Last month, we touched on what burnout is and how it comes about. Equally important is how to avoid it from the get-go. While every job will have stressors, the team at Kip & King Marketing has put together a couple of things to stop those stressors from ruining your mental health!
One of the easiest and most important ways to preserve your mental health is to set boundaries and limits with your job. This can be something as simple as not opening emails outside of business hours to asking your employer to not call you on your day off barring an emergency. Setting a boundary between what is work time and what is personal time will also set a boundary for your body. You’ll find yourself able to relax better knowing that you are truly off the clock and work won’t sneak its way into your personal life. In this specific instance, every job is different. Some will have crazier hours than others. But that one email this one time can quickly lead to emails consistently coming in at 10 pm on a Saturday.
Try to create small routines in your day. Exercise is a great example. As Reese Witherspoon so famously said, “”Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands, they just don’t.” And happy people avoid burnout easier. All Legally Blonde quotes aside, endorphins are good for your brain and can help you feel more at peace with your life and your schedule, including your job. Not only that, but time spent at the gym is time spent away from work, and time spent resetting your mind for the next day.
Similar to implementing easy routines, practicing mindfulness is essential to job satisfaction. Mindfulness can be anything from meditating every day to spending some time outside to let your brain and body relax from the stressors of life. Once you’re in the office, you can be mindful by reflecting on your moments of happiness. This can be anything from the new snacks in the break room to the big promotion you got. You can also help ease your mind by focusing on one task at a time. This way your brain can process and work through every problem before moving onto the next, which can help protect an employee from feeling overwhelmed. Constantly feeling overwhelmed is a quick way to find yourself burned out.
These are some quick and easy ways to help prevent burnout. However, if you start to feel burnt out there are a few things you can do. Firstly, seek support from those around you. This could be your co-workers, friends, family, or even a therapist. Sometimes all you need to feel less overwhelmed is the knowledge that you’re not alone. If you choose to speak with a therapist, they will be able to give you personalized techniques to handle the symptoms you feel from being burnt out.
If you start to struggle to handle the symptoms, talk to your boss to see what accommodation you can set up to help you. This may be something as simple as turning your desk so you have a different view of the office to giving you a different project to work on to reset your mind before going back to the original project. A good workplace will work with their employees so that they will be able to get the job done as best as they can.
Sometimes all you need is a day out of the office. If the Pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that most jobs don’t have to happen in the same place every day. Travel somewhere new and work remotely for a week. Visit a nearby town and get out of your mundane routine. With a rise in cloud-based storage like Google Drive and Dropbox, employees can work from virtually anywhere. A change of scenery may be all that you need to reset yourself and have a newfound passion for your job.
Everyone needs a break now and then. If you’re feeling burnt out, take a vacation. And actually take a vacation. Set an away message for your work emails and texts and don’t check them until you’re back in the office. Don’t take calls from your work, and do your best to not even think about the office. You deserve some time to yourself.
Burnout is a very real and important struggle in today’s workplace. By doing what you can to avoid burnout, you will come back as an even better employee, which works out the best for everyone!