Combat Burnout By Work In Alignment With Your Energy
This article was adapted from Episode 10 of the Elevated Entrepreneur Podcast. Click here to listen.
In today’s episode, we are joined by Catherine Peters, a Burnout Expert, Certified Professional Coach, and an award-winning international keynote speaker. For so long, Catherine received a message to rest, but she didn’t know how to do it, and her search led her to so many different suggestions. So, she did what most of us do when faced with overwhelm. Stuffing it down, pushing it away, and plowing ahead. However, a breast cancer diagnosis in 2018 completely changed the trajectory of her life and taught her the importance of rest and self-care. Catherine's mission is to give people permission to rest and de-stress and to teach people how to do it. Now known as "The Nap Whisperer," she has created signature interactive workshops such as "The Untapped Power of the Nap" and "Go the F*** To Sleep," using fun and humor to address the deeper issues behind burnout.
This article highlights what Catherine shares in the episode about burnout, what it really is, how you can identify it before it's too late, and practices that can help you manage yourself and your work to beat burnout. Read on!
Burnout As A Self-Management Problem
Burnout is a big and legit problem, but it is usually used very casually in our society. In 2019, the Health World Organization classified it as a medical condition and a group of symptoms that result from stress over time. Stress plus time equals burnout, so if you are stressed over time without relief, you’re going to burn out. However, not everybody ends up there because we manage our stress differently, and some of us are better at it than others.
According to Catherine, there are also different roads to burnout as there are people, but two of the main biggest causes are not knowing what you want and being in a constant hand wheel and killing yourself for something that doesn’t support you.
Picking the wrong thing and not getting clear on what you want leaves you unaligned and expending an extraordinary amount of energy just showing up to do the thing you don’t care about. Also, not setting boundaries for your work leaves you unaligned with and burned out on your path to greatness.
How To Win Without Burning out
We all desire more greatness, but for most of us, winning without burning out has become the biggest obstacle in the pursuit of our dreams. We’re just pursuing success for the sake of it, even when it’s not aligned with our energy in life.
Aligning your pursuit in life with your energy brings more happiness and results. However, most of us attach success and happiness to achieving a certain goal, be it income, promotion, or growth. We even go ahead to postpone our success and happiness until we achieve those goals, which can be detrimental.
Science shows that by attending to your happiness first, you attain higher levels of success. Also, by doing less and creating space for you to rest, you can accomplish more. According to Catherine, deconstructing the paradigm that the only path to success is constantly having our hands on the wheel working to 100 hrs a week is the core. You don’t have to suffer to get the reward.
Tip. Working from your happy place leads to more success in all areas of your life.
Finding Balance Between Work And Success
Catherine shares that working with somebody outside your circumstance that can give you some objective feedback is key to success. When you are burned out, it’s almost impossible to make a sound judgment because you can’t see the bigger picture.
When you in burn out, you can’t see the levers to push for yourself that could use 10% of the efforts to get 90% of the results. The creative and out-of-the-box thinking that can reduce the efforts without reducing the result is often dulled by burnout.
What happens is that your brain shuts down resources when burnout in response to stress to maximize the potential to deal with immediate threats. This means that you will have less blood flow and narrower vision, your cerebral cortex will not function optimally, and you will get a defeatest mentality that makes it difficult to think creatively, gain enough perspective and make valuable objective judgments.
Tip: If you are not burned out don’t wait till you are to take action
Identifying Burn Out Before It’s Too Late
So many of us don’t know when we’re in burnout. Sometimes we feel exhausted all the time and disillusioned, but we take it so casually because we think everybody is, but according to Catherine, they are not. It’s just you at that moment.
What causes burnout is not a mystery. It is something we all experience, stress over time. Prolonged stress is what leads to burnout. When you are stressed, you can heal and unwind from that, but it’s much harder to heal from burnout.
Tip. When you go too hard for too long, it takes longer to heal and get back to baseline.
Rest And How You Can Do It Right
Rest is a different thing for different people, and the same person needs different kinds of rest at different points in their day and life, depending on where the exhaustion is coming from.
Rest is not just taking a nap. This is physical rest. You also need;
Spiritual rest, which can be a purpose or being aligned
Social rest; solitude, get your alone downtime to recharge
Rest is critical to recharging. Our brain and visual cortex need to rest because they can become overstimulated. According to Cathrine, this makes meditation great for us. It helps rest the prefrontal cortex, and the older you get, the more rest you need. The physical changes that happen as you get older show that you need longer periods of rest.
Tip: Rest is individualized. You need more or less based on your physiology, stress thresholds, and more. What works for another person may not work for you.
Tip: It’s natural for an explosive and creative time to be followed by a dormant and contracting period
-Raylen
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