Burnout: how to get out of a state in which you have no strength for anything. Guide

It is better to recognize burnout at the very beginning, when the damage is still insignificant and recovery requires only regaining the balance between work and rest. It is also possible to regain strength and enthusiasm after severe burnout - if you act correctly. Health expert, chief coach of the personal mentor service
Deva.School
Larisa Granovskaya, who has worked with many entrepreneurs and companies, has compiled a detailed guide to burnout for Reminder.

Chief coach of the personal mentor service Deva.School Larisa Granovskaya

How to spot burnout? Four stages of change

The easiest way to tell if you're burning out is to remember what kind of person you usually are. Write a list of statements: “I am a person who...” For example: “I am a person who loves Elsa’s Ocean.” And if you haven’t listened to “Elzy’s Ocean” for a long time, you haven’t had the time or energy - this is an alarming sign. Take the test.
A more accurate self-diagnosis tool is the Maslach Burnout Inventory test (MBI, $15). It is based on the theory of the same name, which is considered the gold standard in the study of burnout. A free analogue is an online test from MindTools. But its reliability and validity, unlike the Maslach Burnout Inventory questionnaire, alas, have not been confirmed by research.

Burnout, like illness, has its stages. And each stage has its own distinctive features. The MBI theory talks about three stages of burnout: exhaustion, loss of purpose and cynicism, disgust and depression. At Deva.School we like to add an earlier stage that precedes visible symptoms: idealism and excess.

Here's the main thing you need to know about this and other stages of burnout.

Idealism and excess.
A time of enthusiasm, energy and initiative. You look like the ideal manager or employee: you want to do as much as possible and in the best possible way. To everything that is offered to you, you answer: “Yes, this is a cool task, I want to do it!” Everyone wonders where you get so much energy and love for your work. However, sometimes this is a normal mode of operation, and not the first stage of burnout. To distinguish them, take a closer look at how you relax. Weekends, eight hours of sleep and vacation in place? Do you manage to disconnect your thoughts from work in the evening? Do you have time and energy for family, friends, hobbies and reading a good novel? If work and personal life are balanced, everything is fine. If not, your idealism will inevitably lead to excessive energy consumption and the development of burnout.
Exhaustion.
Your strength is diminishing, your enthusiasm is fading, but so far you cannot admit it even to yourself. You still appear to be a good performer, but you are less likely to come up with fresh ideas and less involved in the processes within the company. New projects are no longer so exciting: “Yes, this is a cool task, but I probably need more time for it.” Perhaps you don't meet deadlines that you set yourself, and you don't understand why this is happening. The reason is actually simple: you expect to work as productively as at the idealization stage, but you no longer have enough strength. Or do you turn to bad habits to achieve equally high results: excess caffeine, working in the evenings and nights, and so on.
Loss of purpose and cynicism.
Resources are sorely lacking, and the brain is trying to save them. To do this, it devalues the thing on which you spent the most energy - work. This is expressed in cynicism: if it works out, it’s good; if it doesn’t work out, that’s also okay. The tension inside is growing, you are becoming more and more irritated, and it is becoming more and more difficult to restrain your emotions. Cynicism can also manifest itself in the way you treat clients and members of your team: the principle of equality disappears, some become more important than others due to social status or personal sympathy. Interest disappears not only in work, but also in close people and important activities. You used to love to draw, listen to music and go to exhibitions with friends, but now you don’t. There is simply no desire. All this is not your choice, but a consequence of a lack of resources: the brain saves energy.
Disgust and depression.
You can't bring yourself to open your laptop and use a variety of strategies to avoid work. Either you need to check if the door is closed, or you want to eat, or your attention naturally focuses on minor details of the project, and there is no time left for important tasks. The results are significantly lower than usual, even if you work all day. At the same time, you feel that you are sick of sitting at your desk. Sometimes you literally feel sick: the symptoms can also be physical. Or you might arrive at a meeting with colleagues and suddenly feel so sleepy that you can't stop yawning. A sign that is easier to notice from the outside is that you cannot clearly and correctly formulate tasks for other people. You seem to think that everyone should read your mind.

What effect can you expect from psychotherapy or medications if you have no strength to live?

