Seven Signs You are Suffering from Burnout
I talk a lot about burnout and being burnt out. But until recently I never considered that many people who are suffering from burnout don’t actually understand that’s what is going on.
In our culture of always doing and achieving, we often dismiss and ignore the messages we’re receiving from our body, mind, and spirit that we’re pushing too hard. Instead of recognizing we’ve depleted all of our reserves and need to slow down, we instead think the problem is that we’re not pushing hard enough. The result – becoming more and more depleted until eventually we get so sick we’re forced to slow down.
Burnout doesn’t always look like serious illness or adrenal fatigue. While it will ultimately lead there, there are several other signs which can help you catch burnout early. And catching burnout early and taking steps to correct course as soon as you realize you’re headed down that path are key to staying healthy, happy, and balanced.
So what is burnout
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 self-care activities you refill the lamp, adding kerosene in to replace the depleted reserves.
Living out of balance
With this visual, it is easy to picture what will happen if you’re 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 is burnout. With the kerosene lamp, as the fuel gets low the light may flicker and sputter. Similarly, as your 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’s empty, you’re also no longer able to function once you fully deplete your mental, emotional, and physical energy reserves.
Here are a few signs you are suffering from burnout. . .
You feel empty or hollow
One of the first ways I identify burnout in friends, family, and clients is when I feel like I’m having a conversation with an empty, hollow shell.
Have you ever left a decorative gourd out and discovered it dried out instead of rotting? From the outside it looks ok, paler than before, but still maintains its shape. But when you hold it, instead of a solid presence, it’s light and empty. When you shake it, you can hear the dried seeds rattling around on the inside.
If you feel like that dried out gourd, pretty normal looking on the outside, but hollow and empty on the inside, that’s a good indicator you’re suffering from burnout. Think again about the kerosene lamp, if you’ve burnt through your energy reserves, it would make sense you feel hollow, drained of the reserves that would normally keep you going.
You are exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally
There are some days when I feel like I just can’t get it together. My body feels heavy like I’m moving through molasses. My brain feels foggy and I can’t do simple things like retrieve someone’s name or remember the steps to a process I’ve done dozens of times before. And my emotions have been zapped out of me – the Folgers commercials don’t make me cry, but I don’t feel excitement or joy over anything either.
When I feel like this, I know I’m out of balance. The scale has tipped and I’m on the way to burnout. Feeling any of these experiences is usually enough to cause me to pull the imaginary emergency cord to stop the train and get off. I focus extra energy on self-care, shifting away from self-work (read this post to understand the difference). And if that isn’t enough to course correct, I start delegating essential tasks and slashing non-essentials from my daily to-do lists.
Sometimes these symptoms are indicators you’re getting sick. Illness is the end result of burnout left untreated. If you won’t slow down and take care of yourself, your body eventually forces you to do so. Even if the illness is unrelated to burnout, focusing on self-care and nourishing yourself will help speed up your recovery. So regardless of whether these symptoms are from burnout or illness, reducing things which drain you and increasing the things that nourish you will help you feel better.
It feels like you have very little control over your emotions
Have you ever had a day when everything makes you cry? Or you’re short tempered with a fuse a fraction of what it normally is? And then a day or two later you get your period and it all makes sense? What about having those feelings but realizing they aren’t tied to hormonal shifts?
Think back to the kerosene lamp. As the fuel runs low, the flame flickers and sputters, struggling to stay lit with limited resources. The same thing happens to your emotions. As you drain your reserves, you have to triage your energy and control over your emotions falls to the wayside.
When you start to realize your emotions are running the show and you’re just along for the ride, it’s a warning sign you’re headed to burnout. Just as adjusting your balance to include more nourishing activities helps regardless of whether you’re dealing with burnout or illness, so too for rampant emotions. Even if hormonal shifts are causing your emotions to take the driver’s seat, increasing self-care and decreasing draining activities will help you begin to regain control.
