first signs of burnout 🍵 just some tea #49

what i do when i feel burnt out

this one has been sitting in my drafts for a bit - because it’s very hard to write about burn out if you feel burnt out.

we’ve all been there. when tuesdays feel like it should be fridays. telling ourselves “next week will be better”.

I call it the next-week-will-be-better movie. we’ve all seen adaptations of it and been the main characters . 💁‍♀️

here’s what I have learned from my time being part of this movie.

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typical signs I find on my personal burnout highway
🚩 my sleeping hours are all over the place. am doomscrolling late into night/ waking up later than usual, often not feeling rested.
🚩 am more consumed by comparison and feeling of left behind or missing out.
🚩 my internal voice becomes harsher on myself.
🚩 I go more into my shell - I tend to stop writing online, sharing on instagram, messaging friends.
🚩 I check slack/email/linkedIn more obsessively than I need to.
🚩 every whatsapp/insta DM feels like a huge demand on my emotional bandwidth.
🚩 overcompensating in relationships/work for my lack of presence and hence feeling more exhausted lol

depending on how far I have let things go, the intensity differs. do you have similar ones? what are usually your early signs of things trending down?

peak summer, peak restlessness mode this year.

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I had all of them yellow red flags recently..
so like mid-julyish, just before my trip to NYC I was ticking almost all of the above. 🫠

writing this to you this week, I am ticking almost none.

here are a few things from my little black book on burnout that really help me navigate these phases of mine.

• chapter 1: find out why my cup empty.
  for me burnout is rarely about number of hours at work or the mental load. but it’s important for me to have control over my time - what’s the task I am spending my energy on and at what time.
  

  when there are days or weeks at stretch where I am forced to do things at a time I don’t wanna do them at - like I need to do house admin when I really wanna write or I have to be in back to back meetings for weeks and cannot make time for myself - it leads me feeling burnt out.
  

• chapter 2: when in a hole, stop digging
  when we feel the early signs of burnout, the tendency we have is to keep pushing through. maybe just another week, just another deadline.
  
  am learning slowly that chaos multiplies if you keep trying to solve it. best way to solve a lot of things is to stop solving for a while. having that realisation and making an intentional decision to stop that cycle is powerful.
  

• chapter 3: breakthrough comes from burnout
  this sounds worse than it is, but more often than not burnout is a signal of doing things that are not aligned with your core.
  

  my friend

  Kax Uson
  wrote beautifully about her own journey, and how burnout helped her reassess and reprioritise.

  
  personally too, a period of intense restlessness/creative exhaustion has usually been followed by a season of ease and realignment.
  

• chapter 4: activate my self-preservation mode
  not every burnout needs to be intense. you can optimize for mini menty-b and burnouts all the time bestie.
  
  my self-preservation mode includes (not an exhaustive list)
  🌸 the first thing I do to stop is get off the social media. delete all the apps, throw my phone on the other side of bed.
  🌸 start sleeping at 10 PM. doesn’t matter when I wake up.
  🌸 plan for a few solo cafe trips or if possible a weekend away to read and write.
  🌸 actively meet my friends that are not in tech/ in my working circle.
  🌸 remind myself that you are not meant to be a working bee all year around.
  and then rinse and repeat.

I loved how

Ami Vora

puts it - become your own burnout spotter, and that pretty much sums up my strategy and perspective. sometimes, me and my little burner book is of no help and then I have learned to ask for help.

hope some bits of this helped you reflect on your own early signals and nudged you to come up with a strategy that might or might not work.😅

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📕 reading
to end the summer, I decided to read books with summer in their title and omg they both delivered just like that last bite of cheese cake.

books in question - bad summer people and the tiktok sensation, just for the summer.

📺 watching
something is very off with me because I haven’t finished bridgerton yet - and neither have I started emily in paris. have you? is it good, tell me in comments please!

🎧 listening
still following along the US election - and been loving listening to What Now by Trevor Noah, and the Ezra Klein Show. I also recently discovered another podcast called Almost 30 (episode recs in the monthly roundup)

if you are looking for a more recs, check out my end of month expanded rec list from july or august.🍵

sending you all the cozy autumn-y witchy energies. 🍁

talk next week.
chhavi x

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