You need to know how to handle burnout in order to progress through the rest of your days. Otherwise, you’re going to go down a slump with little chances of getting out of it. Some burnouts are not temporary but are permanent, unless you take the proper steps to break yourself free.
So you already figured out how to avoid burnout and took the necessary steps to avoid it in the first place. You tried to prevent it to the best of your abilities. However, even after learning how to avoid burnout, you still couldn’t escape it. Work and personal life stress got the better of you and now you’re already burned out.
This post is to learn how to cure burnout, rather than prevent it. It’s not too late to take the steps to detox and free your mind from the clutter, stress, and toxic environments that you’re experiencing.
The first step towards fixing anything has to do with recognition and you already recognize that it’s necessary to handle your burnout, whether it’s job burnout or overall life burnout. I’ve been there countless times. There’s been days where all I want to do is lie down in my couch and do nothing all day long.
However, my boss calling me to give me more work and assignments broke all of my hope and spirits. That’s when I knew that I failed at preventing burnout. That’s when I knew that I have to look towards curing it. It took a very long time before I cured it and it was scary knowing that it wasn’t a guarantee to get out of that burnout feeling.
However, it is possible and when there’s a will, there’s a way.
How to Handle Burnout
One way to know how to handle burnout is to DESTROY that social share button and post to your favorite social media for your friends to learn from! This article has the potential to help your friends who may be experiencing job burnout and needs to know how to cure it.
This topic isn’t something that people talk about openly. People don’t like to admit that they’re burning out because they think it’s a sign of weakness. That’s not true at all. If this post can help and benefit a person who may be struggling, why wouldn’t you share? I would appreciate it.
With that said, let’s go into the concrete steps to handle burnout.
1) Prioritize Sleep Above All Else
Once you are already burned out, every additional hour you put into work is less efficient. You finish more things by the end of the day, sure. However, there’s less things finished per hour. Declining efficiency is a surefire sign of burnout.
So how to handle burnout? You prioritize sleep above everything else. Not your family, not your work, but sleep. Yes, not even your family. It’s bad to take care of someone else if your own needs are not taken care of. The training airlines give you about the life jackets is absolutely correct.
You can’t help someone else with their life jackets if yours isn’t taken care of.
Don’t miss the precious eight hours of sleep. Our phones need to recharge with electricity in order to function properly going into the next day. Sleep is our electricity. There is nothing and no one in this world who can produce consistent large output without taking in consistent large inputs.
The productivity machine needs sleep the most. If work is still pouring in with no end in sight, have a heart to heart with your boss. Help him or her understand that your sleep is a way to benefit the company, not you.
Better yet, you can ask him or her if they ever felt that way and what they did to get out of the lull.
Your productivity is what the company thrives on, so it is in their best interest to grant you that time to recharge.
2) Handle Burnout by Letting Go and Caring Less
How to handle burnout? Let go and care less about things. One of my friends works into the night and weekends. After having a conversation with him, I found out he cares so much about the quality of the work that he does most of the work himself. Even the ones he should outsource to others.
That’s a bad recipe for success. He cares way too much about the quality of the work. Guess what? 80% is good enough. Delegate work out to others when you can and refuse work if you can’t stay longer hours. When my boss asks me to do work and I’m already at full capacity, I don’t hesitate to let them know.
In the past, I would never refuse work that my bosses gave me. I would stay later and complete whatever they needed. No longer am I willing to do that. If I already have to work into the night to finish work, there’s no way I’m working into 1am+ to finish work.
I stopped caring whether that would hurt me or not.
When you start to care less, you are managing stress and burnout quite well. Burnout happens because you care too much.
3) Pay Attention to Your Heartbeat and Body
Actually feel your vital signs throughout the day. Is hydration an issue? Do you feel your pulse increase week to week? Is your heart racing for no good reason? Do you feel a burning sensation here and there throughout the week? Does your mind race with things you have to do?
Pay attention to your body by listening for these signals. Personally, I felt a burning sensation in my chest throughout the day. Even on weekends and during vacation days. I also feel my heartbeat race at a faster pace throughout the day. That’s what burnout does to you.
Don’t neglect these vital signs. When I ignored them is when things started to go from bad to worse. Even though I knew how to handle burnout, I couldn’t do it effectively because I neglected it before. The first line of defense to burnout starts with your biological vital signs.
