Are you wondering why some people get burned out while others don’t? What is the difference between stress and burnout? And, what can you do to manage stress and avoid burnout? 

Without a doubt, we are living in a time of significant stress and burnout and we need practical and self-loving ways to address this for ourselves, our family, friends and colleagues.

While stress and burnout are often confused, they are different. Identifying the differences is the first step in addressing the unhealthy thoughts and behaviours in our lives. Stress is a normal adaptive reaction to adversity, while burnout is a result of uncontrolled or excessive stress.

In both cases, the person suffering from the symptoms will be unable to function normally, however, the signs of burnout will include anxiety, mood swings, lack of concentration and brain fog. 

According to the American Psychological Association, heightened work-related stress is a significant contributor to burnout among U.S. workers. In a recent survey of 1,501 U.S. adults, researchers found that 79% had experienced some form of work-related stress in the month prior to the survey. More than half of these employees had felt the negative effects of work-related stress, including a lack of motivation, interest, or effort in their jobs. Among those who experienced work-related stress, 36% reported feeling tired, fatigued, or emotionally worn out, while 44% reported feeling physically exhausted.

In many cases, prolonged stress will lead to exhaustion and a diminished sense of satisfaction. Other early signs of burnout can include procrastination, taking out frustrations on others, and skipping work. The signs of burnout can be subtle, but it’s time to address them if you’re starting to experience these symptoms.

Burnout can occur for several reasons, but a poor work-life balance is possibly the most common and easiest to address. 

Finding creative outlets is one of the most important aspects of self-care, as is making time to investigate, explore and engage in things we enjoy. While work may seem like a grind and leave us feeling exhausted, having a hobby, sport, or other activity to unwind and spend time with family and friends can help us avoid the pitfalls of burnout. 

Identifying triggers for stress and preventing them is a helpful way to reduce the chance of returning to a burnout track. Try writing down the exact time and place when you experience a stressful event or activity. Review your notes regularly to avoid repeating the same behaviours, relationships, or situations. If you are experiencing chronic stress, it’s time to reassess your priorities and prioritise the things that matter.

Carl Richards, the Sketch Guy columnist from The New York Times, recently shared an enlightening view on our hustle culture. Online engagement has increased our stress levels by making work, social pressures and media agenda more invasive than ever. We can easily believe that if we’re not “on top”, we’re not working hard enough. We need to go out there and crush it until we make it.

But the reality is that we generally crush it until we crash. Here’s some of what Carl shared on bahaviorgap.com.

“In 2017, I remember being tired. Really tired. And I remember being tired of being tired. In fact, it felt like I’d been tired ever since I read Andrew Grove’s book “Only the Paranoid Survive” back in the early 2000s.

That book was the beginning of a sea change in my thinking about work, business, hustling, and survival itself—so much so that I’d been working like a fanatic ever since.

Up at five in the morning? Tried it! Daily workouts? Yep. Paleo, bulletproof, gluten-free, cold showers? Check. Build a business, start a side hustle, dominate Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook? Yeah, all that, too! Make my family a priority? Of course. Serve in my community? Definitely.

For 5,478 days, I’d been hitting repeat. And it just about killed me.

I know I’m not alone. 

It feels like we’ve been in the “Crush It Age.” Every time you turn around, somebody is crushing something.

Some dark corner of my mind used to whisper to me: “This is all true, Carl. If you don’t keep hustling, you’ll end up falling behind, and no one will listen to you. Ever. Again. Then, you’ll just be another failure, left to crawl under a rock, cold and alone to die!”

But then, I appointed myself King of Permission Granting. And my first act as king was to grant myself—and everyone else—permission to declare the Crush It Age finished. 

So, what comes next? The Age of Work Hard, Rest Hard.

In this Age, we’re still hustling. But we’re also resting. In fact, we’re trying to be as good at resting as we are at crushing things. We’re becoming pros at turning off social media, getting great sleep, working less, and living more.

We’re making “being rested” cool. So when people ask how you’re doing, you can say, “Sit down. Let’s talk about it for a minute because I have time for you, my friend.” At a minimum, you should be able to answer, “Rested, and how are you?”

I know this sounds like crazy talk, but we can do it. Let’s make it a priority to be human again—to work hard and rest hard without buying into the idea that we’ll fail at life if we rest.”

Before you sit down at your desk, check your diary or log in to that next online meeting, give yourself permission to take a walk outside. Go get some sun, fresh air, Starbucks or anything else that will remind you that you are in control of your decisions. Rest doesn’t have to be passive; active and intentional rest is healthy and brings balance to our hustle culture. 

Crush it. Rest up. Repeat.

“As soon as we become aware of money, we develop beliefs about it, beliefs we cling to, sometimes for the rest of our lives, often at the cost of our souls.”

– George Kinder

What’s costing you more: what you do with your money or what you believe about your money?

