You can easily spot the signs of burnout. Don’t ignore them, otherwise you will be burned. Burnout is more than failing the weekly Sunday test whether you dread going back to work on Monday or not. Burnout is about lowering your passions and feeling of life. When this happens, you are in trouble.
We’ve all been there. You feel sluggish on a Friday morning, impatient that the weekend can’t come soon enough. So then you count the hours and every task that you have to do feels like a chore.
Then the elusive 5pm comes along and you feel happier than when you were in high school when the final bell rings to let students out for the day.
You take a pause and think to yourself, “am I feeling this way as a once in a while feeling or because it’s a permanent problem like a burnout?” The more you think about it, the more you believe that the feeling doesn’t have anything to do with the way your work is going. The feeling has to do with who you are as a person.
Your will to care is gone. You are completely OK when your bosses yell at you because the alternative would have been to work an extra 2 – 3 hours. That’s a slippery slope position. It starts with the burnout feeling every other Friday. Then it snowballs into every Friday.
Then it spreads over to other days of the week, like Mondays. Don’t ignore the signs of burnout. You have to stop the fire before it spreads even further. Otherwise, it will pass the point of no return and you will be in a permanent slump. As someone who’s been through a slump, trust me that slumps are very difficult to get out of.
9 Signs of Burnout
Below are clear-cut signs of burnout that you need to steer clear of before it’s too late. One way that you can tell is by SMASHING that social share button and post to your favorite social media for your friends. And the Google algorithm, can’t forget about the almighty Google algorithm!
This article has the potential to help your friends recognize if they are burning out so they can take steps to avoid it at all costs. Help your friends out!
In seriousness, let’s get into the signs.
Burnout Sign 1: Months Start Feeling Like Wars
When I first got placed out of my banking rotational program, the work was gruesome. I regularly put in 60+ intense hours a week. However, the great part was that I didn’t even notice the time was gone because I was having so much fun. It was interesting to learn about how financial analysis and lending worked.
It was a great change of pace. I went from learning theoretical information that professors taught to learning about concepts that actually had an impact to real life people from the real world. I devoured and loved going into the office. Getting paid to learn? How come I couldn’t sign up for it sooner?
However, after a year and a half, the motivation went away. I began to count the hours and the time that’s passing. Not only did I fail the Sunday test more times than once a month, waking up became a struggle. Every month that passed gave me a sense of pride because it was one more month that I put in the hard work.
However, the sense of pride only lasted a couple of days. The thought of doing it all over again made me sick to my stomach. When months start to feel like an all out war, that’s one of the clearest signs of burnout.
Burnout Sign 2: Stress Makes it Hard to Fall Asleep
A lack of sleep is one of the signs of burnout that you can’t ignore. Human beings need 8 hours of sleep a day on average. If everything else is normal but suddenly you’re getting less sleep than that on a consistent basis, then it means you are burning out. The flame is slowly dying.
Sleep is valuable, it allows us to function normally throughout the day. Without it, you will never be at 100% of your self. It gets hard to go through the day feeling groggy and thinking about just how much you want to go to bed already at 10:00am in the morning.
When you start to dream about that report you have to finish, then your work is consuming too much of your conscious and unconscious mind. I’ve been there before, and you feel awful the day after you wake up. Don’t put yourself in this situation.
Burnout Sign 3: Vacations Do Nothing For You
Vacations are supposed to be relaxing and great! It’s a time to completely disconnect from work and enjoy the time off that you earned. When work starts to affect you on your you time, that’s one of the signs of burnout. Your heart pounds and feels like a burning sensation.
It’s the leftover stress from the weekdays of working your job that hasn’t evaporated. I’ve been there before. I took two weeks off in December for Christmas/New Years yet it wasn’t at all relaxing even though I wasn’t doing anything. That’s when I started to realize it might have been already too late.
If you experience the exact same thing where vacation days are not enjoyable, you are burning out. It literally feels like your heart is burning up because of the stressful nature of the job. Don’t ignore this burnout sign.
