How to Prevent Burnout: A Comprehensive Guide from a Massachusetts Anxiety Therapist

Hello! I’m Bronwyn, a Massachusetts anxiety therapist who loves supporting people in preventing burnout. (I also provide therapy throughout Washington, DC and Wisconsin.) If you’ve read anything that I’ve written before about preventing burnout, you’ll know that preventing and recovering from burnout are quite related to each other. Today I’ll be focusing on three areas of how to prevent burnout:

1. Know your signs of burnout

2. Consider your causes of burnout

3. Create a burnout assessment

How to Prevent Burnout Step #1: Know your signs of burnout

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s hard to find it. The same goes with burnout prevention. If you’ve never been burned out, fantastic! Keep up the good support strategies for yourself and come back to this after you’ve felt burned out. If you’ve been burned out, like most people, you’ll have a sense of what that felt like. Often though, it can be hard to articulate what exactly you were going through. That’s the nature of burnout (and one might say the nature of being human!). In order to help you name your experience, here are three categories of burnout signs: behavioral, sensations, and feelings. 

Behavioral Burnout Signs

What kinds of habits do you revert to when you’re burned out? Eating a bag of potato chips for lunch? Not eating lunch at all? Maybe it’s drinking more alcohol to feel calm, or isolating from loved ones. Many people find themselves in front of the television instead of taking a walk. You might be scrolling instagram rather than being present with your partner. 

Sensation Burnout Signs

These are the ones that might feel the most hard to articulate. They’re often at first a sense of feeling “off.” Once you hone in, you can put a name to the sensation. Pat Ogden has done a lot of research on how the body stores emotions, and sensations are one of the ways they can manifest. 

Common burnout sensations include things as easy to identify as headaches and sore muscles. You also might feel fuzzy, empty, or flat. To help yourself explore what sensations you are experiencing, ask yourself where in your body you’re noticing anything. It might be your chest, stomach, or throat. Once you identify a location, try on different words for size. Are you feeling burning, buzzing, or tightness? Tingling, flat, or numb? 

Feelings Burnout Signs

There should be a class in school that teaches us how to identify what we are feeling. If you’re lucky, you’ve been able to pick up this skill from adults around you. If you’re like many people however, naming your emotions might feel a bit like learning a foreign language. Your ability to articulate what you’re feeling is a big part of how to prevent burnout. Once you know what you feel when you’re burned out, you can look for it and catch it sooner.

Be patient with yourself as you begin to exercise your feelings-articulation-muscles. Slow and steady wins the race here. Start with happy, sad, or angry. From there, get more specific. Are you elated, giddy, or excited? Are you disappointed or ashamed? Are you irritated or furious? Frequent burnout feelings include pessimism, dread, insignificance, and helplessness. Check out the feelings wheel from the Gottman Institute to get more help in articulating your own burnout signs.

Once you identify what your particular burnout signs are, you can begin to sort through what they might be telling you. Journaling and anxiety therapy are great ways to do that. 

How to Prevent Burnout Step #2: Consider the causes of your burnout

A common cause of burnout is not sticking to your own limits. Beyond that, it might even include not having a good sense of what your limits are. For women, the latter is common due to the effects of the patriarchy, which says women aren’t allowed to have limits or needs. HSPs may also struggle with knowing their limits because the majority of the population has an entirely different capacity for engagement and stimulation. This can lead to overextending yourself in an effort to feel like you’re catching up or fitting in.

Another common cause of burnout is ignoring your emotions. As much as you might wish the hard feelings would go away, they are telling you something. If you ignore them, they will find very sneaky ways to get your attention. Initially ignoring or setting aside feelings like grief, anger and disappointment can be really good coping. But in the long term we need to feel these emotions - go through them, not around them. If you’re ignoring your feelings, it could lead to burnout.

How to Prevent Burnout Step #3: Do a Burnout Assessement

The good news is, if you’ve done step 1 above, you’re half-way done with your Burnout Assessment! Naming your early warning signs and distress signals - your burnout signs - is the first step in the burnout assessment. They might change, and that’s normal. It gets easier every time you do reflect on it. 

Articulating what you want to feel instead of burned out is step number two in your burnout assessment. What are you missing as a result of feeling burned out? Joy, meaning, or purpose? Fulfillment, creativity, or flexibility? These also might change over time. You might get really specific in what exactly you’re missing. You might notice themes. Focusing on them can help you find them in unexpected places. 

After naming your signs of burnout and what you’re missing, the only thing left now in your burnout assessment is to create a check-in routine. When will you intentionally reflect on whether and how burned out you might be? In my experience, it works well to match the frequency of your assessment with the intensity of your burnout. You could do a quick daily check in with yourself every time to walk the dog. On the other end of the spectrum, you could do your burnout assessment every six months. Play with it. Again, your rhythm might need to change over time. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t add the corresponding task of making and implementing your burnout recovery plan here. If your burnout assessment says you’re burned out, then it’s time to start the work of recovering from burnout. 

About the Author

Owner and founder of Bronwyn Shiffer Psychotherapy, I’m an anxiety therapist who loves supporting people to prevent burnout. I’ve been interviewed in Authority Magazine about how to deal with work burnout and Psych Central on ways to lessen burnout. 

In addition to counseling for anxiety, I also provide depression therapy and counseling for HSPs. I offer online therapy in Massachusetts, virtual therapy in Wisconsin, and telehealth therapy in Washington, DC. 

Looking for support in how to prevent burnout?