Before we get to navigating stress and burnout, we have to define and understand the differences between the two experiences.
Stress is often described as the physiological and psychological attempt to cope when we perceive a threat or challenge to something we value. It involves heightened arousal and readiness to respond to perceived threats in order to restore balance.
Burnout is the result of prolonged exposure to stress and exhaustion, with insufficient resources or coping mechanisms to manage it effectively, and without adequate time for recovery. It involves a sense of depletion, cynicism, and a diminished sense of accomplishment.
In a sense, we can think of stress as the experience and burnout as the result of an inability to manage the experience of stress effectively.
If you’re living with chronic stress, barreling toward burnout in life or in your career, and sticking to a losing strategy of putting your head down to get through it, it’s time to wake up.
Consider this your official knock upside the head to come up with a better plan and intervene before you sacrifice your well-being and career longevity in the name of getting things done.
Key Strategies to Effectively Manage Stress
Develop Self-awareness and Recognition
We care so much about our lives, our careers, and the people in them that we easily lapse into a mode where there’s always something we value at stake. Stress slowly creeps up on you, taking hold of your life, and becoming such a constant that we fail to recognize that we’re living in a constant state of heightened arousal.
Are your shoulders and jaw constantly sore? Do you find your heart racing throughout the day, or do you have headaches? Are you more irritable, exasperated, and frustrated than usual?
Pay attention to your physiological and emotional responses to stress, as these will be your first clues that stress is taking hold. These personal reactions to stress provide awareness and an opportunity to take a few deep breaths, go for a walk, and regulate our nervous systems by creating a bit of calm.
Set Boundaries
This can be a tough one because not everyone has the luxury of pushing back on a boss or company that demands too much. All of the memes on TikTok about how to tell your boss you aren’t available after 5:00 p.m. aren’t always realistic. But if you look a little deeper, sometimes boundary violations are self-imposed.
Do you respond to off-hours communication unnecessarily, stay late at the office, and check your email on vacation because you really have to or because you need more practice disconnecting?
Try to catch yourself engaging in work when you don’t have to, and try to manage the experience of wondering what’s in your inbox without acting on it. If you can control the impulse to make sure there are no grenades in professional life before you can relax, you may reclaim a professional boundary without telling your boss to shove it.
Seek Support
Sometimes, all we need is a little perspective to get over ourselves and think about what really matters. The elders among us, who ran the rat race in the 1980s and realized it didn’t get them as close to their dreams as they thought it would, are wonderful mentors as we struggle with the cost-benefit analysis of our efforts.
Find yourself a support network within and outside the workplace of trusted advisors who are further down the path of life than you are. Ask them about the lessons they’ve learned, the advice they would give, and how they finally learned to let go to have a better quality of life. If you can get past the tales of walking to work in the snow, uphill, both ways, you might actually learn something from a companion that’s better for you than constant stress.
Promote Change
That old adage of being the change you hope to see in the world is infuriatingly true. Although it does require access to a bit of Zen, we have to remember that we create a balanced life by finding opportunities to mitigate stress and burnout for others. If we encourage realistic goal setting, provide opportunities to communicate about stress levels, and support initiatives designed to achieve a healthy work-life balance, we create an impact at a micro level that often has a ripple effect in the teams and organizations we serve.
Repeat after me. The path to keeping stress in check is paved with the tiny decisions we make with everyone, every day. Focus on what you can control, consciously minimize stress within your zone of influence, and watch what happens when a series of tiny decisions leads toward lasting change in the right direction.
Practice Mindfulness, Develop Resilience
What if I told you that we could make our bodies and minds inhospitable to stress? What if we could create conditions where stressful situations had a marginal impact, and where we can recover from stress much more quickly? Interested in this magical solution? Ok, twist my arm. Here it is:
Exercise + Mindfulness = Stress Resilience.
It’s that simple. Daily exercise, for as little as 30 minutes, floods the brain with positive neurochemistry and makes it so that level 8 stressors feel like a level 4. Add in a little meditation, deep breathing, or focusing on the present moment, and you have the secret to ultimate stress resilience; no margaritas required. Exercise can seem like an impossible additional stressor on top of everything else you have going on. I get it. This is one area where I could stand to take my own advice…but think of it as a small short-term investment for long-term gain. We always find time when we have to, and this is a have-to effort if you want to sustain longevity in your life and career.
Wait, what if I’m at burnout levels of exhaustion?
I used to think you would know burnout if you were experiencing it, but now I’m not so sure. Just like we can live a long time with stress, we can live a long time with burnout to the point where we question if it’s burnout, or just how midlife with busy jobs and families is supposed to be.
So, I came up with a fool-proof strategy for self-evaluating if you might be experiencing burnout. Answer these questions:
- Are you in a bad mood, irritable or despondent more days than not?
- Have you lost interest in the things you used to enjoy?
- Has your appetite changed where you find yourself eating too much or too little?
- Are you having trouble sleeping or sleeping way too much, especially on weekends?
- Are you chronically fatigued or tired?
- Are you having trouble concentrating on tasks?
- Do you feel like the things you do are ineffective and have little positive impact?
If you answered yes to many of these symptoms, you are likely experiencing burnout. If these questions look familiar to you, it’s because they are the diagnostic criteria for evaluating depression in adults.
Burnout is just another term for what I call professional depression.
Too many of us are languishing in our jobs and suffering from the experience of prolonged exposure to chronic stress and threats to the things we care about. If you see yourself in these questions and are experiencing burnout, it’s time to intervene. It’s important for you to take a prolonged break, seek professional support, and prioritize your self-care. If you can pause and take a breather, give yourself a real chance to recover, and learn to make some tough decisions about how you spend your precious time and energy, you can come back from burnout and restore your well-being.
Sadly, we live in a world that prioritizes productivity and doing it all at the expense of our well-being. If we continue to neglect the warnings of exposure to chronic stress and allow ourselves to careen toward burnout, the world will take all that we have to give and then some. Seven days of passing out in a tropical climate with a Mai Tai is not an effective stress mitigation or burnout prevention strategy!
Let this be your wake-up call to start a journey of professional and personal longevity where stress is managed, burnout is prevented, and we give ourselves a fighting chance to achieve our fullest potential. You have too much to give to let a thing like stress stand in the way. You’ve got this!
Danielle Terranova is the voice behind Leadership Lessons with Danielle.
She has been an executive coach since 2015 and owner of Terranova Consulting, LLC since 2019.
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