Updated:
Readtime: 11 min
Every product is carefully selected by our editors and experts. If you buy from a link, we may earn a commission. Learn more. For more information on how we test products, click here.
- Burnout is a state of chronic exhaustion and psychological disengagement.
- It can happen when your demands overwhelm the resources you have to handle them.
- Luckily, there are plenty of strategies that can help with burnout, like prioritising rest and getting in touch with your emotions.
- The most important strategy you can implement is committing to making long-term change to prevent burnout from happening again.
Burnout is one of those things that we all know about, but few of us actually understand. It’s a term often thrown about by workplaces as something to manage and avoid, when things get too overwhelming or stressful, without really understanding the factors at play.
Often, burnout is the consequence of being stuck in unhelpful patterns. It’s not a short-term exhaustion that happens after a single big project robs you of some sleep, but rather the outcome of prolonged exposure to high levels of stress.
What Is Burnout?
Being burned out isn’t about being tired or feeling disengaged with your job (those can be symptoms, for sure). It’s actually a state of chronic exhaustion, psychological disengagement, and reduced effectiveness that develops after prolonged exposure to stress.
People suffering from burnout are often fatigued, irritable, and apathetic toward many aspects of their lives, not just work. But being burnt out is more than just a stressful day at work putting you in a bad mood.
What Are The Signs And Symptoms Of Burnout?
The symptoms of burnout are a bit more nuanced than fatigue, irritability and apathy, though. For some people the warning signs might be a sense of helplessness or cynicism, emotional outbursts, or a tendency toward isolation or self-destructive behaviours. For others, burnout can coincide with physical symptoms such as headaches, sleep disruption, and gastrointestinal complaints.
Now, burnout isn’t considered a medical condition. The World Health Organisation instead classifies it as an occupational phenomenon that stems from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”, resulting in exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy—however, researchers continue to debate whether burnout is best understood as an occupational issue, or one that extends into other aspects of our lives.
Increasingly, research suggests burnout can be influenced by stressors outside of the workplace, meaning interventions focused only on work factors may overlook important contributors.
Why Burnout Happens
So, what causes burnout? In basic terms, burnout is caused by taking on too many demands without the resources needed to properly account for what those excess demands require.
According to the ‘Jobs Demands-Resources Model’, the leading model in understanding burnout today, what is considered a ‘demand’ and a ‘resource’ in the workplace is purposefully vague to allow for a pretty wide interpretation.
For example, demands could be high workload, tight time pressures, work role ambiguity, or a chaotic working environment. However, a person’s resources can range from having good support networks in place (professionally or socially), having adequate feedback on progress, maintaining the right level of autonomy in your work, or even something as basic as having a good sleep schedule.
To put it simply, if a person’s demands exceed the resources they have to manage them, their performance will begin to suffer. Often, people will be able to find ways to stretch themselves to meet short-term demands, like having that third coffee, convincing themselves they can stay up all night and ordering food in to save time.
However, these strategies aren’t sustainable, and, if that person remains stretched thin for long enough, they will inevitably begin burning out.
8 Burnout Prevention Strategies
Firstly, the good news is that burnout can be addressed, and doing so can often lead a person to a much more meaningful and enjoyable life. However, the process itself isn’t quick or easy. When it comes to making meaningful changes to address the issues that cause burnout, there are no quick fixes.
Effective burnout recovery isn’t about finding a way to return to the unmanageable level of stress and demand. Instead, it is about building a more sustainable path forward.
We’ll explore some of the most helpful strategies you can implement in order to understand what demands are eating up your resources, and what you can do about it—but it’s recommended that you talk to a professional if you believe you’re suffering from burnout.
1. Identify the Main Contributors
Starting any major project without a clear idea of what you’re working toward isn’t the best way of doing things, and the same is true for trying to fix your burnout. The first step you take in addressing burnout should be to take stock of the major demands in your life, and determine which are the main causes of your burnout.
It’s important to be brutally honest with yourself at this stage. If you love your job, but feel it’s actively leading you to burnout, do not ignore those signs. If it’s a loved one who is using up all of your resources, you should take stock in that, despite how uncomfortable it might feel.
Importantly, this doesn’t mean immediately quitting your job, or cutting contact with your loved one. It’s about understanding what is causing the issue you’re currently facing with open eyes.
2. Focus On Rest And Recovery
The next step is to focus on bolstering your diminished resources by actively protecting your recovery time. This usually starts by setting up some healthy boundaries with whatever your stressor is (like not reading work emails after hours, or cutting back on doomscrolling). It also involves focusing on spending any time regained on restorative experiences, like getting a healthy amount of sleep, or spending that time on hobbies or with friends that bring you joy.
The goal here isn’t just work less, but rather to facilitate something called psychological detachment. Psychological detachment is a coping mechanism that encourages people to step back from intense stressors by prioritising using free-time for personally-fulfilling tasks.
