How to overcome stress & burnout

All too often, burnout makes you less able to do the very things you'd need to do to overcome burnout:

You feel overworked, and you respond to it by feeling that you need to work more.

You postpone taking care of your needs (or even thinking about them) until after you've dealt with your "obligations". As a result, you get even more depleted, and less able to handle the stress.

This is a time when you need to look at the big picture. You're aware of the pull toward "staying the course" even though it doesn't work, but you also understand that this pull toward "staying the course" is a normal side-effect of burnout. You understand it will feell hard and counter-intuitive to make the changes you need to make. So you make the effort to be proactive, and you focus on what you need to do in order to get where you want to be.

Burnout is often accompanied by a sense of shame. You feel that you have failed, and somehow you experience this as being a failure.

Sometimes, this sense of failure is just a subjective feeling that is not warranted by the facts. However, it is sometimes objectively true that the burnout is a failure. For instance, plenty of professions include a grueling stress test as part of their rites of passage (e.g. doctors, lawyers in big firms...); if you burn out, you're out, and you have failed.

What's important to remember is that, even when you fail at something because you're not able to handle the stress, this doesn't make you a failure.

This is a subtle but powerful distinction. You fail at something, there's a loss involved, and it is painful; but there's more to you than that. You can go on to something else, and experience success and fulfillment in this other endeavor.

I'm going to share with you an image: A different way to think of dealing with stress. Once you "get it", you can experiment with it.

I am drawing an analogy with what happens with electronic appliances -- let's say, computers -- when their circuits are overloaded. Most of us have had the experience of a computer that starts behaving erratically. Often, a simple solution is all it takes to address the problem: you turn off the computer, wait a minute or so, and turn it back on.

I'm not sure about the physics of it, but what seems to happen is that the circuits are "purged" from whatever static electricity was trapped inside, and the computer is "reset" to function normally.

So my suggestion is that you keep this image in mind when you go through a moment when you feel stressed or overwhelmed. Think of it as your circuits being temporarily overloaded with some sort of static energy. While you are in the middle of it, your capacity to deal with the situation is impaired -- the same way as a computer in a state of overload is not able to compute properly.

What this analogy suggests is that:
- you cannot solve the stress/overwhelm problem within the stressed/overwhelmed mind;
- you first need to "reset" it.