Psychotherapy can help eliminate the very cause of the painful condition. It may take time to study how a person “gets” into an exhausted state, what exactly weakens him, how tension is created and accumulated.

With the help of psychotherapy, a person can realize how he “creates” his problem, how he himself, without realizing it, maintains his painful state, what he can do to change the current order of things.

With a psychologist, a person will figure out how his problem can be resolved or significantly alleviated, and he will learn to independently cope with the state when “there is no strength to live.”

In situations of an extremely acute condition, when a person has endured for a very long time and “did not notice” his condition, he usually delays receiving psychological support. And then, first of all, you have to contact a doctor in order for psychotherapy to become possible at all.

Psychotherapy and psychiatry can work successfully together rather than in opposition to each other. Tablets prescribed by a doctor can help alleviate a person’s condition and keep him in a stable condition so that he can live normally and not lose social adaptation.

However, medications cannot replace psychological and psychotherapeutic assistance. They will not eliminate the cause of psychological problems. Taking medications, the person himself and his way of thinking will not change.

If, for example, you only take pills, but do not change anything in your ways of interacting with the world, then when you stop taking the drugs, the old state may reappear.

The person will return to the usual way of contact with the world and people around him.

But it was precisely this method that “led” him to that very difficult state when he had no strength to live. Therefore, only awareness of your behavior patterns and changing them can help you feel better without medications.

How burned out are you? Assessing the damage

You need to know the stages of burnout not only in order to notice its signs in yourself in time. Different stages have different recovery methods. At the stage of idealism and exhaustion, the body has enough strength to be interested in new things and appreciate the present. All you need is to find time and space in your life for this. But if you are already at the stage of loss of purpose and cynicism, or experiencing disgust and depression, you will have to significantly change your attitude towards work and leisure and acquire new habits.

Re-read the descriptions of the stages of burnout above. What seems similar to what is happening to you now? Remember in what state you started working. Is the same enthusiasm still there? Do you have the same amount of strength - or do you need to push yourself with stimulants? Do you have to force yourself to complete tasks that used to inspire you? Do you finish work with the thought “this will do”? Maybe you just want to lie down or cry when a new task comes up?

Have you determined what stage of burnout you are at? Now you can select the type of tools to exit this state. But before you get acquainted with them, download short instructions

: for mild burnout (idealism and excess or exhaustion) and for severe burnout (loss of purpose and cynicism or depression and disgust). The pictures show the main recovery steps in the order in which they need to be performed.

How to live on if you have no strength

What do people mean when they say they “ don’t have the strength to live ”?
This expression describes a whole complex of states. These may include loss of aspirations and desires, insensitivity and indifference, loss of interest in activities and things that were previously important to the person, and a significant limitation of social contacts. “No strength to live” may also imply decreased interest in professional activities, reluctance to perform routine duties, a state of chronic fatigue that does not disappear even after a long rest, absence or sharp decrease in appetite, slowness of physical and mental reactions, depressed mood, slurred, blurry speech, lack of initiative, impaired concentration.

A state of apathy, exhaustion, anxiety, a feeling that there is no strength to live, can arise as a result of severe overwork or be a reaction to severe stress. If a person was stressed for a long time, did not rest and ignored the needs of his body, he risks wasting all his strength.

The state of loss of strength may occur for a short time and go away after a few days of rest. In this case, we can say that the human body still has a lot of strength for self-regulation and recovery.

Difficulties arise when you cannot get out of a painful state on your own. When depressed, apathetic, or anxious, a person has little strength, and they disappear very quickly. It is believed that if this condition does not go away for two weeks or more, then it is very important to visit a specialist. A psychologist and non-medical psychotherapist can help figure out what exactly is taking so much energy out of a person and cope with psychological problems.

Unfortunately, unfounded beliefs in the benefits of “positive thinking” push people to ignore what is happening to them. Often people try to change their condition with alcohol or drugs, which gives immediate relief, but in the long term can deepen the painful condition.

