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The ultimate psychological guide to burnout recovery
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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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.
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.
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.
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}. ”
Burnout Symptoms Of Cynicism
- Pessimism
- Isolation
- Lack of motivation
- Loss of enjoyment
- Detachment
- Feelings of meaninglessness.
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.
Burnout Symptoms Of Inefficacy
- Lack of productivity
- Declining performance
- Feelings of hopelessness
- Increased irritability.
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Understand your limitations
Burnout occurs when job demands consistently outweigh the resources available. The first thing you need to do is to set proper limits.
When you limit your time spent on specific tasks,...
Learn to say no
... especially to projects and clients that suck the creativity out of you.
When your mental resources are limited, you need to make sure they’re going to the right tasks. Burnout decimates your motivation, making working on projects you’re uninterested in an agonizing process.
Finding a creative outlet
Find a completely unrelated creative outlet: look for a creative task with lower stakes to help ease you back into things and re-ignite your creativity and motivation.
What are the things in your own life that you enjoy but aren’t necessarily “productive”?
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What burnout is
Burnout can be broken down into three parts:
- Exhaustion: it could lead you to be easily upset, have trouble sleeping, get sick more often, and struggle to concentrate.
What Causes Burnout
6 components of the workplace environment that can contribute to burnout:
- Workload
- Control
- Reward
- Community
- Fairness
- Values.
We end up with burnout when one or more of these areas of our work don’t match our needs.
The Risks of Burnout
Chronic psychosocial stress that’s common in people suffering from burnout can impair personal and social functioning as well as overwhelming your cognitive skills and neuroendocrine systems.
Over time the effects of burnout can lead to memory, attention, and emotional problems.
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How to overcome burnout
- Prioritise Nourishment. Get quality rest, eat food that will fuel your body's recovery, exercise gently, get fresh air and also nourish your heart.
- Acknowledge You...
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“Toxic” People
Usually, such people think negatively, are self-centered, hypercritical, communicating with ulterior motives and life. Toxic people make you feel uncomfortable, guilty, and frustrated, and can r...
Pessimism
Unless you have clinical depression, pessimism is just a bad habit. Many adopt pessimism from childhood models or from a painful event and end up making it a part of their life.
Consume inspiring content, or record your achievements and things you are grateful for, and routinely look through these lists to remind yourself of your abilities in difficult moments.
Limiting Yourself
Feeling sorry for yourself, procrastinating and adopting a binary or pessimistic world view are common ways of self-limitation.
Work on your priorities and attitudes to find untapped opportunities. Being ready to face something new opens doors for you.
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Move Past Regret
Dwelling in regret and despair over the past mistakes and failures isn’t productive.
Use the same energy to realize and move forward with your dreams. Use your limited brain cycles wise...
The Stigma Of Failure
Don’t let failure ruin your self-esteem, or stop you from achieving your goals. Initial setbacks and mistakes are natural and instructive.
Almost every great person has experienced failure before achieving extraordinary success.
Our competitive Advantage
We all are unique and have tremendous value. It’s always good to understand and embrace your individuality, instead of curbing it for fitting in the status quo. Our differences are often our competitive advantages.
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Ground Yourself In Reality
Brainstorming lets you speculate without restriction, but your ideas must be checked against reality. Be realistic about what options are actionable, and then take the next steps.
...Identify First Steps
Big tasks tend to lead to procrastination if we don’t immediately choose the first steps. Study past similar tasks, the necessity for it and how to achieve it.
Having a time and a place when you know you’ll need to present your ideas to an audience is a good way to force you to structure your approach.
Choose Specific Goals
Breaking your big picture into specific doable goals will make it much more actionable. Especially if they come with a finite timeline.
Big questions are worth asking but they should be framed in a way that doesn’t feel burdensome or insurmountable.
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Take A Break
When you’re working on a big project, taking a real break is important for mental productivity.
Stop the project you’re working on, take some real time away, and come back to it with a ...
Mind Map It
A common reason for feeling stuck on a project is because there’s too much information to process, causing you to lose clarity on your end goal.
Mind mapping is a visual note-taking style to help you get your ideas out on paper. Essentially, you’re making a map of how all of your ideas relate to one another. Start with one central idea, like the overall project goal or just a piece of it. From there, think about the major tasks, goals, or ideas behind the projects.
Try A Change Of Scenery
Getting out of the space you associate with your project can help bring an unexpected shift in your perspective.
Try to get away from the setting you’ve been working in. Do you work from home? Try a new location like a coffee shop, library, or coworking space. Work in an office? Go offsite with your team.
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Recharging your energy
Fully switch off
We're usually tempted to spend breaks doing things that are convenient but aren’t truly restful (internet shopping, browsing the latest news, etc.)
But brief work breaks are only genuinely rejuvenating when they give you the chance to fully switch off. Any kind of activity that involves willpower or concentration, even if it’s not in a work context, is only going to add to your fatigue levels.
Take short breaks early and often
The timing of our breaks makes a difference.
Although it may be tempting to wait until we’re flagging later in the day before allowing ourselves a short break, we actually respond better to breaks in the morning - it seems we need to have some fuel in the tank to benefit from a re-fill.
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Turn regret into motivation
- Acknowledge how you cope with regret: ignoring it makes it more present;
- Stop the regrets spiral, until you are ready to face the situation with more clarity;
- Revisit the story...
The disease of "What if"
It’s human nature to linger on feelings of regret. We look back and think that missed opportunities(real or not) could have set us on a different, possibly more rewarding path. Unchecked, these emotions become overwhelming sources of stress and anxiety.
Turn regret into motivation
- Acknowledge how you cope with regret: ignoring it makes it more present
- Stop the regrets spiral, until you are ready to face the situation with more clarity
- Revisit the story and identify practical lessons you can learn from it
- Treat yourself like your ideal mentor would
- Ask yourself why you feel regret and work backward to identify the values that are tied up in your feelings
- The cure for anticipating regret isn’t feeling lousy or overthinking, but pursuing solutions, using the wisdom gained through self-reflection.
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Don’t Improve All Things at Once
Create a list of what you want to change and place the easiest issues firstly.
When you finish improving one aspect, only then you can start the next step. The first steps are im...
Procrastinating Is Not Always Bad
It doesn’t mean that you should procrastinate all the time as you want.
If you’re working on a project, for example, schedule an alarm every 2 hours and relax for about 15 minutes. But don’t spend all your free time on unproductive activities: do exercise for your body and for eyes, go for a walk or have a meal if it’s needed.
Don’t Tell Anybody About Your Plans
When you tell someone about your goal, you already feel partially satisfied because you start thinking that you’ve done some steps on the way towards your goal.
Plus, some of the people you tell might demotivate you.
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