Burnout takes time to develop: it creeps up on you quietly. Its hallmarks are hopelessness, cynicism, and an inability to focus.
It’s also associated with physical symptoms like heart palpitations, blood pressure problems, muscle tension, and random aches and pains. But it manifests in more insidious ways too.
You may be at risk of burnout if…
You’re irritated by the little things
When you lose the ability to enjoy your job, you also run out of patience.
Coworkers you used to like suddenly seem pushy, boring, or obnoxious. Your routine feels unbearably stale, but new projects are even more exhausting. If you have a client-facing job, it takes an inhuman effort to talk to them politely and attentively.
Plus, the irritation may spill over to your personal life. You get either snappy or robotically distant, even with people you love. You can’t handle minor inconveniences like a broken appliance. You also can’t enjoy your hobbies the way you usually do because you keep getting distracted or annoyed by some detail.
Bad habits become more tempting
Life-ruining or relatively harmless bad habits seep into your life when you’re under too much workplace stress.
Maybe you’re back to chewing your nails, or you’re drinking more coffee than usual. You spend money on stuff you don’t need, all for that brief rush of joy you get when making your purchase. You haven’t smoked in more than a decade, but you miss it more than usual.
There’s a well-documented link between burnout and addiction. Some turn to alcohol and drugs for the first time because of burnout. Those who struggled in the past are likely to relapse under strain.
When I got burned out, I started hate-reading people on social media compulsively. This isn’t a big deal, except that it robbed me of hours I could have spent with people I love. It enhanced my bad mood and feelings of pessimism, and I couldn’t stop even though I wanted to.
Work haunts your dreams
Burnout can creep into your dreams.
You may have repetitive nightmares of being back at school and getting humiliated by some teacher you never think about anymore. Or you may dream about being trapped, drowned, buried, and so on. My burnout nightmares usually featured some lost item everyone blamed me for.
Also Read: Customer service agents are feeling burned out, how can we help them?
Another weird symptom of burnout is having “flat dreams”. If your dreams are normally colourful and imaginative, and you’re suddenly having plotless, boring dreams, that could mean the stress is getting to you.
Your sleeping patterns are all over the place
Going to sleep becomes fraught when you hate the thought of going to work in the morning. You may find yourself going to bed later and later each day. Or you stay up in bed for hours, scrolling your feeds aimlessly in the hope of distraction.
Sleeping patterns get especially messy on weekends or vacations. You sleep in, wake up listless, spend your day in a haze, and then have trouble falling asleep. The more you’re annoyed by your inability to sleep, the harder it is to relax.
For many years, taking time off was touted as the best cure for burnout. Now we know that it doesn’t work like that: burnout makes true rest impossible.
You’re losing your imagination
If you’re burnt out, and someone tells you to imagine the future, you don’t know what to say. You’re taking life one day at a time, work has robbed you of the ability to look ahead.
But that’s not all. From personal experience, I can say that burnout changes your inner world.
You’re less expressive, and it’s harder for you to describe feelings (or even think about them). You feel blank, emptied out inside, but overwhelmed at the same time. You can’t imagine a better way forward.
The ugly truth
Everyone needs to know how to spot burnout in themselves and their loved ones, but recognition won’t solve the problem. Burnout isn’t something you can handle through positive thinking or better time management. You have to tackle it directly.
Therapy can help, and so can certain lifestyle changes. But keep in mind that burnout is a response to your circumstances.
Sometimes, the only way to escape it is to change the circumstances in question. Talk to your boss, demand a change, and quit if you have to. No job is worth this kind of suffering.
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