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How to Know If You're Suffering From Burnout (Plus Ways to Deal ASAP)
In this fast-paced world that loves to glorify the #hustle, burnout is one of the biggest threats to our everyday well-being.
You might also like READWhile there isn’t a universal definition of burnout, some experts suggest that "burnout syndrome" be classified as "a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment caused by chronic occupational stress." (We'd add to this that burnout can also occur when you're exhausted from personal demands, like caregiving.)
Basically, it tends to show up when your job demands more of you than you’re able to cope with emotionally, although its impact can be physical too.
Evolutionarily, we weren’t built for the stressors of modern life.
Some experts theorize that burnout is simply a warning sign of other underlying issues, like anxiety or depression, but many others think burnout is its own condition. What we do know: The levels of stress we regularly expose our bodies to aren’t great for us.
"Research is still being done in this area, but it does appear that chronic stress may affect our body and brain in many different ways," Jo Eckler, Psy.D., a licensed clinical psychologist in Austin, Texas, explains. The potential downside of chronic stress particularly manifests in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a part of the neuroendocrine system that manages our physical stress response and fuels the fight-or-flight phenomenon.
The HPA is in charge of how much we release of cortisol and other stress hormones. "These hormones naturally rise when we encounter something stressful, then fall once the situation has ended," Eckler explains. "[Evolutionarily], this system is meant for short-term situations, like running from a stampeding elephant. The problem is that in our modern society, the elephants just keep coming, and eventually our cortisol levels get depleted."
You might also like READAll those late-night emails from your boss and endless to-do lists? Those are our modern-day elephants, and they’re causing us way more stress than they’re necessarily worth. And while there is such a thing as positive stress, this isn’t it. "Burnout stress is different from healthy stress," Sonoma County counselor Cathy Wild explains. "It is the result of ongoing stress that goes unrelieved over a long period of time."
It’s also a very modern condition. The word first surfaced on a widespread scale in 1976, when social psychologist Christina Maslach published an article about it; when talk of burnout began to spread, letters and calls flooded in to Maslach from around the world—all from people who thought they’d been alone in their symptoms.
Burnout can have real effects on your body and brain.
Scientists believe that the low cortisol you experience in situations of chronic stress can cause inflammation, which can lead to all kinds of health issues. According to Eckler, experts also suspect that there’s a chance that serotonin and dopamine, our "happy hormones," may be depleted when we experience burnout.
Preliminary research has also found that burnout can inhibit our creativity, problem solving, focus, and memory capabilities—which is a real bummer, because all of those abilities could help us deal with some of our burnout-related stressors in the first place.
How do you identify it?
If you think you’re experiencing burnout, be on the lookout for symptoms like exhaustion, stomach pain, and ineffectiveness in everyday work tasks. "Burnout may be setting in if you find yourself working longer hours but getting less done, having difficulty thinking and remembering things, and generally feeling overwhelmed on a regular basis," Eckler says.
"The initial response we have to feeling overwhelmed is to do more and work longer hours. The problem here is that we don’t realize we’re becoming much less efficient, so we get less done, falling more behind and becoming burned out." It’s also important to be aware of any feelings of isolation. If you feel alienated from your friends or detached from things you used to enjoy, you may be experiencing burnout.
"These hormones naturally rise when we encounter something stressful... a system is meant for short-term situations, like running from a stampeding elephant. The problem is that in our modern society, the elephants just keep coming."
It’s worth noting that many burnout symptoms are similar to those of depression. If you’re facing these symptoms, it can be helpful to talk to a mental health pro who can help you parse through what you’re feeling, determine whether you’re experiencing one condition or both, and help you come up with the best plan to start feeling better.
While only a health professional can tell you for sure what you’re dealing with, one potential sign that you’re experiencing burnout rather than depression is if your symptoms diminish when you take an extended break and really disconnect from work (yeah, that includes not answering emails).
"If somebody has a happy home life, their symptoms of burnout should get better when they’re home, whereas depression is an illness that has specific treatments," says Mary Morrison, M.D., M.S., vice chair for research development for psychiatry at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine.
You've got to take care.
To prevent burnout, old-fashioned self-care can go a long way. "Maintaining a life outside of our work duties, whether our work is in an office or caring for others at home, helps protect us from burnout," Eckler says. "We need to keep up with hobbies, friends, and physical activity."
But if burnout is surfacing in your life, the first step to feeling better is to just recognize it for what it is—and not be too hard on yourself about it. For many of us, our first inclination is to blame ourselves or assume we may have "caused" it by working too hard, but the situation is always more complicated than that. We live in a society that often praises 24/7 hustle and makes it very tough to opt out of pushing ourselves to our limits.
So it's a good idea to pay attention to how burnout plays out for you personally (it's different for all of us). When you can recognize your own signs, you can then take steps to help yourself as soon as possible.
The condition often creeps up slowly over time, which means that basics like eating well, exercise, getting good sleep, and taking time to disconnect are a huge help in lowering your odds of suffering. Of course, all those habits are easier said than done—especially if you have very little free time to begin with—but they can make a big difference in well-being.
"It can also help to stay connected with why [your work] is important to you, and to try to create a reasonable workload if at all possible," Eckler suggests. "Or at least accept that it won’t all get done."
Many people who experience burnout hold themselves to impossibly high standards, so if that describes you, it’s important to be aware of that, and develop healthy coping mechanisms for the next time you’re tempted to beat yourself up.
"Come up with a way of helping to forgive yourself for what are inevitable errors that we all make," Morrison says. "So that could be religion, it could be therapy, it could be looking at things differently and gaining perspective on the way the world works."
