What do I do if I’m already burned out?

The more I talk about burnout, the more this question is asked.

I’m on a mission to empower people to build a toolkit to prepare for burnout. 

I believe we should all have tools we’ve personally hand-selected that help us feel like ourselves when life, work, the world get busy and out of control. When burnout is a matter of when, not if.

As a woman, I feel like the self-care industry tells me that a bubble bath or a shiny manicure will help set me right. 

And don’t get me wrong, I love a good bubble bath and doing my own nails has been part of my personal Burnout Preparedness Toolkit for at least 2 decades. 

But there’s so much more available to prepare for burnout. 

And when you’re really in the thick of that overwhelm, bubble baths are literally the farthest thing from your mind. 

When I talk about burnout - especially when I talk about building your own Burnout Preparedness Toolkit - the conversation quickly leads to this question. 

What do I do if I’m already burned out? 

I get it. I’ve been there. 

I was so burned out I probably couldn’t even spell burnout let alone name the feeling. 

I was overwhelmed. 

I was wired and tired. 

I was unfocused. 

I felt like I had a ping pong balls bouncing around in my brain. 

I could never finish a task because I was interrupted so often - sometimes by external distractions and sometimes by those ping pong balls. 

The best advice I have is:

Start with the smallest thing possible. 

Whatever you do, don’t make another list of shoulds. 

You know - I should eat better; I should workout more; I should go to bed earlier. 

Got one of those lists lying around? Tear it up. Go ahead, I’ll wait. 

What do I mean by start with the smallest thing possible? When it’s hard to see straight, even small things look big.  

In my own journey, before I named the smallest thing possible, I worked with an amazing coach. She helped me get really quiet and ask myself when and where I felt most broken by my burnout.

My answer?  

It was email. 

More specifically, it was email notifications that I set to buzz confidently on my Apple watch. 

I remember the day clearly - when I first decided having immediate notifications sent to my wrist would be, well, a helpful choice. 

Before the pandemic, I was an employee with secure childcare and a job that could be mostly managed from my laptop, so I didn’t need email on my watch. I was always keeping an eye on my inbox from my computer. 

But literally moments into the pandemic shutdown, when information was changing at lightning speed and everyone needed immediate updates on a global scale, I made the conscious choice to set the notifications to buzz my watch. 

It didn’t seem like a big deal, but rather something that would make my life easier. 

With my 20-month old and her 5-year old sister under my care, I felt much more mobile to know what was going on at work, even between diaper changes and lunch prep. 

Unfortunately, here’s what really happened. 

Sure, I knew when my coworkers or leaders needed something from me. 

But I felt a sense of dread when I was rocking my baby to put her down for a nap while my watch buzzed for my next zoom call. 

I felt a moment of rage when a colleague casually asked for a piece of information easily accessible in a shared database while I was cutting an apple for afternoon snack. 

And I snapped at my kids more times than I’d like to admit when I saw a meeting request pop up on my watch, requiring me to quickly run through my calendar to see what I needed to juggle. 

After a year of this frustration building up, I finally realized that I had the metric wrong. 

As an employee, I was not being judged by the way my body reacted when an email notification buzzed my Apple watch. 

I wasn’t being evaluated based on how dramatically I dropped everything in the moment - letting the macaroni boil over - to respond to an email. 

Instead, I was being reviewed based on my thorough, thoughtful and timely (not the same as immediate) response that left any curt, tactless sentiments on the cutting room floor. 

Reading this now makes me laugh. But at the time, taking what felt like a giant leap to turn off email notification to my watch took a lot of work. 

Once I named these feelings, I got clear that I was feeling overwhelmed, burned out, and broken upwards of 50 times a day (give or take a few emails per day). And fixing this was well within my control. 

This smallest action resulted in more space in my head. More breathing space to respond to messages thoughtfully and without (as much) rage. 

This space led me to the next smallest thing on my list. For me, it was finding a creative outlet. But I’ll save the details of that next item in my Burnout Preparedness Toolkit for another day. 

You don’t have to be a working parent affected by a childcare crisis to relate to this story. 

What I want you to see is beyond the usual list of things that cause burnout to the smallest thing you have control over. 

• When do you feel the most overwhelmed? 

• How does your body feel? 

• What external factor shows up? 

• What’s the smallest thing you can do to give yourself a break?
  

My personal Burnout Preparedness Toolkit now includes mindfully checking email. I’m at choice as to when and how I review and respond. 

I chose to pause between reading and responding to emails. 

I set an intention around my purpose for responding to an email.

What am I dropping into someone else’s inbox? 

For me and my work, I want my responses to be thoughtful and, ideally, concise (I think I’ll always be working on brevity).

I choose to listen to my body first before immediately falling into the trap of frustration.

This smallest thing possible was just that - very small. But the effects have been gigantic.

The space in my head and my life that opened as a result of this very small change was big.

And the perspective I gained by the entire experience is a gift - one I share with you. 

I didn’t set out for my smallest thing possible to be gigantic. I don’t want you to put that kind of pressure on your smallest thing possible.

But know that the rewards for this kind of work can truly chart your course to undo the burnout you feel. 

Want to learn more about my burnout journey? Check out guest appearance on my friend Ashley’s this podcast. 

Ready to talk one on one about your own battles with burnout or how to put together your Burnout Preparedness Toolkit? 

Please reach out. You have the power to overcome burnout.