This is the first in a series of blog posts that will (i) unpack a number of common challenges that clients bring to counselling and (ii) provide you with some practical tipson how to manage them.
First up, burnout. Juggling work, home and family life can be stressful and can, if things get too much to handle, lead to burnout. In navigating a busy life, with multiple plates spinning at once, you may start to feel burnt out, jaded or emotionally checked out. Add just one more plate, or forget to spin one of the plates already on the go, and the whole lot could crash down. Ahead of next week’s Mental Health Awareness Week (13-19 May), this post will help you to spot the signs of burnout to be able to pre-empt that crash before it happens.
According to the wonderfully named “Yerkes-Dodson Law”, as stress increases, so does performance, but only up to a point. The Law tells us that having a little bit of stress in your life – known as “eustress” – can help focus the mind towards a task, giving the necessary adrenaline to get into the zone to complete exams or to meet that next work deadline, for example. However, excessive stress in multiple areas of life and experienced over a prolonged period of time is debilitating to mental (and physical) health, making you feel burnt out and resulting in underperformance. That is when you feel the opposite of eustress: “distress”.
What signs should you look for that burnout is imminent? You may realise you are struggling to think clearly, that focus, memory and motivation are impaired, that you feel under water or in survival mode, so that you lose a sense of perspective or of the bigger picture. You may identify feeling more irritable, angry, sad or depressed, with rapidly changing moods, or you may spot physical signs of fight, flight, freeze in your body, such as headaches, nausea, muscle tension, or you may notice getting sick more often due to lowered immunity and feeling exhausted.
If you do spot these signs, what should you do? One good option is to take a step back from the hurly-burly to perform a holistic review of the different areas of your life, with a view to highlighting the main areas of imbalance in your life. This is often referred to in therapeutic circles as the ‘Wheel of Life’. Want to give it a try? Using the template shown in figure 1 below, rate your satisfaction levels for the different life categories from 1 (low) to 10 (high), circling the numbers, then use a line to join the different areas up. You might well end up with a wonky star shape that might look a little like figure 2 – that is, you are doing well in some areas of your life but less well in others.
What does your Wheel of Life tell you about your life balance? Look for the areas where you have given yourself a score of 4 or below: are you at risk of burnout in certain categories? Pinpointing sources of dissatisfaction in life that are causing stress is the first step to managing them better.
In my next post I will explore factors, such as interpersonal dynamics, that can contribute to our stress levels and burnout and offer readers further practical tips and tools.
Katherine Radcliffe is professionally trained Counsellor, working in Pimlico (SW1) and Acton/Chiswick (W3) in person, as well as online. You can contact her on: 07905 805 445 or katherine@radcliffetherapy.com for a free initial conversation or for further information.
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