – not the thoughts and actions of anyone else. That means that you cannot control the way anyone else thinks, feels, and acts.
Take a moment and be honest with yourself, how much energy do you spend trying to control the way others think of you, act, or feel? How much energy would you keep from flying out of your reserves if you just released the need to be in control of anyone and anything other than yourself?
It can be hard to see this in ourselves. Try to start listening to what you say out loud and in your head. If you find that something is taking a lot of your time or energy, ask yourself if the situation is actually within your control. If it isn’t, then take a few long, slow, deep breaths and begin to release it. You may be amazed to discover how much of a difference just this single shift in perspective can make.
Learn how to listen to your intuition
In all of this work, your intuition will be your best guide. It will help you to understand when your reserves are being drained faster than they are being filled. When it is critical that you increase your self-care to keep you from becoming burnt out. And what the best tools and techniques are for you to implement at any given time.
If you are not already comfortable talking to your intuition, check out this free mini-course which will give you three tools to connect to your intuition and begin to learn how to listen. This is an essential skill to have as your mind can easily be clouded by fear and the “should’s” of our conditioning. But your intuition will always speak on behalf of what is in your best interest.
Getting started
If you are reading this, chances are you are already on the road to burnout if not already there. DO NOT, and I repeat DO NOT, try to implement every one of these techniques at once. That will actually make you feel more overwhelmed, lead to additional burnout, and then cause you to feel like a failure when you can’t make it happen. Which will in turn cause you to be afraid to try to take positive steps again.
A much better way to approach this is to pick one technique which seems the easiest to incorporate into your life right now. I would suggest starting with learning to listen to your intuition or productive procrastination. Both are techniques that can be incorporated throughout your day in a flexible manner without requiring any advance scheduling.
Once you feel comfortable that the technique you started with has become an integral part of your life (give it at least a few weeks), then pick a second technique to being to incorporate. Rinse and repeat until you are at a stage where you feel nourished, rested, and restored each day instead of exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed.
Continuing the work
Over time we all grow and change. As we do, the stressors in our lives also grow and change. What works for you today may not work for you tomorrow. Once you find your way to balance, if you notice that you are starting to feel stressed out and overwhelmed again, take a few minutes and evaluate your routine.
Check to see if the self-care techniques you are using need to be changed up to address a new stage of life you are in. Or perhaps your stress level has increased to the point where you are no longer in balance with your energy in and energy out. What can you do to again focus your attention on the conservation of your energy?
Think of this like a dance, you need to move and flow with life as both you and it change. When you have all the tools in place and you are using them regularly, you will be able to dance with grace and ease. It is only when you are trying to muddle through the dance without knowing any of the steps that you will find your toes being stomped on by your partner.
This won’t happen overnight (it didn’t take you just one day to deplete your energy reserves from full to empty). However, each step that you take to begin to move away from burnout will help to bring you back closer to balance. And the closer you get to balance, the easier this will all feel. So while it won’t happen overnight, it will get easier and easier the more you do the work.
