The ultimate psychological guide to burnout recovery

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The Relationship Between Goals And Burning Out

Effective goal-setting underlies the fundamental aspect of your motivation and keeps stressful situations at bay.

If you don’t set goals in positive, attainable ways, you may fall into a cycle of stress and negative emotions, hindering your decision-making, breeding a lack of creativity, and eventually making you feel mentally exhausted and burnt out.

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Reorganizing Your Goal Hierarchy

As losing resources is more likely to cause burnout than gaining resources is to mitigate it, dealing with the negative aspects is more beneficial than using positive “band-aid” fixes. You want to drive down uncertainty and inefficiency to ensure that you aren’t doing unnecessary tasks and minimize your emotional exhaustion. To do that:

Create a chart and place your major goal at its top, followed by layers of very specific subgoals needed to attain the major goal.
Find and fix the inefficiencies in your goal hierarchy.
Determine the attainability of each goal.

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Burnout Symptoms And Signs Of Exhaustion

Chronic fatigue
Insomnia
Impaired concentration/ forgetfulness
Loss of appetite
Anxiety
Increased illness
Physical symptoms
Chest pain
Shortness of breath
Dizziness
Gastrointestinal pain
Depression
Interpersonal problems.

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Reframing Your Approach To Goals

Emotional exhaustion colors our perception negatively, leading to disengagement and feelings of doubt/distrust. This cynicism demotivates and leads to burnout, as we focus on avoiding losses more than on approaching gains. Cynicism recovery happens by reframing the motivational system into one that is more approach driven (as opposed to avoidance driven), as it generates more excitement and less procrastination. To do that:

Separate your list of goals into focused and avoidance focused goals.
Reframe the avoidance-based goals into approach-focused goals.
Some goals you can’t reframe, describe their solution in detail. Patient Using the format “IF {situation} THEN I will {behavior}. ”

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Burnout Symptoms Of Cynicism

Pessimism
Isolation
Lack of motivation
Loss of enjoyment
Detachment
Feelings of meaninglessness.

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Balancing Your Obligations And Desires

Performing obligations makes you want to do desired activities to compensate, which often leads to failures in self-control and feelings of inadequacy. It’s important to not overwhelm yourself with obligations so you don’t lose control later and incur in inefficiency.

Rank the tasks on your goal list based on your motivation toward them.
Look at the balance between desirable and undesirable tasks.
If there are more undesirable tasks, create a small list of desirable tasks, preferably related to your main goal, until you have roughly the same number of each.
Change the order of the tasks so you have desirable and undesirable tasks alternating.

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