4) Doing Nothing is Better than Doing Something
When you’re burnt out, doing anything is bad. It doesn’t matter if your actions help towards your goals or future. You will be overloaded with work, stress, and life in general if you do anything at all when you are burnt out. Doing nothing is better than doing anything in this case.
Many people forget the power of doing nothing. The power of taking a step back to move two steps forward. When your head or feelings aren’t in the right space, you shouldn’t do anything. You are your greatest weapon in tackling your goals. Don’t work with a damaged weapon. It’s difficult to make an impact.
Doing nothing is a great way to handle burnout. Sometimes, we just want to kick back and be alone with our thoughts.
5) Look for Unpaid Personal Leave Policies to Handle Burnout
Check your employee handbook. It contains valuable information that you can leverage to handle burnout. Most companies have an “unpaid personal leave policy” once an employee’s PTOs are exhausted and there are no other leave policies in place that covers the leave request.
FMLA leave requests can be applicable but if it isn’t, companies have formal leave policies set in place for the employee. Jobs may not be guaranteed after the leave, so you have to decide if the risk is worth the reward. In extreme cases of burnout, it can be really worth it.
I personally haven’t had to take this route but I know it is available for employees.
6) Recognize it Takes At Least a Month of Doing Nothing
This is an extension of 4) above. It takes time to unwind, detox, and actually get yourself back to where you were. Approximately a month. Therefore, spend about a month of doing nothing to handle burnout. At first, you’re going to feel extremely guilty because it is so new to you.
Common thoughts are “oh, but something needs to be done, I’m not being productive enough”. The most important step in handling burnout is to get out of this mentality. If you don’t, you’re never going to stop feeling this way. The lingering burning sensation feeling will stay with you for months.
Accept and recognize that it’s OK to not be productive. We weren’t born to provide value 24/7/365. If anything, you are returning to the status quo of doing nothing. When you are in your teens, chances are you didn’t do much in your summer vacations.
Therefore, it’s a return to normalcy, not getting out of it.
7) Take Note of Your Eating Habits
Food is most harmless thing that can utterly destroy you. In knowing how to handle burnout, take note of your eating habits. Stress causes me to eat more than I should. If I’m stressed, I feel that there’s no time to figure out if I’m over or under eating.
After overeating, my body kicks it into overdrive to digest the large amount of food I ate, which makes the problem even worse. Why do you think people who are vastly overweight don’t feel good? It doesn’t have anything to do with their self esteem or body weight.
It has to do with biology. Our bodies take a lot of energy, time, and effort to digest the food that we put into our bodies. More energy than we know. As the body kicks it into overdrive to digest, it makes our heartbeat go up, we experience food coma, and many more things to make us feel sluggish.
Therefore, to handle burnout, take careful consideration of what and how much you eat. It’s a simple idea that has a big impact. People usually work better on an empty stomach but it completely depends on who you are.
8) Don’t Constantly Measure Progress of Your Burnout
Don’t constantly evaluate whether you are out of the slump and job burnout. Otherwise, you’re going to wake up every day with high hopes that you got better. Every day you are going to feel disappointed, especially if you are measuring starting from the early days. There’s just no progress in the start.
Therefore, measure your progress over a good period of time. A general rule of thumb is to evaluate your progress after three weeks to a month. Then you can say you gave it a good amount of effort. If nothing is changing, then and only then consider adjusting your approach.
Most things that you do today isn’t to benefit you today. It’s to benefit you a week, month, or a year down the road. The steps you take from the above to handle job burnout will show results after some time passes.
9) Don’t Drink Caffeine, Red Bull, or Alcohol
One investment banker told me how much work investment banking actually is. He talked about how he worked three all nighters in a row and the next day that he went back to work, he only slept for an hour. Wow.
When I expressed amazement, he talked about how he doesn’t drink caffeine, coffee, or take in any other harmful substances. Caffeine, red bull, or alcohol is a short-term solution to a long term problem. I only drink alcohol twice a year. New Year’s Eve and my birthday.
When you drink alcohol, you don’t just lose that day of mental clarity. You lose the entire next day afterwards as well as you feel the after effects of alcohol. If you want to handle burnout, cut these things out of your life. They are doing more harm than good.
