Mental Health and Lifestyle
Here’s How to Prevent Burnouts with Three Practical Approaches.
I explain why burnouts matter and what we can do to deal with and prevent them based on ideas from my three decades of experience.
The Importance of a Methodical Approach to Dealing With and Preventing Burnouts
Life is not a rosy garden. It constantly throws us challenges. Millions of people suffer from burnout for various reasons.
When our health is compromised, life loses its meaning. Using ideas from my three-decade of experiencing chronic stress, I offer three practical ways to prevent burnout.
Even though I gratefully was born as a healthy child in reasonably good conditions, accumulated stress caused by many factors put me in a biologically and psychologically disadvantaged position in my mid-years.
In my case, chronic stress triggered numerous health conditions affecting my well-being, creativity, and productivity. Even though some challenges were beyond my control, most of them were within my responsibility areas.
This essay is about burnout in life. As burnout is a broad topic, we first must understand its meaning and scope.
My definition is depleting our resources and not meeting our fundamental survival needs, leading to physical and mental health conditions.
Different people can define and describe it differently. My focus on burnout is from a health and well-being angle.
For example, even though people experience burnout in various aspects of their life, the World Health Organization (WHO) looks at it from the occupational perspective as a health diagnosis.
According to WHO, “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
WHO characterizes burnout in three dimensions:
feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
reduced professional efficacy.
Even though work was a significant cause of my burnout, my family and social life also contributed to its manifestation. They had a cumulative effect. Thus, my burnout experience in this essay goes beyond the definition of WHO.
After struggling at many levels for years, finally, I found myself in the middle of a noticeable burnout mode where my body had said enough. Being vulnerable at the onset of a nervous breakdown was concerning.
My burnout manifested in a dozen of health conditions. These conditions indicated my chronic stress, depletion of my resources, and lack of control. They depicted typical burnout symptoms.
For example, cumulative stress makes the body reactive and produces more inflammation to protect it. Thus, excessive inflammation became a cause of several ailments.
My body needed acute inflammation to recover, but excessive inflammation due to recurring pressure on the body turned out to be toxic for the body leading to health complications.
I had to find ways to reduce my stress and inflammation to survive and thrive. I did not want to experience a nervous breakdown which I perceived as the next stage of burnout of mode.
My first focus was survival to reduce the effects of chronic stress and inflammation on the body.
The second focus was to prevent risks and thrive with sustainable solutions.
This two-pronged approach required devising a strategy that I explain under three topics.
First, I needed to find the root causes of my burnout. The apparent culprit was cumulative stress caused by excessive workload and too much activity passing the threshold. As a result, it manifested as chronic stress.
Next, I needed to find practical solutions to reduce the effects of stress and transition from burnout to a more neutral position. I did not know all answers, but I had some ideas by experimenting and learning from others.
After that, I wanted to create a sustainable lifestyle to keep me in a neutral position and gradually transition toward a thriving mode.
Thus, I had to dance between burnout and thriving mode for three decades. Creating supportive habits was essential.
I present my method under three broad categories, only focussing on the essential items to keep this piece concise, practical, and valuable for readers. Besides, I link to some articles for readers who might need to explore specific points in detail.
1 — Applying a Methodical Priority Management
The most significant part of my stress was time management. The crucial point for me was to learn that time was not manageable. We needed a different approach to deal with it.
My key finding was priority management as opposed to time management. Multiple requests coming from different ends inundate our lives. We have basic survival needs.
For example, most of us need to work and produce to earn our living. Work itself might bring many responsibilities.
Living in this modern world requires a lot of effort. Therefore, some tasks are urgent and vital. Some are important but can wait for a while for a resolution.
Thus, prioritizing urgent and crucial tasks and putting the rest in a backlog was a solution for me.
This systematic approach significantly reduced my stress, gradually increasing my productivity. Moreover, due to reduced pressure, my physical and mental health improved.
2 — Building Customized Lifestyles with Experiments
I needed to approach my physical and mental health holistically. Understanding the importance of psychosomatic health in our lives was a piece of valuable knowledge for me.
We are physical, biological, chemical, electrical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual beings. Thus, I developed my lifestyle choices, focusing on each layer and integrating them.
In my opinion, each person is unique with different needs stemming from their genetic makeup and living conditions, as I call lifestyle. Therefore, I understood that we could do little about our genes, but we could do much about our lifestyles.
I reviewed my lifestyle with this understanding and found ways to improve it at all layers methodically.
For instance, I customized my diet and workout regime from a physical and biological angle. Improving sleep and resting were critical for my health, well-being, and productivity.
