When you wake up dreading the day ahead, or when you see getting the stomach flu as a welcome break from your responsibilities, it might be a sign you’re experiencing burnout.
That’s what happened to Emily Ballesteros, who realized that her detachment, resentment, and exhaustion were symptoms of a severe case of it. It was this realization led to her career as a burnout management coach, and ultimately led her to write her new book, The Cure for Burnout: How To Find Balance and Reclaim Your Life.
In it, Ballesteros lays out five areas for the chronically burned-out to focus on, and offers tools to the reader to begin to own their time again.
Ballesteros, who has a background in organizational psychology, joined LAist’s daily news program AirTalk to share some tips on how to recognize when you’re burning out, and what to do about it.
What is burnout?
“Burnout is prolonged exhaustion,” Ballesteros said. And it’s this prolonged exhaustion that she identified as the hallmark sign of burnout, and because exhaustion pervades all aspects of ones life, it’s usually clear when the pieces start to fall apart.
Stress and burnout certainly go hand in hand. But unlike regular stress, which we often can detect, burnout can be much quieter and more insidious.
“Stress is a portion of burnout,” said Ballesteros, “but with burnout a lot of time we see constant anxiety about work. There’s a lot more physical, mental, emotional fatigue because you are expending more resources than you might have.”
Ballesteros said you might notice yourself thinking in extremes, not feeling like yourself, or having big parts of your life start to fall apart. Resentment…
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