The physical and mental exhaustion that comes with doing too much, also known as burnout, can take a toll on your life and make it hard to feel hopeful and invigorated. Whether you’ve taken on too much, have had a series of stressful events in your life or simply have a lot on your plate, burnout is a signal that day-to-day life has become too much to handle, which can make it nearly impossible to manage stress and get out of bed feeling ready to take on the day.
In order to get ahead of burnout, you must take precautions to insulate yourself from the onslaught of stressful situations you may be facing. To tackle burnout before it happens, and to deal with the effects when it does, this guide is here to help.
1. Take Care of Your Health
It’s a lot harder to complete anything on your to-do list when your blood sugar is low, you’re dehydrated or you’re sleep-deprived. In these states, your system simply doesn’t have the fuel that it needs to operate efficiently, which can lead to poor memory retention, mood swings, fatigue, irritability and exhaustion.
Do all that you can to make sure you eat a well-balanced diet, get plenty of rest at night and drink enough water to support your bodily systems. As well, it may be helpful to consider other health-boosting practices that can soothe your system, such as taking daily naps, ingesting hemp flower and committing to a regular exercise program.
2. Schedule Breaks
Though it may not always feel like you have the time and resources to step away from the most pressing tasks on your to-do list, breaks are an essential part of any job, role or responsibility. They not only give your brain and body a chance to pause and recharge, but they also give your system a chance to process the information and energy it takes in while you’re at work.
Make sure to take regular breaks throughout the workday, even if it’s just a few minutes to stretch your legs and get some fresh air. As well, it’s important to take breaks that involve a change of scenery once in a while, whether that’s a longer vacation or a night out to a new restaurant or gallery in town.
3. Find Balance and Harmony
Burnout is often the result of an imbalance of one sector of life that takes up a great deal of the time and energy you could be affording to another area. If one area of your life is demanding too much of your resources, it may be time to take a step back and evaluate how you can restructure it so that it allows for more space for other things in your world.
4. Invest In Your Interests
It’s not always feasible to eliminate stressors or cut back on energy-intensive tasks in your life. In these cases, the best thing to do is to invest in activities, people, hobbies and places that will better balance the scales and bring more joy and fulfillment into your life. If you’re pressed for time, start small. Try to incorporate a small amount of time each day that is dedicated to you and your needs and interests, whether that’s reading a favorite book before bed, working on a passion project or heading out for a class or workshop in a field in which you’re interested.
5. Compartmentalize Tasks
Multitasking may seem like a valuable skill, but it can actually make you less productive overall. The process of splitting your attention between more than one task at a time makes you far less efficient and requires more mental energy to switch gears over and over than if you were to focus on just one thing at a time.
Whether you’re at work or at home, eliminate temptations to task switch by moving your phone out of the room, silencing work emails, requesting privacy from coworkers during certain hours of the day and making a list that designates which tasks are more important at that time than others.