Whether you’re dealing with burnout or a run-of-the-mill stressful day, the most important thing is to be as kind to yourself as possible. That’s rarely an easy thing to do, but remember: It’s for your health! When you’re feeling burned out, it’s likely more clear than ever to you that you deserve more respect and reasonable expectations from your employer—but you also deserve that from yourself. And if you're experiencing burnout due to other reasons, such as caregiving, this applies to you too! Don’t forget to give yourself credit.
Claire Hannum is an NYC-based writer, editor, and traveler who has written for SELF, Racked, The Frisky, Brooklyn Magazine, The L Magazine, YouBeauty, CNN, and countless other corners of the internet.
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Meditation Really Is As Good As Your Crunchy Friends Say
At six years old, I had my first-ever panic attack. I can’t remember precisely what triggered it or how, but I do remember sitting with my parents in a parking lot while my heart thrashed around in my chest like a bee in a jar, feeling absolutely certain that I was about to die. It was terrifying. Since then, anxiety has been a big—at times, overbearing—part of my life, and one that I’ve repeatedly failed to find a long-term solution for. Coupled with some periodic spells of depression and the occasional suicidal thought, I felt for a long time as though I were slowly free-falling.
You might also like READI’ve tried various treatments including prescribed medication, self-prescribed herbal supplements, dietary changes, and even watching live feeds of kittens over the years. With the obvious exception of the adorable felines, none of these felt like effective treatments for me.
Filling an Rx for Meditation
So six months ago, when my doctor joined the ranks of my more free-spirited friends in recommending mindful meditation to me as a legitimate form of therapy for my symptoms, I remained skeptical. After all, if my current state feels like absolute hell, then how is practicing feeling present in those feelings going to alleviate that? As it turns out, I had the completely wrong idea about what mindful meditation can achieve.
Christiane Wolf, a physician-turned-mindfulness teacher who is also the co-author of A Clinicians’ Guide to Teaching Mindfulness, shared some insights about what effect mindfulness can have on maintaining a healthy mind.
"Regular mindfulness practice works on several levels. Like other meditation practices, it allows the body/mind to calm down and relax (even though that isn’t the goal of mindfulness practice, which is simply being with things as they are, moment by moment)," she says. "It lets us see and experience our habitual patterns close up—which is often quite uncomfortable, let me tell you—and it opens the door to a deeper connection with oneself and the world around us."
Changing the Way We Think
When approached as a practice for maintaining good mental health, mindful meditation can be seen as a powerful cross-section between Eastern contemplative traditions and scientific traditions of the West. The practice can be similar to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, for example, in that mindful meditation can help you recognize and change negative thought patterns. [Acceptance and mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioral therapies]. Ngô TL. Sante mentale au Quebec, 2014, Jul.;38(2):0383-6320. In these practices, we pay attention to the present moment, including thoughts, feelings, and sensations, but do so without judgment. We can monitor the process of our negative feelings without dwelling on their content. And it’s exactly these qualities that makes the practice so effective as a daily treatment for my own anxiety and depression.
"Practicing not to identify with thoughts and emotions is challenging, but is a total game-changer," Wolf explained to me. "The most revelatory concept is that you are not your thoughts—and you are not your emotions, either. They are like weather patterns moving through. They are part of the present moment you experience, but they are not who you are."
After I left the doctor’s office and downloaded a couple of mindful meditation apps, I started using guided exercises for a minimum of five minutes each day… and to my astonishment, it worked. Sometimes the exercises were emotional, other times they were peaceful or joyful, and often they were confrontational. However, each day I felt a little clearer, focused, and more in tune with myself and the world. Most importantly, perhaps, the practice helped me to realize I was not my anxiety or my depression. I was in control.
Evidence to Back It Up
I was surprised that my doctor had recommended it to me in the first place, but in retrospect, I guess I shouldn’t have been. The truth is there has been an impressive amount of medical studies that have successfully determined the value of mindful meditation on mental health. A 2007 study, for example, suggested that a mindfulness-based stress reduction program can have a beneficial effect on anxiety symptoms, and could improve stress reactivity and coping mechanisms.
You are not your thoughts—and you are not your emotions, either. They're like weather patterns... part of the present moment you experience, but they're not who you are.
Meanwhile, a 2014 pilot study investigated the efficacy of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) on major depressive disorder (MDD) when compared to antidepressant monotherapy. The study found that an 8-week course of MBCT was effective in treating MDD. So much so that it even had the potential to be used as a viable alternative to traditional courses of medication.
A Crazy-Easy Way to Start
Donna Rockwood, a clinical psychologist who specializes in mindfulness, as well as fame and celebrity psychology, explained that the foundations of mindfulness are also incredibly accessible.
"One thing that is helpful to anyone is the ability to maintain a mindful versus chaotic mind," she says. "A good shortcut is to simply become aware of one’s five senses: What do I see right now? What do I hear right now? What do I taste right now? What do I smell right now? What do I feel right now? After we become aware of our five senses, our minds naturally settle into the present moment. Our physiology calms down, and our reasoning and executive functioning improve."
Mindful meditation has proven itself to be a powerful solution for many of my mental health issues. The practice has given me a positive sense of self-perception, but it’s also equipped me with some easy tools with which to understand negative feelings and habits, face them without judgment, and effectively dismantle them.
The overall effect that it’s had on my life cannot be understated—it’s possibly even saved my life. So believe your well-meaning hippie friends when they sing its praises. The hype is real, and mindful meditation is exactly the support system your mental health may have been missing all along.
Amy Roberts is a freelance writer, blogger, and musician based in Liverpool, UK. She’s the co-founder of the irreverent pop culture blog and podcast Clarissa Explains F*ck All, an entertainment features writer for Bustle, and the bassist for d-beat punk band Aüralskit. She’s currently working on her first novel and slowly completing her debut poetry collection. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
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