What is burnout?

Burnout is characterised as a sense of helplessness, and emotional exhaustion.

It’s essentially when you have an overwhelming sense of dread, that feels like anxiety on steroids. The constant sense of anxiety comes from the accumulation day-after-day of stress that never ends.  

How do you become burnout?

Emotional exhaustion is often the first sign of burnout, and is the symptom most strongly linked to negative impacts on our health, relationships and work.  

Let’s take a moment to dive more into emotions. What are they?  

At the most basic level,

Emotions are our whole-body reaction to an event, circumstance, situation or person, which involves the release of neurochemicals in the brain.

Left to their own devices, emotions will end on their own.  

Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion. We may get stuck simply because we're constantly being exposed to situations that activate that emotion, such as returning to a stressful job every single day. Sometimes we get stuck, because we get lost in a difficult feeling, such as rage, grief, despair, and we don't know how to move through it.

The most typical emotion that we get stuck in when it comes to burnout is stress.  

Dealing with your stress is a separate process from dealing with the things that cause your stress.

Stressors are what activate the stress response in your body, and they can be anything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste or imagine that could do you harm. These are external stressors, such as work, money, family, time, expectations, etc. and they're less tangible than internal stressors, which are body image, self-criticism etc.  

Stress is the neurological and physiological shift that happens in your body when you encounter one of these stressors. When you are in stress mode, you need to do something that activates your parasympathetic nervous system that signals to your body that you're safe, or else you stay in a stressed mode with neurochemicals and hormones degrading your digestive system, immune system, cardiovascular system, musculoskeletal system, and reproductive system.  

Just because you may have dealt with the external stressor, doesn't mean that you've dealt with the stress itself. For example, imagine if you work with someone who you consider to be a pain at work. Every time you get into a meeting with him, you get a similar flood of adrenaline and cortisol as you would if you were faced with a threat to your safety. Because it's work, you have to sit in the meeting and be nice and appropriate to your colleague. You can't escalate the situation by telling your colleague what you really think of him, so you just keep quiet and carry on. And this happens day after day after day.

You are not built to live in a constant stress state, and if you get stuck there, the physiological response intended to save you can instead slowly start to pull you towards burnout.  

How to prevent burnout

It's absolutely essential to your well-being, that you give your body the resources it needs to process the internal stress and bring your body back to the rest and digest state.  

You need to learn how to complete a stress cycle if you want to avoid burnout. Here are some of the things we find are useful for completing a stress cycle:  

• Run, swim or dance around your living room. Anything that moves your body enough to get you to breathe deeply.  

• Standing up from your chair, taking a deep breath, tensing all your muscles for 20 seconds, and then shaking it out with a big exhale.  

• Slow, deep breaths make the exhalation longer and slower than the inhalation.  

• Laughter, and hanging out with friends.  

• Crying is another great way of moving through a stress cycle.  

What you tend to find is that different strategies work better on different days. So sometimes something isn't practical to do, or sometimes you've been holding on to so much stress that a simple run or a dance around your kitchen isn't enough, and that's fine.  

What you need to do is make sure that you experiment and are committed to completing your stress cycle each day because your well-being and health depend on it.