Burnout is a real problem for workers in the United States. Many workers around the country take pride in their work ethic. They want to be the first person who gets to the office in the morning and the last person to leave at night. This can make your boss happy but can have a detrimental impact on the rest of your life. Whether you are working in a stressful job or just work too hard in general, you can suffer stress burnout symptoms. Here are the 5 stages of burnout that you should keep a lookout for.
- You may feel more physically tired. It can seem things that you used to do quickly take more time. The irony is that when you start to feel the first of the 5 stages of burnout, you may find that it is hard to get to sleep and even harder to stay asleep. When you try to fall asleep, it may feel like your mind is racing with all of the things you did not get done during the day and all of the things you need to get done tomorrow. You may ruminate over what may go wrong or what mistakes you may make. The problem is that this gets you into a cycle of stress causing you to not sleep, the lack of sleep makes everything worse, leading to an even harder time falling asleep, and so on, and so on.
- You may be tired both emotionally and physically. This is often one of the first signs of job burnout. When you are exhausted in any way, it can have a bad effect on how well you do things. You may need to resort to cutting corners or taking shortcuts that undermine your efforts. Even if other people in your company are not able to see a change in the quality of your work, and often people who work hard are the first to see when they are not living up to their own standards, you can see it. That makes you feel worse about yourself and your situation.
- Next, you may find yourself plagued with self-doubt. Your confidence can start to collapse because of the shortcuts you are taking. The things that you used to take pride in seem less important. You may think of yourself as being less important. This process is not based on logic but is one of the signs of emotional exhaustion. You may start to see yourself as a fraud and wonder how you have been fooling people for so long.
- You may find yourself becoming more cynical. For some people, it can be hard to tell when they have moved to the next of the 5 stages of burnout but for others, it is really easy. When you are normally a “glass is half full person” and now you are not, that should be a big red flag to start doing something for yourself. For some people they switch from wanting to do a good job to wanting to cover their but, they may use the acronym “CYA.” At this stage, you may find you are arming yourself with more defense mechanisms than you have used in the past.
- You may move to the point where you feel hopeless and helpless. This may make you walk around humming the song, “Should I stay or should I go?” The line, “If I stay there will be trouble if I leave there will be double.” If that rings all too true for you, you have reached the last of the 5 stages of burnout. If you find yourself in this position, you need to seek out some kind of help. Spending an afternoon doing something to pamper yourself is a start. Taking a real vacation may be another thing you want to consider at this point.
There is good news if you have found yourself going through one of the 5 stages of burnout. Recovery is possible. There are techniques you can employ to maintain your sanity while doing a good job. Mindfulness meditation, eating better foods, working out, and getting away from work to do something from time to time are all ways you can better manage your stress level and recover from workplace burnout
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