Emotional Burnout: Early signs and prevention

Burnout can be easily found in our modern society, and its causes are closely linked to the hectic and demanding lifestyles that are present in most developed cities.

Even if some symptoms remain common to all types of burnout, emotional burnout affects the emotional capacity for managing regular situations and installs a simultaneous sense of overwhelm and numbness.

Emotional, rather than professional, burnout (also called emotional exhaustion) has a set of tell-tale signs, and spotting them early on can help you stop it in its tracks.

What is Emotional Burnout?

Professional burnout can stem from an overload of tasks or an underwhelming sense of purpose and recognition, but emotional burnout is connected to the loss of satisfaction within a personal relationship or with oneself. Generally, it’s the consequence of a period of disconnection, an imbalance in the efforts to sustain the relationship, or a lack of meaning drawn from it.

As is the case with other emotional turmoil states, emotional burnout can resolve with a natural shift in the circumstances, but if that isn’t the case, or if waiting for this is not the right option for you, recognizing the first emotional exhaustion symptoms will help prevent the worsening of the situation.

What are the early signs of emotional burnout:

• Irritability: unusual short temper, overall cynical attitude.

• Emotional distancing: taking longer breaks from friends, sharing less, self-isolating.

• Numb / Hypersensitive Cycle: to cope with the emotional overwhelm, a feeling of numbness sets in and is followed by heightened sensitivity to regular situations.

• Restlessness / Troubled Sleep: difficulty falling or staying asleep, as well as waking up.

• Heightened stress: feeling overwhelmed with everyday tasks, not being able to receive help.

How to deal with emotional burnout?

Here are 5 actions to help tackle emotional burnout:

• Quality alone time: Tap into your own pamper mode, and notice the effect of taking these actions from a sense of love and comfort rather than from a demand for relief. How would you treat a best friend who’s going through the same thing as you? Try treating yourself with that thought in mind.

• The right type of rest: Beyond sleeping, there are many activities that constitute resting. The same way that the best restorative sleep happens with the best conditions, other types of rest benefit from that sense of “letting yourself go”, feeling held, supported, and free. This may mean opening to activities that give you that sense of looseness and safety. Some ideas: playing sports you liked as a child, drawing, reading, going to a museum, singing, or doing yoga.

• Restorative talk: When you’re ready, share your feelings with someone who is able to listen, and feel free to give them a disclaimer regarding what you need at that time. Meaning, you might prefer to ward them off of giving unwanted advice or jumping into solution mode. Sometimes, "just listening" goes a long way.

A combination of practical, actionable changes as well as a shift in perspective will help you regain balance. More than a set of coping strategies for emotional burnout, these actions will help you strengthen your inner world beyond this challenge.

• Asking for the right help: Anyone who respects you knows to regard your strength and trust your own journey. The true sense of community comes from being able to ask for the right help and give that help without cutting the development that someone would have had if they had exercised their own agency. You’ll know what’s the right thing to ask when you feel that the solution involves your actions, as well, rather than replacing your actions.

• Filter your thoughts: I can’t emphasize this one enough. We live in our minds, and we have a tendency to listen to our inner dialogue as if it were the source of all truth or as if all our thoughts deserved the same attention. In reality, our mind is testing out ideas, searching for reasons and gathering information, all the time. That means that if we listen to every single thought, we’re going to follow poorly constructed theories all the time.

  Asking 2 questions of your own thoughts will help you determine if they deserve to develop:
  Is it true?
  Is it useful?
  Example: I think my colleagues don’t like me. Filtering this thought through the first question is already difficult, because how could we get to know all the feelings and thoughts of a group of people? That already tells me that this thought might not be very useful, which leads me to directly discard it.

Trying any of these actions can give way to more personal actions that answer specifically to your needs on how to prevent emotional burnout. The truth is that we all need a balance of self-awareness as well as community support in different amounts during the phases of our lives.

Finding that support is key to building your own set of tools that are ready to rescue yourself from challenges and difficulties. If you’d like to explore this and other topics with me, feel free to find the right time for our first chat here.

Even though most of us have felt some or all of these symptoms in our lives, feeling their incidence in the same period can make it harder to regain balance and feel better. That’s why it’s useful to act on the opportunities for healthy relief and reconnection that are immediately available to us.