🔄 Can you break a burnout cycle?

The burnout cycle. Are you familiar? It’s an especially sticky foe.

What is a burnout cycle

When we’re in burnout, there’s a tendency to work even harder to push through. Rest rarely feels like an option when burnout is present. How many times have you said “after.” After [this] then I’ll take a break.

The problem with this approach is that it actually deepens the deficits that caused your burnout in the first place.

Working over capacity ➡️ Feeling overly busy
Feeling overly busy ➡️ There’s no time to take a break
Not taking a break ➡️ Burnout
Working a little more to get through burnout faster ➡️ Even more burnout

This is the burnout cycle.

So, can we break out of it?

Yes! …and also no 😂

Technically, all of us are in a burnout cycle. Personally, I have found it to be impossible to completely avoid burnout, and I’ve instead starting thinking of it as a very important learning opportunity. But, even though there’s learning to be had, it’s still not fun.

But if we think about burnout as unavoidable, we get to do a couple other things too

• We can stop feeling guilty or frustrated with ourselves because burnout is just a part of learning balance

• We can change our approach from avoiding burnout entirely to extending the time between burnouts

• and that changes our expectations, so instead of being disappointed that we didn’t avoid burnout, we get to be proud that we had balanced time between burnouts, and that balanced time will follow