1st December 2021, The Mindful Entrepreneur

📅 Thought for today:

‘The land of burnout is not a place I ever want to go back to.’

— Arianna Huffington

#thoughtfortoday #burnout #stress #selfcare #motivation #depression

I’m running a workshop today on Burnout & Self-Care.

Remote working seems to have increased the rate of burnout amongst my clients, together with the impact of COVID on business in general.

To run the workshop I had to do some research. This is always an enjoyable process and in this case, I dispelled one of my own myths.

I had a vague idea that burnout was due to consistent and unrelenting stress.

I went through a burnout thirty years ago and I know at the time I was going through a lot, yet when I think back I was not particularly stressed.

In fact, I was relaxed to the point of being totally unmotivated.

And the research supports this.

Stress is a factor in burnout but not the only one. The other is the depletion of the resources necessary to support us in our work. Those resources come from within (intrinsic) and from the company (extrinsic). So the compounding of the stress with the feeling that we are “under-resourced” leads to burnout.

I also learned that burnout is often misdiagnosed by GPs as depression when in fact it is a different thing entirely. It even has a name – chronic psycho-social stress syndrome.

I am relieved to tell you that I am relaxed ahead of this workshop, in a good way!

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