Dealing with burnout

[PinkZebraStripes]

I'm posting this to try and reinforce my motivation to make positive change.

I think there are levels of stress - a degree of it is normal and sometimes we all reach a point of exhaustion.

I'm talking about long-term chronic stress, where you're hurtling between crises, verging on burnout and self neglect has taken over without insight of the impact. Sorry that's very depressing!

I mean things like emotionally distressing situations that are difficult, stress impacting severly on sleep over a long period of time, poor food choices, lower activity levels.

I've always teetered between burnout, but usually rebalanced with a holiday, sometimes I've hit burnout and needed a couple of months to reset.

I've been in a higher stress situation for about six months now and there is little chance of it changing.

I'm absolutely not willing to compromise my health long term so am looking to make whatever changes I need to.

At the moment I feel maybe 2 years away from being incapacitated by stress.

I don't actually know how to make changes within the framework of my life but I recently found a coach and my first goal is that I need to balance it all. Whatever that is going to look like.

I imagine it's partly about boundaries- I work with quite a lot of men and they don't seem to listen to women as much and I don't know to how to overcome that without saying just do it. I tried that and it's ignored. Do you just keep pushing? How?

It's also just quite hard to manage it all so I am guessing there is some deprioritising. Happy to do that, it's just quite hard to let go at first. It needs reframig away from ' dropping your standards ' to...'focusing on the basics'.

Then there's addiction to stress. I think that's my biggest barrier. That's a hard one to break as you need time away from stress to break the cycle. But then when stress comes back it's about remembering to use the strategies. I don't know though if it's really the case that once you are a stress addict, you always are. Everytime it shows up, the bodies response is defence, because it remembers. Maybe something about carving out more time so it doesn't become the massive thing. Grey rocking my own stress 😂

And then there's just those massive unexpected curve balls. I really really feel these are the hardest especially if you don't have enough resource already in the bank - be it time, support, resilience, energy. Life is so hard and full of challenges that it's just not possible to have access to all the resources you need. Not sure what the answer is but I think it's in community, whether it's online support groups, finding a community with similar interests.

What's helped you with burnout?

Stress isn't an entity in and of itself, it's our emotional reaction to what's going on around us. The absolute best thing to combat stress for everyone is sleep.

Every time we are faced with a challenge, be it tiny (shall I get off the sofa and nip to the shop?) or huge (I am going to leave my partner/job?) we will do a subconscious 'cognitive assessment' to see if we are likely to succeed. The metrics look something like this;

1. How big is the challenge?
2. Have I done this before?
3. How complex is it?
4. How good am I at this sort of thing?
5. How close am I to my physical and mental best am I?

Now, nipping to the shop is pretty easy but if you are shattered you might say "fuck it" and order a takeout instead. No big deal. But if you aren't in the best condition to deal with challenges on a regular basis you will end up doubting yourself over the smallest of decisions.

So the bottom line; prioritise sleep above all else.