6 Ways to Manage and Prevent Job Burnout

Do you always feel tired, lethargic, or sickly at work? Do you continue to miss deadline after deadline, much to the disappointment of your boss or client?

Even if you are working from home under the new normal, it’s still possible to experience burnout and feel like you’ve overworked yourself. This is true, especially if you are working in a fast-paced, always-on mode.

Although burnout can seem like the usual feelings of exhaustion, what makes burnout a more serious condition is that the exhaustion drags on, affecting your physical, mental, and emotional state in the long run. In fact, burnout is already considered a legitimate medical condition or diagnosis, resulting from chronic stress due to demanding situations in the workplace.

If not appropriately managed, burnout can affect your ability to make sound decisions, act rationally, stay focused, communicate with others, or enjoy your daily routine. Ultimately, your quality of life deteriorates, and this makes you feel even worse.

Stressed or Burned Out?

Stress and burnout are often associated with one another because they have more or less the same symptoms, such as tension headaches, sleepless nights, and the like. The main thing to remember about the two is that feelings of stress can disappear quickly as soon as work circumstances improve, but burnout can last longer as you become increasingly disillusioned with work.

What Causes Burnout?

Here are situational examples when you may feel susceptible to burnout:

• A new boss comes in but cannot provide the level of support you received from your previous mentor.

• You’re getting more and more workload, and you feel the increase is unreasonable. This causes you to think that you don’t have enough control over your work.

• You cannot take time off because you’re deeply involved in major projects.

• You simply go through the motions of working even though you no longer enjoy it.

Whatever the reason is, burnout can lead to exhaustion and frustration as you find yourself unable to perform well or find meaning in what you do.

What Are the Usual Signs of Burnout?

Burnout can manifest through any of these behaviors:

• You begin to have a negative or critical attitude at work. Getting up is a struggle, and you want to clock out as soon as possible.

• You don’t feel like engaging with co-workers because you don’t have the energy or the interest to do it.

• You can’t concentrate on your tasks, and you don’t feel well enough to work, so you end up either turning in low-quality work or being absent

• You have difficulty going to sleep as you keep thinking about not having the capacity to get things done on schedule and work piling up on you.

• You easily feel annoyed or irritated over petty things. You may also feel unrecognized, undervalued, and empty as you focus on your shortcomings or failures.

• You complain of headaches, backache, or other psychosomatic illnesses.

• You’re thinking of giving up your work or taking a vacation for an indefinite period of time.

How to Manage and Prevent Burnout

Do these things before burnout gets to you:

1. Know your purpose

As cliché as it sounds, knowing your purpose is essential because it helps you live for something other than yourself. When you work in a highly collaborative team, for example, being aware that what you do (or fail to do) directly or indirectly affects your team’s productivity can give you a sense of purpose.

With this insight, you can train yourself to start each workday with a plan or an intention to provide the support that your team needs from you.

2. Learn how to say no

The overachiever in you may be thinking that saying “no” makes you look bad or inadequate. What you may fail to realize is that going above and beyond your call of duty is going to cost you valuable time and effort.

If you underestimate the number of hours, days, or weeks that it will take to complete an extra task or request, you may become too busy and exhausted catching up—all because you didn’t want to disappoint someone.

3. Strive for work-life balance

Work-life balance plays a huge role in preventing burnout. When you give equal amounts of attention to your work and personal life, you feel happier and healthier from inside out.

Note that work-life balance does not necessarily mean spending half of your day doing office tasks and then reserving the other half strictly for family time or other personal endeavors. A healthy work-life balance is about focusing on work on days when you need to and then finding time on other days to enjoy your own company or that of your family and friends.

4. Use your time-off

Believe it or not, some employees don’t use their vacation credits because it’s what most of their colleagues do, or the company doesn’t encourage them enough to spend time away from work. As such, they feel as if they are expected to work all the time.

Don’t be too hard on yourself to think that time-off means you don’t care about your company or that it’s not a good reflection of your work ethic. It’s simply about having that much-needed break so that you can recharge and replenish your physical and mental energies. Whether it’s going on a trip or just unwinding at home, give yourself a chance to reset your mind and mood to avoid feeling drained.

5. Switch things up in your routine or environment

When things start to feel dreary, take it upon yourself to change the way or where you work. If you think you’re more focused in the afternoon than in the morning, maybe you can start your day with the less critical tasks first before tackling the more complicated items in your workday agenda. You may also want to consider moving your work station to another area where there is more peace and quiet.

Or, if you are working from home most of the time, perhaps you can spend a day or two at the local library or café. If it’s just a stone’s throw away from your house, take the opportunity to do some exercise by walking or biking to help alleviate stress.

6. Communicate with your employer

Whatever burnout prevention strategies you do will not work if you don’t talk things out with your employer. Let your supervisor know the struggles you’re having and discuss possible solutions with an open mind.

Communicate the idea that you would love to keep your job but that you need help to shake things up in a way that can help both yourself and the company. Often, you’ll find that your boss is willing to listen to you, understand where you’re coming from, and improve things to make you happier and more engaged at work.

Be Kind to Yourself

Burnout is not something that one can only experience in the time of a crisis. Even if the world is not under a global pandemic or employees are not working from home, it’s a condition that can affect anyone vulnerable.

Don’t wait for the time when you start to feel burned out. When you feel the slightest warning signs, take a step back and make an honest assessment where things aren’t going well for you at work to fix them before they cause some severe damage.