The One Thing You Need to Prevent Burnout
Save yourself the misery
I remember a sunny day back in my teacher training when the course instructor, a rough-around-the-edges woman of 60, looked at us and said, “I’ll give you five years before you’re toast.”
At that time, I thought it was a joke. Now, after 10 years in business and experiencing teacher burnout first-hand, I’d say it was a fair warning.
Want to know why not a SINGLE one of us would-be teachers took it to heart? And why nearly all my peers called it quits much earlier?
Because you never notice your own burnout.
Not until it’s too late anyway.
While not a clinical diagnosis, occupational burnout is a common term among mental health professionals that describes a feeling of mental exhaustion and hopelessness associated with prolonged workplace stress.
At best, it can make you lose your job. At worst, it can make you lose yourself.
I was lucky. Work burnout taught me the one thing that ultimately helped me to fight back.
Know yourself.
Surprisingly simple, you’d say. Yet, this lack of self-awareness and clear direction is one of the reasons burnout is so hard to overcome.
Consider this — most of the websites out there cite such symptoms as feeling constantly tired and unmotivated, behaving in a cynical way and isolating yourself from others, as well as procrastination and overeating as the signs of burnout to watch out for. But…
What if, like me, you’ve always been like this? A cynical and introverted procrastinator who just really, really loves to eat?
All jokes aside, that’s why it’s important to share real-life experiences about living through burnout or dealing with other mental health problems. And the reason why I am writing this article.
Because it really IS a matter of life and death, physical and/or mental.
And generic lists of symptoms and instructions don’t just provide zero help. They kill the motivation to get better.
You won’t eat a dish with a vague list of ingredients. You won’t fix a pipe with a set of instructions for IKEA furniture. And you won’t win against burnout if you don’t know exactly what to do.
So let’s have a heart-to-heart about self-awareness.
Okay, you’ll say. But what’s the big deal?
Remember the books about Sherlock Holmes? In one of them, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously said:
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
If you apply this to burnout, then we can say that, once you get the familiar things out of the way, any new disruptive habits or tendencies you develop can point to burnout. And these are unique in each case.
Like to eat? Say hello to loss of appetite!
Have a good sleeping schedule? Welcome to the wonderful world of insomnia!
Never been ill in your life? Get the latest package of seasonal flu and assorted pains!
Alright, you get the idea. My point is, sudden changes in your mental and physical state are what you need to be especially attentive to.
Here’s an example.
Anyone who’s been in higher education knows about sleep debt. It’s the kind of exhaustion that starts early in adults, with at least one-third of college students reporting the so-called “academic burnout” and nearly a half complaining of constantly feeling tired or sleepy.
In fact, as a person who spent more than 12 years in academia in different roles, I can’t recall even one student or teacher who hasn’t mentioned overwork or lack of sleep as a part of their college life.
What does it mean for working adults?
If being tired is the norm, it means you can’t recognize exhaustion as a symptom of burnout at work. And you can’t fight what you can’t see.
For me, it was different.
What really helped me to avoid tiredness when studying and working was setting a non-negotiable amount of sleep and regular breaks.
I picked a sweet spot between the necessary amount of sleep (around 6–8 hours for adults), and the number of hours that my inner productivity freak was okay with — 6 hours, with a mandatory day of sleeping in (9 hours). Add to this 15 minutes of rest every 1,5 hours and you get about 13 hours of activity daily, which is not bad.
This allowed me to reduce cumulative exhaustion for years. It did catch up with me eventually (thank you, Covid-19) but staying burnout-free for 12 years while studying and working two jobs is already a sound achievement.
So when burnout came, not being able to get out of bed in the morning and going to sleep later and later at night was a warning sign exactly because it felt new and worrying.
You see what I’m getting at? If I hadn’t been aware of my sleep patterns, I wouldn’t have noticed anything wrong. And wouldn’t have been able to take action.
Identifying causes of worry is the most important step toward prevention of occupational burnout. There are many techniques and methods for doing it, chief among which is mindfulness.
Mindfulness is commonly defined as the feeling of being present, awareness of your emotional and physical state in the moment, without judgement or evaluation. Moments like this can lead you to important realizations about your physical and mental state.
A lot of sources recommend meditation as a means of achieving a mindful state but if you’re not a fan, there are other activities that can help.
For instance, you can benefit from a hobby that keeps your hands busy and your mind free. It could be anything — cooking, gardening, crafting — as long as it is both relaxing and centering. For me, it was crochet but to each their own, right?
The important thing is to listen to yourself and act if something feels off, no matter how small. Tiny problems have a tendency of snowballing into mighty messes really quickly. Ask friends and family for advice, read up on mental health online or see a therapist — knowledge is power, and this power can save you months, if not years, of misery.
Something to think about, surely.
