How to Stop Suffering Burnout
It can be difficult to stop work and find time to relax. Once you do try to relax, you may find yourself continually scrolling through Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest. Then, when you’re trying to sleep, all you can think about is work, crossing items off your to-do list, and how much more productive everyone else seems. You feel like you can’t do it anymore, but you keep doing it.
This is what Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Become the Burnout Generation , calls it burnout. According to Petersen, burnout is a social problem, not an individual problem. Since so many millennials started their careers at the height of the recession, they are at a disadvantage in terms of work, money, and trajectory, and collectively they feel the tension.
According to Petersen, capitalism forces workers to stay online for as long as possible. Add to that social media and the blurry boundaries associated with working from home and the problem only gets worse.
So how do you deal with feeling tired? Petersen suggests working less . If you can still do your job, close your computer and turn off your phone if possible. You may need to inform your boss or teammates that you will not be online for certain hours, because working longer does not necessarily mean that you are performing better.
All Petersen’s tips can be found in the video above.