How To Deal With Burnout As An Over-Thinker
How It Feels To Overthink In A Burnout
I think in our world there’s a big prize on doing more, being more, and striving for more. I think this frame of mind can be beneficial, and there’s wonderful things about being ambitious. However, in the same breath, it can become difficult if this becomes the entire mindset for life and the balance of rest is neglected.
I find it very easy to slip into a burnout, I expect a lot out of myself probably too much at times and can be a big time perfectionist if I don’t catch myself. I admittedly don’t prioritize rest as much as I should, and this leads me to a place of exhaustion quite often.
When I hit that wall of exhaustion and I’ve exhausted myself to the point of not being able to function the way I do at my typical 100%, is when I lose my grip on managing my thoughts. Being burnt out prevents me from challenging these unkind thoughts about myself and it makes me feel shameful for not meeting my high expectations.
When you’re not at your best and able to do things at the level you’re used to, it can bring up a lot of thoughts and feelings of inadequacy. I find that I use words like I “should” be able to do this, I ‘need” to get this done, I “am not doing enough”. When I’m not at my best, I would find myself putting more pressure on myself to meet expectations I give myself. In turn, I’d find this push and pull of my thoughts vs my body. My thoughts wanted to do more, but my body demanded rest.
What Overthinking About Being In A Burnout Is Doing To My Life
Naturally I need more downtime in a burnout, but my mind was telling me to go into overdrive to make up for the usual energy I’d put into things. Hearing my thoughts telling me one thing and knowing what I needed internally put me in a place of a really bad mindset.
This mindset would bring a lot of shame, I believed because I wasn’t doing all the things I could normally do that I was lazy, inadequate, or a bad person. I would physically and mentally feel like I was failing. Kicking yourself when you’re already down really just leads to a further spiral of burning out.
You can’t pour from an empty cup, and when your cup is depleted of what it needs in order to be re-filled, thinking yourself into hateful ideas about yourself gets you nowhere. When I started to reflect on why me being burnt out led to such negative thoughts, I knew I had to do something different at the rate I was going into burnouts. I didn’t want to make myself do something from a state of self-hate, but wanted to encourage rest from a place of love and care for myself.
What Made Me Want To Change My View On Being Burnt Out
I’m a big fan of the author/ professor Brene’ Brown. I get a lot out of her work on shame and vulnerability, as these two things are the root causes of a lot of my over-thinking. I was reading one of her books and it was about the things that get in the way of being fulfilled. One part of that book mentions being really intentional with your rest. When she started talking about it, it was something I hadn’t considered.
When I rest, I am usually playing on my phone, feeling guilty for not being up doing something, or just thinking about what I need to be doing which really just causes more over-stimulation. So, in lieu of reading that it made me assess what rest meant to me. How could I make sure I’m resting in a way that is really intentional and will lead to rejuvenation instead of driving me further into exhaustion.
What I Thought About To Make Changes In My Burnouts
In Brene’ Browns’ book example, she used playing on your phone while watching a movie instead of intentionally just watching the movie. It’s a small adjustment but it makes so much sense to take out as many sensory overload in restful activities as you can.
I think some resting strategies I could swap out would be decreasing my phone time, getting adequate sleep but not over sleeping to make sure I’m still caring for myself, and when I’m in a burnout saying no more often.
I think these 3 things can drive me deeper into a burnout, and don’t help me as much as I realize. I love the idea of doing anything intentional, and in our world today it is so easy to step outside and be in a state of utter sensory overload. There is the hustle culture, the pressuring of multi-tasking, and the go go go world we create.
We can take our power back and our energy of rest back by making different choices when things aren’t working for us. Our natural state of the world isn’t sustainable, and rest is not something that’s made easy. But when you know something new, you can do something about it.
We can acknowledge our schedule and our life aren’t working for us if we find ourselves being utterly burnt out all the time, putting us in a poor mindset, and knowing it’s only a matter of time before our next burn out. Understanding this made me think about how I could take this re-occurring issue of burn out and adjust what I have control of to make my life more sustainable.
What I Chose To Do With What I Learned About Being In A Burnout
It’s inevitable to not reach some type of wall that you hit with all the pressure of just being a human being. But I think intentionality of anything means doing less. And my negative coping strategy of life sometimes is to do more, and I’d like to work on trading that off for doing less. I can choose to do less, think less, and choose rest even if my list is 20 things deep. There will always be something to do, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it right away. The thing you have to do will still be there after you rest.
Doing less also doesn’t mean not having dreams and goals and turning into a couch potato that does absolutely nothing. To me, it means doing less things at once, doing less things in the day, and staying focused on whatever is in front of me at the moment. Decreasing stimuli seems to be a big cure for burnout, and if I move through my time doing less I believe that’s a solid coping strategy for working in life as a person who experiences burnout quite often.
By doing less things all at once, I think allows you to naturally be more intentional. To me, this means doing the thing that’s right in front of you without trying to simultaneously do something else or think about something else.
How I Carried Out What I Learned About Being In A Burnout
Doing less and doing things intentionally gives less room for overstimulation, putting your mind in over drive, and believing that there is value in wearing yourself out. Decreasing the pressure and stimulation on yourself lets you be able to hear yourself when you do need rest, instead of living in overstimulation and over-thinking and not knowing that your mind and body are in desperate need of something important.
I’m a slower person by nature, I move slow, I eat slow, I walk slow (sorry to the fast walkers of the world), my family calls me turtle because of this, which I actually like :). And for most of my life I have been trying to speed up and work against this, but I think settling into my natural state and taking all my time to relish in what is in front of me is not only an excellent coping strategy, it’s a stable way to live and take care of yourself.
