4 Signs That Tell Me You’re Getting Close To Burnout… And What To Do Next

Around 2.9 million business owners across the UK are suffering with burnout*. Now, that’s a statistic that is really, really shocking. It really breaks my heart because there’s so much more that can be done to prevent burnout. 

But it’s not happening!

That’s why my business is here to make sure that we’re shining a light on preventing burnout. We’re helping businesses to really create that highly efficient business. A business that is going to enable them to have the freedom and to not hit that burnout block. 

Today I’m going to be talking about four signs that tell me that you were getting close to burnout. But not only that, I will cover what you can do about it too.

The first sign that you may see of burnout is that you’re exhausted 

A common cycle here is when you feel exhausted in your business you start working more to try and resolve this issue. Before you know it, you are in this cycle of working, working, working with a tiny bit of sleep. You have conditioned yourself to push through because business is meant to be hard, right? 

This is a really dangerous cycle to be in, because you are going to be physically and mentally exhausted. I’m not talking about the odd day when you wake up tired. This is when you are feeling exhausted day in, day out. Your body is telling you, “hey, you need a break. This is too much”. 

You’re going to really feel exhaustion hit to the extent that you would struggle to get up. Struggle to even hear your alarm because you are so exhausted. You need to start listening to your body and put sleep first!

Number two is the lack of focus

Struggling to focus on what needs doing when you’re faced with tasks. Unable to get your head into the tasks. The creative side is non-existent and then you’re left procrastinating. So this could look like you’re sitting at your desk and you’ve got this task list that you need to do. 

But you can’t do it.

You leave your desk, you make a drink, you come back, you sit there, your minds blank. You still can’t do it. You’re procrastinating and then before you know it your day has passed and you’ve not done a single thing. So, you then become disappointed with yourself because you have not taken that step to complete those tasks. Leaves you with this frantic headspace where you’re beating yourself up for wasting so much time but then you are trying to get on and do this thing and then you’re rushing it because you don’t know what to do with it. You’re really struggling to understand and to get that focus into that task and into your work with enthusiasm. 

Number three is the thought of getting out of bed is just too much can be a sign of burnout. 

The thought of getting out of bed to do your business is just completely impossible. When you started your business, I bet you were super, super excited. I bet you were really passionate about your business and the impact that you were going to be giving your clients and your audience but slowly along the way you’ve lost that enthusiasm. 

You’ve started plodding along with your client work. Maybe taking on some team members, everything just feels everything just feels like you don’t love this anymore. Ultimately you then start feeling like why am I doing this? And that’s really what we’re talking about here. 

I’m not talking about the odd day when I’m talking through these steps. I’m talking about consistently. So, happening day in and day out, that’s when these things can become an issue which means that you are on the road to burnout.

Four is constant stress

Having constant stress, feeling like you cannot deal with those hurdles that are coming your way. You know we’re in business. hurdles are going to happen no matter how efficient your business is, things are going to happen. There is going to be tough decisions that need to be made. There’s going to be business development that needs to happen. There’s going to be all these different things that need to happen in your business. 

But when you are feeling that you are stressed daily, and that you are in this constant state of anxiety, where you cannot make any decisions or rational decisions for your business, that’s when you know that there’s something that needs to change. It’s going to start feeling like leading your business is just impossible. Because you are under so much stress and you might start sweating. 

You might have heart palpitations, you might get panic attacks. And these are really common signs that the stress is too much and it’s your body’s way of telling you that you need to change. As I say, odd bit of stress is going to happen. But when it becomes a daily occurrence is when it can really really start to affect us physically and mentally. 

So what can you do to prevent burnout? 

If you’re feeling like burnout is approaching? So the first thing is to take time out. You need to take time out from your business and you need to take proper holidays. There’s a reason that employers have to give employees a holiday. You need to take real time off and if your business doesn’t enable you to do that, then you need to change your business so it does enable you to do that because holidays are not nice too they’re a necessity. 

You don’t need to go abroad and to go to these different places. It could just be that you want to sit in front of the TV and binge watch Netflix (other streaming apps available by the way!). Making sure that you are taking time to do it and proper time – doesn’t mean taking your laptop and your phone to abroad and working in the sun! You need to take time away. 

When you do this, your creativity, your enthusiasm, your excitement. Everything’s going to come boiling back to you because you’ve taken that time out. You’ve got that headspace back to be able to really reconnect with yourself and your loved ones. That’s going to be why you set up this business in the first place. 

Something that people often fail with is keeping this up. So they would think, Oh, I need to take a holiday. They’ll take a holiday and then they never do it again. You need to make sure that you are keeping this up and that you are maintaining this like anything in life in business in order to prevent burnout.

Making sure that you have set boundaries, sticking to your boundaries and that you are communicating them. 

So that people often say, Oh, well, I had to work late this one day because I had to do something. And then the struggle that you then have is when you break that boundary once. It’s really hard to get back on track to be within your boundaries again, and especially if this is client work. We love our clients. But if we break our boundaries once for our clients, it kind of gives the clients a green light to help us break them again. 

So you need to make sure that you are sticking to your boundaries. This is what I need out of my business. This is why I set up my business whether or not that day for me it’s a three day week. But you know for other people, it might be a four day week, you might just be having the weekends off whatever that looks like for you. You need to keep those boundaries. 

And you also may want to look at your business model. So this is something that gets lost in translation a little bit. When you first set out your service based business, you probably were working one to one, which is great. It served you well, it created you the revenue that you have at this moment in time. However, when you are working one to one, it’s very easy to burn out. Because what you end up doing is serving more and more clients to get that revenue up. 

The only person that can do it is you, so you end up working more and then the stuff that you need to do for your business kind of takes a backseat or it ends up being done in the evenings or the weekends. 

This is a really easy trap to fall into. 

So you need to make sure that once you have those clients that you are now looking at okay, how can I change this? How can I serve more people and earn more money without taking on more one to one clients? It’s not saying to stop the one to one at all because there’s definitely a place in the need for one to one work. But it’s saying that actually cap the amount of one to one people that you work with to a comfortable amount that isn’t going to encroach on your on your kind of boundaries on your life on your business. 

Making sure that you are scheduling in your one to one clients but then you also have another revenue stream that is going to enable you to make more money effectively than what you did before but isn’t going to take up the amount of time that one to one work does so whether or not that could be a group programme it could be affiliate marketing, it could be courses, you know, whatever that looks like just making sure that you have an even layout with your business model is going to be really really game changing for you. 

I hope this has helped and as I say this is all around preventing burnout. If you are feeling that you could be on the road to burnout and this has really resonated with you. I would love to hear from you. Because not only is my business here to help you set up an efficient business but I want to be able to help business owners. I want to be able to be that support network and whether or not you’re a client of ours or not. I still want to be able to provide you with that support. 

*Source: FreeAgent