Antidotes to Burnout (Part 2)
by Robert Hackman
Photograph by Lucas Santos on Unsplash
This burnout, I don’t want it
Lyric from the song ‘Burnout’
By Mugsea
This is the second of three articles regarding Antidotes to Burnout.
Burnout is a state of exhaustion from some combination of emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical deficits from sustained or recurring stress. It makes you vulnerable to depression and other psychological difficulties.
It can be caused by being overwhelmed by work, parenting, caretaking, and relationship issues. Our response to personal losses, trauma, and world events also contributes. Burnout is characterized by decreased motivation, diminished performance, disinterest in relationships, and persistently negative attitudes and outlook.
The purpose of the articles is to answer three questions. What leads to burnout? What changes must you make to prevent exhaustion? How do Everyday Legacy Mindsets provide an antidote to burnout and put you on the pathway to living and leading with fewer regrets?
The first article revealed the causes of unwanted stress.
This article (Part 2) answers the question, ‘What changes must you make to prevent exhaustion?’
I realize the list is long. Still, you must adopt some of them to keep from burning out.
Priorities
Narrow Your Focus
More obligations than you can handle wear you down without time to replenish. It would be best if you decided what you want to stop doing. What can you cut out?
Determine if they need to be done, and if so, resolve to get them done by someone else or some other way.
Reducing your commitments to the few that matter most rather than saying yes to the many allows you to give them the appropriate focus while retaining vital time for reflection and recovery.
Create and Maintain Boundaries
Determine your boundaries regarding work, family, friends, and volunteer activities. Identify people, situations, and environments that trigger you and induce you to violate what you value most. Get support from others to help hold them.
Slow Down
Notice your pace. Commit to slowing down when it gets too fast. Introduce breathing and meditation practices for yourself. They can be done in brief interludes throughout your day or for longer durations.
Restorative
Gratitude Practices
Practicing gratitude reduces stress, contributes to well-being, and fosters resilience. It can be as simple as identifying something you are grateful for before getting out of bed to more extensive ones. Consider making it part of a journaling practice or attuning yourself to what you appreciate.
Prioritize Relationships
Getting caught up in the whirlwind of work and life, it can be too easy to allow relationships to atrophy. Guard against this by regularly reaching out to those you care about. It helps to list the relationships you value most and monitor your degree of interaction. Please pay attention to how you feel after connecting with them.
Build in Reflection Time
Carve out time and space for contemplation, taking time to assess whether you are on track or need to correct. Consider whether your words, actions, and decisions align with what you hold most dear.
Participate in communities and peer-to-peer group discussions that are secular, religious, spiritual, and otherwise as appropriate for you.
Get Support
Ask for help, engage a coach, therapist, mentors, friends, and family, or take part in peer support groups that nourish you and reveal you are not alone.
Creative Endeavors
You name it. It could be engaging in art, dance, music, collecting, or other hobby.
Move Your Body/ Eat Healthily
Commit daily time to exercise, walk, stretch, do yoga, or do other types of movement. Get out in nature as much as possible. These practices contribute to enhanced physical, mental, and spiritual health.
Pay attention to what you eat, how it affects you, and how you eat. Eating mindfully slows you down, improves digestion, and causes you to eat less.
Sleep
Sleep deprivation can have devastating consequences. Prioritize the amount of sleep and rest you need without judgment. Establish helpful sleep routines.
Notice sleep disrupters and inhibitors and take steps to eliminate them.
Pressure Relieving
Laughter
Stay attuned to the absurdity of life, situations, and the excessive and complex predicaments you sometimes find yourself in. Look for humor.
Cultivating the ability to laugh at yourself and your responses to circumstances takes the pressure off and puts them in a proper perspective. Seek out shared laughter.
Stories
Pay attention to the stories you tell yourself and the motivations you attribute to others. Evaluate their helpfulness, ascertain their validity, and respond in the ways best you can.
Make Room for Your Shadow and a Full Range of Emotions
Take time to pause, tune in to your emotions, and give yourself permission to feel them. Tears can provide a significant release.
Take time to learn about emotions. In her book Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown
cites research showing how understanding our emotions changes how we experience them, improving our response to them and fostering resilience.
Do not even consider trying to apply all these antidotes to burnout. Doing so would be stress-inducing, not stress-relieving. Ouch!
Play with them, determine which ones help most, and how and when you will practice them. Pay attention to their effects by themselves and in combination.
You cannot expect to engage in active work, family, and personal endeavors without risking burnout. Thus, you must take intentional action to avoid it.
Worthy Inquiries:
- Have you ever felt yourself becoming exhausted or headed towards burnout? If so, how did you respond?
- Do you take time to pause? What do you become aware of when you do?
- What activities and experiences restore you? How can you prioritize these?
- What can you stop doing altogether, get someone else to do it, or get it done another way? Do you choose your commitments carefully?
- Who are the people you value most in your life? How will you commit to fostering those relationships?
If you want to discuss ways to develop and grow your leadership to benefit yourself, your team, your family, or your organization, please reach out to me. I welcome the connection.
Robert Hackman, Principal, 4C Consulting and Coaching, helps people live and lead with fewer regrets. He grows and develops leaders through executive coaching consulting, facilitation, and training of individuals, teams, and organizations. He is committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He facilitates trusting environments that promote uncommonly candid conversations. Rob is also passionate about the power of developing Legacy Mindsets and has conducted over 50 Legacy interviews with people to date.
A serious man with a dry sense of humor who loves absurdity can often be found hiking rocky elevations or making music playlists. His mixes, including Pandemic Playlists and Music About Men, among others, can be found on Spotify.
Bravely bring your curiosity to a conversation with Rob, schedule via voice or text @ 484.800.2203 or rhackman@4cconsulting.net.