“Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.” — Robin Sharma
Burnout isn’t a passing feeling that we can just shake off.
It’s often something that’s been building within us for a long time, often with many red flags being sent up that we ignore.
If you feel like you have lost your passion, your joy, your creative energy — you are not alone.
I’ve been exploring the idea of collective languishing that has been going on for many years — long before the pandemic — for women who feel trapped or stuck in their current situations. In our languishing, what’s not working always rises to the surface.
If you aren’t sure if you are burned out or just exhausted, now is the right time to get on track to figuring it out.
Just like the quote above, we don’t want to keep doing what’s not working or what’s not serving us and call it a life.
But it’s not always easy to stop all the patterns that lead you to suffering from burnout such as …
- How we give all of ourselves to others without holding any sense of respect and worthiness for own personal wellness.
- When we serve others before ourselves repeatedly until we collapse of exhaustion or illness.
- When we ignore our own basic needs.
- When we practice bad habits that lead us to a less fulfilling lifestyle.
Suffering from burnout is often the wake up call we need to make changes in our lives. If you’re not sure if you are just having a bad day or if you are in the midst of burnout, it’s important to notice what’s really happening for you.
How do you know if you are suffering from burnout? Here are some of the signs I’ve noticed from my private coaching clients …
- You feel unmotivated to do anything — especially your own self-care.
- You feel numb and cannot seem to experience authentic joy.
- You feel a constant heaviness holding you down, dragging you along that makes it hard to take action.
- You feel negative and frustrated about many things in your life but you feel powerless to change anything.
- You feel resentful for any rest or fun your partner or ex-partner has in their life.
- You feel like you are being swallowed up by constant responsibilities and feel overwhelmed with where to begin to change the pattern.
What does unaddressed burnout do in the long run?
It is easy to blame your job or your family life for your burnout. You just have so much to do and so little time to do it.
However, operating in extreme physical and emotional fatigue is not good for you and it’s not good for you or your work or family.
Of course you go through the motions and operate on auto-pilot to make sure everything gets done. But your lack of energy for true joy and connection becomes more and more apparent.
This creates a lack of bond and connection with your family. They will pick up on your exhaustion and disinterest as well and act accordingly.
Burnout shows up in your work, too. It shows up in mistakes and an inability to make sound, intentional decisions. And it shows up in how often you end up saying yes to doing things you don’t want to do because you are so busy trying to prove you are enough on the outside because you do not feel enough on the inside.
All of these results of mom burnout can lead to intense feelings of guilt, shame and loneliness.
What can you do about burnout right now?
It’s easy to think that what you need is a rest and certainly good sleep and more time to relax is going to be a great start.
But the only way to really tackle burnout is to create a foundation of true self-care that leads to a greater sense of purpose and meaning in your life. Figuring out what brings you alive so that you can BE YOU, FINALLY again is the secret.
When a new client comes to me facing burnout (or overwhelm, stress or exhaustion) we begin the hard work of digging her out of the rubble of the life or work that you feels trapped under. Sometimes that rubble is so heavy that it’s impossible to see what’s possible for you. We figure that out, too.
But the truth is that we have to start to figure out where your patterns of resistance, people-pleasing and settling keep showing up.
Once you can reclaim yourself and your energy and start living a more bold, beautiful life you start to feel more whole, more enough.
You will thrive once you do the self-discovery deep dive that is necessary to figure out what you need, how to make it happen and how to sustain it. Once you pull back the layers of all those shoulds, expectations and of lifelong habits that led to your burnout, you will start to thrive and flourish in mind, body and spirit again.
And it doesn’t mean you have to burn it all down, either. Quitting your job isn’t always the best solution. Sometimes what you need to feel joy again is so simple and so basic you can’t even see it.
