Quick snippets from my morning read on Wednesday, 29th October 2020
The article focuses on entrepreneurial burnout, but I believe it applies to everyone who is stressed and burnt out by work.
Understanding Entrepreneurial Burnout (And How To Deal With It)
Normal stress can be healthy, and it can even contribute to one’s peak performance. But when we consistently don’t recuperate by resting, we start building chronic stress, which can lead to any combination of disorders and illnesses.
Eventually, the continuous stress on the body over a long period of time (called chronic stress) disturbs the endocrine system, which is responsible for regulating the “fight or flight” response. When the endocrine system is disturbed, it starts taking over everything that the brain considers nonessential, like sleep, digestion, and the reproductive system, while amplifying the functions activated during high alert moments, like muscular and cardiovascular functions. This is when burnout starts.
At its highest degree, burnout is a state of complete mental, physical and emotional exhaustion.
Today’s society makes us believe that we can only be successful when we work incredibly long hours, and “sacrifice” our health, our personal time, and our relationships. This can’t be further from the truth, for what is success when we lose our health, our inner connection, and our relationships with others? Moreover, when we spend more time with ourselves (not working), we are able to have better mental clarity, more abundant creativity, and improved ability for sound business decisions.
There are a few things to keep in mind for entrepreneurs to avoid getting there. First, keep your external values in check. That includes balanced time with family, friends, and personal nurturing hobbies outside of work.
Second, keep your physical health in check. That includes healthy eating, exercising, sleeping, and outdoors activities.
Third, keep your mental resilience in check. That includes not letting daily setbacks and obstacles, negative feedback, or erratic schedules affect you. You can grow it every day through small goal gains, as simple as committing not to miss your daily workout, setting time to meet your friends on weekends, or pledging to eat natural foods for a month.
And lastly, keep your personal sense of purpose in check. That includes knowing the difference between external and internal sources of validation. It also includes doing our best, then letting go of the desire to control everything outside of us, and becoming the witness of everything unfolding with gratefulness and humility.
Read the full article Understanding Entrepreneurial Burnout (And How To Deal With It) on Entrepreneur.
And as always, if you enjoyed this, check out the rest of my daily snippets, curated daily, right here on The Red Notebook.
