Carefully! Burnout At Work And At Home

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I work as a psychotherapist, I have a small stable practice, and suddenly I began to notice a breakdown, a desire to sleep at lunchtime. At first I thought that the reason for everything is autumn, a short sunny day, weather phenomena. Then I decided to make an interesting observation: the average employment in practice is 7-9 client records per week, one therapy group that I lead once every 2 weeks, one master class per month - it seems that this is very little and there should be free time a lot of. But on closer inspection of the schedule, it turned out that my workload, including travel, supervision, intervision, my own therapy and periodic training and lectures, reading materials and books, writing articles, is at least 45 hours a week. In busier weeks up to 60 hours.

For a long time I was very surprised and indignant: well, how is it, I have so few office hours, why am I so tired ?! For some reason, it didn't seem obvious to me to include in the calculation those additional workload moments that occur between meetings and sessions, the time spent on moving around the city.

It turned out to be an important point to check your ideas about yourself and reality. Then you can breathe out calmly, plan your rest both in the middle of the day and at the end of the working week, clearly mark the visiting days and times when I do not take any work.

Very often, young mothers and freelancers fall into a similar "trap" when the time of employment is not regulated or can be scattered throughout the day or night. It may seem that I'm not doing anything like that. Just think, I get up during the night to feed the child 4-5 times, well, yes, I cook three or four times a day, I drive two children on public transport in sections. The translator prepares urgent translations "for yesterday", the make-up artist gets up to do makeup for the brides on weekends at 5.30 and comes home at 15.00, the whole day is still ahead! After 10 hours of shooting, the photographer can then process the photos for a couple of days or weeks, take materials from the press, and meet with customers.

Sometimes it can be helpful to sit down and honestly count all these "I don't do anything like that", they can add up much more than you thought and the beginning of emotional burnout can be easily confused with the autumn blues or called a whim. You begin to consider yourself a lazy and ineffective person, although in fact it is high time for you to think about organizing a regular rest or just stop and take pity on yourself, recognizing the real volume of your workload. Be careful with yourself!