4 Daily Recovery Activities To Prevent Burnout And Cope with Chronic Work stress
Burnout is a consequence of chronic work stress over extended periods of time. It has three components
Emotional exhaustion (feeling tired, drained, frustrated and fatigued);
Cynicism or detachment (caring less about coworkers or clients);
A loss of satisfaction in one’s work.
Burnout prevention is about recovering well from work on an ongoing basis. Not about waiting to the weekend to care for yourself. Or even worse - until it’s too late and you are actually fried to a crisp!
Beyond simply preventing burnout, daily work recovery is imperative for your well-being. Work stress activates our hormonal, metabolic, immune and cardiovascular systems. If these bodily responses are triggered too frequently, or for too long, they fail to return to normal and can alter our body’s immune and inflammation responses. These changes may eventually cause other physical conditions – such as coronary heart disease.
Let’s acknowledge that yes an overhaul of work conditions and culture is needed to address the rise in people experiencing burnout. However, there are still many things we can do ourselves to deal with it now. Ultimately we need to take responsibility for our own life and well-being.
Daily recovery means finding time or space for yourself where you don’t engage in things that are work-related or stressful. Recovery is about bringing physiological responses, such as cortisol (a key stress hormone), back down to baseline levels. Proper recovery helps you feel both enthusiastic and energetic enough to face another day at work. Recovery can take place both during the workday (internal recovery) and outside of work (external recovery).
Two Types of Recovery
Recovery can take place both during the workday (internal recovery) and outside of work (external recovery).
Internal Recovery is about giving ourselves relief from stress by using short periods of time during work to reduce our body’s stress responses. This may include taking short breaks, doing breathing exercises, or switching tasks when you’re feeling mentally or physically exhausted. For example, if you have a few minutes at work between tasks or meetings, try stretching rather than checking your emails and experiencing new stressors. One of my favourite ways to recover during the work day is to take a walking break at lunch.
After work, we have the opportunity for external recovery. These are things we do outside of work to help complete the stress cycle. Instead of checking those work emails after hours, external recovery may include doing things that offer actual relaxation and/or bring meaning to your life. Hint: scrolling through social media while binge-watching Netflix does neither of those things. While this may give you the illusion of relaxing, it is having the opposite effect on your brain and may be a form of avoidance or numbing.
Daily Recovery Activities
Thinking about what you do after work to recover – and whether these activities really are helping you recover – is key. There are four types of recovery experiences that explain how and why recovery activities work:
1. Psychological detachment (not thinking about work)
2. Relaxation (taking a walk in nature, listening to music, reading a book, doing nothing on the sofa)
3. Mastery (such as seeking out opportunities to do things unrelated to work such as learning languages or pursuing sports and hobbies)
4. Control (choosing how to spend your time and doing things the way you want to do them).
Please note that psychological detachment is essential to recovery, and not as easy to achieve as it sounds. For example, meeting friends and socializing to relax does not allow psychological detachment if the conversation is a bitch session about work.
What you want to do is personalize and pick the recovery activity that provides you with the best antidote to your particular form of work stress and burnout. The key is choosing activities based on how they make you feel. It’s important to do things that make you happy or content as you are doing them – and doing them for yourself.
You may feel like you don’t have enough time to engage in any recovery activities. I will counter this with - you don’t have enough time no to. You are no good to anyone if you are sick or dead. And you don’t need huge amounts of time. It’s not the amount of time that’s important, but the quality of these activities.
Certain types of recovery experiences are more suited to different peoples. If you’re not sure what is the best fit for you, here’s where I can help. Schedule a single single session with me where we can laser-focus on your unique situation and characteristics, to identify a recovery activity or activities which will truly work for you.
