Do You Have These signs of Burnout and What to Do About It If You Do | Ep. 86 | Mind Podcast
Summary
As an entrepreneur and business owner you’re likely to get some form of burnout while building your business.
Once burnout starts it slowly creeps up on you and erodes your productivity which ultimately can spread to other people in your company. And…
Before you know it you’ve crashed.
Listen to this episode to identify the signs of burnout and how you can turn things around once you’ve identified you have one of the symptoms.
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Hello, friends. Welcome to the show today. We’re talking about burnout as business owners and entrepreneurs. At some point in our journey in building a business, we are going to experience some form of burnout, and the key is to recognizing it. So listen in to this episode. See if you have any of these signs and if so, stick around to the end, where I give you some tips about what you can do to start to overcome it. And how do I know? Because I’ve actually been burned out before.
Let’s not waste another second. Let’s get to it. How to Avoid burnout. Welcome to build the business success secrets. The only podcast that provides straight talk for entrepreneurs. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, starting with an idea or growing your business, this show is for you. We’ll teach you how to build a strong mindset, powerful body and profitable business so you can achieve success. And here’s your host, Brendan. See white. Here’s the interesting thing about burnout. It doesn’t happen.
Suddenly you don’t wake up one morning and all of a sudden have burnout. Its nature is much more insidious. It creeps up on us over time just like a slow pinhole leak in your tire, which makes it super hard to recognize because we don’t realize it’s actually happening to us. But here’s the good news. All along the way, our bodies and our minds are giving us warning signals. And if you know what to look for, you can recognize it before it’s too late. And you hit a wall like I did, which I’ll tell you in a little bit. But let’s talk about burnout and three areas, which burnouts really chronic stress over a period of time that does three things.
It gives you physical and emotional exhaustion. It’ll make you cynical. It will make you detached from your family and friends or even your workplace, and you’ll start to feel like you’re ineffective. You feel like you’re not accomplishing things. You, at the end of the day, look around and are numb or almost indifferent, and you don’t feel like you actually did anything.
So if you have any of these feelings, don’t panic. But let’s talk and talk about them a little bit more and break them down so that you know what to look for and recognize. Here are some signs as it relates to your physical and emotional exhaustion. It’s chronic fatigue. You don’t have energy. Even maybe one night you actually get some sleep and you still don’t have any energy. You basically feel like you’re just completely depleted. You can’t sleep. You have insomnia. You start forgetting things. You have impaired concentration, can’t concentrate for long periods of time. Can’t keep your attention on things.
I remember about three years ago when I started to get this. I couldn’t even remember what the destination of my flight was that I was on and I would doze off on the plane and I would literally wake up on landing and have to bring up the weather app to figure out which city I was in. And it was even more significant that by the time I had walked to the end of the tunnel and got into the airport into the main terminal, I had forgotten what airport I was in when I had been there 100 times. So this is a sure sign.
If you have this, recognize it. You have physical symptoms. You could have heart palpitations. You could have shortness of breast. You could have dizziness. You could have headaches all the time. You could have chest pain. Any of these things are signs or burn out. What also happens during these periods is that your immune system decreases, so you might constantly have a runny nose. You might get sick in times like we are with covid. It’s dangerous because you’re more susceptible to getting it. You can lose your appetite if you don’t find yourself craving or being interested in some of your favorite foods. That could be a sign.
You have anxiety. In the beginning, it will be small, but there could be some edginess. Could be short temper. Could be any of these things that anxiety is expressing itself. You could actually start being depressed. You start feeling hopeless. You feel like there’s no way out. You feel like you don’t know how to get out. And I’ll just mention that if you are at that point, you really should get some professional attention because it spirals in psychology. It’s, uh, just think of it like a sink and the water going down into the sink into the drain.
And what happens is it just gets faster and faster and faster as you go down there and and it accelerates so you don’t want that to happen. So I encourage you. If you feel like that, definitely get some professional help. And then the last thing I’ll mention that that is a sign is you start to get angry and this could just be you could be irritable or things trigger you fast or you just have this negative attitude. You find yourself being short with people, and you start to recognize that or people actually start to point that out. Let’s talk about the second, larger category signs of cynicism and detachment, so you just don’t enjoy anything anymore.