I needed to nurture my brain and improve its functionality from a mental aspect. The key points were improving nutrition, quality of movements, and adequate rest to recover after physical and mental tears. A time-restricted eating regimen helped me achieve this goal.
From an emotional perspective, I needed to manage my thoughts via cognitive flexibility and regulate my emotions to gain emotional maturity and resilience. The critical contributor was mindfulness practices and hormonal balance via lifestyle changes especially meeting fundamental requirements at the physical and mental levels.
I needed to connect with the world beyond my identity from social and spiritual angles. Therefore, improving social and spiritual intelligence was a must. Again, mindfulness practices, especially regular meditation, contributed to achieving these goals.
The best contributor to reducing my stress and increasing my productivity was entering the flow state and putting the body and mind in a creative and productive mode.
3 — Taking Personal Responsibility for My Life
Feeling born as a middle-aged person at a young age, I understood that nobody would care about our health and well-being as everyone had their problems to solve in this life.
However, some people are more vocal about expressing and escalating issues rapidly at various levels. Some people prefer a subtle way to keep a lower profile and act more self-sufficiently. Stoics are prime examples.
Of course, we need help and support from others. Still, it is only possible to keep our lives under control if we take personal responsibility and accountability for our intentions and actions.
Obtaining help and support is also a responsibility. Unless we communicate our pain and needs, others cannot support us.
As mentioned in my previous stories, setbacks never end in life. All of us experience setbacks in various forms and intensities. Some people experience significant setbacks, such as life-threatening situations affecting their health and well-being. Some experience setbacks in rejection form. I learned to transform rejections into blessings.
Nature also throws setbacks like earthquakes, floods, natural fires, and environmental toxins. In addition, governments cause setbacks by creating wars that adversely affect the peace of citizens.
We can control some setbacks to a certain degree, but many situations and conditions are beyond our control. So my focus has been on the things that we could control and manage with our resources.
Not worrying about what we cannot control can diminish our stress and anxiety. So letting go of unnecessary worries is also a personal responsibility. Thus, I stopped worrying about unknown unknowns in life.
Therefore, I focussed on specific points that I could control to improve my health and well-being.
For example, by learning and experimenting, I made my body insulin-sensitive and reduced visceral fat and obesity, causing metabolic issues. I protected my muscles by eating nutritious food, getting regular exercise, getting restorative sleep, rest, and having fun.
We sometimes need to tolerate discomfort to experience sustainable comfort. For example, simply skipping a meal a day, cutting refined carbs, and exposing my body to cold or hot temperatures like dry saunas significantly improved my physical and mental health.
Here are practical ways to relax the body and mind systematically.
Conclusions and Takeaways
Burnout in life is a critical health and well-being risk for many people. Chronic stress is the culprit for burnout to happen.
One way of addressing burnout is to increase our capabilities to cope with the challenges. Another way is to create a strategic plan and take systematic action.
Based on my three decades of experience in effectively dealing with burnout and preventing them, I can summarize my experience and observations of lifestyle habits in the following seven bullet points.
1 — Understand your priorities and deal with them systematically.
2 — Customize your lifestyle based on your needs and conditions.
3 — Look at health and well-being holistically from multiple angles.
4 — Improve sleep and take regular breaks at work.
5 — Consider mindfulness practices and scheduled funs to reduce stress.
6— Take personal responsibility and accountability for your life.
7 — Connect with others meaningfully and seek help when needed.
Despite all measures, we may face intense setbacks in life. Thus we need a fall-back position to recover timely.
When life conditions worsened, I created a mental fallback position to recover rapidly, as I explained in this article titled Three Attributes Brought Me Back on My Feet When Things Fell Apart.
At least, I learned that we couldn’t live a healthy and happy life without consciously managing our thoughts and emotions.
Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
If you enjoyed this story and have time, you might also check my experience on other topics in the original stories that impacted my readers.
I wish I had Gone Self-Employed 40 Years Ago for Three Reasons.
Ten Hobbies Enhanced the Quality of My Life over the Past Five Decades
What Would Happen if We Set Healthy Boundaries for Emotional Maturity?
An Overweight Man Called Me “Crazy & Freak” in the Butcher Shop Today
Let’s take this information and use it to make a meaningful difference in our lives and those we care about. Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.
Besides aiming to increase the hormonal intelligence of my readers and writing about neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, and acetylcholine, one of my goals as a writer is to raise awareness about the causes and risk factors of prevalent diseases that can lead to suffering and death for a large portion of the population.
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