Hello LFT family! I know what you may be thinking, “You haven’t released any blogs for the past two months! What’s going on?” Life has been “life-ing” as my students say, so charge it to my head and not my heart. I have been so busy with moving and helping my students commit to college, and I was burned out, y’all.
That’s actually what brings me to writing this blog for you all today. I was listening to Kamie Crawford’s podcast, Relationsh*t, on YouTube and found the perfect topic that related to what I was feeling. The episode is called “Burnout is Real with Emily Ballesteros” and it opened my eyes to just how busy and overwhelmed I have been lately. I’d like to share what I learned with you all, but I encourage you to give the episode a listen when you have some time.
What are the signs of burnout?
Kamie’s guest on this episode, Emily, specializes in burnout management and encourages others to create a healthy work-life balance. So, she is the perfect person to get insight from. According to Emily, burnout itself is prolonged and consistent exhaustion. If you’re not sure if you’re experiencing burnout, there are certainly signs that you can look for. You may feel more emotional and physical exhaustion, and you may have anxiety after work when you should be relaxing from the day or anxiety on the weekends as you prepare to enter the work week. You may notice that you have trouble sleeping due to stress or are pessimistic when you’re usually optimistic, and you may even struggle to answer calls and texts.
What are the 3 types of burnout?
The first type of burnout is burnout by volume. This is when you are consistently filling your plate with so many different tasks and you’re not giving yourself enough time to recover.
The second type of burnout is social burnout, which is when you work with a lot of people and you’re dealing with a lot of their emotions and unpredictable issues. You’re absorbing a lot of different energies from different people, which can cause a lot of emotional stress and exhaustion.
The last type of burnout is burnout by boredom. This is when your life becomes repetitive and lacks variety. You may start to feel disengaged from your life because you’re not satisfied or fulfilled.
My struggle with burnout
Like I said earlier in the blog post, my life has been extremely chaotic in recent months. I knew that I was burned out, but of course, I didn’t fully understand that I was experiencing two of the three types of burnout until the podcast put it all into perspective for me.
Burnout by volume was certainly relatable because there was just so much on my plate, and I had little to no work-life balance. I was stressed at work because there were a million things to do and keep track of, and I was stressed at home because I’d often have to bring work home with me if I didn’t get to everything I needed to get through while at work. Then, I’d be stressed on the weekends because I’d constantly think of new things to add to my to-do list when I was supposed to be decompressing, and I’d begin to dread all of the tasks waiting for me on Monday morning.
Here, I wasn’t giving my brain a break from work because there was no separation between work and home. If you haven’t been following the disaster that is higher education and financial aid from the past few months, please read one of many articles about it. It was covered in CNBC, Forbes, CNN, and many other reputable sources. Because of this chaos, work existed in my brain 24/7 for me — I was keeping up with the latest news about financial aid that was impacting my students, I was constantly researching college deadlines to see if anyone would push their enrollment deadline back, I was answering calls on weekends from parents who were freaking out, and so much more.
I was also struggling with social burnout too. My job requires me to deal with 150+ high school juniors and seniors and all of their emotions. I’m helping them with college applications and financial aid, so you can imagine all of the ups and downs that come with this territory. Each day brings a matter of unpredictability as you never know when a student is going to break down into tears because they’re recalling a traumatic story in their essay and talking to me about it or if they’ll quite literally jump for joy because they got accepted into their dream school. Students often come into our classroom in a state of panic because they forgot to do something and the deadline is approaching or they received an email from a college requesting something and they have no idea what it is.
All day, I’m putting out fires and juggling the emotions of teenage students. I’m spending eight hours each day, five days a week absorbing their emotions and energy. No wonder I’m tired all the time when I get home and barely want to talk to my friends. No wonder I’m exhausted and don’t have the energy to do anything but lay in bed and scroll mindlessly on my phone. I simply don’t have the capacity in my brain to do anything that requires thinking.
Final Thoughts
If anything that I’ve said today resonated with you, I implore you to check out the podcast in its entirety because I learned so much about myself through it. I spent months feeling exhausted and tired all the time — it’s even a running joke in my family that I’m always tired — but the lightbulb went off as I was listening to the burnout expert. It all clicked and made perfect sense to me; I’m tired because I have so much going on. My to-do list is filled with tasks that keep my brain in constant motion even when I’m supposed to be off the clock, and my battery is drained because I’ve given a lot of my emotional energy to my students.
Unfortunately, I have not yet mastered how to prevent burnout or even how to release myself from feeling burned out. This is something that I am working through in therapy and hope to provide an update on when I have the answers.
Right now, I’d love to hear from you! Have you experienced one of the three types of burnout? How did you know you were burned out? How did you get through it? Let me know in the comments!
“Give up the delusion that burnout is the inevitable cost of success.”
– Arianna Huffington
Let's Flourish Together 