Burnout is not only a new trendy buzzword. Burnout is actually an experience that is becoming more and more common especially after the global pandemic. A recent survey shows 59% of employees feel burned out, up from 13.5% two years ago.
But what is burnout? How to know if you’re burned out? What causes to it? And how do we recover? I’m going to be answering all of those questions here.
What is burnout?
Before we get any further, it’s really important for us to define what burnout is. The World Health Organization recently updated their definition in the International Classification of Diseases diagnostic manual to say this:
“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
The manual states that burnout refers to occupational contexts, not other areas of life.
In nearly a decade of coaching high achievers, I’ve seen burnout from chronic stress outside the workplace. Before my partner became an Occupational Therapist, I had a limited understanding of the term “occupation.” “Occupation” doesn’t just have to refer to how you earn a living. The World Federation of Occupational Therapists defines occupation as: “the everyday activities that people do as individuals, in families and with communities to occupy time and bring meaning and purpose to life. Occupations include things people need to, want to and are expected to do.”
So now, if we combine those definitions I believe we get a very holistic definition of burnout. On this podcast, we’ll define burnout as “a syndrome of symptoms caused by insufficiently managed chronic stress resulting from internal and external pressures to consistently perform activities that an individual needs to do, wants to do, and is expected to do.”
Now, what are those syndromes of symptoms?
What Burnout Feels Like
- Feeling depleted of mental, emotional, and physical energy or feeling completely exhausted of all energy in any of those spheres
- Feeling mental distance, disengagement, cynicism or negativity from the meaningful occupations and activities that used to bring fulfillment and joy
- Lack of consistent motivation, productivity, and efficiency in your day-to-day life activities
These symptoms indicate you’re in the final stress response stage, where your body forces rest. However, chronic stress doesn’t always lead to burnout. Many CEOs, athletes, artists, writers, parents, and everyday people navigate busy lives under significant internal and external pressure to excel.
It’s not the chronic stress itself that leads to burnout. It’s chronic stress without an adequate nervous system and energy recovery that leads to burnout.
As we’ll discuss in later episodes, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, going on vacation – these can help prevent burnout. But depending on the individual, it likely will not be enough. We’ll dive deeper into that in future episodes, but for now, let’s discuss the factors that contribute to burnout.
What causes burnout?
You’re going to hear me say this a lot here, but my answer is “it depends.” Like how two people experiencing the same situation interpret it differently. Just as one person may experience trauma while another does not. Two people in the same situation may react differently, with one experiencing burnout and the other not.
However, certain risk factors for burnout can help identify which causes need to be addressed.
- You are as a high achiever
- You are as highly sensitive person
- You are a people pleaser
- You work so hard that replacing you would require hiring two to three people.
- You are a perfectionist (either overt or covert)
- You have numerous hobbies and commitments, and people often wonder how you manage to get everything done.
These, combined with our modern-day capitalist society, are a recipe for burnout. Our upbringing often reinforces societal expectations. Society trains us to be better producers and tie our worth to daily accomplishments. These can contribute to burnout. But there’s an important part of our understanding of burnout that is often misrepresented and misunderstood. Burnout is not a cycle – it’s a wave.
The Truth About Burnout
Normally, when we talk about burnout, we view it as a cycle. We visualize it in a circular model. At the top, you have the peak-performance version of yourself. As you slide down, efficiency decreases and energy wanes. Eventually, you crash and land in burnout at the bottom. Then, your body forces you to rest. You might try superficial self-care strategies and feel a bit better. You return to life and tackle it the same way as before burnout.
The truth is, though, with common self-care methods and without any habit change, we don’t get back up to our peak performance space. We feel better, absolutely, but we come up just shy of where we started as that fully optimized version of you.
The next time we burn out we fall harder than we did the first time, and then crawl our way back out of burnout up into some degree of function. Over time, this peak to the wave keeps getting lower and lower until it feels like there’s not much difference between being burnt out and living your life.
You’re surviving, and that’s about it, which we both know is no way to live your life. You deserve better, and maybe you know that too, but where do you go from here?
How do you recover from burnout?
Over my time working with other highly sensitive high achievers, I have discovered that there are three phases to recovering from burnout and preventing it from ever happening again.
First, you have to Recover. When we’re burnt out, our nervous system is dysregulated and working on overdrive. Our liver and our stress responses have exhausted all efforts to get us the energy we need to be successful in what we’re trying to do. This then, in turn, makes it really hard for us to make any positive changes in our life and we’re truly running on our ingrained habits. This is why, in the Flow State App, we look to capitalize on the little pockets of time between activities, for example, to do a 60-second guided meditation, or a 15 minute yoga class, or a 3 minute breathwork exercise.
When we’re burned out, our nervous system becomes dysregulated and operates on overdrive. You have nothing left to give, especially to yourself, so we have to start small and start healing your exhausted nervous system. We get you back up to the top of one of the waves (maybe a higher wave that if you were do try this on your own).
Optimize Your Habits to Prevent Burnout
Now, instead of heading back down another wave into another experience of burnout, we can start to address your current habits to stop the perpetuation of exhaustion and energy depletion. This is where the Optimize phase comes in and you can start to objectively look at your external reality, your decisions and actions that keep you pushing yourself back down the curve.
Now that your nervous system is continuing to heal because you have adjusted your external habits to better support your optimal performance, it’s time to dive in and Elevate your thought patterns.
Elevate Your Mindset to Avoid Burnout
In the list of risk factors, you’ll notice many relate to internal belief systems that we can be taught and strengthened over time. It is possible to bring into balance your high achiever, people pleaser, highly sensitive nature, perfectionism and everything else we can use to sabotage ourselves. But the only way to do this is to look within, release that which is sabotaging and strengthen that which is serving.
I know that this all went by a little fast, but consider this the introductory chapter to the guidebook that will help you fully recover from burnout and prevent it from happening again. Each episode of this podcast is going to expand on the concepts touched on here so that you can Recover from burnout, Optimize your habits and Elevate your impact on your corner of the world.
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Looking forward to getting to know you!