Decisions are impossibly hard to make – even little ones
When you find yourself consistently asking the waiter to come back for the third time because you can’t decide if you want your eggs scrambled or over-easy, or you struggle to respond to an e-mail because you aren’t sure how to sign off, you’re probably burnt out. Often you might think about (or describe) this as feeling like everything is just too much.
As your energy reserves are depleted, decisions that once seemed easy take on a greater weight. It feels like every choice you make has enormous consequences. Consequences that, when you stop to really think about it, are far out of proportion to reality.
Learning how to tap into your intuition is a great way to help ease this burden on your energy reserves and bring you back into balance. To learn more about listening to your intuition, check out my Intuition 101 course.
You struggle to see the forest for the trees
This is a sign of burnout when you become so wrapped up in one thing that you believe it will make everything better. For instance – “if I just start going to bed at 10 pm then all my problems will be solved”, or “if only I could get to inbox zero I wouldn’t be overwhelmed anymore”.
While these “trees” might help you to move closer to balance, often they’re decoys you use to ignore the bigger problem of burnout. As someone who has over 10,000 e-mails in their inbox, I can assure you that the idea of getting to inbox zero is WAY more stressful than having an empty inbox would be stress-relieving. When the number of messages creeps up instead of down, it’s a symptom of my feeling burnt out, not the cause. When I start to triage energy, sorting through e-mail is the often the first thing to go!
So if you find yourself focusing on a single thing which once achieved will magically bring you back into balance, take some time to consider whether it is actually a symptom of your burnout instead of the cause.
Your friends and family note you seem “off”
They may also ask if you are (or were) sick. And may even let you know they’re worried about you. Often when you’re burnt out you are so busy just trying to get through each day you don’t have the time to reflect back on how you’re doing. By listening to the people around us, we’re able to see ourselves in a different light.
Which leads us into the last sign of burnout – when your friends and family express their concern and. . .
You find yourself saying “I’m just a little more stressed than normal. . .”
You might also replace stressed with overwhelmed, busy, emotional, exhausted, etc. When you find yourself thinking or saying some version of this, you’re probably dealing with burnout.
This is burnout and not a response to a temporary situation when, if you take a little time to think about it, you realize you have no idea how to get back to normal and you can’t remember the last time you actually felt normal. When you realize that “normal” is actually an idealized state, and not a state of being you’ve recently been in, it’s a good sign you’re burnt out.
Because we are conditioned by society to believe we just need to do more, be stronger, faster, more efficient, and then everything in our lives will come together, the response to burnout is often to push harder. Only this leads to deeper burnout. So when you find yourself excusing your drained state as temporary, take a moment and to see if you can remember the last time you weren’t stressed (or overwhelmed, busy, emotional, exhausted, etc.).
Burnout vs. depression
All of those indicators might also sound like warning signs of depression. And while burnout and depression may go hand-in-hand, it’s important to understand that if you have any doubt if you’re suffering from depression, seek professional help. Depression is treatable, and there is no reason to suffer when you can get help.
If you think what you are dealing with is burnout, take a few days to rest, perhaps a long weekend. Focus on activities that fill you up and nourish you (check out this blog post). Avoid anything that drains your physical, mental, and emotional reserves. Be sure you understand the difference between self-care and self-work.
At the end of your designated rest period, take stock. A great way to do this is journal on how you feel both at the start and end of your rest period. Do you notice a significant improvement in your attitude and energy? If so, you’re probably dealing with burnout. If you didn’t notice a major difference, or if you couldn’t get together enough energy to engage in self-care activities, it’s more likely depression is in the mix.
Burnout doesn’t always look the same
Note that we are not cookie cutter humans, each of us manifest burnout differently and it may look different at different times in your life. You most likely will not have all seven signs at once. Perhaps you’ll never experience some of these signs. But if you identify with a few of these, focus on trying to rebalance what fills you back up with what drains you so you can replenish your reserves. Check out this post to get started with five ways to avoid burnout.
