What Causes Burnout? 19 Reasons Of Burnout That You Should Be Aware
If you’ve ever wondered what causes burnout this article is for you. Burnout is a serious disorder that can leave you seriously ill if you don’t deal with it as soon as possible.
By reading this article you’ll have a good idea for what can cause burnout. Do not take it lightly. Your health and overall wellbeing are in danger, in addition to, those people who surround you. There are so many contributing factors to burnout. Everyone has different perspectives on life and different outlooks. We all take stress and deal with life differently; however, we all aren’t at all times resistant to the effects.
Many of us haven’t had the luxury to find ourselves. We all need purpose and to feel like we have meaning to our lives. Discover who you are and what will make you happy. Your underlying stress, depression, and fatigue could be from dealing with a path that you didn’t chose yet were forced into because of life’s circumstances. You can at all times find a way to better your life.
If you think you may be on the track to or are officially burnt out, then keep making yourself aware. The more you learn and understand what you are up against, the easier it is going to be to combat it.
What Causes Burnout?
1. You are burnt out from your choice in career
Most of us aren’t sure what we want to be when we grow up, so we end up taking a choice that it less than ideal for us. Our career choice might be something a friend proposed, or it might be something we thought we could do easily to get our foot in the door of a professional career.
It might just be a job that we settled on so we could buy an apartment or fix our car. Then, we eventually got stuck there. Or, we went to college for so long that we can’t feasibly see how we could switch careers this late in the game. We are doing something that we burnt out on after 10-20 years (or possibly even a year or 5 years).
We are ready to do something else, but we are too burnt out to switch jobs or careers. Or, we have a family to support, and we cannot easily transition to a new job while there are bills to pay and mouths to feed at home.
2. You signed up for a ‘helping’ career
If we got into a ‘helping’ career, we are burnt out by helping other people and not getting our own cup filled. We have grown tired of helping other people, and we see an endless stream of helpless people coming our way when we see our students or patients. We feel like our efforts aren’t appreciated or not putting a dent in the world’s suffering, and we start to question why we really took the job in the first place.
3. You are burnt out from your incompatible relationship
If your relationship with an incompatible partner goes on for an extended period of time, you are likely getting burn out from the relationship that you’re in. Unfortunately, not all relationships are happy and joy-filled. Many people get together for the wrong reasons.
They might get together for sex, financial security, social status and more. Everyone has ulterior motives for getting into a relationship. If your partner is leaving you feel exhausted and unfulfilled, you are most likely heading towards burnout.
4. You are being taken advantage of by an abusive and controlling bully in your relationship
Many people enter into a relationship to exploit or bully their partner. A bully might take a partner just to be his slave and do his chores for him while he sleeps around. Most of us don’t realize how bad a poor relationship can affect our health and happiness.
The truth of the matter is that we can become so needs deprived in a relationship that we end up experiencing psychotic breaks and nervous breakdowns (amongst other mental health issues and personality disorders).
5. You don’t have much for resiliency or healthy coping mechanisms.
People who are resilient and have healthy coping mechanisms know what to do to reduce the control the stress in their lives. People with unhealthy coping mechanisms often ruin their brains and bodies by participating in unhealthy coping mechanisms when they get stressed. They have unhealthy habits that put additional physiological and psychological stress on the body, rather than habits that help the stress to dissipate and the body to heal.
6. You are burnt out from your lack of relationship
People are social creatures, and most of us consider ourselves successful if we are able to land a healthy and productive relationship with another person. If our other person didn’t show up in our life yet, and we have a string of failed relationships – we may feel burnt out from just being single and having a lifestyle that differs from our internal definition of what a happy life should look like. Instead of accepting and adjusting, we feel like something is still missing from our life.
7. You are burnt out from your boss
If you have a nitpicky boss that never gives you acknowledgement of a job well done or a pat on the back, you might be heading for burnout. Most of us cannot work under another person without getting some kind of recognition from others or recognition from ourselves.
If you have an OCPD or OCD boss who is consistently fussy about what you are doing and micromanaging you, you’ll head towards burnout. If the coworkers around you are continually standing up on their soapbox even although they’re wrong about whatever they’re preaching about, this can grate on a person’s nerves and cause extreme stress over time.
If your boss is verbally, physically, or sexually abusive, you’ll even be under extreme stress at work that will lead to burnout.
8. You are burnt out from your coworkers or friends
If you are around quite a lot of gossipy types at work, at home or with your friends – you might suffer from burnout. Constantly listening to someone talk badly about everybody else through gossip or venting can be exhausting to some people, specially introverts or nice people.
Worrying about what that person is saying behind your back when you aren’t around is also stressful. It can be equally draining trying to keep up on the gossip so that you aren’t left out and uninvited to things by other people. You don’t want to be the odd man out, but the negativity from others can cause burnout and stress over time.
9. You are burnt out from your hobbies
You took up your hobbies to maintain your social life and do fun things, but you struggle to balance the schedule between your hobby, your work obligation and your home responsibilities. Someone is almost at all times mad at you that you didn’t make it to something, otherwise you didn’t stay late.
You feel like your boss; your friends and your family are at all times making demands on your time. You never have alone time to yourself to rest and reflect because your hobbies, work or family responsibilities take up all of your time. You overextend yourself on your hobbies because you’re a perfectionist, and you feel like something shouldn’t be done if it can’t be done ‘right’. You see your hobby as a contest rather than a soothing endeavor.
