If you work online, you have probably experienced burnout. Hopefully not, but dang it’s easy to have hit. Perhaps you witnessed a colleague “crash and burn” due to high levels of stress that were never recognized and changed.
Unfortunately, this type of on-the-job burnout, in the tech industry can lead to more than just biz failure.
Mental health professionals recognize burnout as a serious physical and mental problem. When left untreated, the chronic stress which leads to burnout can even cause someone to have thoughts of suicide. The constant release of cortisol and other stress-related hormones cause dangerous imbalances in your mind and body, which could lead to an inability to function normally.
I’ve been very vocal about my burnout at the end of 2020. I can easily look back at all the reasons it happened. I am now aware of the signs as they show up since it still has been a weird time and they’ve continued to pop up. At the end of 2020 I was about to walk away after 20 years of working online.
I wasn’t going to sell things off. I wasn’t going to pass things on. I wasn’t going to say goodbye even. I hit a point that I was going to go to all my accounts and delete them.
It hit a serious point. No longer caring is a scary place for me to be. As an empath that has always helped others this was a very obvious rock bottom. I can look back and tell you that point was when I realized I no longer cared about helping others. Looking back I know this was because I was personally lost.
This is why it is so important to identify the symptoms of tech burnout so you can deal with them before you become a victim of this very real entrepreneur calamity.
What is Tech Burnout?
In the tech world, workers are all too familiar with burnout. Long hours, working days on end without any free time is a common occurrence.
Burnout is a condition of the effects of prolonged stress, which have serious mental and physical health consequences. Look at your habits and feelings to see if tech burnout may be creeping up on you:
- Long hours of work at a hectic pace
- Feeling unappreciated and taken advantage of
- Poor sleep quality
- Constant irritability
- A frequent and uncharacteristic crash in productivity
- A feeling that you hate your work
- Not enjoying spare time activities, and thinking about work all the time
- You feel like there are no “good days”, and everyday stinks
How To Avoid, and Deal With, Tech Burnout
It is always better to prevent a health condition rather than treat it. When you experience constant, unrelenting stress, your body and mind will eventually break if you don’t take a break. So, schedule frequent breaks throughout the day to think about anything other than your biz.
Look at the list of symptoms above.
When you start noticing more than one of those tech burnout symptoms in your life, stop what you’re doing. Think about your biz and personal life. Prioritize what is important to you. Work is fine, and more to than fine to those of us that love our biz. But living only for your biz will create the symptoms above. Remember why you work for yourself. You want the LIFE your biz will create that you will enjoy.
Here are some simple steps that you’ve heard before. You’ve heard them before because they make a difference. You fight doing them because you don’t have time AND you know they will make a difference lol But what you aren’t paying attention to is the awesome productivity and creativity it brings to your biz!
Make sure you get plenty of rest. Keep properly hydrated. Eat healthy. Don’t forget to exercise regularly.
Sitting on our ass all day-every day leads us down an ugly road. All of those activities lead to a body and mind which can naturally handle stress and anxiety. As you already know, stress and anxiety are frequent companions as a biz owner, so make sure you take the required steps to keep tech burnout from negatively impacting your life.
Hitting the extreme low point made it easier to drop things. If I was willing to walk away from it all, then I had now given myself permission to take any and all things off my list I no longer wanted to do. Hence, 2021 became a much better year filled with things I enjoyed. Building on that, my word for 2022 is fun. I just don’t think we can get enough of that in our lives.
Biz boldly,
You have provided some solid and sensible info here! I think when you work for yourself it is assumed that you love what you do and therefore work = fun and you should be able to do it every waking moment. But nothing is always all fun and, even if it were, you should diversify your fun to include other activities and people.
For me personally, the online work was definitely more hobby as I taught myself most of what I knew that first decade. So it was and has been fun for me. But that definitely turns unhealthy when it’s all you are doing.
And yes, as you said, it’s not all fun. Thanks for commenting Amy.