These substances also create a dependency cycle, which isn’t good.
10) If You’re Too Burned Out, Quit Your Job
This is the absolute last resort but sometimes, it’s the only viable solution. One of my bosses wrote a resignation letter without a job lined up. Why? Burnout got to her. The labor market was doing so well, I was confident that she would find another job if she wanted to.
If you want to handle burnout, consider starting over from scratch. There are many companies out there who will hire you and need your services. Keep in mind, though, that this should be the absolute last resort. This is after you try everything you can to get out of the slump.
Sometimes, this is the only way out. You can take time to recover, get energized, and start over from scratch. The ideal way to quit is to ask to get laid off. How your performance will suffer too much for the company to benefit and that their only choice will be to lay you off.
If that isn’t possible, quitting cold turkey is a Hail Mary approach.
Learn How to Handle Burnout
Once you’re burned out, it’s difficult to get out of the slump and get back into the game. It’s not easy to recover quickly. If prevention didn’t work, the next best thing is the cure. Fixing something is harder than leaving something in tact in the first place.
If it’s too late and you’re already burned out, then learn how to handle burnout. It’s a dangerous spot to be in. Burnout put me into a slump for four months. It was demoralizing and quite difficult to get out of it. Be prepared for a prolonged period of when your mind and body won’t cooperate to where you want to go.
Quite honestly, burnout has the chance of ruining your life trajectory.
When you are burned out, you don’t feel like you are in control of your own life anymore. You feel that you are spiraling out of control and someone is spinning you around. There’s no more internal locus of control. You don’t feel like it’s your life to start with.
That’s an awful spot to be in, in terms of positioning. Handle burnout by doing the steps outlined above. My favorite is to do nothing all day long, maybe for even two. straight days A day off will do more wonders for you than you know.
Burnout Can Ruin You
Burnouts can literally permanently hurt your life. A slump ruined professional careers before, especially athletic careers. It happens to the best of us. It’s a serious issue that needs fixing. When you are burned out, your work quality goes downhill. The company might even fire you or lay you off.
Then afterwards, your personal relationships can suffer if you become bitter that you got laid off. It’s a slippery slope process with very few exits on your way down. Even then, no one hands you those exists, either. You have to seek them out yourself and take the opportunity when you see it.
In general, work helps you get your mind off things. However, there’s a point when there’s too much work to handle and you feel overloaded.
Previous posts outlined how to avoid burnout and what the signs of burnout are. This is what to do if you are burnt out already and are looking for a way to get back on the road after a detour. If you felt burnout, your higher ups definitely felt it as well. Ask them for some advice as well.
Even if you don’t have a good relationship with your boss, your boss will be more than happy to share their experiences. After all, if you are not productive, it ultimately reflects on them. Implement all or some of the above steps on how to handle burnout and you are on your way to back to the course.
How to Handle Burnout List:
- Prioritize sleep above all else
- Handle burnout by letting go and caring less
- Pay attention to your heartbeat and body
- Doing nothing is better than doing something
- Look for Unpaid Personal Leave policies
- Recognize it takes at least a month of doing nothing
- Take note of your eating habits
- Don’t measure progress
- Don’t drink caffeine, red bull, or alcohol
- Quit your job
David—
I especially agree with getting sleep! I think each of us is different, to a degree, but folks who relish not getting enough sleep and still surviving might just begin to tolerate the problems… As to say, they might just be becoming used to the difficulties it creates, tiredness being their new normal.
I find things really fall apart for me after two nights of getting less than perhaps 7.5 hours of sleep, in a row. Even the first day is noticeable. I really struggle to be productive, to do anything creative especially.
And of course, your fourth item on the list—sometimes you just need a break. When you’re beat, you might feel guilty if you do “nothing”—but sometimes nothing is just what’s needed.
Whew, I am glad that I’m not the only one who values sleep a lot! Sometimes, it’s just hard to get quality sleep because of the things that happen throughout the day. However, I know that my performance suffers drastically if it happens too often. Our physiology matters more than we know.
Yes! I’m finally taking a 2 week vacation to remove myself from the stresses of the job this month. I can’t wait to find out what it does to my mental health after taking this break. Doing nothing is the best thing ever.