Burnout: A Modern Epidemic
Dec 09, 2024
Burnout is a growing concern, often creeping up unnoticed until all of a sudden it feels as though a 4-tonne elephant is pressing down on you, leaving you gasping for air!
But what exactly is burnout, and how can you navigate your way through it - or, better yet, prevent it altogether?
Recognising Burnout
Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion triggered by prolonged and excessive stress. Its effects can manifest in various ways, including:
- Physical Symptoms: Persistent fatigue, headaches, and disrupted sleep patterns
- Emotional Changes: Low mood, irritability, and a sense of being overwhelmed
The impacts of burnout vary from person to person but often lead to difficulty concentrating, reduced performance, and an overwhelming sense of dread about work, social commitments, or daily responsibilities.
Imagine burnout as a staircase. At the base, you're thriving. But as you climb each step, stress accumulates, and subtle changes in mood, behaviour, and energy levels emerge. Recognising these early shifts is crucial to taking action before reaching the top step, where burnout fully takes hold. If you can identify yourself climbing the staircase of the "Mental Health Continuum" chart below, it’s important to take corrective action before you reach Step 5.
Preventing Burnout Through Self-Care
The best way to combat burnout is to prevent it. Understanding your personal "Mental Health Continuum" and how stress impacts you is the first step toward safeguarding your well-being.
Intentional, consistent self-care is a cornerstone of prevention. Yet, in the chaos of daily life, self-care is often the first thing we neglect. Time at the gym, a quiet lunch break, or a relaxing massage quickly fall by the wayside, displaced by back-to-back meetings and endless deadlines.
At Kinetik Global, we often remind organisations striving for high performance that even Olympians don’t sacrifice their well-being in pursuit of greatness. They prioritise recovery, focus, and balance to achieve their goals. In contrast, many modern day workplaces demand unsustainable practices, undermining both performance and health.
To help you think about your individual self-care needs, we have provided a self-care plan. This will help you identify what regular activities you need to undertake to help you prevent burnout. Having a self-care plan in place, will give you an actionable plan to follow, before you are gasping for air with no idea how to walk yourself back down the staircase from Step 5.
Addressing Burnout: Steps Toward Recovery
Recovering from burnout requires patience, intentionality, and the willingness to explore strategies that work for you. Start with these steps:
- Prioritise Self-Care: Incorporate activities that rejuvenate you every day. The activities are different for everyone, but may include exercise, mindfulness, hobbies, yoga, meditation, reading, massage etc
- Acknowledge It: Recognise and identify that you’re experiencing burnout
- Set Boundaries: Protect your time and energy by learning to say no and setting realistic expectations
- Seek Support: Verbalising your struggles can be an enormous relief. Sharing our challenges can help us reframe our thinking and prioritise our responsibilities to tackle overwhelm
- Take a Break: Get off the hamster wheel and take a break
- Reset Your Vagas Nerve System: Research your Vagas nerve system and how to reset it. You’re welcome!
- Practice Deep Breathing: Focus on your breath and take deep belly breathes. Techniques like box breathing (inhale for 4 counts, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4) can ground and calm you
- Reassess Your Goals: Reflect on what truly matters to you and adjust your priorities to align with your values. We rarely audit our priorities and get so busy chasing goals that no longer serve us. Don’t take on too many goals at once
Final Thoughts: A Call to Pause and Reflect
Burnout has a ripple effect and impacts more than just the person feeling it. The impact is felt within the workplace, personal life, relationships, and overall quality of life.
A very simple but profound piece of advice is to just stop doing what you are doing. We all have a pattern of behaviour and unless we consciously choose to change this, we tend to repeat the same habits and mistakes.
- If you stay up late and always feel tired, go to bed early
- If you are fueled by coffee, reduce the number of cups you have per day
- If you say yes by default, change your default response to I’ll come back to you on that
Change requires conscious effort, but the rewards - greater energy, focus, and well-being - are well worth it.
Take the time to prioritise yourself, embrace healthier habits, and actively reshape the patterns that may be leading you toward burnout. Your future self will thank you.
