Stress + No rest = Burnout. Time is ticking for all….part 140

Ho!! I always forget, it's a short stay on this planet.

Not only does sleep affect mood, but mood and mental states can also affect sleep. Anxiety increases agitation and arousal, which make it hard to sleep.

Sleep is a powerful stress reducer. Following a regular sleep routine calms and restores the body, improves concentration, regulates mood, and sharpens judgment and decision-making.

You are a better problem solver and are better able to cope with stress when you're well-rested.

It’s all thanks to that surge of hormones — including adrenaline and cortisol — our bodies produce when the brain registers

Stress becomes a problem when it’s constant. When those adrenaline and cortisol surges are happening so frequently, and calm is not being adequately restored between ‘triggers’, that you eventually end up being in a constant fight-or-flight state. Here are some common symptoms to look out for:

Mood and character changes:

When struggling with stress, it’s usual to feel you’ve lost your patience, and find yourself being irritable and snappy. Long-term stress can increase irritability, aggression and anxiety. It can lead to depression, poor concentration, and someone experiencing stress at work, for example, may struggle with seemingly simple tasks, including motivation, punctuality and decision-making.

Feeling overwhelmed: Perhaps the clearest point that you’ve reached your stress tipping point is that desperate anxiety where you simply can’t handle any more on your plate. Things you’d normally be able to handle now make you teary and afraid that you can’t cope.

Excessive worrying: We’re programmed to worry — it keeps us safe and functioning. But when you’re suffering with stress, it’s not unusual to find you’re suddenly worrying much more and possibly having more negative thoughts than usual about things that may happen in the future, which may be a symptom of anxiety too.

Behavior changes: ….

Some people will stop their hobbies, avoid socializing, lose interest in things and neglect their physical appearance. Sometimes people might drink more, use drugs or binge-eat, for example, too.

Sleep disturbance:    

Stress makes it incredibly difficult to ‘switch off’, hence it is difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep. Our normal sleep cycle gets disrupted, so we do not enter the essential deep phases of sleep.

Exhaustion:….

Poor sleep inevitably leads to feeling drained the next day, but stress hormones can add to daytime fatigue too. When we’re stressed, our body is wired and this means our metabolism’s running at a faster rate. This will have the effect of draining our energy stores, hence we feel tired.

Palpitations:…..

Being suddenly more aware of your heartbeat or feeling your heart’s racing, pounding or fluttering in your chest and throat — can be frightening, but it’s a common symptom in stress and anxiety and, most of the time, harmless. If you’re concerned, get it checked with your GP.

Weight loss or gain:…..

Some people gain, while others lose weight when they’re stressed. This may be linked with a loss of appetite, or comfort eating, and may also be due to metabolic factors associated with stress-induced hormonal changes.

Headaches:….

Muscle tension is also a factor in headaches, as are the increased levels of stress hormones.

These affect brain chemistry and lead to less control over blood vessel regulation. This leads to inflammation and the associated pain of headaches, alongside a reduced capacity to process sensory information, such as sound and light.

Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensure discussion or debate. 

Thank you …We live in the era of, “yes, I can”. We tell ourselves that whatever we want to achieve, if we work hard enough, we can do it.

Achieve more, be the best, push to the top, reach your goals, have no limits. Yes, you can! But sometimes all this “yes, I can” results in something very different indeed: a severe case of “no. I really, really can’t”.

And when you really, really can’t, you have probably burned out.

Burnout is a big problem .

Also last year, a survey of more than 2,000 UK GPs by Pulse, found that 50% of them were at high risk of burnout.

And in one of the largest studies of burnout among social workers in the UK conducted by Community Care,

73% of the respondents reported levels of emotional exhaustion so high that the lead researcher said it was above the cut-off threshold to be considered at risk of burnout.

So what is burnout? Burnout is not just feeling a bit knackered in the mornings, missing a few deadlines, or an inbox full of emails you forget to reply to. It’s not being a bit moody or having a few broken nights’ sleep. It’s not feeling sad for a few days, or crying when there’s no soya milk in Costa.

Want to add word or two?

Burnout is total system breakdown, after prolonged, unmanageable stress, and emotional fatigue.

People suffering from burnout often experience emotional, cognitive and physical exhaustion, and this can have serious physical and mental health related consequences, from which it can take a long time, and a lot of treatment, to recover.

Burnout doesn’t just affect an individual – people with burnout can be irritable, unpredictable, isolated, frustrated, confrontational, irrational and very hard to be with.

This can have catastrophic consequences for a family, in the workplace, or for friendships.

So, all in all, far from it being some kind of superhero badge of honour for being such an amazingly hard little trooper who strives and pushes the extra mile all the way to the burnout bin, it’s really not very good at all.

Your comment ….? 

Burnout predominantly happens to high performers, and is sometimes described as “overachiever syndrome”.

Unfortunately it is these very high-performing individuals who find it hard to accept that they might have burned out – which can make spotting it before it’s too late, very difficult.

It costs businesses and individuals millions of pounds a year. More importantly, it costs lives.

Often the only people who don’t recognize burnout are those who are exhibiting all of the symptoms, because highly motivated, driven, high-functioning, ambitious people can have great difficulty believing they are breakable.

They think if they just push on, work through the stress, keep up the “yes, I can” they will be OK.

And they will, for a while. Until they’re not.

Ironically, while one of the causes of burnout is overload, what many of us do when we’re reaching burnout is work even more. Because working through it will beat it. Right?

Wrong.

The result is that everything gets exponentially worse, because we are too shattered to do anything properly, let alone the 5 billion things we’ve just started.

Being super-busy overloads us with stress and anxiety.

Excessive ‘busy-ness’ is usually a sign that all is not well. When I’m reaching burnout I start too many articles and writing too many emails. I become so uber-busy that things don’t make sense any more.

This is exactly what I do. It’s at the times of the most stress that I go out looking for more work. Exactly at the time I should be cutting back. It feels like desperately trying to put out a fire by throwing ever more petrol on it, in the hope that some of the heat will burn the problem.

I’ve sent emails I can’t remember sending. Had work calls I don’t remember having. Set up meetings with people I can’t ever remember having heard of, or talked to. I can have 20 brilliant ideas a night, and wake up in the morning to an inbox jammed full of emails to myself, outlining these brilliant ideas, all of which need to be started immediately.

So, I start work on them all and all of them fail. And I feel ever worse and worse. I try desperately to grab on to one thing and hold it, and make it work. But of course I can’t, I’m too exhausted.

And the best thing to help burnout is the thing that people suffering from burnout often find hardest to achieve: rest.

You need to stop, sleep and recover.

Doing this takes time. It takes accepting that you have burnout, and that fighting it won’t help. It takes surrender, and readiness to rest.

It takes realizing that you are not a laptop or a robot, you are human. And sometimes, no, you can’t. And that’s OK.