How To Avoid Burnout at Work: 6 Proven Strategies
There’s nothing like the feeling of being “in the flow” at work. You breeze through your workday, check off your to-do list, and have energy at the end of the day.
Then suddenly, you hit a wall. The mere thought of work feels exhausting, and your motivation is completely gone.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your work, it might help to realize you’re not alone. In a recent survey, 75% of people said they have experienced burnout at work.
When you’re burnt out, you’ll find that the tasks that used to be simple become quite difficult, if not impossible to accomplish.
Your workload keeps growing, and you keep falling further and further behind, causing even more stress.
How To Recognize The Signs of Burnout
Some giveaway signs that you’re suffering from burnout at work are:
- You feel exhausted and depleted
- You’re highly irritable
- You’ve got a killer headache
- You’re coming down with a cold
- You feel overwhelmed by small, simple tasks
- You’re getting cynical about work you normally love
- You can’t seem to make any progress with work
The Negative Effects of Burnout at Work
A recent study found that workplace burnout can have a significant impact on the quality of our lives, in more ways than you might think.
The study found a direct association between burnout and hospitalization from cardiovascular diseases. Musculoskeletal disorders, hypercholesterolemia, and type 2 diabetes were also found to be higher among people experiencing burnout at work.
This isn’t all: you can add chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, respiratory problems to the list of physical consequences. The study even found that burnout increases the risk of dying before the age of 45.
People who experience burnout at work are likely to experience insomnia and depression. These factors make life very difficult in the workplace, causing people to fall behind in their work responsibilities.
How To Avoid Burnout at Work
No one wants to experience burnout, but it can happen before you know what’s hit you.
Here are 6 proven strategies for avoiding burnout in the workplace.
1. Take Care of Your Health
When we’re working long hours and cutting close to deadlines, it’s easy to ignore our normal routine of taking care of our bodies. But our physical health is vital to staying on top of work.
Simple acts of self-care go a long way toward handling stress in the workplace.
Take a mental health day off from work. Use these templates to email your boss and take the day to recover.
Eating well nourishes our body and gives us the fuel we need for staying energized throughout the workday. Pay attention to the types of food you’re putting in your body – sugar will give you a temporary kick, but will have you crashing later in the day.
Exercise keeps our blood pumping, giving us extra energy and helping our brains to be able to think better. Even a walk on your break will do the trick. Getting a night of good sleep is also essential for handling stress, so keep a regular sleep schedule.
2. Step Away From Your Desk
Einstein used to walk 3 miles each day. Between sessions of intense thinking, he would step away from his work and go for a walk. He went on to shake the foundations of physics and shape the way we understand the world.
“Life is like riding a bicycle, to keep the balance you should always be moving.” - Albert Einstein
There’s a direct correlation between Einstein’s walks and his extraordinary feats of the mind. When we are faced with a problem to solve, sometimes sitting at our desk and stewing over it won’t do any good.
When you take a break from work and let your mind wander freely, it helps to get your creative juices flowing. You’ll most likely come back from your break with new ideas for solutions to your problem.
3. Set Aside Playtime
When we hear the word “playtime”, we immediately think of children. Surely playtime isn’t something that applies to adults, right? It turns out that engaging in play helps reduce the stress that can eventually lead to burnout.
Playing activates the creative part of our brain and allows inspiration to flow. It also increases our levels of dopamine, which makes us feel rewarded.
When adults engage in play, they enter what’s known to professional athletes as the “flow state” – that zone you’re in when everything just seems to flow perfectly.
What counts as play? Some ways you can include playtime in your daily routine are watching a funny video, jamming on a musical instrument (another secret trick that Einstein knew), and playing a board game with your family.
This leads us to our next strategy for avoiding burnout at work…
4. Reduce Your Workload
One of the main factors that cause burnout at work is being overwhelmed with too much work. When our workload is too big, it becomes impossible to get everything done, leaving us with a sense of never getting anywhere.
At the risk of sounding too obvious, the trick to reducing stress in the workplace is reducing your workload. But how on earth do you do that?
One highly effective method is to delegate tasks. Whenever possible, take the simple or mundane tasks from your workday and delegate those responsibilities to others. This might come in the form of hiring a new employee or training an existing one.
Another way to powerfully reduce your workload is to automate your workflow. Take some time to discover tools that will reduce the effort put into mundane tasks. Text Blaze is a great example of this, an easy-to-use tool that uses templates to eliminate meaningless, repetitive typing tasks.
5. Learn the Power of Saying “No”
It’s easy to take on more work than we can handle in an attempt to please our bosses or clients. People-pleasing may seem like a good idea, but ultimately results in us being too stressed to deliver quality work.
Saying “no” to extra work doesn’t come naturally to most people, but practice makes perfect. Just saying the word out loud can eventually make us more comfortable having boundaries in our work life.
You don’t need to be rude when you’re turning down work. Simply being assertive is enough – saying “no” in a clear and confident way. It also helps to explain the reason you’re saying “no”.
6. Relax and Breathe
Another strategy for avoiding burnout at work is to learn the art of relaxation. This doesn’t mean just getting a good night’s sleep – there are other important areas where relaxation should be prioritized.
Relaxing your body allows us to recover from the physical strain of work. Even if you sit at a desk all day, your eyes will be strained from staring at your computer or taking part in long Zoom calls. You can relax your body by practicing breathing techniques or giving yourself breaks from your computer screen.
Relaxing your mind is equally important when it comes to preventing burnout. Listening to a guided meditation or music you love can reduce your stress levels.
In Conclusion
It’s likely that you’ll experience burnout at least once in your work life. No matter how much you love what you do, if you don’t pay attention to your other needs, you’ll eventually find that stress becomes overwhelming.
Use these strategies for avoiding burnout at work will keep you functioning at your peak level. From there, the sky’s the limit when it comes to what you can achieve.
While you're here, get started with Text Blaze for free, and start ending meaningless low value work today!
Hi there! You made it all the way down to the bottom of this article. Take a few seconds to share it.
Want to turbo charge your work with templates and snippets? Text Blaze is the fastest way to do that.