How to Pull Yourself Out of a Burnout Spiral
Feeling overwhelmed by the demands of city life? Burnout might be lurking closer than you think. Luckily, there’s a way out. In this blog, we'll explore how to pull yourself out of a burnout cycle and regain your energy and motivation.
Whether you're a high-powered executive or a creative professional, burnout doesn't discriminate. But by understanding its signs and learning effective strategies for recovery, you can transform your life and reclaim your joy. With the right tools and mindset, you can turn burnout into an opportunity for growth and renewal.
Continue reading to learn practical tips and strategies to pull yourself out of the burnout spiral and thrive in the city that never sleeps.
Recognizing Burnout
In New York City, where working 60 to 80-hour weeks is typical, it can be hard to recognize the signs of burnout until you’re completely overwhelmed and exhausted. Like frogs in hot water slowly reaching a boiling point, New York professionals often normalize and adapt to perpetual stress until it’s too late. However, you can become an expert at recognizing burnout in your own life and reverse the adverse effects now.
By definition, burnout is a deep sense of exhaustion experienced in reaction to chronic job stress that is felt physically, mentally, and emotionally. Verywell Mind states burnout is “characterized by three main dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism (less identification with the job), and feelings of reduced professional ability.” When you are in a burnout spiral, you may feel unable to cope, saying things like “I can’t do this anymore.”
The following are other common burnout symptoms:
Sleep disturbances
Fatigue
Difficulty concentrating
Frequent recurring illnesses (indicating a low-functioning immune system)
High blood pressure
Depression
Loss of interest or pleasure in activities previously enjoyed
Suicidal ideation
When burnout goes untreated, the consequences can be substantial.
Your performance may suffer. As stress mounts, you may need help focusing or concentrating on the aspects of your work that require your full attention. You may lose creativity. In an effort to manage your workload, you may begin performing tasks with less desire for excellence.
You may feel emotionally spent. Drained by the psychological and emotional toll stress has taken on you, it may become hard to cope or muster up the internal resources to complete your work or positively engage other parts of your life.
You may become disconnected at work. As stress mounts, you may react by retreating from your colleagues or disengaging from work projects. Cynicism may take over as you disparage the job you are doing. You may become critical or increasingly frustrated with coworkers. You might also lose pride and joy in the work you formerly felt proud of doing.
As you might imagine, the consequences of burnout have the potential to perpetuate the very rhythms or conditions that cause you to feel overwhelmed at the outset. For this reason, it’s vital to intervene early by creating more work-life harmony to move from burnout to balance.
Understanding the Burnout Spiral
Luckily, burnout rarely happens overnight. Instead, burnout progresses through what New York psychologist Herbert Freudenberger and his colleague Gail North identified as the 12-stage model of burnout. Let’s explore each stage so you can assess the current progression of burnout in your life.
The 12 Stages of Burnout
Stage 1: The Compulsion to Prove Oneself
Burnout usually begins as seemingly harmless yet excessive ambition. The positive striving that historically helped you excel along your career path shifts into a compulsion to prove your competence. In this early stage of burnout, it’s common to accept responsibility increasingly out of a desire to prove your worth and demonstrate you can handle whatever comes your way.
Stage 2: Working Harder
Over time you find it hard to switch out of work mode, and you establish higher and higher expectations of yourself. You begin taking work home and increasing the number of hours dedicated to accomplishing tasks so you can stay on top of an ever-increasing task list. As Melody Wilding describes in Forbes magazine, “Work begins to feel like an addiction and you have trouble switching off or disconnecting in the evening.”
Stage 3: Neglecting Needs
Self-care takes a backseat as you sacrifice biological needs like eating at healthy intervals or getting sufficient sleep. In this stage, you may reduce time and energy devoted to social interactions, rationalizing these choices as simply eliminating activities that feel “unimportant” or “unnecessary” to completing the tasks at hand.
Stage 4: Displacement of Conflicts
At this stage you may begin to see physical symptoms of burnout. You have a sneaking suspicion something is wrong, but are uncertain or dismissive of the cause. It may feel like you’re having an internal crisis, caught in a value conflict between getting your need for a sense of self-worth met through work. And yet work is the very thing making you feel stressed and inadequate. You try to ignore or suppress your concerns, which leads you to feel panicky and jittery.
Stage 5: Revision of Values
Work becomes all-consuming as the primary and, in many cases, the sole focus of your life. Though you’ve abandoned many of your core values and aspects of your more holistic life purpose, you revise your values so that work is now central. You tell yourself work productivity and performance is the primary value, and your emotional experience becomes blunted.
Stage 6: Denial of Emerging Problems
As your workload increases, you become intolerant and loathe social interactions. You may view others as lazy or stupid, becoming more cynical and aggressive. You tend to think the answer to your problem is more time to relieve the pressure of your heavy workload rather than viewing the work itself as the problem.
