14 Surprise Signs of Burnout You May Be Missing

#Burnout, I am calling it the curse of the 21st century, especially now that we are all tuned in and turned (and some of us hooked on) tech & social 24/7.

I know when I started to clearly see the signs of burnout it was almost too late (as none of my signs made sense and they all seemed to be totally random!) so I thought I’d share these 14 Surprise Signs of #Burnout You May Be Missing.

[WARNING] The intention is not to go out all alarmist on anyone please, however, I guess the more we can listen to what is happening to us, the quicker we can catch it from reaching a tipping point.

PLEASE note this is not a diagnosis post, more like a “hang on a moment, I can start to see the golden thread here!” post.

In no order of importance, and I guess another point to mention is to see these from the viewpoint of it happening a lot as opposed to a one-off bad day (we all have those!)

• You are like Carb-Zilla, starving and hungry for carbs as in all the time. Your body thinks it needs to get ready for a big hunt & gather so it sends out signals “get something quick in your belly and make sure it releases energy fast!”. Cortisol tells the body “food is scarce, get it whilst you can from wherever you can”.

• Food again - lunches are regularly taken behind the desk or the computer. Enough! Sitting is the new smoking y’all. Move from the desk, get your lunch and enjoy it somewhere less techie, preferably out in the fresh air. Go FREE RANGE human.

• Making careless mistakes - which would be totally unlike you (although no mistakes would be really dramatic). Stuff like locking your laptop in your car, pitching up at an event only to have the wrong date, forgetting where you parked (time and time again) that type of thing.

• You just can’t seem to find inspiration/juice/pep/drive for a thing you once really loved. Like your career. You just feel OVER it most of the time. There is a much stronger language for this that usually gets muttered.

• Feeling like you are always failing, described as a kind of defeatist feeling, one where you feel incapable and where your confidence is really LOW.

• Taking everything personally way too often with a bit of teariness and oversensitivity to conflict thrown in. This is a tricky one to catch especially if you are “living it” in your current circumstances. A good coach can get you to be objective again.

• Exhaustion despite regular sleep - not too great a revelation here. I can remember my last year of high school I was severely burnt out, and those around me thought I was going through a growth spurt. I slept every afternoon for 3 hours solid, and then crashed at night time again!

• Re-starting a bad habit that you have kicked, such as smoking. This was the tell-tale sign of someone I knew when she had hit a brick wall.

• Unexplained pain in the body along with prolonged stiffness. Personal reveal here, I had lower backache for almost 16 years!!! Half my life and an enormous amount of $$$ later I was no closer to understanding the source of my muscle problem until I looked deeper and stopped treating the symptom. Excess cortisol in the body makes it a haven for inflammation build-up. Ouch

• The inability to concentrate, or brain foggy-ness and inability to switch off. Or as someone put it so eloquently “my mind was like a Twitter feed, random comment after comment, with little or no follow-through.”

• No patience, as in NONE…like a volcano ready to explode - again reiterating here - that this is happening more often than not! I used to be like that and thought “oh well that is just the way I am”. This lead to me being hurtful to others that I cared for. Burnout is not an excuse to be a jerk to others. Sadly though as humans we tend to take out bad moods on those around us most often, almost as if we are “testing” their unconditional love.

• I call it the yo-yo effect. One day I would be on top of the world, the next day I would be so down in the dumps. This cycle would continue (not to be confused with depression) but the slump or dump would be akin to a kid tantrum complete with body meltdown on the floor - “this is too hard - I give up!” (Complete with foot-stomping). Drama, drama and more drama.

• Frequent head colds, that just don’t seem to subside. Full of snot internally but emotionally dry. Quite the predicament

• You can’t shift any weight no matter how little or how well I eat…YIKES!

So after all that doom and gloom, I am here to tell you there is a fix though.

Something so simple and so cost-effective had I thought of it years ago I could have probably bought another house with the amount of money I have spent in the past to solve my problem, which at the heart of it was burnout plain and simple + a deadly mix of fear conditioning.

The fix is - emptying your daily stress bucket, or completing your daily stress cycle. During our Mental Fitness Program, we show you just how, as it is jam-packed with Qigong (movement medicine), totally gentle and natural in nature!

If you are keen to find out more be sure to stick around!

Cheerio

Adele (ex-burnout sufferer) is now reformed and back-ache-free!

Cheetox.com Founder

When you are ready here are a few ways to keep in contact with us and what we do here at Cheetox.com.

* Find out what your Mental Fitness score is. What does your next mental fitness need to have in place for it to be unique to your body's profile? Click here >>

* Ease into your own 5 Day DIY Detox by clicking here >>

* Mental Fitness Training - check out dates for our programme by clicking here >>

#stressmanagement #workplacewellbeing