How to Prioritize Burnout Recovery with An Energy Audit

Read Time: 5 Minutes

A big thanks to the People and well-being leaders in this community for their focus on supporting their organizations that have brought this work to life.

It’s a collective effort to realize wellbeing in the workplace, promote mental and emotional health for performance, and end the culture of chronic stress and burnout. #Wellbeing is the new performance?

Join us on LinkedIn Audio on May 17, 2023 at 12PM PT / 3PM ET for our next Workplace Wellbeing, Performance, and Recovery Support for People Leaders.

Key Highlights:

• Loneliness is the new mental health concern says the U.S. Surgeon General
• Energy Audit Protocol Deep Dive
• How to Detox the Toxic in Relationships

The theme for this week’s community support is how to prioritize your efforts in addressing your energy drainers.

Loneliness is the new mental health concern says the U.S. Surgeon General

With the start of mental health awareness month, the U.S. Surgeon General released a report on a rising crisis in mental health: Loneliness.

Similar to the systemic challenges we see with burnout, our technology, hustle culture, and the pandemic has been an influence on being socially disconnected.? Followed by life circumstances like living arrangements, social isolation, and even financial problems that can trigger poor mental health.

The quality of loneliness generally falls into lower-intensity negative emotions such as depression, emptiness, sadness, helplessness, and disengagement.

Where burnout and chronic stress are having an excess of the neuro-chemical dopamine, loneliness and the feeling of social connection is a lack of oxytocin.? Following that observation, our modern-day culture hijacks our focus on our technology and away from making real deep human connections with people.

When we connect to a person's surface-level avatar, it prevents us from creating deep trusting bonds that foster emotions like joy, love, passion, and excitement with others. We also lose a channel to have others help us process negative emotions, keeping us stuck brooding and dwelling on problems and self-destructive beliefs.

How can we address loneliness? (Especially in the workplace)

Foster rapport and human relationships. How peers communicate with peers. Managers with their teams. Make it okay for relationships to go beyond the workplace and encourage friendships between co-workers.??

Establishing shared values is an excellent place to start.? Find a guide for that here .

Energy Audit Protocol Deep Dive

The Energy Audit Protocol is an exercise designed to identify where your energy is consumed and replenished on a consistent basis.? Our goal is to reduce and eliminate the energy drainers and make room to enrich our lives with activities that make us feel alive.

The process is covered in Part 1 of the Burnout Recovery VIP Experience Playbook .

While the process looks at events that seem transactional in nature, I want to deep dive into utilizing relationships and 3 energy pattern combinations.

1. Frequency and Intensity

How you choose what energy drainers to focus on is up to you.? It can depend on what’s easier for you with long-term gains, all the way to getting the most difficult issues resolved first.

• High-Frequency / High-Intensity: Biggest win, but can be riddled with complexity.? An area that might work with a professional or coach to keep you on track and process triggers
• High-Frequency / Low-Intensity: What you cope with that keeps you hypervigilant. Can be an area of low-hanging fruit that stops the micro-aggressive distractions and feel safe
• Low-Frequency / High-Intensity: Set and enforce boundaries. Can be a source of trauma that is worth working with a trauma-informed therapist.
• Low-Frequency / Low-Intensity: Monitor these for growth as they can offer insights into deeper issues to help you resolve first, and these events will naturally disappear.

2. How and When Energy Drains

Looking at this specific pair is useful to help you identify triggers as well as internal resources and strategies you already do to prevent these events from happening.? By changing re-sequencing and setting boundaries, it’s focusing on the thought-behavior patterns that work and turning them into habits.? Develop and nurture them like a new skill.

3. Emotional Home and Environment

Look at all your events and look at your predominant top 3 emotions that are positive and negative. Are there any patterns with the environment you’re in?? Chances are, your environment can trigger certain emotions and you can first release the negative emotions and secondly, connect positive emotions with environmental circumstances and use them as positive emotional triggers.

There’s a high likelihood that your environment isn’t best utilized to create the desired emotional state, for example, often we want to go to the office for creativity and teamwork, but we don’t feel creative and collaborative.? The environmental intent needs to align and neurologically wire with emotional outcomes.

How to Detox the Toxic in Relationships

People are not their behaviors.?

Hurt people do hurtful things.

While you can’t necessarily change someone’s behaviors, especially if they don’t want to change, it doesn’t mean you have to be a victim of it.

Set and enforce healthy boundaries.? The process is in part 2 of the Burnout Recovery VIP Experience Playbook .

Identify and capture the negative behavior and communicate it as a trigger to a “do not pass” for you.? Be clear and concise, not with passive-aggressive behavior.? Especially when it comes to unhealthy behaviors, it’s okay to take the moral high ground to establish the playing field.

Heal your own wounds first, so you can respond with compassion and empathy.

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. If you're still looking for personal recovery and support for your well-being, I'd recommend starting with this affordable course that's helped hundreds of people and their organizations, here .

2. If you’re struggling with a crisis of burnout and looking for an effective way to recover quickly, consider a life-transforming Burnout Retreat for your next vacation, here .

3. Build out Workplace Burnout Responsiveness and Recovery in your organization by booking a strategy call with me, here .