Stage 7: Withdrawal
It’s as if all of your conversations and activities revolve around work at this stage. Isolated from healthy social interaction with friends or family, you may turn to drugs or alcohol as temporary relief from work production. Indulgence in guilty pleasures may seem like your only way to suspend working.
Stage 8: Odd Behavioral Changes
Family and friends become concerned by changes to your lifestyle. People who care about you may verbalize that you need help or something seems wrong. In the past you were reliable or quick to jump in and do the right thing. Now, people in your life notice you neglecting responsibilities and becoming irritable or forgetful.
Stage 9: Depersonalization
You may feel disconnected from yourself and others, no longer able to perceive your needs or see yourself and the people in your life as valuable. You are a shell of the person you used to be. Life feels mechanical, as though you’re operating on autopilot.
Stage 10: Inner Emptiness
Inside, you feel empty, and to relieve this experience, you turn to exaggerated use of food, sex, alcohol, or drugs. These unhealthy coping mechanisms may cause new problems to arise in your life by negatively impacting your body, costing you money or relationships, or putting you in physical danger.
Stage 11: Depression
Lost and exhausted, you begin to feel hopeless, as if life has no meaning. You may feel like life is a blur, with one moment dissolving into the next. Work itself no longer has meaning or purpose for you.
Stage 12: Burnout Syndrome
You reach a point of total mental and physical collapse. You may need immediate medical attention. In some cases, you entertain thoughts of suicide, falsely believing it could be an escape from the despair.
As you can see, the signs of burnout typically begin with mild stress that progresses to exhaustion and, eventually, total disengagement. Where do you find yourself now?
Remember that burnout is not always linear. Without intervention, it is easy for burnout to become a spiral that intensifies over time. Early interruption with the help of a trained clinician can help you break out of the burnout cycle before severe consequences occur.
Strategies for Recovery
We recommend a 3-phase intervention plan for burnout recovery at Healthy Minds NYC. First, it’s important to get perspective through self-assessment and psychoeducation. As you recognize you are genuinely experiencing burnout rather than an average level of stress you’ll be more equipped to address the work rhythms and practices that reinforce your distress. Next, you’ll develop self-care practices that lead to replenishment and restoration. Finally, we’ll help you build a support system that includes your therapist, family, friends, and potential support groups or communities of others recovering from burnout.
Let’s explore these steps in more detail so you can feel confident in knowing how to pull yourself out of a burnout spiral.
Self-Assessment
As we shared the 12 stages of burnout above, did you begin to feel a tightening in your chest or a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach? Perhaps your heart began to beat faster as you recognized some of the signs of burnout. The first step in recovering from any condition is to pause to reflect and acknowledge the degree to which the issue affects you. What stage of burnout are you currently experiencing? Have you experienced others in the past?
Next, take a moment to consider the potential personal triggers or stressors that may be contributing to burnout in your life. Have any changes to your personal or professional life that have influenced how you perceive yourself or your relationship to work? Be sure to note if you are affected by any other mental health conditions that may be exacerbating your experience of burnout or a more substantial underlying cause for burnout. For example, if you have a history of depression but just recently started experiencing burnout at work, the preexisting condition of depression may be the more significant contributing factor to your current state of wellness.
Self-Care Practices
Next, address burnout by developing a healthy rhythm of self-care practices. We always recommend addressing self-care’s physical aspect first by prioritizing adequate sleep and routine rest. Also, you can improve your diet and increase your level of movement through daily exercise. Self-care can also include incorporating mindfulness and relaxation techniques into your daily routine. Simple practices like coloring, listening to uplifting music, or even holding ice can shift your mood and encourage you to be present. Lastly, establish healthy boundaries between work and your personal life by setting clear work hours and adhering to them.
Seeking Support
If you’re experiencing burnout, the most essential recovery strategy is to make sure you’re not facing this season of your life alone. “The best antidote to burnout, particularly when it’s driven by cynicism and inefficacy, is seeking out rich interpersonal interactions and continual personal and professional development” (Harvard Business Review). Isolation can perpetuate the poor habits that first caused you to lean into work at the expense of other parts of your life. For example, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a spike in clients living alone in the city slip into burnout as work filled spaces in their lives previously occupied by social engagements.
The first person you need on your social support team is a good therapist, psychiatrist, or coach. At Healthy Minds NYC, our care coordinator can help you get paired with the right provider and mental health service for your needs. Next, connect with your larger network of friends, family, and colleagues. Consider signing up for a burnout support group or joining an online community that is focused on how to get out of burnout.
Breaking the Cycle
Since burnout can be cyclical, we find that treatment must include not only triage recovery actions for the short term but also a long-term plan to help you break the cycle. Here are some methods you can explore to deal with burnout in the future.
