There is no shortage of posts saying that sleep is important to help reduce stress and prevent (or reduce) burnout.
Signs of burnout include exhaustion, insomnia, interrupted sleep and getting sick more often.
The challenge of getting a good night of sleep if you are burned out is a big one.
During burnout, your mind is constantly thinking about work, life, family, responsibilities, struggles (health, financial, personal), and it’s often coupled with a lack of motivation to do anything about it.
Sleeping 8 + hours per night is beneficial, but if your sleep isn’t truly restful sleep, your body is not able to recover from the toxicity that you face/digest every day. No wonder you’re irritable!
Burnout is real. I had severe burnout in 2009, that nearly took my life. After a year of significant losses, I rebuilt my life from the bottom-up, and now I live a life with reduced stress and zero burnout. There’s hope for all that are going through high-stress and burnout, but simply stating get more sleep is just a band-aid, and it doesn’t address the root cause(s) of your burnout.
I’m a big fan of journalling. It allows you to get what is in your head, onto paper, so that you can review it later and see where you are today, compared to when you wrote your note.
Journalling your challenges and stressful situations is helpful, as it can provide clues as to what’s causing the stress in your life, and give hints to how to reduce (or hopefully eliminate) those stressful times.
There are reasons why you are not resting when you sleep. The key is to determine what those reasons are, so that you can deal with those causes head on.
For the next week, keep a notepad by your nightstand (not on your smartphone, but a piece of paper and a writing instrument), and when your mind starts racing about things, write down what those things are.
In the morning, review that list and next to the list of things, write down some reasons why these things are bothering you.
Over a week or so, you should start seeing some trends, and it can help shed light on what the issues are in your life that are causing you stress and leading to your burnout state.
Once you have compiled the lists and can see patterns of what’s going on, next you need to figure out how to resolve those issues. Easier said than done, but it can be done!
Follow me on Thrive Global or BreakfastLeadership.com for additional tips on dealing with burnout.