For many people, the beginning of financial planning involves the creation and maintenance of a budget. A budget is a practical and helpful tool for understanding and having a say in what we do with our money, but it doesn’t really answer many questions about how we feel about our money. The challenge with only working with the numbers and not the beliefs and emotions is that any budget exercise that doesn’t follow on from a deeper introspective conversation is arduous to sustain.

As Kinder also says, We have gotten stuck thinking of money as about counting, about numbers, something abstract done by banks and accountants.  The truth is, money is a much larger topic—it involves our whole human nature.

We need to address beliefs that we’ve held onto from our earliest experiences with money. Just like a budget can help us change what we do with our money, a lifestyle financial planning conversation can help us change how we feel about our money.

In a 2011 interview, Kinder said that human growth has to mirror the growth of our relationship with money, because money enables so much of our lives. If we agree that money is this personal, then perhaps we need to stop focussing on the practicalities of our financial situation and start to look at the conversations that we’re having with the people we trust about our money. Not only will this help us identify and change how we feel about money, but it will also help our family know that they too can change how they feel about money.

Working with a trusted financial adviser assists you with these conversations and increases your financial wellbeing. Research shows that people who have worked with an adviser for 15 years have up to three times higher returns on their investments.

One of the main reasons for this is because people who choose to work with a financial planner, coach or adviser are intentional about ensuring their financial wellbeing. The money beliefs we adopt as children can leave us feeling guilty, anxious or unworthy regardless of how much money we make. As experts learn more about imposter syndrome and other self-sabotaging behaviours and biases, we can see how much they impact every area of our lives.

The sooner we can see that wealth is more than just the money in our account and that being healthy is more than just what we see on the surface, we can begin to change the way we think, feel and behave.

Bruce Lee once said: Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own. It’s an exceptional quote that is profoundly helpful when working with a financial plan. However, the difference between our current situation and Lee’s is that in the 60s, it was much harder to access information.

Now, we’re overwhelmed with information, and too much advice can derail even the most robust plans. Sifting what is useful from what is useless is exponentially more challenging than it was for previous generations.

And this is just when we’re actively looking for information and advice – what about all the times that our family, friends and colleagues offer unsolicited advice? You may not have been anxious about something, but now that they brought it up, you can’t stop thinking about it!

Elizabeth Scott, from verywellmind.com, says that anyone can be on the receiving end of unsolicited advice, and it doesn’t always feel helpful. Whilst it can be a life-saver, unsolicited advice can create stress.

People offer advice for many reasons, some of which are well-intentioned, others less so. As Lee alluded to, the key is being able to tell the difference and understanding a person’s motives can be especially helpful.

There are helpful motives, like altruism, friendliness and shared excitement – but some advice can come from a place of neediness and helplessness. There are more damaging motivations, including traits like narcissism, control, judgment, and drama. We’ve all experienced advice given from a range of these places and will continue to experience this, so we need to have a plan to create healthy boundaries to protect ourselves from too much advice.

Verywellmind.com suggests that when someone is giving advice to make themselves feel more powerful, there is underlying anxiety in their behaviour that we will most likely pick up on. We might be triggered to react harshly and accuse them of being manipulative, but this approach might backfire.

We need to take space from the situation so that we can respond from a non-reactive place. We can validate their advice and create an atmosphere of emotional security for both of us. The key is to validate without overidentifying. We can let them know we’ve heard them and appreciate where they are coming from without taking on the potentially damaging narrative.

To do this while proactively communicating a boundary around further advice, you might say something like, “Thanks for the idea. I have my own plan for handling this, but I really appreciate your perspective and will take it into consideration. Can I let you know when I need help in the future?”

If you have trouble setting boundaries without being reactive, prioritise working on your own ability to self-regulate. As uncomfortable as it may make you to continuously receive unwanted advice, if you can respond with compassion, the situation will likely diffuse much faster.

We’re all different, which means we’ll all approach things differently and make personal choices. In an unaware environment, this will always create conflict and stress, but in an aware environment, it creates opportunities for growth, collaboration and stronger relationships. 

P.S. If you’re the one offering unsolicited advice… “Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

― Will Rogers

How much time do you waste trying to solve problems that haven’t happened yet? Many of us fixate on problems that might happen tomorrow, next week or several years in the future, and this is not what life and financial planning are about. Getting stuck in the future at the cost of living life to its fullest today is precisely what we’re trying to avoid! This is why we talk so much about being mindful.

Dr Susan David says that true mindfulness is when the mind stops insisting on being rational, stops being a problem-solving or indexing machine, and becomes more of a sponge than a calculator. It just is.

This is a beautiful take on mindfulness – seeing our awareness as a sponge to soak up what’s happening right now, to be present and conscious. It also helps us see our natural inclination to calculate, problem-solve and plan for the ifs and maybes in our future. Mindfulness helps our money in that it allows us to use what we have today in a way that will make our future-self grateful; in other words, it helps us avoid making choices that we might regret.