Reevaluating Priorities:
Start by reflecting on your personal and professional goals and values. In life coaching at Healthy Minds NYC, we help clients step outside the regular rhythm of their lives to get perspective by reflecting on where they’ve been and where they want to go in life. Healthy Minds NYC Co-Founder Chanel Dokun, author of Life Starts Now: How to Create the Life You’ve Been Waiting For, offers an introductory coaching session through our practice to help you audit some of the underlying goals and values that have been driving your behavior so you can work better. During this session, you’ll identify areas of your life that may need adjustment and get practical recommendations and tools to promote balance and life fulfillment.
Setting Realistic Goals:
Next, set yourself up for future success by setting more realistic goals. Burnout often occurs because the metrics for success keep expanding, leaving you in a no-win position as the goalpost keeps moving. Take back control of your life by redefining what success means for you and the people you love. With a clear target set, you can better measure where you are on your journey toward the ideal life you envision.
Develop a habit of breaking tasks down into manageable steps. Understood.org, an organization supporting individuals who learn and think differently, offers the following five steps to break down large projects into manageable tasks:
Look at the big picture
Then, think small.
Review each step.
Make the steps specific.
Factor in other people.
Once you set your bite-sized steps, create boundaries around this set of responsibilities so your overall workload doesn’t escalate. It’s okay to say no, ask for help, or delay a new task so that you aren’t lost in the excessive demands of others or your inner critic.
Be sure to celebrate your small achievements as you complete tasks. Burnout is a relentless taskmaster, giving little recognition for all of the work you produce. Appreciating yourself as you execute tasks can be a helpful reminder of all you do.
Establishing Healthy Habits:
As you focus your energy on how to recover from burnout for the long-term, look for ways you can proactively develop healthy habits. For example, incorporate regular physical activity and nutritious meals into your daily routine. You might also start practicing time management techniques to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
You might employ several strategies to better manage your time, such as the Pomodoro method. We love the recommendations from Clockify that consider your time management style. According to Clockify we all have a unique relationship in managing our time. For example, a “time martyr” might overfill their schedule with other people’s needs instead of caring for themselves. An “underestimator” might be too optimistic about how long tasks take to complete. Many people who suffer from burnout have a “perfectionist” time management style that leads them to work overtime. Consider how you naturally manage time and then select an approach to time that fosters health for you.
Lastly, cultivate hobbies and interests outside of work to spark joy and creativity in your life. There are plenty of options around New York City to indulge your interests. You live in one of the greatest cities on the planet. Take advantage of your location!
Cultivating Resilience
Changing how you approach your professional and personal life may initially feel uncomfortable. It’s normal to feel uncertain as you attempt something new. Remember you are resilient and as you make positive changes in your life, you cultivate even greater resilience.
Mindfulness Practices:
One way to stay connected to yourself through this life change is to practice mindfulness. Mindful.org defines mindfulness as “the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.” You have the potential to be mindful right now simply by tuning into yourself. What a beautiful invitation, given that burnout keeps you running further and further away from your core self. Try out one of the many mindfulness practices, such as gratitude or positive thinking. You could also engage in deep breathing exercises and meditation to reduce stress.
Adapting to Change:
As you integrate new changes into your life, stay open. When we feel afraid or nervous about lifestyle changes, the temptation is to grip more tightly to our old ways. If you refuse to try anything different, you’ll never learn how to deal with burnout. Embrace the new by being flexible and remaining open to new experiences. View momentary setbacks as opportunities to keep learning. The inevitable failures you’ll have along the way are new chances to grow.
Building Support Networks:
It will take time to learn how to get out of burnout. Be patient with yourself and surround yourself with positive influences. Invite individuals into your life who can support you. Also, connect to people within your industry who can model healthier work habits for you. Offer and seek help within your professional communities to expand your support network and grow your circle.
Sustaining Well-Being
You can do this! If you’ve been experiencing burnout symptoms, you don’t have to continue living this way. By learning how to pull yourself out of a burnout spiral, you can build a healthier life and sustain your well-being for the long haul.
Regular Check-Ins:
Make sure to periodically assess your well-being by scheduling regular check-ins with yourself to rate your level of burnout. Adjust the burnout strategies you’re using as necessary. Burnout recovery will continue to be an ongoing process that requires commitment and self-awareness.
Celebrating Progress:
Beating burnout takes hard work. Take pride in your progress and celebrate every step. Mark the milestones in your recovery journey the same way someone who struggles with alcoholism might celebrate their sobriety. Consider using a token or charm like this bracelet to honor the growth you’ve experienced. It takes courage and resilience to overcome burnout. Keep going!
Check out our self-esteem therapy services and schedule your free consultation with our Care Coordinator.
