3 Simple Boundaries to Help Prevent Burnout
Burnout prevention is an important topic in today’s world because 89% of workers have experienced burnout in the last year and remote workers report feeling burnout more than hybrid or in-person employees.
Even before the pandemic, the line between work and personal life was increasingly blurry. Working from home, whether for yourself or someone else, makes that line even harder to find unless we set boundaries to keep them separate.
Here are 3 simple ways you can set boundaries in your day to prevent burnout:
1. Prioritize taking breaks.
Ensuring you take regular breaks is important to prevent overwhelm, headaches from staring at screens, and generally remembering that you are in fact a human being and not a robot! How you accomplish this will depend on your unique neurotype and needs as a person. It may look like using the Pomodoro technique based on how you feel/what you are working on that day. It could also look like having your breaks at the same time every day. However it looks, the important thing is that you are taking breaks to regularly move your body, hydrate, and give your brain little rests throughout the day.
2. Keep office hours.
But probably not how you are thinking about it... If you own your own business, this one can be especially hard, but I promise you, you HAVE to shut it off regularly. If you have employees, this means trusting them to handle things and solve problems on their own sometimes. If you are a one-person-show, this means clear communication with your clients and gentle email responders that make it clear you are a human and disconnect from work during certain hours. You need to make sure that your body and nervous system can count on you to disconnect and provide time away from your work so you can rest and recoup. It’s vital to preventing burnout.
3. Be compassionate and honest with yourself.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I can pull the wool over my eyes faster and easier than anyone else can. Optimistic outlooks can quickly become harsh expectations that push us to abandon our boundaries with ourselves and hold us to standards we would never expect of others. So one of the most important things you can do is remember to be compassionate with yourself and honest when you’ve hit a limit and need to step away, switch tasks, and yes, sometimes push through and then appropriately hold extra time to recoup afterward.
There is no question that most burnout is the result of systemic issues that expect more from us than is humanly possible. While you are not at fault for your burnout, you are responsible for safeguarding yourself and taking care the best you can to prevent it.
And the best place to start… is to start small.
Build the tools and strengthen the muscles needed to prioritize your mental and physical health. So that you can build a life and business that shows others that it’s possible.
If you are a person of privilege and can make the necessary changes, it is our responsibility to build a world where more people get those opportunities too. Because having the privilege to take care of your health shouldn’t be a privilege at all, it should be the bare-effing-minimum.
References:
Zippia - https://www.zippia.com/advice/burnout-statistics/
