Burnout Help: How To Quickly Help Yourself When You Are Experiencing Burnout
Mental Exhaustion – I’m so tired of thinking this over.
Physical Exhaustion – I’m so tired of doing the same thing over and over again.
Emotional Exhaustion – I’m so tired of feeling anxious and stressed.
When we are experiencing burnout, exhaustion can also happen alongside:
Feeling mentally distant from or cynical about our tasks – Does this even matter anymore?
Making more mistakes – My thinking keeps distracting me from reaching my goals.
Unable to get on top of our emotions – I keep feeling sad, even when I’m not at work.
If you can relate to any of the above symptoms or thoughts, it is possible that you are experiencing burnout.
It is important to note that if you are experiencing situations or thoughts that are more than you can handle on your own, seek help from a qualified mental health professional. Trusted mental health agencies can be found at the bottom of this webpage.
Preventing Burnout
We want to try and prevent the symptoms discussed above. The reality of life is that it is commonly exhausting when there are threats and challenges in our path. Threats and challenges are stressors, which you can find further information about under stress help.
First way to preventing burnout is to make sure we have the adequate mental and physical resources for dealing with the threats and challenges. If we don’t have the necessary resources, we will start to exhaust more resources than we have available!
What the necessary physical and mental resources look like is going to be different for each individual, so it can be good to discuss it with a trusted friend or mentor, but a good starting point is to ask yourself questions like:
Am I taking on more tasks than I am able to do with my currently available time resources?
Am I doing tasks that require more emotional resources than I have available right now?
Am I doing too many tasks, that require too much mental switching throughout the day?
Am I taking on tasks that are outside of my areas of knowledge and expertise without additional resources to help me?
Am I doing tasks which I am able to see little purpose in, without additional resources to guide me?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, the first step is to find the resources that you are currently lacking, to complete the tasks.
This resource may be simply a friend or mentor to talk the tasks over with to gain an outsider's perspective on how any systems could be changed, or to help process through how you are feeling around tasks.
It might be literal added job resources (e.g. staffing, time) which you may need to negotiate with a manager. It can be helpful to go to the manager with the problem, suggested solutions, and justification for how the solutions will aid with better reaching the organisation (and managers’) goals.
The resource might be additional help so that you can step away from the task until you are able to recover some of your personal resources.
Recovering From Burnout
Recovering From Burnout
You may, unfortunately, already be in the midst of experiencing burnout, relating heavily to the symptoms discussed at the top of this article. If that is the case, I’m sorry that that is your current experience. Here are some tips for overcoming and recovering after an experience of burnout.
1. Seek rest by finding help:
The strategies that apply for preventing burnout (discussed in the section above) directly apply to burnout recovery. You have more than likely exhausted some of your personal resources (mental, emotional or physical) and you may need to find additional, external, resources to help you recover your personal resources. This may require talking to a trusted friend or mentor for an outsider’s perspective on what resources would best benefit you at this time.
You may find that you need to step away from the demands from a time, but this stepping away should not be for avoidance, but rather to help you get some mental clarity for seeking the necessary additional resources. Just taking a break and then returning to the identical situation will find yourself feeling just as exhausted as before.
2. Seek emotional support:
There may be demands that you feel no one else can help with or demands from which you are unable to take a break. In the midst of a burnout experience, it can feel near impossible to gain a different perspective on a situation. In these cases, it's important that you seek emotional support from a trusted friend or mentor with whom you can process through your thoughts and feeling around the demands.
One common thought associated with burnout is cynicism, where we grow sceptical that a situation will ever change or improve. Your friend or mentor can help you think through the facts of the demands, and your life situation in general, to identify if there may be additional resources you might have missed or have a reluctance to find.
They can also help you identify if there are any thoughts that aren’t true reflections of the reality of your situation. You may just find talking the situation over to be cathartic, but it is important, again, to seek emotional support with goals of helping yourself overcome the burnout experience.
3. Leave the demand:
There may be some situations where the demands are constantly exhausting your personal resources, and you have the choice to leave or stop the demands. Where this is the case, it may be necessary to step away from the demands. Talk this over with a trusted friend or mentor, as they should, again, be able to help give you an additional perspective on whether a demand is necessary or not.
For example, we might feel that a certain volunteer position is ‘necessary’ because we are the only one who is able to perform the relevant tasks in an organisation. Additional perspective may help you see that a) someone else could do the relevant tasks, but it would just be different to how you would perform them, or b) the lack of additional support available for you to complete the tasks may indicate that the position is not as relevant to the organisation’s goals as you thought they might be. Either of these situations could mean it is not actually necessary for you to continue in that role with the demands.
Again, there are many, if not more, demands that we feel are necessary, and that is where it is important to find those additional resources and supports.
It is worth repeating:
If you are also experiencing anxiety or depression at the same time as experiencing, burnout, it is important to seek professional support. We don’t need to go through those experiences on our own!Further help
There are many agencies who can help when you feel there is a stressor or an experience of burnout that you can’t handle on your own.
Don’t assume that your feelings are “not enough” to need support.
Some supports in Australia include:
Beyond Blue - Beyond Blue provides information and support to help everyone in Australia achieve their best possible mental health, whatever their age and wherever they live.
headspace - headspace is a mental health support service for young people and their families with a focus on early intervention. Young people aged between 12 and 25 experiencing mental health issues can contact them online or via the phone to access support services from 9 am to 1 am, 7 days a week.
Lifeline - Contact Lifeline for support if you are experiencing a personal crisis or have suicidal thoughts. You can call them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from anywhere in Australia for crisis support. You can also send a text message or contact their confidential online chat.
MensLine - MensLine Australia is a telephone and online counselling service for men with emotional health and relationship concerns. Men can contact them for free professional support from anywhere in Australia 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
For further reading and practical stress and burnout prevention strategies, check out How Burnout Stops: A Practical Guide To Stress Management, Burnout Prevention and Burnout Recovery.
Check out more free resources from Coolout!