Idealism and exhaustion. Learning to rest correctly

If you are still at the stage of idealism and excess or exhaustion, the first thing you need to do is take care of rest. It must be sufficient (quantity) and effective (quality). Let's take a dream. You need to sleep 7–8 hours a day - it's about quantity. You need to sleep in silence and darkness - this is about quality. A signal that you are doing everything right - it’s easy to get up in the morning at the first alarm signal, or you even wake up without it.

Once you've secured healthy sleep and freed up your evenings and weekends, start incorporating some light support tools into your routine. These tools will reduce your exposure to work stress.

Step 1: Define work boundaries—and write them down

Draw up a written (oral, but a letter is more effective) agreement with you, similar to the one that the employer enters into with the employee. In it, write down the conditions under which you are willing to work, how much time and effort you are willing to invest in the work. And also - what would be a violation of the terms of the contract, what you definitely do not agree to do for the sake of work. For example, working late, missing birthdays of loved ones, answering work messages on weekends. Add any details that seem important to you. Save the contract, monitor how you follow it, and re-read it periodically to refresh your memory of the rules.

Step 2: Create routines that will keep you going throughout the day.

Rituals reduce anxiety and increase our productivity at work. In the morning you can meditate and do a mini workout. During the day, take a long break for lunch and go to a cafe with colleagues or friends, a new one each time. Or take short 15-minute breaks, and during them dance, do breathing exercises, or just lie in the dark if you are tired of communication and movement. And to relax before bed, take a shower and read a good novel.

There are two rules. The first is regularity

: Routines should become so familiar that you do them without thinking.
Secondly, giving up smartphones
: they make rest ineffective, in particular, they impair concentration and increase stress. The exception is if you meditate or breathe using an app.

Which rituals to choose?

Take the Wellbeing Index test to determine the ones you need most. It will show you which areas of your life need the most attention right now: nutrition, physical activity, stress/emotions, time/focus, sleep and balance.

Step 3. Choose the right type of holiday

Vacations should always be completely relaxing

or be
as contrasting as possible
with your everyday activities. Complete relaxation is the format of a sanatorium, when the maximum effort you need to make is to get to a place where others will do the rest for you. It should be a safe and comfortable space. And the less novelty (even news) and the need to make decisions, the better. Examples: flotation tank, massage, meditation, yoga, spending the day in bed, progressive muscle relaxation, spending a day in nature swinging in a hammock and having a picnic. Just 8 hours of sleep will do.

The maximum contrast with what you do on weekdays can also be created with simple actions. If you spend all day with people, limit social activity and go for a walk in a park or forest alone. Conversely, if you work at home all day on a computer, your ideal relaxation is a rich social environment. And if you are a leader, accustomed to going forward and leading others, go to training, where the coach will tell you what to do and how to do it.

An alternative is to choose rest that stimulates oxytocin

or
adrenaline with dopamine
. The body produces oxytocin through support, care, touch, or the simple presence of other people. All this gives us a feeling of deep connection - “we are together.” If you want to feel the effects of oxytocin, look your loved one in the eyes. You will feel relaxed and protected. Oxytocin-filled rest is best for those who gain resources from caring for others. Suitable activities: have a heart-to-heart talk with loved ones and hug with them, go for a massage and SPA treatments.

There are people for whom effective protection against burnout is adrenaline plus dopamine: new experiences, moving forward every day. Almost all startup founders are like this. Three days without changes seems like stagnation to them, and when the project becomes stable, they are more tired than when they first started the business - even if objectively there are fewer problems. If this sounds like you, it's important to remember that the adrenaline and dopamine rush needs to be triggered in an environmentally friendly manner, not through gaming or watching porn. Anything that forces you to get out of your comfort zone, excites and inspires you will come in handy: learning a new language or mastering new skills, preferably complex ones, visiting new places, meeting new people with experiences and views that are different from yours.

Step 4. Devote half an hour a day to something that makes you feel happy and full of life.

As a rule, these are very simple things that we tend to put off until later, giving preference to more rational and urgent matters or procrastination. To remember them, think about what is important to you to do in life outside of work. What did you dream about at school, university and before burnout, when you had more strength? What would you like to remember on your centenary? Perhaps the answers will lead you to deeper relationships with family or loved ones. Or to a new activity that has nothing to do with work. Or maybe - to understand what the meaning and value of your current work is for you.