You things that used to make you happy or that you liked. You don’t get any enjoyment out of that anymore. You’re pessimistic about things you start to isolate, and in the beginning it will feel like you’re just making excuses. Why you don’t want to do something social now in today’s covid times, probably all want to meet more people. But if you find yourself not even looking forward to that or thinking about, that is something that you would want to do that could be a sign and the last one in this category is just feeling detached. So if you’re part of a team or your company, you’re leading your company and you just don’t feel in the flow.
I think that word is used in many different ways, but you just feel non connected where you may have felt a better connection with the people that you work with over time. If you feel any of those things, all could be signs that burnout is creeping up on you, and the last main category will talk about is signs of ineffective, that ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. What does that mean? It means that you feel hopeless. This is in many ways similar to depression, and one of the telltale characteristics of this is if you find yourself saying what’s the point? What’s the point of this? What’s the point of that? What’s what’s the point?
If you start thinking like that definitely can be assigned increased irritability, which we talked about a little bit earlier, but definitely also a part of this, and at the worst part is it can destroy relationships with your friends, your family and your colleagues. When that was not your intention. So if you start to feel like that definitely could be a sign that burn out is creeping up on you, and the last thing is just like a productivity. And I remember when I had burned out, and it was just as if I actually couldn’t even perform well, and it took me a minute to get back and I actually had to get. I came back slowly, but I brought back the exercise and I started doing just a little bit more every day, and eventually everything was fine. But it’s this just inability. I remember sitting down, and it was just, like, hard for me to write an article one day, whereas when I’m at my best or not, even at my best. But in a good place, I can pump out 1000 to 3000 word article in a few hours time, at least a first draft and it can flow.
But I couldn’t even write a first paragraph when I first started coming back from it. So if you start feeling just you’re not productive, your performance isn’t there. You don’t feel that sharpness definitely could be a sign. So if you have any of these signs, it’s definitely possible that burnout could be creeping up on you. So let’s talk about how you can overcome First part is recognizing these signs. The second part is, how can you overcome them? And while I’m going to rattle them off here, I’m not suggesting that they’re easy. They it will be challenging for you. Anyone that tells you easy must have some magic thing that I don’t know about.
But it’s not easy, but you can do it, and I suggest you do it slowly and a little bit at a time so you don’t get discouraged. So the first step is just to take an inventory. We talked about all these signs taking inventory. Play this back, go through these things and just write some things down on a scrap piece of paper and see how many of them you have. If you have one or two, I wouldn’t be alarmed. I wouldn’t freak out here, but just be aware of it and take an inventory of what bothers you.
If you’re triggered by something, write that down and at the end, see how big this list is and what it looks like The second part of this inventory is write down what you can do or what you think you can do to mitigate it, to reduce the stress and again understand that this is not going to happen overnight. It’s not as if you all of a sudden recognize that you have burnout and you sit down. You take your inventory and then you write some mitigating things that you’re going to do and implement, and all of a sudden, boom, it happens. It doesn’t. It will happen slowly and you will fail a few times, but over time you can and will recover if you stay consistent.
And another good mitigating thing that I learned a long time ago is just to say no to things. Stop adding more to your pile. As an entrepreneur and small business owner, we I call it stacking firewood. We’ll just keep adding things on. We’ll just keep taking things on. We’ll want to go do more, and eventually it just just that process can lead to burning you out. You can burn yourself out as a business owner. As an entrepreneur, you just keep stacking the wood and you’re trying to get that wood into the fire to burn to put into action, and you just can’t get there because the wood stacking faster than you can burn it.
So just start saying No, actually, I would suggest you that when you start doing that, you’re going to feel a lot better because it instantly takes off what would have been an entire process about something off your plate. And it keeps the things that are important to you, which are your business, your friends, your family and ultimately, all the people that you lied and work for you in the forefront. The next one isn’t even easy, necessarily when you’re not burned out, but when you get good at it, it actually is really cool thing, which me probably two decades to do well. But delegate, delegate to other people learn how to do that.
Get in the practice of doing that, and you have to start delegating everything. Delegate One thing. You may not feel comfortable because you want that control, and we as entrepreneurs, always want to make it perfect. Start delegating one thing as you’re doing big projects. Take some breaks, take a break. Even during the day, jumping back and forth or jumping from one thing to another will literally wear you out. And that can lead to burnout. Just switching tasks all day long that will wear you out.
