How a Burnout Impacts Your Health
A burnout is defined as a person suffering from total exhaustion, physically, mentally and emotionally. It often results from a stressful situation that has developed over many months or even years.
The effects of stress on the body are well documented. When under stress, a person engages their “fight or flight” response. This creates a chain reaction in the body which will prepare us to fight (for our life) or flight (and escape to safety).
When under stress, our breathing deepens, our vision becomes more focused, blood flow is directed towards essential organs (such as legs and arms), our brain switches to the instinctual working mode, access to long or short term memories is limited, digestion, memorization and other ‘secondary’ functions are pushed to the side in order to allow for survival mode to take over. Our blood pressure increases, due to the reduction in blood flows to the extremities. Sense of smell, or hearing or vision are all heightened allowing someone to instinctively discern danger. Adrenaline level goes through the roof, allowing for more energy to flow into the system making it available for the anticipated conflict.
But we are not designed to function in that state for long periods under stress. The state of stress is designed to be a short term measure, to allow us an increased chance of survival. Nowadays, people are constantly living in a state of extreme stress which takes its toll in the long run.
The consequences of maintaining this state of extreme stress over time are clear. Your blood pressure will increase; your adrenal gland may suffer from total exhaustion. This can lead to chronic fatigue along with the potential for diabetes or insulin resistance. You may suffer a weight gain which will be resistant to dieting. You may notice brain fogginess, information retention issues and even problems making sense of even limited amounts of information. This list can go on...
When a person suffers from a burnout, it is safe to assume that this person was under a previously uncontrolled amount of stress for an extended period of time. Each individual is unique, therefore the amount of stress one person will be able to cope with and the amount of time that person will be able to "last" before breaking, will not be uniform.
However, the consequences will be the same: A burnout.
- In order to avoid burning out it is important to exercise the art of self-care. Taking time to incorporate things that make us happy in our daily life is important. This could be a new hobby, spending time with our kids, family or friends, sports, meditation, knitting… so long as we experience a sense of happiness when doing it. Of course, people will always complain that they don’t have enough time to start with, but it is still important that we prioritize and set healthy habits in our life.
- It is also important to define what would be an optimum balance between your family, personal and professional life. Again, the goal is to offset the stressful part of your life against the many calmer moments in your life. By determining what is important to you and its impact, you are actually setting up boundaries. Once you are clear as to what aspects of your life are a priority, you will be more likely to respect your boundaries in the long run.
- The last factor in this equation is to remain conscious of what is important to you. Too often people define this and realize what they will gain if they stay firmly behind those boundaries. Then suddenly, life throws a curve ball, those boundaries are quickly forgotten and old habits return in a self-induced stressful situation.
A simple tool that I suggest in order to avoid this would be setting up a practice of daily meditation or gratefulness. Anything that will force you to regularly pay attention to how you feel and force yourself to unplug even for only 10 minutes, every 24 hours. This simple practice will allow you to remember your commitment to your own health.
