Burnout can be challenging to recognize even while having significant impact on you daily life including reduced sleep, anxiety, depression, weight gain, and more. But commonly we got about trying to fix burnout all wrong.
The source of burnout is challenging to recognize, but it tends to be related to some persistent part of your environment. Maybe it is from work, home, school, friends, a combination of, lifestyle choices, or something else altogether. And even once you have figured out which of these that it is, there is still the question of can it even be changed and if not what else can you do?
Work tends to be the most common environmental source of burnout and as part of my graduate studies included a fair bit of time on how to build environments in such a way that they are less likely to burn out the humans in the environment. Sadly, the solution many use with work when they feel burnt out is to take a break from that work, maybe a week vacation relaxing at home or a trip somewhere and sure when they come come back from the vacation they seem to be recovered, but this tends to only be for a short while before the burnout returns to what it once was. So then what can we do?
With burnout caused by work, one of the best areas to start is by looking at your own relationship with work. Do you find you are responding to work all of the time? Maybe working long days and weekends? This was part of my burnout in the past and could be easily be resolved by defining boundaries with my work and, as a manager, set an example to my team that I did not expect them to work all the time either to help prevent organizational burnout. But a lot of times you are on a team where it is just expected that you are always working, you are not in a position to change this trend. Then the solution is to sometimes find a new environment, maybe that is a new team within the company or sometimes another company.
While work is probably the most common, the same can be said and applied to sports groups, friends groups, and much more.