Overcoming Burn-out with Improved Mental Fitness

Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress.

Most of us have experienced burned out at work, by life circumstances, and/or by people around us.  Especially now when times are more challenging than ever, even without any extra responsibility, it’s hard not to start feeling burned out.

The easiest answer to burnout is to improve your mental fitness.  If you are experiencing any of the common symptoms of burnout, such as lost motivation, exhaustion, feeling overwhelmed, being disengaged, short-tempered, terribly negative, or even questioning everything, improving your mental fitness will make you feel like a different person.  

Becoming burned out doesn’t happen overnight. It is a culmination of whatever is taking place in your life that causes stress. Improving your mental fitness is the same way. Becoming mentally fit is a culmination of you taking care of yourself, changing habits that don’t serve you, gaining strength in your self-command, and practicing a new way of living.

I'm not talking about going to the spa every week, but I am talking about using a mental gym of sorts. There are many mental exercises you can use to make sure you aren't allowing yourself to burn out. You can be in control of how you're feeling, and when you start going down the path of burn out, you can redirect with self-command, and get back on the path where you are choosing to do what is good for you - not what you think people expect of you, or sometimes, what you expect for yourself.

It’s important you understand why you are feeling burned out. It’s probably obvious, but what may not be obvious, is the reason you feel you must do everything you’re doing. Is it out of obligation? Is it because you can do anything better than most? Is it because you don’t want to ask for help? The reality is when a person has so much on their plate something has to give, and most often it is our mental fitness and those we care about that take the hit.

Once you understand the “what and why,” you can begin to change your habits and improve your mindset. Being encumbered with so many responsibilities can be so overwhelming it’s impossible to see any solution.

Sometimes it's as easy as saying no, but often it requires learning ways to take care of your mind by recognizing that we all do our share of unconscious self-sabotage. In the POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE® program, based on the NYT best-selling book of the same name written by Shirzad Chamine, we focus on getting to the heart of what drives us, especially to do things that don’t serve us or that aren’t in our best interest. Getting burned out is NEVER in our best interest.

We explore what Shirzad calls Saboteurs. We start by learning what our top Saboteurs are, how to identify when they are present, and how to intercept them before they sabotage us. The key is to develop the self-command muscle in your brain so you can choose to follow what your sage wisdom knows is the right thing to do, and to send that Saboteur packing. As you can imagine, this takes practice because most saboteurs have been with us a very long time.

Let me share with you an example of how self-sabotage can cause burn-out.

Let’s say you are in a job that requires you to work 50+ hours a week on a normal week, and you have just taken on an additional project that is adding several extra hours to your workday. This project requires you to run meetings with the project team each week, provide updates to senior leadership (great exposure), and the success of the project will reflect on you. In addition to a highly demanding job, you are married with 4-year-old twins and all that comes with raising toddlers. You feel the pressure of being a great parent and spouse and providing for them. And as if that isn’t enough, you also have an elderly parent whom you need to visit a couple times a week. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It’s easy to see what is causing burnout.

So, what is it that is sabotaging you, and how could you be doing that to yourself? All these things require your attention, right? You don’t have a choice! Guess what? We ALWAYS have a choice.

Let’s say you are a person who is really driven for constant performance and achievement. Your success gives you self-respect and self-validation. You’re highly focused on external success, meaning others view you as a top performer who always achieves strong results. You know that the next promotion or raise you get will be based on your achievements, and if you don’t get those you will have failed. You are goal oriented and can ignore any feeling or thoughts that might distract you because feelings are just a distraction. This makes it easier to just put your head down and do the work. These are the things that can and often will lead to unsustainable workaholic tendencies.

This is what we call a hyper-achiever. Being a hyper achiever isn’t necessarily a bad thing. So many things about being a hyper-achiever are awesome - this is what makes you successful in your job or any task you take on. You can feel good about yourself and know you are the best at what you do. You have confidence. But what happens when that hyper-achiever doesn’t help you and actually hurts you? Do you take on more work than you need to because you tell yourself that life is about achieving and producing results? Do you base your self-acceptance on each success? Do you feel good about yourself and know you’re the best only when you are succeeding or proving yourself?

What can happen is that peace and happiness become fleeting and short-lived because each time you celebrate an achievement, you are on to the next one. You can lose touch with deeper feelings and the ability to connect deeply with others (friends and family) because you are so focused on achieving. You push yourself because what if others see that you aren’t as perfect as the image you portray? But along the way, as you are over-working and not spending enough time with your family or doing things that regenerate you, you are burning out. So being a hyper-achiever isn’t really helping you unless you can find the balance.

With POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE®, the goal is to identify that hyper-achiever at the point when you are ready to take on extra work or commit to something that someone else could do. Or when you have to skip visiting mom because you must work all weekend. Or you get home later each evening, missing the twin’s bedtime, because there was too much to do. At that point, you redirect your mind to a mental exercise to change your focus and to tap into that sage wisdom. You will then make the choice that is best for you. At first, it’s challenging, but once you realize that you have the choice to make your life easier and that burning out isn’t the only option, you will avoid going down the wrong path the next time. If you’d like to check out the content of the six-week-program, click here to request information.