Overworking or lazier? How do you tell the difference between laziness and burnout?
Are you an overworked overachiever? Or are you just getting lazier?
You have been questioning whether you are overworked or just getting lazier. You used to work so hard, and you pride yourself on your achievements. But lately it feels like you can’t keep up anymore. You’ve been googling “signs of being overworked” because you are wondering what’s wrong with you.
Take note: overwork and burnout does NOT make you lazy.
A person who is lazy never feels like working at anything. There is no history of hard work in a lazier person’s life. So, if you’ve been working like crazy, but are struggling to find the energy and motivation, you can rule out laziness.
In fact, I happen to agree with the premise of Dr. Devon Price’s book Laziness Does Not Exist. Laziness isn’t something you can catch. It’s also not a character trait. People aren’t born lazy or productive. There’s no gene for laziness that begins expressing itself 15 years into your career.
Laziness is a result of a system in which the quantity of work exceeds the resources and time required to manage it. Whatever level of cog you are in that system, your laziness is a result of working too much without replenishing your energy.
Overachievers who avoid burnout regularly do three things. They:
- Practice daily self-care to replenish their energy and motivation.
- Focus on their value.
- Detach from the mental and emotional stress both at and outside of work.
Let’s dig into what this looks like practically, so you can start finding your motivation today.
Daily self-care fills up your internal reservoir of vitality, so you have the energy and motivation to continue to support your over-sized workload.
Self-care looks different for everyone. For some it’s distance running, while others shudder at the idea of spandex and pain.
Define what self-care means you.
To do that, reflect on two things:
- When was the last time you felt replenished? Self-care does not necessarily mean dinner with friends or time at the gym. Picking the wrong style of self-care will simply add to the sense of depletion.
Self-care should leave you with more energy, not less. Dinners with friends may be entertaining, but that does not equate to replenishment. Exercise may very well be invigorating, but only in moderation.
- Secondly, what are you passionate about? It doesn’t need to be all-consuming. Write down three things that make you excited or make you laugh. What would you look forward to?
If this is hard to answer, think back to the last time you wanted to wake up and go – what was specific to that day or time?
Once you define what self-care is for you, bring more of that into your life. Easier said than done, right?
Name what you will need to implement to undertake sustainable self-care.
Space for self-care requires time and boundaries.
- Time
Pick a couple of daily times and commit to them. If you identified that a walk outside and a breathing session would refill your vitality tank, pick two slots in your day and lock them in your calendar.
Move them only for something urgent. When you get a request from a colleague for a meeting that falls at the time you scheduled for self-care, act as if your self-care is what is urgent.
It is urgent. In your world of work there is never time for self-care. You can’t even get through your to-do list in a day. Self-care is precisely what WILL enable you to keep going. It’s your oxygen mask. Treat it as such.
As an overachiever a large part of your identity is the work you do. To continue being able to achieve, before you sacrifice your self-care slot, think outside of the box for how to handle that meeting request.
Some language that may help….
- I have a conflict at that time. Could we dig into this at [insert proposed time]?
- I am not available at X time. If [insert proposed time] doesn’t work for you, could we handle this via [insert proposed method – via phone, teams, with another colleague?]
- I have a meeting at that time. I’d love to send you some bullet points to include in the discussion.
- Boundaries
Of course, being able to use that language means you have set boundaries that you are holding.
Healthy boundaries guard what’s acceptable to you and clearly delineate what doesn’t work for you. They protect your space, while still allowing you to connect with others.
There are several types of boundaries, but at work overachievers often use diffuse boundaries.
This looks like always saying yes to work. Overcommitting. Struggling under an over-sized sense of responsibility. Never admitting you are struggling. Not asking for help.
Any acknowledgement of stress is followed by resignation – you might protested when the project got dumped on you, but you never considered not doing it.
Boundaries are critical to your being able to continue to say yes to work. Treat self-care as a boundary that helps you continue to devote all the time, energy, and effort that your organization requires.
This begets the question of whether you want to continue saying yes to work. If this occurred to you as you read the last couple of sentences, keep reading – we’ll look at this in part two.
To define boundaries, consider what conditions you require to have the energy you need to be effective. After you identify those conditions, what limits do you need to communicate to safeguard those conditions?
Boundaries are only as useful as they are well communicated. Something that is well communicated is undertaken proactively and clearly conveys an actionable request.
Realizing that you need 15 minutes to meditate right before the most stressful portion of your day, communicate that in advance to your boss and colleagues and ask directly that they respect that.
If given a choice, no person would choose to have you skip 15 minutes, preferring to deal with your stress and potential burnout.
Difficult to imagine asking for this? We’ll touch on why that’s the case and what you can do about it in part two.
You matter. Spend time daily connecting to your value and how you are contributing.
