Strategies for Burnout Prevention

Burnout is something that all of us are familiar with. Unfortunately.

Everyone knows someone who has gone through it or they have their own experience. I have my own experience, which has led me to look closer into it.

I notice myself feeling tired, disinterested in everything, and performing worse in the gym and everyday activities than normal. The main factor for my burnout symptoms was my workload. During my master’s studies, I had a lot of stress and I was training a lot. This experience taught me to recognize when I get too close to my limits.

I have earlier written about the 6 early signs of burnout. Experiencing mood swings, lack of motivation, frustration over poor performance, dysfunctional behaviour like cutting corners where you shouldn’t, feeling a lack of control, and lastly having impaired performance when exercising. I recognize these signs a lot better now.

The goal of this blog is to present strategies for preventing burnout. I also aim to help people find the lowest-hanging fruits to avoid burnout. I like simple solutions to complex problems so here we go.

Water Cup Analogy

The water cup analogy has always resonated with me. It comes from the world of pain and explains the different factors involved in pain experience. I see that it fits into burnout perfectly as well. Authors Brabban and Turkington (2002) have also presented their stress bucket model similar to the one in the field of pain (1).

The water inside the cup represents all the stressors in your life: financial issues, toxic work environment, school or work tasks, that presentation you’ve been prepping for weeks, your knee pain after you went hiking, and so on. The more stress we have, the more water is pouring into the cup.

The cup itself is your ability to withstand stress. The size of your cup can increase or decrease. You can increase the size of your cup by making sure you sleep enough, you exercise, you get enough energy from your balanced diet, you have social connections, and so on.

We want to avoid the situation when our cup overflows. When that happens, our risk of burnout, ability to recover from training, and risk of injury increase.

Prevention Strategies

The important thing is to pinpoint where the lowest-hanging fruit is to create change. If you work 60 hours per week, adding exercise probably won’t help.

We all experience times when stress levels are temporarily high. In those times, we want to ensure that we can handle it. That our water cup is big enough.

In everyday life, it can mean prioritizing sleep, enforcing a regular exercise routine, or making sure that dietary habits are supporting your ability to handle stress.

I acknowledge that in cases when water is pouring in for months, these actions won’t save you. For example, if someone is working 60 hours per week, taking care of their kids, and handling some family issues. In those moments, it’s important to recognize the situation and accept that something has to change before running into a wall.

Here are some simple ways you can start approaching your situation.

Recognizing the Lowest-Hanging Fruits

To increase our capacity to handle stress, I like to start by exploring our aspects of wellbeing:

1. Physical Activity

2. Your Recovery

3. Mental Well-being

4. Social Connections with other people

5. Nutrition

How would you score each aspect from 1-10? What are the smallest changes you can do to improve your scores?

When we are stretched thin, it’s better to focus on making small changes that create a big impact. Adding one resistance training session per week can create great changes in your strength, self-esteem, and confidence (2). Better cardiorespiratory fitness has also been shown to reduce perceived stress and symptoms of stress-related exhaustion (3).

Sleep quality has been noticed to play a part in how you perceive stress. Self-reported sleep quality moderates the relationships between your brain’s amygdala reactivity, negative affect, and perceived stress, especially among men (4).

If your mental well-being is the one lagging the most, how can you address that? Who can you talk to about your mental health symptoms? (I’m available and I’m a great listener so email me at samuli@murtoperformance.com)

Some years ago I wouldn’t have added social connections to the list but after four years, that’s extremely important. If you wish to join a community, is there something happening in your city? I started skateboarding and have met like-minded people through that.

Even though the link between burnout and nutritional habits is not well established, I feel it can be an easy way to help your body handle stressors. For example, eating only two fruits per day can increase our vegetable and fruit intake by 150-200 grams which reduces your risk of illness.

Reducing the Stressors

We all have things in our lives that we can’t change. Your small children don’t care about your busy work schedule when they get sick and you have to stay home. Sometimes work gets hectic and you have to suck it up. If you regularly work 60 hours per week and feel exhausted, I wonder if there are ways to change that?

What are some of the biggest stressors in your life? What are some ways you could do to reduce the control those have over you?

Summary

In my approach, I want to understand in what ways can I guide you to increase your capacity to handle stress and improve your well-being. I also aim to understand your stressors so I don’t add more stress to a sensitive situation.

References

1. Morrison, A. P. A Casebook of Cognitive Therapy for Psychosis. (Routledge, 2014).

2. Collins, H., Booth, J. N., Duncan, A., Fawkner, S. & Niven, A. The Effect of Resistance Training Interventions on ‘The Self’ in Youth: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Sports Medicine - Open 5, 29 (2019).

3. Lindegård, A., Wastensson, G., Hadzibajramovic, E. & Grimby-Ekman, A. Longitudinal associations between cardiorespiratory fitness and stress-related exhaustion, depression, anxiety and sleep disturbances. BMC Public Health 19, 1726 (2019).

4. Prather, A. A., Bogdan, R. & Hariri, A. R. Impact of Sleep Quality on Amygdala Reactivity, Negative Affect, and Perceived Stress. Psychosomatic Medicine 75, 350 (2013).