Preventing Burnout: Do You Recognize The Early Warning Signs That You're Not Taking Care Of Yourself?

I’m going to give you some ideas, but your task is to come up with a list of 4-6 of your own early warning signs that you’re not taking good enough care of yourself.

Hint: Try to make your early warning signs as objective as possible – meaning it would be impossible to dispute whether it had occurred. That way you’re less likely to let stuff slide for too long.

This is my list.

– baking and accidentally leaving out ingredients.
– pain in my wrists from the computer.
– not putting client payments into my spreadsheet at the end of the day. Putting it off till the next day when it only takes a minute.
– leaving it too long between times getting my hair colored.
– almost running out of petrol rather than keeping my tank at least half full like I usually do.

What I do when I notice this stuff

It’s all pretty basic. For example,
– I try to read some fiction rather than non fiction.
– I take a short break from learning new things and doing extra work like writing blog posts or website maintenance.
– I catch up on sleep.
– I do some physical maintenance.
– I’m pretty good at doing this already but I make sure I chill out when I have a few spare minutes at work rather than squeezing in a little bit of reading or small jobs. I take extra care to finish appointments on time so I can have a few minutes between clients to reset my brain.

Simple strategies like these can help prevent burnout.

I’d love it if you would share your early warning signs list with me on the Facebook page. (You’ll need to “like” the page first to get the option to comment. This is set up to reduce spam comments.)