Busy or burnt out??

Being busy feels good. Jobs, new workouts & gyms, plans with friends, new hobbies, & new routines.

We build our schedule up so that by the end of each day we’re exhausted...but in a good way because we feel productive; we feel accomplished.

But there comes a point when it no longer feels like the good kind of exhaustion, when you’ve run out of energy to even decide what’s good and bad, when your mind seems to be stuck in a constant game of catchup with the activities, commitments, and expectations in your life; burnout.

It’s real. It happens to all of us. And most of us don’t realize we’ve burnt out until it gets bad.

One of the earliest signs of burnout is feeling like you’re just going through the motions. Doing tasks, even those that you may usually enjoy, just to complete them.

But, unfortunately, a lot of us miss this immediate sign.

Because when your energy is running low & your mind is thinking faster than you can possibly act, you somehow feel this deep obligation to maintain this state of hyper-productivity. As though just sitting down to take a few deep breaths, listening to music to ease your stress, or stepping AWAY from the screen just to stretch your neck for 5 minutes means you’re losing out.

The thought of relaxing is lost under this self-imposed pressure to stay busy, keep improving...to not stop moving, working, or trying.

That is, until you reach the final sign of pure exhaustion; you finally witness yourself slowing down, becoming incapable of going at life with such a high speed.

You spend an hour doing work that usually takes you 15 min, you physically feel how tired your arms and legs are from working out and running errands and sitting at a desk hunched over at your screen, you can’t hold up a conversation with someone because you’re so mentally occupied with the “oh yea I have to do this and that later,”s and “how am I going to finish this and that by tomorrow?”s.

You feel it all.

And by then, it becomes a little easier to realize there’s a problem because it’s just so apparent. Something unhealthy is clearly going on.

Relaxing no longer seems like a useless waste of time, but a cure to feeling capable, fulfilled, and sane once again.

For so many of us, with our fast-paced and overly career-focused idea of success, we follow the “I’m so tired, I have to push through” rule believing with certainty that this is the only way to succeed in life. Life seems like it's supposed to feel like a constant challenge.

I'm not sure why we feel so committed to this live to work philosophy and why we assume it's the best one to live by.

But, treating life in such a way, constantly feeling like we have to prove to ourselves and the world how long we can spread ourselves thin and work until we reach burnout, just leaves us prey to a positive feedback cycle:

Insistent on staying busy → work extremely hard → burnout → realize burnout late in the game → make efforts to relax → reenergize → insistent on staying busy…

We too often just wait until it gets bad to do something about our mental or physical well-being. We wait and wait to the point where we’re really just following the steps of the cycle again, blindly.

But we can break this cycle by taking a preventative, sustainable approach.

We can dedicate time, whether it’s daily or just a few times a week, to letting our brains, our minds rest. Whether it’s meditation ( shameless 50th plug for the Calm app), painting, cooking, sitting on the beach, or simply taking your eyes off of your computer, it reminds you that there is so much more to life that matters than your work.

Yes, your work is a product of your efforts, but what’s the point if you can't enjoy it. If you’re beating yourself up over this idea to consistently stay productive, to keep adding on commitments because you feel you have to, to suppress feelings of exhaustion and loss of interest, you’re losing yourself and your worth in the midst of your efforts.

It’s ok to take a step back. It’s ok to take a trip because you just want to get out and because you want a change of scenery and a reminder that your happiness, your mental health, your emotions matter.

Working hard is always something that I’ve lived by, but late in the game I realized that there’s no way to continuously work hard without playing a little.

There needs to be a balance.

After I realized I was living by an ideal that didn’t account for the fact that I do not have super human energy and that falling prey to this burnout cycle over and over again wasn’t worth it, I gave the preventative approach a shot.

And while I am still working on it & while there are days when I still struggle to step away from my computer or work or social obligations to take a break, I have found that I’ve fallen into the cycle less often.

And like my wise and often unapologetically cynical dad says, “it’s not that life’s magically going to start getting better and stay that way.”

It’s not just let me just get through high school and then I’ll care about my mental health because then comes college and grad school and jobs and adult-life and not to mention, through it all, changes, transitions, and new relationships.

Life is always going to have a way feeling demanding.

So, by carving time into your schedule to take a step back and to remove yourself from the constantly ticking clock, you’re acknowledging that yes life does get hard, that yes you are capable of wearing out, and that yes none of our energy tanks are limitless.

And, through learning to accept our limitations, we learn to work with them rather than fight them.

They no longer make us feel guilty, but valid for taking time out of our lives to pay attention to our mental health, to be gentle with ourselves, to allow ourselves to feel cared for.

And, to me, the best part about incorporating this approach is that by stepping away from our work, people, and life, we're better able to remember and feel just how much we love them all.