As an overachiever you work the way you do because you feel the need to prove yourself. Laura Empson defines you as ‘insecure overachievers’: exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious but driven by a profound belief in [your] own inadequacy.
Developing the insecurity that you need to do enough or be enough in childhood, your life is designed to protect you from your fear that someone will find out you don’t matter.
Work gives you a mechanism to protect yourself. It gives you a sense of belonging with others who you believe matter. You are what you do, and you do it well, which satisfies the imposter syndrome that dogs your heels.
Putting boundaries in place to practice self-care will be difficult if you believe that those boundaries will cut you off from the source of your worth.
Get clear on what makes you valuable and get in touch with this daily.
This is the gateway to give yourself permission to set boundaries and practice self-care.
Learning to believe that you are not only adequate, you are magnificent, is not about doing, it’s about being. You cannot do more to be more worthy.
Get in touch with your spirit, your soul, your unconscious mind or however you define the part of you that connects you to the animating energy of the universe.
Meditation works. Dancing or being in nature alone also help you get outside of your current perspective.
Reflect on what your value looks like in just being. Connect to any revelations you may have when you are feeling pressure to prove you are good enough at work.
Understanding that you have value and a unique role in the universe helps you accurately assess your scope of responsibility. This frees you up to place boundaries, practice self-care, and ask for help.
Once you understand you have value, you realize that you are sacrificing yourself for an organization that won’t return the favor. If you believed that you were valuable and capable, would you continue running this pattern?
How would the pattern change if you came from the premise that you were doing your best and your best was enough? Would you say yes to overload? How much lighter and inspired would you feel? Risks would feel easier.
The pattern would change because all of your decisions would be made from the assumption that you make a valuable contribution just by being you. If you didn’t feel compelled to justify the space you take, you would choose what you want, not what you have to do.
That pattern – choosing what you want – would prove that you weren’t lazy. Sure, you might take a few duvet days as you recover from depletion, but once you start giving yourself permission to choose you, you can bet your inspiration returns.
And with that inspiration comes a decision point – are you trying to balance your workload to be able to swim better in a system designed to deplete you or do you want to learn to swim differently?
Applying these tips and others to manage the overwhelm you feel will help you ensure you can continue to overachieve. To avoid arriving at the end of your life as an under fulfilled and overworked overachiever, get clear on WHO you are overachieving for.
Will you look back with satisfaction at your achievements or will you feel unfulfilled and regretful because your pursuit of security and self-worth drove you through a lifetime of self-sacrifice?
Find your value. Choose yourself. It’s worth it.
Detach from the mental and emotional stress both at and outside of the office to feel less overworked.
The third thing overachievers who manage to avoid burn out do is unplug from the stress.
At the end of the day, do you notice a reduction in tension when you leave the office? Or does your mind keep whirring? Perhaps your mental motor is even more active because it doesn’t have work in front of it to occupy it.
At the beginning of the day, do you feel sluggish? Maybe even resentful? Does your heart rate pick up as you get on the tram?
Avoiding burnout means saying goodbye to your constant companion. You can’t replenish when stress is getting a couples massage on the table next to you.
I looked at how to turn off the stress response and empty your internal reservoir to make space for replenishment in a previous post.
Today we are going to look at how you can redirect your focus to get time back to spend on self-care.
Typically, a large portion of the runaway mental train that leaves work with you is devoted to concentrating what you could have done differently. You spend time relaying scenarios and meetings, pulling them apart to critique your performance or reflect on how others might have perceived you.
This is costing you an incredible amount of your two most valuable commodities – energy and time. Picturing your workload and focusing on feeling overwhelmed and ineffective ramp up your stress response.
Thoughts that you didn’t perform or that others didn’t receive or return your performance as you wanted amplify the tension.
The good news is that you control your focus. Use it to change your thoughts.
Choose to redirect your focus toward something that serves you.
Harnessing the power of focus means intentionally directing it toward something that replenishes you. FYI, social media doesn’t fit that requirement.
So, think about something you did well. Reflect on what you appreciated in the day.
Do this even if what you did well was not yell or what you appreciated was only your morning coffee.
You are practicing this not to use positivity as a band aid, but to give yourself a break from the stress. It helps you replenish your positive energy.
If the day doesn’t provide enough fodder to hold your focus, daydream. Intentionally think about past memories that make you laugh or feel warm and fuzzy – laughing at nonsense on the kitchen floor with your child.
Fall into imaginary scenarios about the future – your upcoming vacation, the person you just started dating, date night with your spouse. Give yourself permission to invent positive scenes.
Schedule a free call with me to look at how you can get your motivation back and learn to swim better or…differently.
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With gratitude to Abir Mukherjee for the accompanying illustration that gives us the chance to rethink what would happen if we chose to show up differently and let go of the rock. Find more of his work and curated choices here: https://www.pinterest.ch/pin/148548487696961587/