3. Pay Attention To Your Emotions
Emotions can be scary for a lot of us, as they tend to be associated with feeling bad, upset, lonely, empty, frustrated, miserable, or worse. But what’s really important to remember is that even the negative emotions can provide useful information about how we respond to our circumstances.
Burnout to Brilliant author Dr Marny Lishman calls emotions “signals” from our brain and body that “are telling us about something in our environment that we need to pay attention to,” and often serve as helpful guides as to what may need to change.
During this process, it’s important to pay attention to what makes you happy. But it’s just as important to pay attention to what makes you sad or fulfilled, frustrated or content. These are all helpful signals that can help you to figure out how to lead a more meaningful life (more on this later), as well as what to address.
4. Challenge Unsustainable Beliefs
Burnout often arrives as a result of overcommitting to tasks while avoiding asking for help, or holding your work to a higher standard than you do someone else’s. You might expect your work to be perfect, and so you sacrifice all else in order to ensure it is as good as possible. These are all unsustainable beliefs.
An easy way to assess how helpful such a behaviour is is to ask yourself probing questions. These could include things like “is this expectation realistic?”, “would I expect another person to meet this standard?” or “if I maintained this approach for another five years, what would be the outcome?”
Often, you’ll find that strategies you thought were helpful, such as working late or drinking coffee, aren’t as sustainable as you might think.
It’s important to challenge those beliefs. After all, if you know that maintaining your current course will inevitably lead to a crash, it only makes sense to change course or pump the brakes entirely. Sometimes, burnout is created due to the rules we believe we must follow, and breaking those rules can help to chart a new course.
5. Reconnect With Your People
At a time when many people report increasing loneliness and reduced social connection, it’s worth noting that feeling a sense of belonging, either from friends, family, or by way of community, serves as a strong protective factor against burnout. Having a strong social support network can connect people with other individuals, and provide outside perspectives that can challenge unhelpful beliefs they may have.
However, connecting with people when already feeling exhausted is a challenge, so it’s important to start small. Find a low-effort activity you can do with a close friend, and spend the time connecting with them, rather than simply doing an activity. Catching up for a coffee and having a chat can do wonders for your mental health.
6. Reconnect With What Matters To You
We’ve already spoken about the important of paying attention to things that make you feel positive emotions, like joy, fulfilment or contentment. That wasn’t just as a means of ensuring you’re aware of what makes you happy, but rather to help set the stage for a broader shift toward understanding and reconnecting with things that are meaningful to you.
Burnout often comes with a side of nihilism. This overarching sense that life is meaningless that can lead to feelings of isolation, detachment, apathy, and a sense of existential dread. A sure-fire way to combat the long-term negative effects of this attitude is to practice finding your own meaning and living by your own personal values. This can be family, friends, nature, religion, acts of kindness or even just doing things that bring you joy.
Identifying your values doesn’t have to be a grand spiritual journey. It’s actually just about finding and prioritising activities that make you feel good about being in the world. Have you always wanted to spend more time hiking? Do it. Have you been meaning to try a painting class? Make the time. Do you want to get more involved in your local community? Go for it! If any of those things bring you joy, make a note of it.
Research shows that people who live according to their values show greater psychological flexibility, resilience, motivation, and wellbeing, while experiencing less distress and self-criticism.
7. Focus On Your Physical Health
While this is probably the most-common recommendation to combat mental health challenges, that’s because it really is that important. You simply won’t have the mental fortitude to make any meaningful changes if your body isn’t firing on all cylinders.
You can start with the trinity of maintaining a healthy sleep schedule (yes, that means no screens in bed), a regular exercise routine, and a healthy diet, and make sure to cut unnecessary alcohol or stimulant reliance where possible.
Your body is potentially your most valuable resource, and ensuring it is healthy and operational will make a large difference in how many demands you’ll be able to meet.
8. Make Meaningful Change
We’ve saved the hardest, but most important, step for last. While focusing on rest, recovery, and finding meaning are necessary steps, making meaningful change is often the actual catalyst to burnout recovery. Very few people have overcome burnout by simply getting better at tolerating the demands that overwhelm them every day.
This step will look different for everyone. It may involve telling your boss “no” more often, cutting back on weekends at work, or laying out boundaries with a toxic friend or family member. In very extreme cases, it may involve quitting an unhealthy job, or cutting a person out of your life, though steps like this should be taken after trying more manageable approaches first.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, burnout is often a consequence of being stuck in unhelpful patterns, and even if you’re able to improve your own well-being and bolster your resources using the prior strategies, failing to adequately change your relationship with the overwhelming demand may simply lead to more burnout in future.
As Robin Sharma famously said in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, “change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end.”
Related reads
Comments
We love hearing from you. or to leave a comment.