The secret to breaking the burnout cycle in an era of endless productivity
Do you find yourself in a constant cycle of high achievement then nothingness? In nailing a few areas of your life whilst others flounder? In managing to get everything ‘just right’ for a period of time before it all goes to shit?
I get it. And I’m going to tell you why it’s happening and what you can do about it.
It will be no secret to you that we’re living in a constantly switched on era. Technology and the increasing pace of working life now puts a constant pressure on us to always be productive. Whether that’s in work or our personal life, we want to be producing, achieving, improving - especially for those of us who are enthusiastically driven by self improvement and growth.
This constantly switched on era stacks another pressure upon us, which is having to exercise our willpower and energy to make a conscious effort to switch off and protect ourselves from burnout. This can be difficult when our expectations of ourselves are so open to influence from the pressures and productivity we see around us. Now, more than ever, it’s more about managing our mindset, rather than our time.
A few years ago I became OBSESSED with productivity. How could I be more efficient? How could I optimise myself to be constantly achieving in my work and personal life? How could I set goals across different areas of my life and work towards them? I read books, I listened to podcasts, I bought goal planners. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the whole process and I learned a shit ton about productivity.
BUT something kept happening. I’d sustain a super human level of productivity and success for 2-3 weeks, then suddenly I’d get tired and emotional and I’d end up stopping everything. And this happened to me for years. Why couldn’t I sustain a normal level of productivity? Why did I keep failing at what I was committing to? I didn’t think I was asking a lot of myself.
I was reading books such as Laura Vanderkam’s ‘How successful women make the most of their time’. She uses interviews and data collected from time tracking of successful women, to illustrate how we are never ‘too busy’ because there are literally 168 hours in a week. Of course that’s time to be a CEO, go to the gym every morning, make a chia seed garden bowl every day, meal prep your lunch, read a chapter of a book, pick your kids up from school, have a wine with a friend, play squash with the hubbie and still go to bed at 9pm so the whole regime can begin again by 5am the next day. It’s the stuff we hear about and see all over our social media. I was nowhere close to that level of heroic productivity, so why couldn’t I sustain a basic level of success?
There were a couple of things I’d failed to notice about myself at the time...
1) What I believed was a basic level of expectation of myself, was actually crushingly high.
2) There was a constant (although not always conscious) dialogue in my head of this high expectation and a total lack of self compassion and understanding that it wasn’t humanly possible to be 100% on my A game, 100% of the time.
Ironically, as I’ve come to discover, this exhausting inner critic was creating the one thing I was trying to avoid: failure.
What the productivity culture and literature often forgets, is that we are not robots. We are feeling humans. Humans who get tired or sick, humans who sometimes just can’t be arsed, humans who sometimes need to take a break, humans who’s will power wains, humans who want to throw caution to the wind and have fun outside of a strict regime sometimes!
I’m not saying you can’t do all of those things on your list, or achieve the dizzying heights of productivity shown by the women in Vanderkam’s book. But I AM saying you won’t be able to achieve that until you can better manage your own self-expectations and make friends with the prospect of failure.
I’m also saying you’ll be more successful once you accept that you won’t be able to do all of those things in the list all of the time, and when that happens, you need to be prepared to forgive yourself, calm the inner critic, be kind to yourself and adapt.
So, what’s the secret?
Make friends with the feeling of failure.
By setting ourselves up to such high expectations of productivity, we are avoiding what it feels like to ‘fail’, we are avoiding having to face negative emotion that comes when we attach our self worth to how productive we can be. If you want to read more about how we fear feeling failure, check out my previous post here.
Here’s a quick guide to making friends with the feeling of failure when it comes to productivity…
1) Remember your productivity is not your self worth. Next time you don’t do as much as you planned, or have to cancel a plan you made, remember this is not a reflection of who you are as a person.
2) Next time you feel you’re failing at being productive. Stop. Don’t over-exert yourself trying to make more time to get things done. Stop and sit with that feeling of failure, rather than trying to avoid it through aiming for more and burning yourself out.
3) Write it down. Write down why you are feeling failure and ask yourself ‘What is the worst that can happen if I don’t do this thing?’ Write that down and sit with it. Then don’t do the thing. Come back later to reflect on how you felt from not doing it.
4) Flip your role. Think about what you would say to someone else who was telling you they were a failure because they hadn’t met their own productivity standards. Would you be as hard on them as you’re being on yourself?
Is there any particular point above that you’d like to know more about? Message me on Linkedin or Instagram to let me know and I’ll post some more content on that topic!
