3 Tips for Beating Burn Out
So you’re experiencing burn out? It’s hard, believe me, I know. You question if you’re on the right path. You wonder where you went wrong. Then you wonder how the heck you can get back to feeling like you’re aligned with your day to day life.
Before I start speaking into burnout - what it is, strategies to navigate it, all that good stuff, let me be the first to tell you that I have been there. You’re not alone. There’s not something wrong with you. I still have moments when I have to pause, re-align myself, and redirect so as to not hit burnout. And when I was in grad school and working up to 3 jobs at a time, I had to implement all of these strategies as to not be overcome by burnout.
Let’s define burnout, first. I feel like it’s one of those terms that gets thrown around pretty often without the speaker actually knowing what they’re referring to. I went to Help Guide’s website, which is a great resource for mental health + wellness. This article is where I found this definition.
“According to helpguide.org, burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest and motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place.
Burnout reduces productivity and saps your energy, leaving you feeling increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, and resentful. Eventually, you may feel like you have nothing more to give.
The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life—including your home, work, and social life. Burnout can also cause long-term changes to your body that make you vulnerable to illnesses like colds and flu. Because of its many consequences, it’s important to deal with burnout right away.”
Let’s jump into 3 steps that you can follow to help you handle burnout:
Assess what you’re doing.
Okay so the first step is to figure out the root of what has pushed you over the edge. What things are stressing you out? What things are taking up a lot of your brain space, and not in a good way? I do this by doing a brain dump-type exercise. I open up a blank page in one of my Hustle Sanely digital notebooks and first, I write a list of anything that is currently causing me to feel stressed out. Some examples might be: I spend too much time worrying about the future, how often I have to do laundry, I don’t know what to have for dinner tonight, how many emails are in my inbox, my Granddad has surgery coming up, etc. I list out big things, small things - just whatever comes to my mind when I ask myself, “What is stressing me out?”
Then I make a second list of things that are taking up a lot of my time + energy. Examples: Work: specifically formatting blog posts/emails and creating graphics, working out, cleaning. Then I make a third list of things that I want to put more time + energy into. Examples: planning special date nights, lettering, writing content for work (rather than formatting emails and blog posts).
Then I go back through each item on all the lists and I audit them. For the “things stressing me out” list I ask for each item: Is this something I can solve? Is this something I can ask for support in? Or is this something I need to let go? For the “things taking up my time + energy” list I ask for each item: Is this a do it, ditch it, or delegate it task? For the “things I want to put more time + energy into” list I ask for each item: What habit can I create that prompts me to make this a regular part of my life?
2. Define your priorities, including decluttering your plate.
The first part of this is taking responsibility. We allow things to make their way onto our schedules - they don’t just magically appear. When you take ownership of your schedule and what you allow on it, you empower yourself to get rid of what no longer needs to be there. Now obviously, you can’t just ditch all of your responsibilities - that’s not what I’m saying here. But you can prioritize them.
The brain dump exercise that we just went through should be really eye-opening in helping you define what your priorities currently are (where your time + energy are going) and what you want your priorities to be. If you want to overcome burnout, you’ve got to make changes by decluttering.
Chances are, just moving stuff around will be like a bandaid fix. You’ll feel more in control for a bit because you’re distracted by adjusting to your new schedule but the truth is, you still have the same amount of stuff filling your days. Take action and truly ditch and delegate things from the lists we created in step 1.
3. Audit your workflow and make sure you have margin and self-care in there.
Now that you’ve done the legwork of weeding out what doesn’t need to be on your plate anymore, you can create a new workflow to accommodate your true priorities. When I say workflow, I just mean how you structure your days and allocate your energy. In my Hustle Sanely Intensive Program (which is actually opening back up this summer, yay!) I teach the 5-Step Hustle Sanely Schedule-Building Framework.
Here’s what that looks like:
Track your time
Audit + declutter
Organize
which is broken into 5 steps:
STEP 1: Write out your roles and responsibilities.
STEP 2: Categorize what can be batched, grouped, and automated.
STEP 3: List your desired daily/weekly habits.
STEP 4: Create triggers for those habits.
STEP 5: Determine your non-negotiables.Build your weekly outline
Build your daily outline
And let’s talk about margin. Margin is just leaving space in your schedule for life to happen. You’re not a machine, you are not going to perfectly transition from one task to the next without needing to decompress, shift gears, or hey maybe your mom calls you and wants to chat for a bit, ya know? Margin is what allows us to connect. Margin is where life happens.
As you’re creating a new workflow, make sure you don’t schedule every single second of every single day. A to-do list and schedule bursting at the seams is a recipe for burnout. The way I ensure that I have margin in my days is by adding between 15-60 minutes onto how long I think each task will take as I’m planning out my day. So my workouts usually take 45 minutes, but I schedule in 90 minutes for my workouts. If I have a client call that is 60 minutes, I schedule in an hour and 15 minutes. Doing things like this allows for wiggle room. You won’t be frantically trying to hurry up and move onto the next thing, you know?
Lastly, don’t forget to make self-care part of your normal routine. Self-care doesn’t have to be done in 2 hour blocks of taking baths and going to the spa. Self-care for me looks like getting enough sleep, eating whole, nutritious food, exercising daily, reading + journaling every morning, not working outside of work hours, and spending time with my husband and loved ones.
A big part of overcoming burnout is introspection: recognizing and analyzing things that need to change in your life and acting on them. Before I go, I thought it would be encouraging to wrap up with one of my go to Bible scriptures for when I’m feeling burn out come on.
Matthew 11:28-30 from the Christian Standard Bible:
“28 Come to Me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 All of you, take up My yoke and learn from Me, because I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for yourselves. 30 For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
If you’re interested in learning more about the 5-Step Hustle Sanely Schedule-Building Framework, make sure to put your name on the waitlist for when the program opens this summer. I’m SO STOKED to run through this new and improved program with you!
Did you enjoy this blog post? If so, I bet you’d love episode 026 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast!
