One TA Subscriber wants to fully show up for work and life without burning out:
The biggest challenge I’m currently facing is not burning out while working to my fullest potential.
Like so many of our subscribers’ biggest challenges, this one likely strikes a chord throughout the broader community as well.
We all genuinely want to do our best. We also want to feel our best. Regardless of our desires and ambitions, achieving these two bests often feels like we’re constantly fussing with an old-fashioned balance scale that refuses to, well…balance.
So!
Question: Are ‘avoiding burnout’ and ‘doing your best’ mutually exclusive concepts?
Answer: They can be, but they don’t have to be.
A bright side for everyone experiencing burnout: you’re not alone! That’s a bright side not only because you have good company, support, and genuine understanding about how you’re feeling, but also because the dramatic rise of reported burnout in the workplace means a lot of experts are studying the issue in-depth and finding life changing solutions.
Choose your own burnout expert and strategy from below:
The experts: Brené Brown + Emily and Amelia Nagoski
Their core philosophy for beating burnout
Burnout isn’t only about how much work we’re doing or how much stress we’re aware of feeling.
A major burnout contributor is emotional exhaustion, which can build up in the body, lead to significant physical symptoms, such as IBS and heart disease, and also wreak havoc on your central nervous system — all sometimes without you even noticing.
Strategy: Learn to recognize your stressors, label the emotions they spark in you, and then independently complete your own stress cycle to move on and feel refreshed.
Resources:
The expert: Cal Newport
His core philosophy for beating burnout
To overcome burnout while also doing work and creating things that make us feel proud and accomplished, we must start by altering our relationship to productivity and our understanding of what it is.
He argues that society’s current understanding of productivity is rooted in manufacturing. The ‘term’ productivity started as a literal, visual, and quantifiable measure of production.
Knowledge workers experience burnout when trying to gauge their value in manufacturing terms.
Strategy: Try to reduce your workload to what’s truly important and meaningful, work at a pace that feels natural to your own mind and body, and spend your mental energy on quality instead of quantity.
Resources:
The expert: Clinical fatigue specialist Vincent Deary
His core philosophy for beating burnout
Burnout stems from modern workers’ overdeveloped ability to work hard combined with their underdeveloped, and often non-existent, ability to rest and recover. The common mindset that we are safe or can rest only after we’ve finished that big thing is erroneous and a core contributor to chronic burnout.
Strategy: Experiment with different activities until you can understand and define what “rest” means and feels like in your mind and body.
You’ll likely know it when you experience it, but some common signals include:
- Feeling a deep sense of safety in your body
- Being able to breathe more deeply, slowly, and fully than you typically do
- Thinking markedly less about work or anything else for that matter
Resources: