5 ways to overcome burning out.
With many of us having to try and juggle various different roles in life like being a parent, daughter, son, grandparent or carer on top of business commitments which can include doing your business admin, marketing and sales on top of actually running your business and keeping your clients happy, it isn’t any wonder that many of us feel the symptoms of burn out.
So, what is “burn out” and when do you know that you have reached that stage of being overwhelmed?
If you would say “yes” to any of the below then you are probably currently struggling a little in life and gradually feeling overwhelmed or maybe you are nearer that stage of “burn out”. If you are nearing the later stages, you need to act now:
Feeling aggravated and it is easy for the slightest thing to agitate you.
Struggling to get a good night’s sleep and constantly feeling tired and de-flatted.
You don’t have time to properly look after yourself. You are not eating properly and drinking more caffeine than normal to combat fatigue.
Your struggling to get motivated and not as interested in what you are doing as you once were. This could be both with your work and personal life.
Generally, feel that you are stressed and unable to cope with daily life.
So, what do you do about it? Well you need to find more “me time” and take some valuable time out of your day to look after yourself. You might think if you are overwhelmed and there already isn’t enough hours in the day how can I find the time. What you need to think it can you afford not to find the time. I am not saying you must find a huge chunk of time, maybe just 15 minutes per day. Within this allocated time, you could look at doing one of the following positive activities:
Mindfulness & meditation. These can easily fit into a short space of time.
Physical exercise, a walk, jog, swimming, gardening or yoga.
Drawing, painting, writing or something creative.
Spend time with your family and friends.
If you have pets spend time pampering them.
Remember, you can’t do everything and sometimes you just need to understand this and take it on board and let others help where they can. Look at the things you enjoy doing with your business and personal life and what you don’t enjoy outsource it to other who do enjoy doing those tasks. You also need to realise you won’t please everyone all the time, so don’t waste precious time trying to do so.
Learn to say ‘no’ sometimes. Warren Buffet one of the world’s richest men swears by the power of saying ‘no’. Try it now and again if it is a task that doesn’t really interest you, you might feel quite powerful to just be able to say ‘no’ for once.
Try planning you day and have a list of what is possible to get done within your working hours and as they are done tick them off. Focus on each individual task and don’t move on to the next task until the first one is complete.
Give these a go and if one of these pointers helps you, we would love to hear about what works for you and if by just taking a little time out in your day makes you feel better.
Written by Emma from the Spiral Orange Team.
