How to Beat Burnout

We are living in a world which convinces us that unless we are being productive 24/7, we aren’t doing enough.

TikTok videos are telling me that I should want to be That Girl, that I should be waking up at 5am and getting a day’s work in by noon. YouTubers are telling me that having a full-time job or being a student isn’t enough; I need a side hustle and seven different streams of passive income. No matter how many areas of my life I try to work on, change doesn’t happen overnight. By the time I’ve reached the goal I once dreamed of, it doesn’t seem like an achievement anymore because there’s already ten new expectations I’m yet to begin working on.

And this is where burnout steps in. I want to be doing so much. Too much. There’s not enough time, energy or feasibility for it all and that stresses me out because I know that this is setting me up to fail. So instead of doing some and feeling shit for not completing it all, I do none of it. Why does it feel better to do nothing at all than to try and partly succeed? Probably because I don’t see it as partly succeeding and more as partly failing. Doing nothing doesn’t feel like failing because at least then I know I haven’t actually tried at all.

There seems to be an easy solution to this; set myself expectations and goals which match my abilities and resources available. But the thing is it’s not always as simple as that. I’ve developed burning out as a habit in my life and it feels almost normal now to get to that point once in a while. Sometimes I want to burn myself out. I want to feel so mentally drained, overwhelmed with work and commitments, taking on everyone else’s problems to the point that I zone out into an unconscious state. Because this is when I feel like I can finally stop. I get to this stage and I know “Okay you’ve gone too far now. You deserve to rest.”. It’s a toxic behaviour really and I know I need to quit, but how can I when my social environment is praising my ability to multitask, be a “Girl Boss” and hustle my way to the top, all while procrastinating to no end?

What really is Burnout? It is a state of physical and emotional exhaustion, often as a result of stress from things like work, family and other commitments. We all have stress triggers in our lives, but sometimes they can be hard to identify and without realising it we have exhausted ourselves before we can take time to stop. Burnout can happen in a number of ways. Like I mentioned before, my mind feeds on burnout. It recognises the familiarity of getting to that stage and pushes me further, like a form of self-sabotage. Burnout feels like when you have no money in your bank, but you’ve already promised £20 to a friend, still need to pay your rent and yet want to go shopping and spend even more. Money is like energy; once the bank account is depleted that’s a sign you need to stop engaging in the behaviours you have been doing to get to this point and take time to build it back up again. The only problem is that we cannot physically see how much we have in our energy bank, so it’s harder to know when you’ve gone too far.

So how am I going to try to prevent burnout in the future? Well, I think the best way to start is to try and measure my energy levels in a way that makes sense to me. If I make a list of everything I have going on in a week, I can label certain tasks depending on how much energy they will take from me, so I can track what days are more intense than others. Then, when I choose what I want to work on, commit to and engage with I can balance them out so that most days are as steady as each other.

Stress is also a vital factor to consider in beating burnout. Some tasks and commitments will induce higher levels of stress than others. And there are sometimes ongoing stress triggers out of our control that exist 24/7. Stress uses up a lot of energy, just like sometimes more money comes out of your bank account than you would choose for things like bills going up due to the cost of living. It’s something that’s happening and it’s out of your control and that bloody sucks, but you’ve got to factor it in and get on with it. If you’ve got one of these ongoing stresses in your life as I do, you need to put extra energy aside. This is how you don’t let burnout take control. You’ve got this reserve energy supply at hand; it can be in the form of a free afternoon/evening you’ve set aside to catch up on things you thought you could fit into the day but didn’t. Or it could be as simple as a meal you prepped and shoved in the freezer for a night when cooking just isn’t on the cards. The key to beating burnout is having your extra energy weapons at hand, to whip out when things get tough and tiring. Just when life thinks it can get the better of me, I’m going to show them wrong.

It's okay to experience burnout now and again. We all can get caught up in the moment and forget to pay attention to what we are realistically capable of. It's when you become aware that you're burning yourself out a few times every single month that it's time to make some changes. These need to be small steps because habits are hard to break and it's tricky to force yourself to rest when you still have so much to do. But just remember that by letting yourself have some self-care, some time to chill and recharge, you will be able to bounce back with a clearer head than if you had just kept going.