4 Ways to Avoid Burnout

Do you know this guy? With stressful jobs there's always risk of burnout if you don't take preventative measures. Below are a few tricks I've learned to help myself.  Have you experienced burnout? How did you get through it? Please add your tips to the list. 



Communicate – When reading about burnout, people often say to leave your work at home, but if you have a stressful job, that may not be the best—or even a realistic—option. Communicating about the stressors at work with family and friends can serve to release the stress, instead of just temporarily putting it on the back-burner. Just a few minutes of communication and working out your thoughts and emotions with people who care about you is one of the best ways to avoid burnout. Plus, instead of trying to force yourself to not think about work, there are other ways to naturally ease into thinking about other things. See below:

Practice Self-Care – Getting a massage, taking a bubble bath, enjoying a little aromatherapy, doing something creative, and many other forms of self-care help to alleviate stress and burnout. Practicing self-care naturally creates a mental state that is more relaxed, which lifts the burdens of work and responsibility. Remember, your mind and your body needs to have down time in order to recuperate, and while sleep is an excellent form of rejuvenation, you also need to be relaxed in order to experience a good sleep.

Visualize Outcomes – As mentioned, burnout often comes from the high stressors of work, but the stress itself often comes from not knowing what's going to happen and in turn feeling overwhelmed or fearful of what may happen. Take a moment after you get home from work to visualize positive outcomes from your efforts. This type of visualization is meditative and therapeutic. When you wake up the next morning, let go of those nasty little "what if" questions about what may happen, and instead, embrace those positive visualizations.

Decrease Multi-Tasking – Multi-tasking is another one of those things that's pronounced as a cure-all for numerous work tasks that must be completed. When you look at the brain, however, studies show that we are not only incapable of truly and accurately focusing on more than one thing at time, but we get better results when we do one thing at a time. Start with the most essential task that needs your attention and follow it through, and then go to the next one. While interruptions such as phone calls may occur, remember to go back to the most essential task when the phone call is over instead of getting caught up with new tasks. By taking things one at a time, you may just find that the little things you thought were so important have a way of either working themselves out or being even less important than you thought.

Please share on social media if you found this post helpful. If you have a comment or question I would be happy to discuss.