Burnout Sign 4: You’re Plain Exhausted
One of the easiest signs of burnout is you just know it. There isn’t a specific sign that you’re looking for but you just feel tired, exhausted, and unwilling to get out of bed in the morning. Your feet feels like lead that you have to drag across the finish line to get your cup of coffee.
Your eyes are bloodshot and your shoulders droop. Not even a holiday or a couple of days off healed those wounds. This is even after getting eight hours of sleep. Instead of feeling refreshed, you feel like the world is weighing down on your shoulders and it’s getting hard to carry it across the finish line.
Exhaustion and the lack of mental clarity isn’t a good feeling. Take an extended vacation time in order to heal from work and build up your spirits and sense of purpose. Have a heart to heart with your manager. It’s not because you want to skip work, it’s because you have a legitimate business reason to avoid burnout.
Take a sick day if your company offers it.
Burnout Sign 5: There’s Negative Joy in Your Life
We all know I’m a glass is half full and half empty kind of guy. I like to see the world from a point of reality. However, it’s one thing to feel neutral about your life. It’s completely another to feel negative about your life. If on a given year, you don’t feel there was more joy than pain from start to finish, then something is wrong.
A year is a very long time to evaluate the quality of your life. If over that very long time, negative feelings outweighed the positives, then that’s a huge problem that needs to be fixed. That’s not even one of the signs of burnout, it’s an extreme sign of burnout.
Life with sadness and pain isn’t a good life. What’s great is that there’s always plenty of time leftover to get to a place of joy and happiness. The first step is to get out of the burnout slump and go into greener pastures.
Burnout Sign 6: Performance Suffers
Maybe it’s because you’re taken advantage of at work. Or maybe it’s because it’s one of the signs of burnout. Whatever the reason is, your work performance can dramatically suffer. This isn’t a 10% decline in quality. It’s a nosedive of 70% decline in quality that causes your bosses to say something to you.
While it’s unlikely you’ll get fired on the spot, it’s a downward slopping path you are on. You will get a warning today and a few weeks or a month later, you will get a formal write up. We’ve all been through a slump here and there. Your bosses have been there too. Where everything in life isn’t peachy and the work quality has to decline.
Heck, I’ve heard stories of McKinsey partners who were once on the performance improvement plan before crushing it and becoming partners. Jack Welch blew the roof of a GE factory and he still didn’t get fired. As long as you catch this sign early, then you can take steps to better it.
When the quality of your work suffers, then there is something that you need to change to get back on course.
Burnout Sign 7: You Feel Impatient and Like You’re Holding in Emotions
Impatience is on the list of signs of burnout. In a neutral state when you are sitting on the couch on a relaxing Saturday afternoon, you don’t feel impatient. You feel inner peace. Once you lose that inner peace and you feel like you’re holding in those emotions you want to let out, that becomes a problem.
Go to a mountain where people visit to let out stress. You can kill two birds with one stone that way. You can better your health by getting your exercise goal of the day. Then you can also let out your stress by screaming, yelling, and shouting at the top of your lungs in the mountain.
It’s going to feel awkward when you first do it, but once you get used to it, you feel better. After a good shouting session, my voice is gone but I always feel so much better. Like all of the feelings I’m forced to hold in at work is now heard and there are zero repercussions from doing so.
Bottling in emotions can lead to burnout and a blowout fuse that can be set off to the wrong person.
Burnout Sign 8: Concentration is Difficult
Once you burn out, you can’t focus on anything. It takes much more effort to concentrate on the things that matter. Then the next day it takes even more effort to where not even a large amount of effort is enough for you to concentrate. Concentration should not take that much effort.
If it does, then there’s something wrong. Maybe it’s one of the signs of burnout or maybe there’s something else that’s more important going on in your mind. Whatever the reason may be, recognize and be cognizant of when you can’t concentrate.
It’s difficult to miss this sign, too. After an hour passes, you start to question where all the time went. Then you realize it’s because you haven’t focused on anything meaningful in the past hour. Why is it? You can figure out the answer but one answer is that you are on the path to burnout.
