If you’ve ever wondered what causes burnout this article is for you. Burnout is a serious disorder that can leave you seriously ill if you don’t deal with it as soon as possible.
By reading this article you’ll have a good idea for what can cause burnout. Do not take it lightly. Your health and overall wellbeing are at risk, as well as, those people that surround you. There are so many contributing factors to burnout. Everyone has different perspectives on life and different outlooks. We all take stress and cope with life differently; however, we all are not always immune to the effects.
Many of us have not had the luxury to find ourselves. We all need purpose and to feel like we have meaning to our lives. Discover who you are and what will make you happy. Your underlying stress, depression, and fatigue could be from dealing with a path that you did not chose yet were forced into because of life’s circumstances. You can always find a way to better your life.
If you think you may be on the track to or are officially burnt out, then keep making yourself aware. The more you learn and understand what you are up against, the easier it will be to combat it.
What Causes Burnout?
1. You are burnt out from your choice in career
Most of us aren’t sure what we want to be when we grow up, so we end up taking a choice that it less than ideal for us. Our career choice might be something a friend suggested, or it might be something we thought we could do easily to get our foot in the door of a professional career.
It might just be a job that we settled on so we could buy an apartment or fix our car. Then, we ultimately got stuck there. Or, we went to college for so long that we can’t feasibly see how we could switch careers this late in the game. We are doing something that we burnt out on after 10-20 years (or maybe even a year or 5 years).
We are ready to do something else, but we are too burnt out to switch jobs or careers. Or, we have a family to support, and we cannot easily transition to a new job while there are bills to pay and mouths to feed at home.
2. You signed up for a ‘helping’ career
If we got into a ‘helping’ career, we are burnt out by helping other people and not getting our own cup filled. We have grown tired of helping other people, and we see an endless stream of helpless people coming our way when we see our students or patients. We feel like our efforts are not appreciated or not putting a dent in the world’s suffering, and we start to question why we really took the job in the first place.
3. You are burnt out from your incompatible relationship
If your relationship with an incompatible partner goes on for an extended period of time, you are likely getting burn out from the relationship that you are in. Unfortunately, not all relationships are happy and joy-filled. Many people get together for the wrong reasons.
They might get together for sex, financial security, social status and more. Everyone has ulterior motives for getting into a relationship. If your partner is leaving you feel exhausted and unfulfilled, you are probably heading toward burnout.
4. You are being taken advantage of by an abusive and controlling bully in your relationship
Many people enter into a relationship to exploit or bully their partner. A bully might take a partner just to be his slave and do his chores for him while he sleeps around. Most of us don’t realize how bad a poor relationship can affect our health and happiness.
The truth of the matter is that we can become so needs deprived in a relationship that we end up experiencing psychotic breaks and nervous breakdowns (among other mental health issues and personality disorders).
5. You do not have much for resiliency or healthy coping mechanisms.
People who are resilient and have healthy coping mechanisms know what to do to reduce the control the stress in their lives. People with unhealthy coping mechanisms often ruin their brains and bodies by participating in unhealthy coping mechanisms when they get stressed. They have unhealthy habits that put additional physiological and psychological stress on the body, rather than habits that help the stress to dissipate and the body to heal.
6. You are burnt out from your lack of relationship
People are social creatures, and most of us consider ourselves successful if we are able to land a healthy and productive relationship with another person. If our other person didn’t show up in our life yet, and we have a string of failed relationships – we may feel burnt out from just being single and having a lifestyle that differs from our internal definition of what a happy life should look like. Instead of accepting and adjusting, we feel like something is still missing from our life.
7. You are burnt out from your boss
If you have a nitpicky boss that never gives you acknowledgement of a job well done or a pat on the back, you might be heading for burnout. Most of us cannot work under another person without getting some kind of recognition from others or recognition from ourselves.
If you have an OCPD or OCD boss who is constantly fussy about what you are doing and micromanaging you, you will head toward burnout. If the coworkers around you are constantly standing up on their soapbox even though they’re wrong about whatever they are preaching about, this can grate on a person’s nerves and cause extreme stress over time.
If your boss is verbally, physically, or sexually abusive, you will also be under extreme stress at work that will lead to burnout.
SEE ALSO: How To Stop Feeling Tired When You Get Things Done: Try These 19 Tips
8. You are burnt out from your coworkers or friends
If you are around a lot of gossipy types at work, at home or with your friends – you might suffer from burnout. Constantly listening to someone talk badly about everyone else through gossip or venting can be exhausting to some people, particularly introverts or nice people.
Worrying about what that person is saying behind your back when you aren’t around is also stressful. It can be equally draining trying to keep up on the gossip so that you aren’t left out and uninvited to things by other people. You don’t want to be the odd man out, but the negativity from others can cause burnout and stress over time.
9. You are burnt out from your hobbies
You took up your hobbies to maintain your social life and do fun things, but you struggle to balance the schedule between your hobby, your work obligation and your home responsibilities. Someone is nearly always mad at you that you didn’t make it to something, or you didn’t stay late.
You feel like your boss; your friends and your family are always making demands on your time. You never have alone time to yourself to rest and reflect because your hobbies, work or family responsibilities take up all your time. You overextend yourself on your hobbies because you are a perfectionist, and you feel like something shouldn’t be done if it can’t be done ‘right’. You see your hobby as a competition rather than a relaxing endeavor.