Add to these four tools basic body care: regular exercise and comfortable eating. If after this the condition has improved, you can not reduce the pace of work. But don’t forget: rest and self-care are as important as taking medications prescribed by your doctor. Neglecting them is like running towards a severe burnout.

How to combine productive work with self-care?

The answer is simple, but difficult to execute - to design your lifestyle correctly. Deva.School personal mentors will help you with this.

First, you and your mentor analyze your current habits.
Then you discuss your personal goals. Maybe you want to get more done. Or finally start exercising regularly and eating healthy. Or perhaps both at once.
The mentor draws up a simple plan, you act according to the plan and mark your progress in the telegram bot.
Once a week, you call your mentor to review the past week and set goals for the next. It's much easier and faster to change your habits to healthier ones than going it alone - and to stick to them.

Tried really hard to be good

Looking back, the women acknowledged that during the period when they became depressed, they structured their lives by adapting to the expectations of others.
They were trying to live up to an ideal that they had internalized and that they believed others expected them to achieve. Each of them tried to be a good daughter, mother, wife, sister or friend. Satisfying the expectations of others was an important goal for them; it gave their lives meaning.

Often for a long time these women did not realize that this activity was, first of all, tiresome and hopeless. If, despite their best efforts, at some point they realized that they could not achieve their ambitious goals, they blamed themselves. Here are the words of one of these women: “I don’t have the strength to be what I should be. I am a bad mother, I do not correspond to the image of a mother that I have in my head. I don’t have enough skills or resources for this.”

Loss of purpose and disgust. Fighting severe burnout

If your burnout is already at the stage of loss of purpose/cynicism or depression/disgust, intensive tools are needed to limit energy expenditure on anything that does not help you recover. The most important thing is to overcome the inner feeling “if I start devoting time to something other than work, everything will collapse.” This is difficult to do. But burnout is already robbing you of your health and happiness—and if you do nothing, it will only get worse. The symptoms of burnout are similar to the symptoms of depression, and many experts even believe that they are the same thing. Treat the problem as seriously as you would treat a mental illness.

Step 1: Get out of stress

Burnout is the result of overwhelming chronic stress. There is stress—the tension we feel. And there is a stressor - something that causes this reaction. Each of them needs to be worked on separately. Until we have come out of the stress reaction, we have too little energy to study its causes and eliminate them. Therefore, you first need to reduce the severity of stress and increase the amount of resources. And only then move on to the stressor.

Living emotions.

What emotion is associated with stress: irritation, despair, anger, something else? It happens that inside you there is a ban on this or that feeling, because it seems wrong and destructive (this often happens with anger) or meaningless (“What’s the point of being sad? And anyway, my feelings are not that important”). Then it may be difficult not only to express, but even to recognize the emotion. Here is a technique that will help you recognize that very feeling. Afterwards, it needs to be thrown out in an environmentally friendly way - that is, without any address and in a safe environment. Anger can be expressed by tearing paper into small pieces. Or go into the forest and loudly swear, stomp your feet and scream. If you feel sad, but you can’t live through it, turn on sad music or a sad movie, call a friend and cry with him. You can also try: theater courses or trainings based on gaming philosophy, embodiment yoga or Ecstatic Dance to explore yourself through movements. These bodily activities, with a focus on self-discovery, help us connect with our senses when our minds disconnect us from them.

Release of the body.

Stress is necessary for us to do something: run away from a predator or fight with it. To complete the stress response, you need to let your body know: you escaped or won. Otherwise, the body will still be in anticipation of a threat and produce stress hormones. Sport is the easiest way to do this. Training mimics the fight-or-flight response, and by ending it, we end stress. You can go for a run or dance, the main thing is to move quickly and intensely.

Relaxation with breathing.

Another option is breathing using the Breathing Zone app. Breathing can be done according to the 4-7-8 pattern (inhale-pause-exhale count), when the exhalation is twice as long as the inhalation. Singing is an alternative. In the process, you will have to lengthen your inhalation and exhale long - this is exactly what is needed to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and calm down.

Attention management.