And it can be chronic and cause problems. I’ve experienced that, too. And what I’ve gotten good at is recognizing when these things happen and saying, Okay, I got to take some control. What is going on here? Another one, which you hear all the time and can be hard, which is just take control of your devices, turn them off. One thing that I was in a bad habit at night I have my phone scrolling just laying down. I’d scroll through a few last things and the challenges that screen time and light.
So what I started doing, I used to do this when I was a kid. I love radio and I love podcast. And at night I’ll just turn on a podcast and I put the timer on for 30 minutes, and usually I make it through about three minutes. Um, but that’s how I wind down or I put on some light music or that has a timer. I have found that putting on the timer is key because at least for me, if I leave my radio on or I leave music on or I leave the podcasts on podcasters keep playing is I actually wake up to turn it off, and that must be something in our brain. So use the timer to do that. But take control of these things. These things are wildly addicting.
It reminds me of Charlie Brown and Linus and his blanket, because really, what’s happening here is these phones are our blankets, and I took an inventory a little while ago and I was like, Why do I have to have my phone next to me? I’ve always got an excuse why I need this thing next to me. And sometimes now I leave it in my office downstairs. When I go to eat and I’ll be honest, conversations are better. Concentration is better. My mind is more at ease, and I really find that. So try to try to do that. It won’t be easy, but even little things when you put it down and put it down. When you go outside or eat dinner, don’t even put it near you.
Some people don’t even keep their phone in their bedroom. If I had a hard line phone, I would do that. I think for an emergency, I feel like I want my phone. But I do. I do keep it further away from me in bed. So take control of the devices. Another one. Start to set some hard deadlines on your time from when you’re working and when you’re living, so to speak. Especially now that a lot of people work from home. Working from home is great, but working from home is stressful.
It took me a long time to get good at it. I’ve been lucky enough to work from home offices if I’ve chosen since I was in my twenties, but it can be distracting, so the irony of this is that we don’t have to drive in these crazy commutes. But working from home can be distracting defining your space and then deciding that when you walk out your office door or whatever area you have in your home as your home office, that’s it. Work doesn’t leave their try to do that, and the last one I’ll offer you is there’s tons of groups out there online on Facebook on everywhere instagram.
All of these platforms have groups of people or hashtags, that people follow that you can join, and it’s happened for a long time. Sports groups, uh, peloton groups are out there. Entrepreneur support groups. There’s tons of groups out in the Internet that you can find, and I encourage you to join them part of recovering. If you do have burnout, sometimes it helps just to talk to other people who have had it that you realize that you’re not the only one in the world that has happened to, and some people will give you a little tips and tricks.
There’s not one fix all. I think one of the things that is overdone in our society is do these three things, these 10 things and it will magically happen to you. What happens in the weight loss and diet fitness industry all the time and it drives me crazy is the fact of the matter is we’re all a little bit different. You may be able to eat avocado with no problem. I can tell you that if I eat too much avocado, regardless of how many calories I have during the day. I’m probably going to gain some body fat, and that’s just how my body reacts.
I learned that over time, and and I think it’s the same thing, whether it’s burnout here, chronic stress, all these things you gotta learn what works for you. What works for me is I love riding my bike if I go more than 72 hours without riding my bike. Actually, some of the things we’ve talked about here the edginess, the anxiety not so much, but it comes through and just edgy and annoyed. It just happens. But as soon as I ride my bike, life is good or I go to the gym lift weights, which I don’t go to the gym anymore.
I created my home gym and I started doing little things, so I put my weights near my kitchen and I do do a quick set. Tonight. After dinner, we were hanging out. I made a fire. I did five sets of shoulder presses and three sets of sit ups because we keep the ball in our living room. Made it easy. So these little things just help and you know, I’ll tell you recording tonight I feel better do some of these things. Figure out what works for you. Take the inventory for sure. Rewind to the beginning.
Go through, see if you have a bunch of these things. And if you do, just take note and try to mitigate them and do what you can to avoid burnout. Thanks for being generous with your time and joining us for this episode of Build a business success Secrets. Before we go, let me ask you a quick question. Are you the type of person who wants to get 100% out of your time, talent and ideas? If so, you’ll love our monthly Built A Business Success Secrets newsletter.
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