The ultimate psychological guide to burnout recovery
The recovery plan includes three steps, best remembered by the 3 Rs: Reorganize, Reframe, and Rebalance. As a passionate entrepreneur, your business means everything to you. But it’s that high-achiever “I-can-do-everything” personality that makes you particularly prone to job burnout:
How to know when you’re in need of a burnout recovery plan
Burning out can be broken down into three components: exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy
- The 3 main signs of burnout are best dealt with through three steps of goal-setting tactics
- Exhaustion recovery = Reorganizing your goal hierarchy
- Cynicism recovery = Reframing your approach/avoidance goals
- Inefficacy recover = Rebalancing your want-to vs. have-to goals
Step 3: Inefficacy recovery = Rebalancing your want-to vs. have-to goals
Self-control (or what we sometimes call willpower) is the ability to override thoughts and emotions so that you can vary your behavior from moment-to-moment
- Recent science suggests that you fail in your abilities of self-control not because you are unable but because you’re unwilling
- A failure of control is due to a lack of motivation and an imbalance in goals – you can alter these internal states by altering your internal states
- The way to resolve these feelings, and to recover from burnout, is to find the ideal balance between your have-tos and want-toes
- Organizational activity you can perform to ensure balance
- Rank each task based on your motivation toward them
Three steps to recovery:
Emotional exhaustion recovery: Organize your goals in a hierarchy to better manage what you do
- Cynicism recovery: Take a look at the major goals and sub-goals that need to be completed and determine if they’re approach- or avoidance-focused
- Inefficacy recovery: At each level of your goal hierarchy, determine which tasks are “want-to” and “have-to”, and rank the “need” tasks by priority at each level
- Alternate the want-to and have-to tasks
Step 1: Exhaustion recovery = Reorganizing your goal hierarchy
Emotional exhaustion is thought to be the first manifestation of burnout. Reaching this stage you may feel as though your emotional resources are being depleted.
- While the negative aspects lead to burnout, the positive aspects don’t necessarily protect you against it. Your emotional resources aren’t going to be replenished through the positive, but they will be depleted through the negative.
- Organize your goals by creating and organizing a goal hierarchy, with your major goal at the very top of the chart, followed by layers of subgoals.
Step 2: Cynicism recovery = Reframing your approach/avoidance goals
Cynicism is thought to develop because the depletion of your emotional resources leads you to have an overly negative impression of things
- When you reach the point of cynicism, “losses loom larger than gains” and you begin to see the world as traps of possible punishment rather than opportunities of possible reward
- Approach motivation (promotion focused)
- This system seeks rewards and goals and is generally associated with feelings of well-being
- Avoidance motivation (prevention focused) is associated with avoiding the negative
- These people don’t play to win but rather they play to not lose and are motivated by the presence or absence of negative outcomes
- Reframe your goals into approach-focused goals