Burnout – Personal Experience and Step-by-Step Instructions for Getting Yourself in Order in 24 Hours
My name is Slava UsovAt the age of 20, I went on my first expedition to Spitsbergen, then to Antarctica, and since then I have lived and worked on almost every continent. From a scientist to an operations manager in Africa and the Middle East.
Working in different organizations, managing people of different nationalities, I always had to start by solving the same problem – team burnout. People feel permanently tired. This condition is best described by the word “cynicism”. High ideals, your own dreams and other people’s enthusiastic moods irritate you. Humor gives way to sarcasm. Libido and general interest in life drop sharply. It’s hard to get up in the morning. What’s really scary is that over time we get used to it. Working and living burned out has become almost the norm.
The most surprising thing in this situation is that the way out of burnout is, in general, not a difficult question, and the process is pleasant. Each of us is partly familiar with these methods, the task of my article is to put them into a consistent system. The structure to which each of you will be able to impose his practices. Prepare a “life preserver”. Make a decision in advance.
The thing is that in a state of burnout we are inadequate. Understanding with our minds that this or that action can help us, we, nevertheless, seem not to believe in it and time after time slide into default. We get stuck on YouTube and TV series, fast food and alcohol.
So, to the method. The entire complex described below takes exactly 24 hours. Any weekend will do for this. At the end of the article I will give a specific example of what this might look like. But first, let's discuss each of the stages.
Let it be
For many years, bringing myself to a state of burnout, I solved the situation at the level of will. I pulled myself together, sent myself to run cross-country and take ice baths. It helped in the moment, but after a short period of time the state again fell on me like a concrete wall. Much deeper and heavier than the previous one.
The solution was found in an unexpected place for me. Once I tried to throw discipline, healthy lifestyle and any actions requiring at least minimal expenditure of will before all the baths and cross-country running. Allow yourself everything. To theatrically and artificially play the role of Oblomov in a separate apartment.
I would buy a cake, turn on What Happened Next, and generally sink as low in my decomposition as possible.
Surprisingly, by squeezing your base desires to the limit, saturation comes quite quickly. After 3-4 hours, you understand that the humor in CBD is so-so, and the cake is cloyingly sweet. At this point, you can move on to the next stage.
Self-compassion
There are quite a lot of things we don't allow ourselves to do. To be sad, angry, to brag about something, to fool around. Everyone has their own. The list is individual. But we are usually familiar with our “demons”. These are most often emotions that manifest themselves in moments of extreme fatigue or, for example, alcohol intoxication.
I need to find a way to let these emotions be expressed. In my channel There is a post with very different approaches to solving this problem.
The easiest way is to sit down and sympathize with yourself as a friend. Music helps a lot. For each emotion, you can put on something that touches you personally. I lay down, put on headphones and listened to it on repeat. November Richter And Lose Yourself EminemIt is important to listen to the music as carefully as possible and, as it were, follow her with emotions and heart.
Dream
Entire books have been written about the importance of sleep, and I don't want to repeat myself. The difficulty is that during periods of burnout, you sleep poorly. This moment is shown very well in “Fight Club.” There, the doctor refuses to give the main character a sleeping pill. I keep it for exactly such cases.
There are various over-the-counter medications (melatonin, CBD), at the moment of burnout it is important to have the ability to reliably disconnect yourself from the world for 9-10 hours of sleep. Often this alone is enough to get back to normal.
Cleaning
After waking up and washing, the first thing to do is to tidy up. Quoting Major Zvyagin from Mikhail Weller's book of the same name, “If you haven't touched something for two years, you can safely throw it in the trash: you don't need it.”
Cleaning is one of the most energy-filling processes. Strictly speaking, we do not add energy, but we remove leaks. Every thing, especially junk, regularly requires a decision: where to put it, is it worth throwing away, why did I buy it, and so on…
In addition, there is a direct relationship between the levels of order inside and outside. Remember Bradley Cooper's character from “Limitless”. Having found a new order with the help of NZT, the first thing he did was to restore order. Well, right after seducing the girl, to be precise. 🙂
The more you throw out, the better. It would be great to collect clothes and take them to charity bins. In general, if at any stage you feel like doing something good, don’t hold back. This includes the bestwhat can be done and for myself.
Return to the body
In the most general sense, any low state is associated with loss of contact with the present moment in timeFocusing on the future creates excitement and anxiety, while focusing on the past creates regret and sadness.
Our closest contact with reality is the body. Just focusing on physical sensations for a few minutes is guaranteed to make you feel better. However, when you are burnt out, it is worth going into more intense interactions. Sports, massage, sauna.
The principle is to definitely use your will this time.
In training, bring repetitions to the limit. In the bathhouse, order the services of a steam bath attendant and ask him not to pity you. Choose a sports or Thai massage. The task is through physical sensations bring attention back to reality present moment.
Ten things to do
When you return from training, take a piece of paper and write down 10 small tasks that you can easily do right now. The selection criterion: each can be done in five, maximum ten minutes. Scan something, order cat food, organize your desk, and so on. It’s good to choose tasks that you’ve been putting off for a long time. But it’s important not to get stuck on any of them for more than the allotted ten minutes.
The point of the exercise is not what you do, but to gain energy and calmness (more about this method here). By completing tasks, like steps, you will quickly gain the necessary resource.
Once you've gotten the hang of the little things, you can move on to more creative tasks.
Flow
The flow state is characterized by maximum involvement and loss of the sense of time. Steven Kotler (author of Stealing Fire) says that for each person there are at least two types of activitiesin which he easily gets “into the zone”. On one of them it is worth earning (for example, by writing code), with the help of the other – to gain energy.
Most often, this activity manifests itself in childhood. Sometimes we feel it later. Playing a musical instrument, drawing, football, dancing, writing texts. Creativity that is characteristic of you. It is important to go into creation and play for at least an hour and a half.
Any of the presented stages is self-sufficient. You can change the order and it is important to find your own. The logic of the proposed sequence is, on the one hand, to easily enter this routine, on the other – to gradually increase the complexity.
Example of protocol execution:
17:00 – 20:00 – Let go of the brakes. Avoid drugs, but otherwise give yourself carte blanche to do things you usually don't allow yourself.
20:00 – 22:00 – listen to your feelings. Turn on some music, hit a punching bag, sit in silence. Everyone has their own method. At this stage, it is important to give free rein to your emotions.
22:00 – 7:00 – sleep. The longer, the better. But it is important not to lie around if you are already awake.
07:00 – 10:00 – Cleaning. The more you throw away or give away, the better. Do it with extreme cruelty.
10:00 – 13:00 – sports, massage, sauna (of course, you can combine them). Remember that it is important to feel the body here. Return to reality through sensations and movements.
13:00 – 14:30 – ten things to do. It is important not to do more, not to do anything complicated, but to use this method to accelerate the internal generator and transfer it into a creative channel.
14:30 – 17:00 – streaming creativity. From football to drawing. It is very individual. It is fundamentally important at this stage to create something of your own, to bring back the taste of creativity and play.
If you've done all the steps correctly, you should be fine by this point, and ideally in an elevated state. It's a good time to think about where exactly you want to take your life (your approach to this issue I described it in my blog on Telegram). In my experience, burnout is most often the result of moving towards someone else's goals. To quote Nietzsche: “one must have the need to be strong.” The problem, however, is that more often than not, this need was not ours.