When we see planning as a way to create a specific future for ourselves, we limit ourselves to one perspective of our future, limiting our ability to accept different outcomes and causing heaps of self-sabotage in the process. We find ourselves stuck in old narratives and developing a cynicism toward ourselves and others.

This is not helpful planning; it’s destructive and impossible to stick to.

Instead, when we practice financial planning that is linked to our life choices, not our income, markets or products, we have to become more mindful of what our life truly looks like and how we’d like to make empowered choices for ourselves and our family.

Mindfulness with our money helps us see the world through multiple perspectives.

Multiple perspectives open up our financial conversations to be more inclusive, interwoven with the thoughts and feelings of those we love and trust, and this is incredibly empowering. Speaking with your partner, kids and parents about money means that you don’t have to shoulder the burden of “providing for the future” alone. It also allows us to draw on the strengths of the different money personalities in our family and reduce our blind spots.

Mindfulness with our money enables us to move forward with higher levels of acceptance.

It’s tough to move forward if we expect one specific outcome, and it doesn’t happen the way we expected. We will see this as an all-consuming failure. But when we can plan with multiple perspectives, we can move forward with a more profound acceptance of different outcomes. It’s not about accepting second-best or finding a compromise; it’s about totally changing our mindset around how success will look.

Mindfulness with our money cultivates tolerance and self-kindness

Rational, problem-solving, calculative behaviour causes us to try and save all our money for future crises and expenses. Mindful sponginess allows us to see how we can invest in experiences and relationships that we enjoy today. This is not to say that we don’t invest for tomorrow, but it helps us find that healthy balance between enjoying life today AND tomorrow.

Mindfulness with our money allows us to practice non-judgement

A strong focus on our own lives, relationships, dreams and goals takes the focus off what others are doing and protects us from comparing ourselves to others. This is a powerful and all-too-often understated benefit of personal lifestyle financial planning. 

Mindfulness with our money equips us to rework old-narratives

To a large extent, managing our money has changed significantly from how our parents and grandparents managed their money. This is because money and life are linked – when life changes, money changes and when money changes, life changes. If we adopt a growth mindset with our money, we will find ourselves freshly equipped to re-think and re-build strategies to use our money wisely.

Ultimately, we need to slow down and create space to be intentional with our choices. This applies to life as much as it does to our money. By taking care of ourselves today, we take the first step to taking care of ourselves tomorrow.

Have you ever gone for a walk in the garden without shoes on? Remember what it felt like, as a kid, to come home from school – slip out of tight school shoes and walk barefoot? Whether it was on comfy rugs, soft sea-sand or lush grass, the sensation often felt so good because we were grounding ourselves.

A quick Google search will tell us that there’s a lot more happening when we walk barefoot. The exchange and release of energy are scientifically measurable, and the experience has a positive impact on our health.

As adults, we often forget to walk barefoot – and we often forget to keep ourselves well-grounded. Liz Fosslien, Author, Speaker, Head Of Communications and Content at Humu, recently shared some helpful thoughts on this through her LinkedIn profile.

She said that when everything feels up in the air, rituals can help us ground ourselves.

Research shows that rituals significantly reduce our stress levels. Psychologists have found that it doesn’t even matter what the practice is; simply doing the same thing at the same time can improve your mental health.

Whilst some of us do all we can to break free from structures and systems, the hidden truth is that structures can increase our sense of security and wellbeing. This means that it’s not the structures or rituals that are the problem but our connection to what they mean or represent. If we have little or no connection to the schedule or routine or feel like we don’t support the system implementing those routines, we can leave and create our own routines.

If we look over our lives, we will see that we’ve always had routines that help us stay grounded, and that’s okay! But, as we encounter change, our routines can be interrupted, leaving us feeling untethered and stressed.

It could be something as simple as saying to yourself, “My work is complete for today” at the end of every day of working from home. You will be affirming that you’ve achieved something for the day and that you can now let go and relax, focussing attention on other things in your life that make and keep you happy and healthy.

Maybe it means beginning your day with a 7-minute workout, or winding down at night with Wordle. It could be a weekly practice of reviewing your budget and planning the meals for the week ahead.

On the flip side, it can also be helpful to intentionally let some things go. Perhaps, instead of feeling untethered, you’re feeling overwhelmed with too much to do. Fosslien shared the story of a friend who, ahead of moving across the country, decided to order takeout for dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays and not worry about cooking. “I gave myself permission to put some parts of my life on autopilot,” she recounted.

If you feel like you’re losing track, perhaps you need some grounding. Let’s chat if you think that might help, but take a moment to consider the things you enjoy doing and the people you enjoy spending time with, and make sure you’re regularly making time for that. Oh yes, and walk around barefoot once in a while!