If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably are one of those people that work really hard. And with working really hard comes burnout. And with burnout comes depression, unhappiness, and all kinds of other crap we don’t want in our lives. In this post: I’ll talk about effective ways on how to avoid burnout, and how to treat burnout if you do get it.

Why You Need To Avoid Burnout

Burnout is a real health issue. It affects your mental, which affects your physical.

Other than being tired all the time, here are some of the consequences of burnout.

• Overstressed + anxiety = more inflammation and weakened immune system. This means getting sick more frequently and staying sick for longer.
• You might be working a lot, but you won’t get much done if you’re burned out. By definition, your performance if you’re ‘burned out’ is almost nil. Thus, burnout leads to more burnout if left untreated because you’ll just feel like something in your brain isn’t working, and you don’t know why. This leads to a negative feedback loop of forcing yourself to work harder and harder, but doing less and less work.
• The negative spiral can lead to hopelessness. Like everything you do isn’t good enough. This can lead to depression and pessimism in general.
• Body aches due to neuropathy and for sitting for a long time to do work.
• Shortened lifespan in general, if left untreated.

The Most Basic Thing Needed To Avoid Burnout

To avoid burnout, you’ll need to know when you’re burning out.

Other words: you need self-awareness if you don’t want to burn yourself out. And self-awareness means not having an ego. If you need rest, rest.

To enhance your self-awareness over time, consider doing the following:

• Set daily alarms on your phone (2-3 times a day).
• Each time the alarm goes off, take a step back for a minute to see your stress level. Are you more stressed than you woke up this morning? Less? What’s the trend? Are you more or less stressed than your last check-in?
• Keep noticing this until you can correlate an internal stress level to feelings of lethargy and exhaustion / depression / hopelessness.

Knowing what that inflection point is for your downward stress spiral means you’ll have enough in the future to do preventative countermeasures to avoid burnout.

Here’s an example of my being burned out a few years ago, where my self-awareness came quite delayed:

I was dealing with some real estate deals + work stuff + a bunch of other issues in my life. I was irritable and depressed (though the latter wasn’t obvious to me). I only knew I was irritable until someone pointed it out to me. I then took the time (say, 3 minutes) to think about the root cause for this heavy shift in behavior. Why am I like this? I noticed that the main delta in my life that correlated to my mood / behavior change was that I was sleeping 4-6h/day due to high workload.

To see if this ‘sleep’ thing is as good as the medical journals make it, I started sleeping 8-10h/day. Within 2-3 days it literally felt like I was living in a much more different, happier world. The problems still existed but I just had a much healthy perspective.

Having healthy sleep was able to—quite abruptly—lift the ugly mental clouds plagued me.

An Ounce Of Prevention Is Worth A Pound Of Cure

Having the self-awareness to know when you’re trending towards burning out means you can prevent burning out, instead of having to treat it.

Here’s an analogy: when you put your hand on a stove and it hurts, you pull away from it. Otherwise, you’ll get 3^rd degree burns. It’s painful, and you react to it.

So why is it that when work sucks, we keep pushing?

Is it because society tells us it’s a ‘good thing’ to keep working for ‘the man’ and to take no breaks and it’s good to ‘push through’? Well, it’s not good to push through. That’s how athletes get injuries, and knowledge workers get burned out.

Know this: pushing through is a matter of pride and a deep desire to be accepted by society for your ‘hard work’ and ‘hustle’, not a matter of grit. Grit requires consistent and persistent action over long periods of time. And part of being consistent is letting your ego go and knowing your threshold for work. This way, you can work long-term without ever stopping, as opposed to burning out and get less net work done despite more hours. I say again, jeopardizing your long-term consistency is not grit – it’s ego and short-term thinking.

So…as soon as you start felling symptoms of burnout, stop working so hard.

Take a nap or take the day off. Better to take a short-term, 1-day hit in productivity than to have to recover for weeks. In my case, my burnout was very slight. So I recovered in days. But you can see a case where I forgot to be self-aware for another month or so and it would probably take me much longer to recover. And keep in mind: my productivity would be down the whole time I was burned out anyway.

And if your job doesn’t allow you to just ‘stop’ – merely disengage. Just “don’t care” about anything that’s going on and give your brain a rest that way. Once you get home, just eat well and crash. And call in sick the next day. Burnout is a sickness, even if it’s not conventionally defined as such. And realize you are going to be sick if you keep forcing yourself to do work when you’re trending towards burnout (due to a weakened immune system). An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Don’t let your ego get in the way and try to force yourself through lethargy.

OK, I Didn’t Listen And Didn’t Avoid Burnout. I Got The Bug. How Do I Treat It?

Doing some research (and just from my own experience), here are some ways that you could treat your burnout:

• Sleep. I used 8 hours a day and I felt probably 50% after the first day, and completely recovered after 3 days. Couple your sleep by disengaging at work or taking sick days off. This’ll make you recovery faster.
• Exercise. In particular, HIIT. If you loooooove cardio, you can do that too. But my mood drastically becomes a lot better even after 10-15 minutes of HIIT. A HIIT exercise that I do are elliptical sprints: 1) Warm up on the elliptical for 1 minute. 2) Sprint as hard as you can with your legs (and arms, if your elliptical has moving arm handles) for 15 seconds. 3) Rest 1 minute. 4) Repeat steps 2-3 10 times. 5) Cool down on the elliptical until 15 minutes is reached. Feel free to start out at 3-4 sets and work your way up over time.
• Healthy diet. Eating shit foods make you feel like shit. That ice cream might feel good in the moment, but you’ll feel depressed afterwards. Diets come in many shapes and sizes so it’s hard to advise you here. But just stay away from processed foods / junk foods and eat whole foods. Deep down, you know what goods are healthy and what isn’t healthy. Eat the former.
• Meditate and take perspective. I do 10 minutes of meditation everyday in the mornings and write down 5 things I’m grateful for. This helps me keep perspective on the scale of my problems. That is – I can have a lot of business issues etc. but as long as my loved ones and I am healthy, I realize almost no “problem” is an actual problem. This leads us to the next point…
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This is a way to logically talk to yourself in order to treat emotional issues. It’s been shown to treat depression. Here’s a textbook (but very easy to read as it’s fairly conversational) on CBT that I used to deal with some internal issues. Last purchased in 2015 apparently:

Do one, some, or all of the above. Pick and choose to what you’re curious about trying, and do it. If symptoms of burnout persists – seek a medical professional. I’m not a health expert and I don’t claim to be one. The above are all just things that’s worked for me personally. It may not work for you…

…Though eating healthy, exercising, and sleeping enough are really things you should do if you’re not doing it already.

In Conclusion

Avoid burnout by being self-aware. Once you notice you’re trending towards burnout, take a day (or a few) to relax.

If you do happen upon burnout, definitely take a few days to relax and get enough sleep. Take care of yourself by eating healthy and taking perspective. If symptoms persist or if you’re acutely depressed, seek a doctor.