Burnout can sneak up on you. And it’s awful when it does. The warning signs were all there. Increased stress, diminished patience, less sleep, maybe even fluctuation in weight and eating habits, increased avoidance, and attempts to distract yourself that only result in an increase in your workload and a decrease in productivity despite the temporary reprieve from the stress. That being said, here are 5 things you can do to help reduce burnout.
1. Set Firm Boundaries
If you’re burnt out, or even on your way towards burning out, time and energy are precious resources. It’s okay to say no to activities or people in your life that are going to sap those resources. Focusing on yourself is important when you’re struggling to balance the responsibilities in your life. After all, these responsibilities are yours and yours alone and no matter what, you are accountable for completing them, no matter what happens.
2. Stay Consistent with Meals and Meal Prep
If you are one of those people who cooks for yourself, be consistent. Even if that means making a super simple meal for the week. There are plenty of one pot or one baking sheet recipes out there that make cleaning easy and have little prep. Whatever it takes to reduce effort so you can stay focused on the things that need more of your attention.
Eating healthily and consistently is important given how a poor diet can negatively impact focus and energy levels. If you don’t cook, be sure not to skip meals! It can be easy to be so focused on the tasks at hand that you forget to stop and eat. Whether food is about pleasure or strictly about functioning, make sure you get some.
3. Make lists
My personal favorite. You can be sure after writing this I’ll cross it off my daily to-do list. I even like to assign the first task on my list as ‘make list’ so that I immediately have something to cross off after it’s done to give me a small dopamine boost to get me going.
Start with smaller tasks on the list so that as you go in order, you get that extra bit of dopamine every time you accomplish the next task. This will build up and helps you stay focused on the larger tasks. You can also break larger tasks down into smaller tasks and cross those off as you complete those steps before crossing off the big task altogether.
If games on your phone, and video games in general, can use this technique to get you hooked onto the game, why not use it on yourself to keep yourself focused on what you need to get done throughout the day?
4. Take time for your hobbies
Whether it be through hitting the gym for an intense workout or going to a martial arts, aerial, dance, rec basketball game, arts class, book club, movie, off-Broadway show, cooking class, rock climbing gym, swim, run, or even binge-watching Love is Blind (is it really though?), or reading a book, take time for yourself.
Unwinding through doing something you love is more likely to help you de-stress and relax. Especially if that activity is physically active, which helps get the stress out of the body and lower cortisol levels. For those folks who don’t like to move around so much, make sure the activity is stimulating in a way that balances out the demands of your day with some sort of play.
Carl Jung, after building Bollingen Tower for himself, a stone tower with no electricity, which he built by hand, took some time to create paper boats and channels in the lake bed using his finger to sail them through. An activity he loved as a child. He did this up through his 80’s, keeping a sense of play and wonder alive throughout his life.
5. Get consistent sleep
Perhaps most importantly, getting consistent sleep is the best way to reduce burnout. This can be challenging with increased anxiety from work and from the daily stress of life. Maintaining a consistent evening ritual where you reduce screen time, don’t eat 3 hours before sleeping, minimize drinking before bed, floss, and get into bed by the same time each night can help you get consistent sleep.
This may involve writing a list of the things you didn’t do today and reminding yourself that you can finish them tomorrow. And that it’s OKAY to finish them tomorrow, that you did enough today and that you are enough.
Maybe it’s spending some time journaling at the end of the day to process your feelings and to have some open-ended questions for a possible dream that night to answer. Whatever your ritual is, keep it consistent.
In Buddhism, the room where you sleep is traditionally used for just sleep. This way when you enter the space, you know that you are entering it to fall asleep, helping you unconsciously begin to unwind. In a shared NYC apartment, this isn’t always possible.
But setting a specific light in your bedroom to signal that you are going to sleep, or only sitting on your bed when you are about to sleep may be adjustments you can make that will help.
And most importantly, even if you struggle to stay asleep or fall asleep, waking up at the same time each day will help you establish and maintain a steady circadian rhythm, ensuring that when you are less burnt out, your sleep steadies itself fairly quickly.
