Creating a Burnout Care Practice

The problem with burnout is that if you have experienced it once, the odds of it happening again is increased. In ways, it almost becomes a rollercoaster where things will get better but you are waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is hard because there is this underlying fear that what if things get that bad again. This is because burnout is not a one time and done thing.

Burnout Care HAS To Be A Practice That Contains These 4 Components

• Self-Care 
• Self-Love
• Self-Preservation
• Commitment

Self-Care 

I have shared in previous posts the importance of self-care. These are the things that help you grow, helps you heal, or help you show up better in your life. These are things like eating healthy, getting enough sleep, and doing stuff that is good for your mind (reading, learning a new skill, etc.)

Self-Love

Having self-love is deciding not to beat yourself up for mistakes. It's stopping punishing your body when you overeat. It's giving the same compassion you give to others to yourself. This includes not seeking other people to validate your thoughts or feelings.

Self-Preservation

Self-preservation is about doing the things that will protect your from harm and danger. This one is a hard one, especially for my nurse clients, people pleasers and the givers out there. They want to keep giving although they have literally nothing left to give. The biggest piece of self-preservation is learning it is okay to say No. Sometimes when we say no, it is actually a yes to ourselves. For example, saying no to friends who want you to go out the night before a 7AM shift. Or saying no to working an extra shift because you need a day off. 

Commitment

If you have ever tried to lose weight, you are familiar with how hard it is to keep going when things get hard or once you lose the weight how important it is to commit to keeping to the habits that helped you lose the weight. Just like a weight loss journey, you won't cure burnout with one class or exercising on occasion. It has to be a commitment and something you do every day.

Creating A Real-World Practice

A lot of the reasons that people fail in committing to self-care or burnout care is they try to make a grandiose, perfect plan when they are literally just trying to survive each day. It's like New Years when we all set new goals and then nine months later haven't done anything to achieve them. Here are a few of the tips I give to help my clients:

Set yourself up for success by making new self-care habits easy and realistic.

When people take on new self-care practices like exercise or healthy eating, it usually is this grueling calendar that really isn't fun to do and sets them up for failure. According to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. The best way to start a new habit is to do something that will easily integrate into your life without a lot of effort. If you know that after you work a 12-hour shift, you will not want to go to an exercise class, then do not plan to do exercise classes after your shift. Here are some examples of easy habits to incorporate into your life:

Examples:
-Finding a 15-minute video of yoga on YouTube you can easily do when you get up.
-To start reading more books, get audible books and listen to them on your drive to work.
-Meal prepping on Sunday for your workdays so you have something healthy to eat.

Practice being an observer of your mind. 

In my coaching practice, I help clients break down their life experiences to really understand how their minds are driving their results. One tool I use to help them do this is teaching them observer mind. This is taking a step back and separating out what is neutral or circumstantial and what is their story or thoughts about it. One area this is really helpful is when we are frustrated or annoyed by another person. If you were an alien from Mars who didn't understand anxiety or frustration, how would you break down this situation?

Get help. 

The journey is always easier when we are in good company. When we are starting new things, our brains like to get overwhelmed and make everything harder than it has to be. As a burnout and resiliency coach, I help my clients see their blindspots and how their brains are working against them. Nothing has to be as hard as our brains like to make it. If you know you need to create a burnout care practice, but don't see how it can possibly work, set up a consult with me and I will get you started.