Burnout Sign 9: There’s No Happiness Even as Good Things Happen
It’s one thing when you are not happy because there isn’t anything to be happy about. It’s a completely another thing when you’re unhappy even when good things are happening to you. Progress is a great sense of pride, joy, and happiness.
However, when you are burning out, you’re not happy even if you are making progress towards your goals. That’s a clearcut sign of burnout. Even if your net worth starts hitting all time highs, you feel empty. Like nothing happened at all. It’s one thing to feel that way because you’re already so used to crushing your financial goals.
It’s a completely another thing to feel that way because you are burned out. You’re starting to lose pride, passion, and most importantly of all, meaning. There’s no care that you’re doing good in other aspects of your life because all the other negatives in your life are anchoring your complete life and mindset.
This sign also applies if you experience negatives in your life yet feel nothing and apathy towards it. That needs to stop and tended to now.
Consequences of Burnout
The consequences of burnout are severe. The consequences include:
- Anger or irritability
- Lose self belief
- Increased blood pressure
- You can get sick easier
- You push away your loved ones
- Increased cortisol levels and stress
- Lack of performance
- No sense of control
- You feel like you’re just existing, not living
How Long Does Burnout Last? When I Ignored the Signs of Burnout
When I was at my very first job out of college, there was a horrifyingly terrible boss towards the end of my tenure. I was on the road to burnout and the classic signs of burnout were all there. I felt a burning sensation in my heart when I was on vacation, relaxing at home.
As a result, my work suffered. However, instead of being understanding, guess what my boss did? He talked to me about how bad of a job I was doing and dominated the entire conversation without understanding my side. I got out of there as soon as I possibly can.
He was such a bad boss that 80% of the analysts left. Upper management finally replaced him with another boss.
My burnout lasted 4 months total and I mistakenly ignored the signs of burnout and powered through it. That was a bad decision. It was scary because we were just about to go into busy season. There was no way I could have lasted another 3 months of the berating and abuse.
I thank my lucky stars that my current company took me in before I went into a permanent slump.
I negotiated a week of vacation between the end of that job and the start of my current one. That week of vacation where I literally didn’t have to think about anything was the absolute best.
It was a completely unplug and disconnect vacation where I spent the week doing nothing except detoxing. It opened my eyes to how much I was neglecting my sanity, mental health, and well-being for the benefit of the company. No more will I sacrifice that much for the company. I put myself first above my job.
Prevent the Signs of Burnout Before It Happens
Prevention is better than the cure. It’s better to regularly maintain yourself to avoid the burnout position in the first place. Speak with your bosses and let them know of your concerns. The bad bosses will see you as weak and tell you to suck it up. You are not valued highly at the company.
When that happens, you interview at another company. Vet your potential bosses very thoroughly during this stage. If there’s a question they refuse to answer, that’s not a good sign. When I ignored the signs of a bad boss, I paid for it with the job. A wrong employment decision has disastrous effects.
Check yourself regularly. Are you genuinely enjoying your weekends? Are you taking care of your mental health and taking sick days to tend to it? If the answers are no, then it’s time to make some changes. By the time you notice the symptoms of burnout, it’s already too late. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Worse yet, you don’t ever recover from the downward trajectory slump. Then you will eternally end up there until review season comes around. It’s not a good feeling to leave a job because the company asked you to leave. It’s a good feeling to leave because you wanted to.
Even if it may be too late, don’t ignore the signs of burnout. It can have lasting and consequential effects that follow you throughout the year. Depression is a hard medical condition to get yourself out of. People aren’t born with depression, their environment causes them to be depressed.
Instead of digging yourself into a bigger hole, don’t fall into the hole in the first place. Life is more enjoyable that way.
Signs of Burnout List:
- Months start feeling like wars
- Stress makes it hard to fall asleep
- Vacations do nothing for you
- You’re plain exhausted
- There’s less joy in your life
- Performance suffers
- You feel inpatient and like you’re holding in emotions
- Concentration is difficult
- There no happiness anymore
