How to Fight and Prevent Emotional Exhaustion

Without noticing it, you can get emotionally exhausted. But there are ways to (quickly) get back to yourself.

Nowadays, all of us have plenty of reasons to be emotionally affected— either because the pandemic hit hard our finances; our physical and/or mental health declined; because of a stressful job or a complicated relationship. There is always something going on in our lives that distress us.

The fast-pace we live our days, the problems we struggle to solve, and the emotions we have to manage, all together, have a massive weight — they will pull you down, they will drain your energies.

Stress, worries, anxiety and multitasking, will lead you to emotional exhaustion.

Understanding how each event on your day affects you will prevent you from burning out. Also, it will allow you to increase your productivity: your mind will be clear, and your body more rested.

But before we get to efficiency, let’s start with defining emotional exhaustion:

What is Emotional Exhaustion?

You can be physically exhausted but still maintaining a fresh and functional mind. However, if you are emotionally exhausted, hardly you’ll feel a rested body — emotional distress affects your sleep pattern and your physical agility.

When you reach the point of emotional exhaustion, it means you overloaded your mind over time; often, without you being aware it was happening. You were focused on getting more done, in hiding or disguising emotions, in delaying personal issues because there are other priorities. All that (impossible) management has a price attached.

You must recognise your mental and emotional processes, so you can prevent getting caught by them in a distressful way.

Here are the most common symptoms of emotional exhaustion:

Symptoms of emotional exhaustion

Memory and mental agility problems

Emotional exhaustion will block your mind from functioning on its best performance, namely in focusing, which will affect your memory.

When emotionally overloaded, your mind will react to every stimulus around you; you will get easily distracted, and struggle to rest your mind. You will also have more difficulties to retain information in your brain; there is a lot of fragmented input. Your memory and mental agility will be affected.

I’ll give you a real example: I am Portuguese living in the UK for almost six years, meaning, I am fluent in the language. But lately — because I am emotionally exhausted — I find myself struggling to have a proper conversation either in English or Portuguese. My (exhausted) brain freezes, I can’t find the words, I even mix both languages in a sentence! My mental agility is compromised.

Hypersensitivity

When you are in emotional distress, your emotions are heightened, sometimes to the limit — you are more susceptible to an extreme emotional reaction.

Think about when you are very tired, you get home after a long, stressful day, and your kids are fighting, they demand dinner, and they refuse to have a bath (one of those days.) Think about how you react when you are rested and when you are exhausted. So different, isn’t it?

People with emotional exhaustion will feel sadder, angry, and depressed with more ease.

Low motivation levels

Emotional exhaustion usually has attached a negative pattern of thoughts and a lack of motivation, both to your professional and personal life.

Physical tiredness

Emotional exhaustion is also associated with physical exhaustion, even chronic fatigue. You might sleep ten hours a day and wake up feeling as you haven’t rest at all.

Why do we get emotionally exhausted?

As I said previously, emotional exhaustion can escalate without you even noticing it. However, when you do, you must question yourself why you got to that point. Was it job-related? Are you a worrier? Do you stress with other’s problems? Stop for a moment and question yourself about these things and make a realistic assessment of your emotional health.

Sometimes you have a positive attitude towards life, but you are so obsessed with a project that you dismiss — you neglect — everything else that is happening in your life. You don’t feed your other needs. Without realising you are jeopardising your mental health.

Related: Are you feeding your emotional needs?

There are several reasons for emotional distress, usually a combination of diverse factors. Here are some suggestions for you to be conscious of how you can fight and prevent future emotional exhaustion.

How you can come back from emotional exhaustion

Being aware of your symptoms and with willingness, you’ll be able to fight your exhaustion and come back to your true self. Here are some suggestions:

1. Find time to relax

Either as intervention or prevention, relaxing is mandatory in your life: if you don’t have leisure time, even if split into small portions on your week, you will burn out.

Related: The importance of making time for leisure

At work, take a break, go outside and have fresh air. At home, make time for yourself, either with a long bath or binge-watching your favourite show. Whatever gives you pleasure.

It is paramount your body and mind to rest; to relax and enjoy the pleasures of life.

2. Avoid overstimulation

Our fast-paced modern society is rich in stimulus, either visually, auditory and mental. Whatever you turn to, there is always something you can focus your attention to, often, causing overstimulation of your senses and mind.

Your mind receives, uninterruptedly, a massive amount of sensorial information. You must build a resistant layer to filter those stimuli and only allow the input of those you choose. If not, your attention span and memory abilities will always be compromised.

You need to learn how to resist to overstimulation and focus your mind on what truly matters for you in that specific moment. My suggestion is for you to research about mindfulness, it’s working wonders for me.

3. Be realistic

One of the reasons for anxiety to happen is people implement personal or professional projects with unrealistic goals and means (you don’t have the time, the skills or the resources.)

Multitasking might seem a strength, but, in fact, it’s the opposite — rarely there is someone good at multitasking. For the successful completion of a task, you need to be fully committed to it; your attention must be directed to it. When you multitask, you are splitting your attention, so you actually are not doing two things at the same time, you are breaking your focus, time and skills into two: you are wasting time and mental energy.

Be realistic with your time management, with how many tasks you already have on your agenda. Say no when you have to — you are not a superhero, you shouldn’t juggle your tasks and duties. Prioritise and accept the jobs you know you will be able to finish.

In conclusion

Emotional exhaustion doesn’t happen overnight; it’s built up in time, by you depriving yourself of leisure time, of not resting enough, of overloading yourself with job tasks, personal projects; worries, stresses and all that naturally happens in life.

Fighting and preventing emotional exhaustion is not about not doing things, but doing it differently: managing your time wisely, learning to say no to things that aren’t priority nor your responsability.

Being aware of the signs and how you can prevent to get emotionally burned out is the safest way to protect your mental health.

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