Burnout is different from being exhausted or simply stressed out. How do you know if you're burned out? One of the easiest ways to know is if you don't feel better after what normally feels refreshing or renewing. If you come back from a vacation or a long weekend and you don't feel better, there's a good chance you are in burnout.
Signs of burnout include excessive use of substances (alcohol or otherwise), physical and mental overwhelm and fatigue.
Burnout has different symptoms than being stressed out. One way that the two differ is that burnout is a feeling of emotional exhaustion where as being stressed is more of a feeling of physical exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion can be feeling numb or stagnant, having no highs, like feeling joy, and no lows, where you aren't able to cry or having any emotion in between.
When you're in burnout, you have a loss of motivation. You're not inspired by much of anything and again, you have dull, flatlined emotions. You have a hard time finding the strength to do much of anything outside of existing. When you are stressed, you have a loss of energy. Having a loss of energy and having a loss of motivation look very different from each other.
One of the key signs of burnout is that you slowly disengage from the people around you. You begin to isolate yourself instead of staying social and interactive.
Burnout is the accumulation of stress left unchecked over time. You can have stress with burnout, but you can't be in burnout without stress. When we constantly feel swamped, we set ourselves up for burnout. Burnout is a result of excessive and prolonged emotional, physical and mental stress. It happens when we are overwhelmed and emotionally drained, unable to keep up with life's incessant demands. This is why having a good self-care routine, where we keep our stress levels in check, is the best and healthiest way to live our lives and keep us out of burnout. The key word here is routine because it is easy to slip out of self-care and let things slide.
So if you are not in burnout and just really stressed, do a quick evaluation of your self-care routines and identify areas where you need to improve or focus on so that you can live a happy healthy life!
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