9 Signs You’re About To Burn Out (& How To Prevent It)

We all want to feel, be and bring our best in every aspect of our lives, but with all the stressors we face these days, it’s hard to keep our emotional and physical batteries fully charged. When work – or life in general – starts to feel like an endless blur, or each day feels harder to get through than the last, you might be heading down the path of burnout.

I touched on the topic of burnout with Kelsey J. Patel on The Blonde Files Podcast and in this blog post about what it means to make micro changes for macro joy. But basically, when it comes to burnout and being overwhelmed, it often has nothing to do with the tasks but your mental attitude toward them. The key here is to be willing to watch yourself with radical honesty, love and acceptance, and remember that you are not doing it alone. The minute we believe we are on our own means our control has hijacked us; surrender no longer becomes an option even though it’s still available. Then those guards that you just put up block your divine flow and you end up exhausting yourself on a never-ending hamster wheel that *you* pulled out and *you* got on. Remember that you have the same power to slow down the wheel with love, step off of it, put it in storage and start accepting flow.

In 2019 the World Health Organization (WHO) considered burnout to be an official diagnosis. Under their diagnostic criteria, burnout is a psychological syndrome involving a minimum of a specific triad of symptoms – unmanageable exhaustion, cynicism or a lack of emotional engagement in your job and a decline in performance – due to work-related stressors. The official diagnosis only pertains to job-related situations, but lately, the term “burnout” has been used in a more generic sense to describe the same feelings of exhaustion, overwhelm, detachment and reduced performance in everyday life. Burnout isn’t only caused by one particular factor, or one primary, long-lasting driving force; it can also result from the cumulative effects of several less obvious but just as exhausting factors.

Here are 9 signs you’re about to burn out:

-Emotional exhaustion

-Excessive tiredness or fatigue

-Recurring physical symptoms such as headaches, stomachaches, nausea and an increased heart rate and blood pressure

-Insomnia

-Loss of motivation

-Irritability

-Anxiety & depression (in case you missed it, I have a post on all things anxiety and how to manage it right here on the blog!)

-Feeling numb about work

-Declining performance

The key to preventing burnout lies in your ability to cope with stressors. Burnout can exacerbate if you don’t have an adequate support system and lack a nourishing and rejuvenating self-care routine. Regulating your sleep schedule and getting quality sleep, practicing mindfulness, eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly will recharge your emotional and physical batteries and help you better tolerate other stressors. Making space for downtime (and actually enjoying it) is an essential part of my self-care routine. Prioritize setting aside time for yourself to indulge in things that make you happy! It’s helpful to check in with yourself on a regular basis and evaluate how much you have on your plate. Maybe something can be taken off, or someone can help you with a certain task so you don’t feel burdened.

How do you like to prevent burnout – and bring yourself back from it? I’d love to hear!

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