10. Your work schedule is not conducive for sufficient rest and relaxation
People who don’t have a good family-work balance often experience a significant amount of burnout. They work too late at night, or they can’t put their work right down to rest and relax with their families. They at all times seem to be they’re connected to work in some way, shape or form. They bring their phone and laptop into the bedroom at night with them, and they fall asleep stressing about how the workday went or what they’ve to do the next day.
The person with a work-schedule burnout problem at all times feels like they’re coming or going from work, and they hardly ever feel like they’ve enough time to wind down from their workday. They feel like they live at work, and they feel like their life consists of nothing else besides work.
11. You surround yourself with bullies.
If you enjoy hanging around with bullies, you’ll undoubtedly start feeling strain and burnout by them henpecking you or asking too much of you. Bullies like to push us around and dump their work on us. Then, bullies often take the credit for a job well done. People are conditioned to bully, have the genetical propensity to bully others, and relish in bullying because they were taught the skills to bully.
Bullies are takers, and they often take a great amount of resources from the world without replenishing much of what they took. Bullies exhaust your resources, if you let them – and this also leads to burnout.
12. Your social skills are missing.
People with poor social skills and communication skills will struggle through life. They won’t understand how to delegate responsibilities to others to help themselves not carry the full burden of a task. They won’t have other people who are invested in their success to help propel them forward. They won’t network with the right people to help their cause, and they’ll at all times feel like they’re lifting the world up on their own shoulders.
There are so many gatekeepers and barriers of entry in the world that it is helpful to work together to attain our accomplishments rather than going it alone.
13. You don’t understand how to say no
If you’re a ‘yes’ man (or woman), it’s likely that you’ll ultimately experience burnout. You cannot continually say ‘yes’ to other people and still satisfy your own wants and needs. Sometimes, you must say ‘no’ to the requests of others so that you can say ‘yes’ to yourself.
As parents and adult kids, we regularly say ‘yes’ to our kids or our parents to our own detriment. Or, we say yes to our kids and oldsters rather than saying yes to our spouse (causing marital troubles at home). We must balance our ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers out so that we spend an equal amount of time on each of the parts of our life, including spending time with ourselves to stop burnout when we are giving too much of ourselves to other people.
14. You think it’s your responsibility to ‘save’ everybody else
The world is full of individuals who are suffering, struggling and too low IQ to think themselves out of their own problems. We get feeling responsible for the happiness of other people in our lives. The problem is that people who are often struggling will normally return to struggling once we get done helping them. This is because they don’t learn anything from their struggles that will help them later in life.
Sometimes, it’s a better sign of affection and respect to let the other person work out their own problems. Then, they will learn from their mistakes, so they don’t repeat them. Letting them learn from their mistakes helps both them and you from getting burnout in the future.
15. You don’t have any boundaries to speak of
Most people who experience burnout do so because they struggle to assert their boundaries at appropriate times. They don’t stand up for themselves. They let another person tell them how they should think and feel. They let someone else push them around and bully them.
Another person will step on your boundaries, particularly if you don’t give them an inkling of where your boundaries are. Learn how to speak up for yourself and tell someone else if they’re pushing your boundaries. Learn how to walk away and separate yourself from toxicity and negativity by physically putting distance between yourself and a person with boundary issues. If you do this often enough, the other person might in fact find out how to offer you space and respect rather than crossing your boundaries repeatedly.
16. Your expectations are too high
If you expect too much from yourself and from others, you’ll experience burnout from being too hard on everybody all the time. You will continually beat yourself up, and you’ll become surly and disgruntled that things aren’t going the way you wanted them to go. You will become upset with other people for not meeting your expectations to the point that you begin controlling and bullying them rather than letting them live their life the way they want.
You will beat yourself up so much that you begin to lose motivation to attain your goals. Once you achieve or accomplish your goals, you won’t feel fulfillment or satisfaction from them because you’ll be too busy nitpicking all the details that don’t matter much at all to anyone.
17. You are a perfectionist
If you are too hard on yourself, you’ll undoubtedly experience burnout from hell at some point. Many people with perfectionism issues suffer from a personality disorder called OCPD. If others have accused you of being anal, perfectionistic, or high strung, you might be suffering from OCPD.
Even if your perfectionistic tendencies are comfy for you, they might be causing angst in those around you. OCPD often comes from how someone is conditioned or from anxiety (fear of failure). Having OCPD traits for an extended period of time often leads to burnout.
18. You don’t take time to be grateful or grateful
We start to experience burnout when we don’t stop to smell the roses. We strive to attain fame and fortune, so we aren’t appreciative about the little successes in life. We want to have the American Dream, and most of us would be proud of the lives we have if we would just slow right down to appreciate it. If we would look at those who have less than we do rather than looking at those who have more than us, we might appreciate what we have already gained rather than feeling like failures and beating ourselves up.
19. You haven’t discovered yourself yet
Some of us suffer from burnout because we are doing what we think other people want from us, rather than doing things to discover who we are. We think that adults know who they’re and what they want out of life. The truth of the matter is that everybody changes as they age.
What you wanted at 20 might not be the same thing you want at 40. Most people must adjust their career and their activity levels at 40 because of a decline in their physical and mental abilities. People who ignore this fact and keep trudging on can feel exhausted, burnt out and unfulfilled. Maybe it isn’t as important to make quite a lot of money in your 40’s. Maybe bosses in your field hardly ever hire anyone over 40 years old, and perhaps you need to find an alternate career that will be more possible with aging.
I want to thank you for taking the time to read my article about what causes burnout. I sincerely hope its contents have been a good help to you.
