How Not To Burn Out

5 strategies on how to be high-performing without burning out.

Hi everyone!

It’s been quite a while since I sent out the last newsletter - more than a month.

Since launching this newsletter in October 2022, my goal with Conquering Burnout has been to publish and send out a weekly newsletter.

But lately, I haven’t been able to be consistent with writing and publishing. 

It’s partly because my Slovenian podcast called Podkast Benessere has been taking a lot of my time. I love having deep conversations with people about different aspects of well-being and healthy living, making content about it and I love seeing it grow and how people love the content. 

Another project that took a lot of time and energy in the last couple of weeks was a course about fatigue and burnout for a new Slovenian course platform OptiForm.Fit. It’s been a big goal on my bucket list to film an online course about everything I’ve learned over the last 6 years about stress, fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout. I'm super grateful and excited that I made it happen and it will be released soon!

I also have more duties in my day job, some smaller projects, and I’m having places. 

For a long time, I’ve been able to dedicate enough time, energy, and focus to all the projects, but then Conquering Burnout slowly took the back seat. 

I’m very passionate about writing and I feel a lot of purpose in sharing content about burnout, but there’s a limited amount of time and energy available. 

I’m a type A, high achiever, and a perfectionist. When things don’t go according to how I’d like them to go and be, I put a lot of pressure on myself. I want to write about burnout. I want to share my experience, thoughts, and insight about burnout. I want to help people and inspire them. 

But here’s the thing: Too much and excessive desires become pressures. Inner pressures cause stress. And chronic stress, if it lasts for too long, leads to burnout. So you have to be careful not to want too much.

Internal pressure has been one of the things and aspects that I’ve struggled with the most in the last couple of months. I think this is one of the reasons why I brought myself to a limit point and experienced the first signs of early burnout a handful of times in the last couple of months. I felt energetically depleted, less motivated, driven, focused, and experienced more mental health problems than normally.

There’s been a movement on YouTube lately that you might have seen in the last 2-3 months. A lot of Youtubers and creators took a break or quit entirely.

You can call this a Creative Burnout.

Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

It’s hard to keep up with producing content, especially if you lose sight of why you’re making it and focus on keeping up with the ever-growing demands of a growing following base and algorithms. 

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The irony for me is to talk and write about burnout without burning out. Or sharing the journey of how to be high-performing and not burn out. It can be hard sometimes, but it’s achievable!

Here are some of the things that have been helping me to do that.

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1. Find Balance

“Balance” is one of those vague terms and things in life that we hear we should focus on and strive to achieve.

But the thing is: balance is very personal and varies from person to person.

For me, I found that balance is found in the extremes. 

• Periods of work and periods of non-work. 

• Periods of deep work and periods of deep rest. 

• Working all day and resting all day. 

• Periods of enjoyment and fun and periods of pain and suffering. 

• Periods of socializing and hanging out with people you care a lot about and fill you up, and periods of solitude and social rest. 

• Periods of going all in periods of chilling the f* out.

I’m planning to write a newsletter about this soon, so stay tuned for that!

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2. Turn Completely Off

However you decide to approach the balance of life, it’s crucial to find the off button and switch it regularly.

It’s one of the strategies that Kevin Hart, one of the most famous actors in Hollywood, implements in his life and enables him to do what he does, why he’s so successful, and how he’s able to avoid burning out.

You can read more about it in the article below:

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3. Support Yourself

I’m more and more convinced that you can’t burn out if you support yourself enough and in the right way - even if you’re a high-achiever and push a lot.

The way I see it, there are 4 aspects: you have to support yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

1. Physical support: Good nutrition, enough and good-quality sleep, different types of rest, supplements, etc. 

2. Mental support: Mental break and time off, mindfulness and meditation, gratitude, time in nature, relaxing activities, etc.

3. Emotional support: Cultivate positive emotions, be emotionally true to yourself, allow yourself to feel emotions, peace, silence, time in nature, emotional rest, etc.

4. Spiritual support: Meditation, prayer, connecting to Yourself and Higher Power, Vital Energy (point 5 below)

If you have energy and support coming to you from all 4 categories, you’re good and in no danger of burning out. 

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4. Process Things Regularly

One of the things that can be detrimental and can lead to burnout is accumulating things. 

When you’re in action and go-go-go mode, your body and mind can process all of the stress, stimuli, and emotions that they are exposed to and they repress them for later.

If we go too long without giving ourselves permission to let out these things and process them, they will grow in size, causing more tension and stress in ourselves, which could then lead to burnout.

I have two articles on how to process and release accumulated stuff that you can check out:

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5. Incorporate Vital Energy in Your Daily Life

In my opinion, one of the most important pillars for vigorous energy, revitalizing well-being, and resilience against fatigue and burnout is what I call “Vital Energy”. 

Vital Energy is generated and created when we engage in things and activities for which we feel a strong sense of passion and purpose. 

You can learn more about vital energy and how to implement it in your daily life in the article below:

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That’s it for this article, thank you for reading it! I hope you found it useful.

Going forward, I’ll try to be more consistent with writing and publishing here on Conquering Burnout. I’ll switch to shorter newsletters and share more insights from my daily life and different aspects regarding the topic of burnout.