By Julie Morris
Feeling a bit flustered by your career? You’re not alone. At some point in their careers, most busy professionals begin teetering on the edge of burnout. Finding ways to pull yourself back is essential to preventing yourself from completely crashing and burning. So how can you take a break without breaking down your career? You can start by taking these essential life and career tips to heart.
Your Career Shouldn’t Cause You Undue Stress
Look, we all have bad days at work and we all have stress in our careers. Stress actually is not all bad when it comes to motivating us to work harder and achieve our goals. It’s when that stress becomes chronic that our health really begins to feel the negative effects. Chronic stress can leave you feeling exhausted, unable to focus, and eventually can lead to serious health conditions, like high blood pressure and depression. If your job is at the root of your chronic stress issues, it may be time to think about switching careers. Especially when there are so many options for your talents to truly shine.
If you love helping people but are stuck in a cubicle staring at a computer all day, you are bound to feel bummed. So think about researching more fitting careers online, like becoming a teacher, an occupational therapist, or even an audiologist or a speech pathologist . Whatever you decide, it’s likely you can receive a degree online from a fully accredited program to make the switch easier so you don’t have to leave your job just yet. If you do need to leave your job ASAP, you can always find a side gig to make ends meet in the meantime.
Getting into Nature Can Get You Out of Your Bad Mood
Even if you love your current job, you can still get majorly stressed out. Burnout can happen to anyone, no matter how fulfilling your career, so you have to be especially savvy about preventing stress from becoming overwhelming. Want a fast way to relieve tension in your professional and personal life? Try a dose of the great outdoors. Researchers at Harvard found that people who spend around two hours outside a week have reduced levels of anxiety, stress and depression. The reasons for those mental health benefits are still not very clear, but the point is that spending time outside can boost your mood. You can get those benefits with a morning walk outside or even hiking some local trails.
Work-Life Balance is Possible But It Takes Effort
Many professionals will tell you that work-life balance is a myth. That may be because those people have yet to find balance in their own lives. For most busy professionals, finding some kind of balance is crucial to preventing burnout. So much so that many companies make helping employees achieve that balance a top priority. How do they do this? For one, these companies encourage employees to disconnect by turning off email and taking time off. Those are huge steps in creating boundaries between your own career and personal life, so take note and find ways to incorporate these practices into your routine.
If not checking work email makes you anxious, start with one day and then work up to longer periods of time. Be sure to set your out-of-office reply and know that work will always be there when you return. Better yet, disconnect altogether by taking a vacation that can enhance your productivity and make you a better worker.
Burnout can creep up on you with little warning and make your life less satisfying. So before you start to feel overwhelmed, check in with yourself to see what needs to be changed. Maybe you need a stress-relieving hobby, maybe you need to disconnect, or maybe you need to change careers altogether. What matters most is your happiness, so do what you need to find it.
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