The Pomodoro method is work lasting 25-50 minutes, then a short pause. In this mode, you will be able to work focusedly throughout the working day (this is especially difficult if you are burnt out). Use a timer app for your smartphone or the desktop version.

What to do during a short break? 12 ideas

Put on headphones, turn on music, a podcast or audiobooks and take a walk around the house.
Go out onto the balcony, breathe in the air and look at the sky or another natural object.
Meditate or do breathing practice. An alternative is “neuron massage” in the Norbu app.
Dance or just jump to the music. Stretching exercises will also come in handy. This stimulates the production of endorphins and makes you less sensitive to any discomfort at work.
Be in darkness, silence and loneliness if there was a lot of communication during the day. You can take a shower or even lie in the bath.
Do local cleaning. For example, a desktop.
Turn on your favorite song and sing along. Or play musical instruments.
Draw the view outside the window or make something out of plasticine.
Place turrets and stone figures on the table.
Take care of plants in the garden or indoors: water, spray, replant, prune.
Talk to someone significant. Call a friend you haven't seen for a long time, or your beloved grandmother.
Think about what's important. For example, about your motivation in your current case. Why is what you do important to you?

Energy planning.

Write a list of tasks for tomorrow and rate the energy consumption for each on a scale from 1 to 10. For example, answering a letter in detail is 2, and speaking in front of colleagues is 8. Rate on a scale from 1 to 10 how much energy you have now. If there is less than you need to complete all tasks, you can increase the amount: relieve stress with a workout or breathing exercise, eat and sleep, do something that inspires you. The alternative is to reduce the number of tasks (delegate, postpone to another day) or reduce their complexity.

Making work tasks easier.

All tasks should be simple and feasible, otherwise burnout will increase. Add a separate task to your schedule: adapt tomorrow's tasks to your current level of strength. To do this, break large tasks into small steps. Imagine delegating them to a less experienced person or team. How would you formulate the task for them, what stages and details would you mention?

Step 2: Develop awareness

Practicing mindfulness is essential to preventing and recovering from burnout. Often a person burns out because he takes the results of his work too seriously. Mindfulness helps to expand the boundaries of perception and separate yourself from your emotions and thoughts - everything that happens in the field of consciousness.

Additionally, burnout is a result of chronic stress. And the practice of mindfulness, according to research, teaches us to control our emotions and reduces stress levels. This is how deep mind founder Max Timofeev

. Regular formal and informal mindfulness practice helps us better understand our current state, including how our body feels. The more developed this skill is, the better we understand how different activities and our reactions affect us - and we can protect ourselves from harmful ones. By being aware of our body and our condition, we also release accumulated stress reactions and emotions. And we do this not through external tools, but through internal skills.

When you are feeling burnt out, you should choose a comfortable mindfulness practice to help you relax and gain insight rather than stress. If you haven't meditated regularly before, start with a simple practice focusing on your breathing .

If it's difficult to meditate with written instructions, try audio-guided meditation. There are many good applications in English (Insight Timer, for example). In Russian, it’s worth taking a closer look at special practices to combat burnout

from deep mind. The technique is aimed at working through unpleasant emotions that we tend to accumulate under stress.

If you already meditate, add some time to your current practice, do your usual practice in a new environment (in the park, not at home) - or learn a new practice altogether. Take a closer look at practicing self-care and acceptance

to develop the skill of self-care or to the motor practice
of free movement
for a more complete experience of emotions (especially good for those who find it difficult to do still meditation).

At first it will be difficult to connect with the body: when we burn out, we feel bad about it, otherwise we would have stopped and rested a long time ago. It can also be difficult to concentrate on positive emotions: joy, happiness, peace. If you get distracted, don’t scold yourself, but support yourself: “Hurray, I noticed that my thoughts have flown away, now I can return to practice.” For this case, the noting

: As you practice, at a comfortable pace (every 3, 5, or 10 seconds, for example), name what you see, hear, or feel. It can be something material (I see a room, hear a sound outside the window, feel the pressure of a clothing seam) or something intangible (I see images, hear thoughts, feel joy).

Step 3: Address the cause of your stress

Now you can move on to the stressor. What causes the very situation of chronic stress at work that leads to burnout? Identifying a stressor and limiting its influence is not always easy, so at Deva.School we use the following algorithm for this.