10. Your work schedule is not conducive for adequate rest and relaxation
People who do not have a good family-work balance often experience a significant amount of burnout. They work too late at night, or they can’t put their work down to rest and relax with their families. They always seem like they are connected to work in some way, shape or form. They bring their phone and laptop into the bedroom at night with them, and they fall asleep stressing about how the workday went or what they have to do the next day.
The person with a work-schedule burnout problem always feels like they are coming or going from work, and they hardly ever feel like they have enough time to wind down from their workday. They feel like they live at work, and they feel like their life consists of nothing else besides work.
11. You surround yourself with bullies.
If you enjoy hanging around with bullies, you will undoubtedly start feeling strain and burnout by them henpecking you or asking too much of you. Bullies like to push us around and dump their work on us. Then, bullies often take the credit for a job well done. People are conditioned to bully, have the genetical propensity to bully others, and relish in bullying because they were taught the skills to bully.
Bullies are takers, and they often take a large amount of resources from the world without replenishing much of what they took. Bullies exhaust your resources, if you let them – and this also leads to burnout.
12. Your social skills are lacking.
People with poor social skills and communication skills will struggle through life. They will not know how to delegate responsibilities to others to help themselves not carry the full burden of a task. They will not have other people who are invested in their success to help propel them forward. They will not network with the right people to help their cause, and they will always feel like they are lifting the world up on their own shoulders.
There are so many gatekeepers and barriers of entry in the world that it is beneficial to work together to achieve our accomplishments rather than going it alone.
13. You don’t know how to say no
If you are a ‘yes’ man (or woman), it is likely that you will eventually experience burnout. You cannot constantly say ‘yes’ to other people and still satisfy your own wants and needs. Sometimes, you must say ‘no’ to the requests of others so that you can say ‘yes’ to yourself.
As parents and adult children, we often say ‘yes’ to our children or our parents to our own detriment. Or, we say yes to our children and parents instead of saying yes to our spouse (causing marital troubles at home). We have to balance our ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers out so that we spend an equal amount of time on each of the parts of our life, including spending time with ourselves to prevent burnout when we are giving too much of ourselves to other people.
14. You think it is your responsibility to ‘save’ everyone else
The world is full of people who are suffering, struggling and too low IQ to think themselves out of their own problems. We get feeling responsible for the happiness of other people in our lives. The problem is that people who are often struggling will usually go back to struggling once we get done helping them. This is because they do not learn anything from their struggles that will help them later in life.
Sometimes, it is a better sign of love and respect to let the other person work out their own problems. Then, they will learn from their mistakes, so they don’t repeat them. Letting them learn from their mistakes helps both them and you from getting burnout in the future.
15. You have no boundaries to speak of
Most people who experience burnout do so because they struggle to assert their boundaries at appropriate times. They don’t stand up for themselves. They let another person tell them how they should think and feel. They let someone else push them around and bully them.
Another person will step on your boundaries, especially if you don’t give them an inkling of where your boundaries are. Learn how to speak up for yourself and tell someone else if they are pushing your boundaries. Learn how to walk away and separate yourself from toxicity and negativity by physically putting distance between yourself and a person with boundary issues. If you do this often enough, the other person might actually learn how to give you space and respect instead of crossing your boundaries repeatedly.
SEE ALSO: How To Get More Motivation: 10 Tips For Getting And Staying Motivated
16. Your expectations are too high
If you expect too much from yourself and from others, you will experience burnout from being too hard on everyone all the time. You will constantly beat yourself up, and you will become surly and disgruntled that things aren’t going the way you wanted them to go. You will become upset with other people for not meeting your expectations to the point that you begin controlling and bullying them rather than letting them live their life the way they want.
You will beat yourself up so much that you begin to lose motivation to achieve your goals. Once you achieve or accomplish your goals, you won’t feel fulfillment or satisfaction from them because you will be too busy nitpicking all the details that don’t matter much at all to anyone.
17. You are a perfectionist
If you are too hard on yourself, you will undoubtedly experience burnout from hell at some point. Many people with perfectionism issues suffer from a personality disorder called OCPD. If others have accused you of being anal, perfectionistic, or high strung, you might be suffering from OCPD.
Even if your perfectionistic tendencies are comfortable for you, they might be causing angst in those around you. OCPD often comes from how someone is conditioned or from anxiety (fear of failure). Having OCPD traits for an extended period of time often leads to burnout.
18. You don’t take time to be grateful or thankful
We start to experience burnout when we don’t stop to smell the roses. We strive to achieve fame and fortune, so we aren’t appreciative about the little successes in life. We want to have the American Dream, and most of us would be happy with the lives we have if we would just slow down to appreciate it. If we would look at those who have less than we do instead of looking at those who have more than us, we might appreciate what we have already gained instead of feeling like failures and beating ourselves up.
19. You haven’t discovered yourself yet
Some of us suffer from burnout because we are doing what we think other people want from us, rather than doing things to discover who we are. We think that adults know who they are and what they want out of life. The truth of the matter is that everyone changes as they age.
What you wanted at 20 might not be the same thing you want at 40. Most people have to adjust their career and their activity levels at 40 because of a decline in their physical and mental abilities. People who ignore this fact and keep trudging on can feel exhausted, burnt out and unfulfilled. Maybe it isn’t as important to make a lot of money in your 40’s. Maybe bosses in your field rarely hire anyone over 40 years old, and maybe you need to find an alternate career that will be more feasible with aging.
I want to thank you for taking the time to read my article about what causes burnout. I sincerely hope its contents have been a good help to you.