Take a piece of paper and write down specific problems. First, you can outline the event in general terms, then highlight the details: how you feel and in response to what events. This will help you identify your stress trigger. Then you can act in two ways: remove the stressor or change your attitude towards it so that it does not cause so much stress. Here's what it might look like.

You worry that you're not doing your job well enough.
Because of this, you wake up at night thinking about how to improve the case. Then you need to formulate what it means to you to do your job well, what criteria you set for yourself. We look at the list and compare it with reality. Can one person do it all—or does it take a whole team? If there are too many tasks, changing your attitude towards them will not help much. We need to figure out how to reduce them. Think about what you can delegate to team members, find out how others solve the same problems.
You feel uncomfortable working with your boss.
After talking with him, you feel exhausted, and his way of formulating tasks is annoying. Think: do you want to change jobs? If so, make a detailed plan on how to do it. It may turn out that changing jobs requires too many resources. Or that working conditions in other companies are no better. Then it’s worth changing your attitude towards your boss (as much as possible) and including in your schedule actions that make you more resistant to stress before and after talking with him. Don't forget: you are not a victim. You have a choice - to change the situation or attitude towards it. The feeling that you have no influence on anything is dangerous: it leads to burnout.

Step 4. Return to yourself: your goals, values and priorities

All of us, including myself, tend to run away to work when we don’t want to worry about something or when we need to prove to ourselves our worth, which has been shaken in personal relationships. Therefore, in parallel with reducing the level of stress and the number of irritants, I recommend thinking about what kind of relationship you have with yourself and others - and how to make them more comfortable.

First, remember what values are most important to you. What did you want when you started a business that made you burn out? What result did you want to get? It's unlikely that you intended to burn yourself out. Perhaps you wanted to make a contribution to the world? How else can you do this without having to burn out in the process?

Exercise “Inner Compass”

It will help you remember your values and goals, which you have slightly forgotten in the pursuit of high results at work, and re-gain an understanding of which direction to move.

Think about five books or movies that have had the greatest impact on you. Why are they so important to you? Write five theses that answer this question.
Which five people have influenced you the most? And again - five theses why these people became special to you.
What do you value in people? Top 5 important qualities.
What intangible thing can you not imagine life without? List five values. For example: freedom, like-minded people, family, fulfillment, and so on.
To get started, what are the five factors you need? For example: energy, calm, silence.

Next, ask yourself: what else is important to you to include in your life besides work? What aligns with your values? Most likely, the first answer will be: nothing, there is so little strength, you need to put everything into work. But remember: it is the balance of personal life and work that protects us from burnout. Ask yourself: “Am I now the person I wanted to be? What is missing in my life? What was my dream before I burned out?” Perhaps it's playing an instrument, learning art, or volunteering. If you can’t find a non-work related activity that you like, take a closer look at nearby areas: mentoring, networking.

Ignored my own needs and satisfied others

The women who took part in the survey took for granted the fact that they had to subordinate their lives to the needs of other people. Caring for others—sick relatives, grandchildren, elderly parents, or neighbors in need—was an integral part of their self-image.

Looking back on this period, they understand that all these additional tasks could not be combined on a permanent basis with their already existing family and professional responsibilities.

One of the study participants puts it this way: “Today this is clear to me as daylight! But at that time I could not even think that this was impossible. I felt like it was all about me, that I wasn’t good enough.”

Another interlocutor admitted: “I stopped understanding what is good and what is bad. I didn’t know what I was entitled to for myself or how much I was obligated to do for others.” Another woman recalled that, while caring for those around her, she completely lost sight of herself: “I became invisible, a neuter creature. I tried to please everyone - my parents, my husband. I cared about their needs, but I was extremely critical of myself and demanded a lot from myself.”

3.Diagnostics for loss of appetite

If the patient himself cannot determine the reasons that caused the loss of appetite, and there are no obvious accompanying symptoms, then the examination should be comprehensive and cover all possible causes. Basic studies, as a rule, reveal violations of certain processes and allow us to move on to more thorough diagnostics in a certain area. The required initial diagnostic minimum includes: