writing private psychologist, psychotherapist (Gestalt therapist, MGI), philologist-teacher (MGOU).

Expert: working with topics: - Finding yourself - Crises - Professional self-determination - Relationships (with yourself and important people

Everyone who has ever worked with people has experienced burnout and the stress associated with it. Let's break down what burnout looks like, how to avoid it, and what to do if you're experiencing it right now.

Even if you didn't know it was burnout, that doesn't mean it didn't happen in your professional life.
Specialists of any profession can “burn out”. But professionals in the field are subject to this by definition.

Working with people means not only forgetting about your domestic problems at the workplace, but also delving into the problems of other people in one way or another, patiently taking into account the context of the lives of the people you come into contact with, responding to it, adapting to the energy of a person and his container.

Containerization is a process that psychoanalysts and psychologists in general describe and use in their work. To put it simply, containment is to withstand the feelings of another person without trying to influence him so that they stop, just to be there. This helps the psychologist's client to live, to share his feelings with another person, gradually stabilizing and finding a way out, a solution.

So, psychologists are very attentive to how a mother behaves with a child in the early years of his life (and not only), whether she has the ability to withstand the aggression of her child (irritation, discontent, whims), his despair, impotence. If the mother is not capable of this (shouts, interrupting the flow of feelings, or rushes to correct the situation that caused a lot of feelings, not letting them live), then this has a bad effect on the development of the child, on his ability to cope with his emotions, on his self-esteem, and, in the future, on the ability to act independently.

We talk about containerization because people who come to our classes, who receive our, let's call it a common word - “service”, express different feelings about our teaching style or the boundaries set (deadlines for submission of papers, assessment criteria on the exam). We are accustomed to endure them. Everyone who works with people knows how to do it and somehow copes, otherwise they would have left the profession long ago. But problems begin when the process of exhaustion is launched and there is no longer any resource to withstand.

Depletion can be of varying degrees and for various reasons.

What are the symptoms of emotional burnout?

- tiredness, feeling of exhaustion,
- headaches, gastrointestinal disorders, insomnia,
– work is hard and takes more time,
feeling of helplessness, restlessness, boredom,
- feelings of disappointment, insecurity, guilt,
- a feeling of worthlessness
- increased irritability, suspicion,
– ,
- the desire to distance from colleagues,
- general negative attitude, cynicism and apathy.

If you recognize at least 3 of them, listen to yourself, perhaps you are on the verge of a breakdown and, trying to hold on like a steadfast tin soldier, you can overstrain.

Specialists at particular risk are those who are accustomed to self-criticism and demand high results from themselves, paying little attention to their own exhaustion. Therefore, no matter what stage of emotional burnout you are currently in, to get out of it - “stop digging” and find temporary solutions (for example, a couple of glasses before bed). Of course, the most effective tool to help you not even enter the zone of emotional burnout is prevention.
How can we help ourselves to avoid burnout at work?

The key words are self-care.

Namely:

• In your free time, it is obligatory (obligatory) to do, including what you like (meaningless but cheerful chatter with friends, trips to nature, lying on the couch, drawing, singing, delicious food). Everything for which there is never time, but it is these actions that give a feeling of fullness and resource. Communication with people who do not take away your energy, but exchange it or give it to you.
• Physical activity or body work. Running, swimming, dancing. These can be relaxing treatments if you are not into fitness. Massage, yoga, sauna, body psychotherapy.
• Conversation with superiors and colleagues about what is difficult for you and what you would like to change. You are not a robot, but a person with a unique view of things, so what is easy for someone can drain you. The first pair, for example. Try to arrange your schedule, place of work so that you feel more comfortable.
• Take mini vacations. As soon as you feel the initial signs of fatigue and reluctance to go to work, find a way to leave for a few days to recover.
• Profession development. Template work just kills a creative person. It is impossible for a thinking and developing person to conduct the same discipline from year to year - he gets tired and bored. Therefore, study further, read the latest literature, attend conferences, prepare speeches, let's develop students - joint trips to museums, theme evenings, various methods and forms of conducting classes.
• Focus on what is hard. If there is some specific difficulty in work that takes a lot of strength and you are not enough for a long time, but it cannot be solved administratively, that is, this is some kind of unstable place in your psyche - figure out why it is so draining. How can you behave differently, or look at the situation, what is the reason for your reaction - in this case, coaches, psychologists help.
• Keep your boundaries. We are used to being humane to the problems of colleagues and students. We go forward, thereby constantly making troubles and inconveniences for ourselves. If you tend to move the line, to give people the opportunity to get what they want at your expense, this leads to rapid exhaustion and irritability. Therefore, make it a rule for yourself to first listen to yourself - how ready you are now to agree to what is proposed - give yourself time, if necessary. Be tough on what doesn't suit you.
• Change jobs. It's sad, but sometimes the only solution. And it is important to take it in time for the sake of your mental health.

Emotional and professional burnout, leading to general exhaustion, become the main cause of diseases from the heart, to the thyroid gland and oncology. By applying even a few of the techniques described below, you will learn how to significantly improve your well-being.

At some point, I caught myself thinking that I was leading a slightly different lifestyle than I would like. Constant fatigue and slight burnout have quietly become my constant companions. There are several promising projects, but with such labor productivity that I have now, I won’t be able to pull them off. So, sooner or later it will lead to problems with money.

Moreover, I did not have enough time and energy to communicate with my wife and children, and wow, how quickly they grow up. It turns out a shoemaker without boots. Every evening, the child came several times and asked - dad, have you finished work yet? Will you play with me? Will you read me a fairy tale? And I'm tired, and I'm not up to it.

But I would like to go skiing in the winter, skating, rollerblading and cycling in the summer, and much more. I kind of regularly did yoga in the morning, on weekends I sometimes went for a run. Periodically, the whole family skated and skied. Wasn't that enough?

It all started as usual, I wanted the best - I began to work out 1-2 hours a day, and then I didn’t have the strength to go outside to run, ski or skate, and I also didn’t have the strength to meditate in the evening. After a week of overwork, I began to burn out. Another week or two of this lifestyle and there will be exhaustion.

What is SEV? Burnout Syndrome is...

This is when there is a feeling of severe fatigue, not only physically, but also emotionally (mentally), which does not go away for weeks. It's hard to wake up in the morning. At work, it is difficult to concentrate and do important things. Productivity is low, deadlines are violated. Bosses or clients are not happy with you, but there is no strength to work better, even if you try.

At the same time, a state of apathy is felt - you don’t want to do anything. This is a deep exhaustion of the body due to emotional burnout. It is very difficult to concentrate on your duties. Relationships at work and at home with loved ones deteriorate. Children painfully endure such a state of their parents and take part of the fatigue and stress on themselves.

People do not immediately understand what is happening to them and why it happened. Simple enhanced rest on the weekend does not help. There is dissatisfaction with life and dissatisfaction. Self-pity intensifies, resentment against almost everyone and for everything. Someone's remarks and their minor failures irritate, more than ever, and strengthen the state. At the end of the day, no matter what you did during the day, you feel squeezed out like a lemon, not only physically, but also mentally.

Your situation at work or in your personal life seems hopeless and hopeless. And the challenges seem insurmountable. Burnout and such exhaustion cannot be eliminated by standard methods - a trip on vacation, more sleep, rest, as before. Often accompanied by insomnia with general constant fatigue.

Can break through to the zhor and swim weight. Or vice versa, appetite disappears and weight drops critically.

Why do we get emotionally tired and burn out?

No forces? Projects cannot be made, dreams cannot be realized, it will not be possible to communicate with children for a long time, and life does not turn out the way we wanted. Or maybe you already spat on all this? Are you working to support yourself and your family? Or would you still like to aim for something more? Live a joyful life, be satisfied with your life, some dreams, but still realize?

Let's first find out - why do we burn out?

1. Sedentary work for 8 hours a day - requires at least 1 hour a day of leg activity, preferably with the parasympathetic on. The legs are the weakest part of the body. Are you moving a little? Expect burnout, and then exhaustion.
2. Constantly being inside enclosed spaces is very tiring. You need to go outside for at least 1-2 hours / day - saturate the body with oxygen and give physical activity. If you are not on the street - further tips to eliminate fatigue will be useless for you.
3. Sleep, insomnia. Daytime stress turns on so that then the body and mind cannot calm down and relax for a long time. In a partially wound state, it is impossible to fall asleep on time and sleep normally. By itself, this state does not go away - it needs to be released.
4. A sedentary lifestyle means that the body is full of energy in the evening, while mentally you feel tired. So it turns out that it is difficult to fall asleep, being tired.
5. Too much stress during the day. We were taught theorems and integrals at school, even the theory of relativity was told a little. But we were not taught to get along with each other, just like letting go of stress. Working with people means a lot of stress – whatever that may be.
6. Lack of harmonious communication with loved ones: family, children. Lack of own hobbies, petty joys, periodic change of scenery, travel. Life, turned into a continuous work, emotionally and mentally tires, exhausts, burns out. Living only for the sake of work does not bring satisfaction and joy.
7. Frequent criticism, especially undeserved. And it doesn't matter where it happens at home or at work.
8. Low salary. What creates a feeling of uselessness, underestimation, not being in demand.

a. Burn out at work or professional burnout.

Occupational burnout and exhaustion is increasingly due to work. In Japan, the authorities are forced to introduce administrative and even criminal penalties for death from overtime. Even in China, they began to pay attention to this and punish them.

In Europe, working more than 220 hours a year at a work rate of 1,800 hours a year is prohibited by law and punishable by fines - this is monitored by labor protection services and trade unions.

• tight deadlines
• punitive obligations
• big risks or responsibility
• routine work
• low or falling demand/sales,
• receiving or reading a lot of negative news
• conflicts of intrigue among colleagues
• taking out discontent on each other and especially on the part of the authorities
• frequent inspections, changes in legislation
• disrespectful attitude towards you, outright rudeness
• difficult working conditions with people

Some statistics about burnout.

In Europe, professional burnout is the cause of 50-60% of lost working days.

In Australia, to cope with stress:

• 61% of people drink alcohol
• 41% gamble
• 31% use drugs.

In Russia, in total, up to 70% of the population, who, according to statistics, are depressed, are at risk.

As you can see, the statistics are depressing. And it tends to grow.

b. Family causes of emotional burnout.

Emotional burnout can also happen for family reasons. In mothers after birth, due to insomnia. Even housewives can happen. The causes of burnout are about the same as at work, but coming from the family. Not appreciated, not respected. Busy household chores. Difficult financial situation in the family. Debts, psychologically pressing on the psyche.

Lack of due attention, love, recognition, support from a spouse. Intervention of other people in the affairs of the family. Unfounded criticism. Lack of regular sex, which helps relieve some stress and promotes better sleep.

According to the Pareto rule, 80% of tasks require 20% of energy. And the remaining 20% ​​of cases require 80% of energy. In other words, if a wife will only look after small children, and get up at night and do housework herself: cook, wash, clean, then she has a serious chance of burning out. But if the husband or one of the parents at least help and take on up to 20% of the affairs in the family in order to give his wife a little sleep, then thereby save her 80% of her strength.

c. Age crises

All people have age crises for which our education does not prepare at all. Moreover, our culture is somewhat frowned upon to openly acknowledge and discuss our crises. In youth, there is a lot of energy and little experience - this energy is spent extremely unproductively and often to the detriment of oneself.

To be honest, I felt my first crisis already at the age of 18-19, when I had to face life one on one for the first time. Alas, they do not prepare independent life in schools and universities. And the state doesn't care about that. At that time, the Soviet Union had just collapsed and shock therapy began in the economy. I tried myself in several directions, but I did not really succeed in my business.

The second time I faced a crisis at the age of 25-27.

By that time, I had learned to make good money, but I had to work incredibly hard. There was not enough time for hobbies and personal life. And there was no experience in building relationships. A slight dissatisfaction began to overcome me. And brought to sciatica at the age of 28.

Having suffered for nine months with sciatica, I felt like an old man: you couldn’t bend over, and you had to dress very warmly because of the constant feeling of cold in the lower back. Radiculitis was cured in 3 days, on yoga courses. Why don't doctors know about this?

The next crisis arose around the age of 33 - it was already a classic midlife crisis. But I spent it at work for 8-16 hours a day. And all my free time I meditated, looking for a solution.

Blood pressure dropped to 82/75 and I wanted to sleep all the time. Only the kicks of the authorities dragged me to work. At some point I almost died from it. But knowledgeable people helped - the pressure leveled out in 1 evening, it became like in the book 126/90.

I felt the next crisis when I was 40 years old.

Something happens to us at this age - you need to seriously change your lifestyle in order to cope with everything. Most men burn out and cannot fully overcome this milestone. A sluggish downshifting begins: beer, fishing, football, the Internet, simple work, detachment from household chores.

Each of the crises is an emotional burnout and should not be underestimated. For example, in the English-speaking world there is a "27 club" - these are celebrities who have died at the age of 27. In other words, the celebrities who could not cope with this age crisis.

d. Reasons from childhood.

By and large, the cause of age crises is the lack of preparation for adulthood. We are not taught this in school. Yes, and parents often, instead of passing on life experience to their children, pour their dissatisfaction on them. Many people have had difficult childhoods for one reason or another.

Let's be honest - just as you were not taught to raise children, no one taught your parents either. And for most, it wouldn't hurt to learn. Raising children is no easy task. The socialization process that each of us goes through in childhood is quite painful.

e. External causes

For the past 25 years, there has been a continuous crisis in the country, and throughout the world. Somewhere it is felt more strongly, somewhere less. It would be dishonest of me to say that an external factor does not affect your life at all.

We live in a world that is changing too fast and too competitive, at the intersection of several crises: economic, cultural, ethnic, demographic and others. All this exerts some psychological pressure.

Doctors and teachers, although they are state employees, have a rather difficult job, and then there are continuous “reforms” in medicine and education, when in words they seem to want the best and promise support, but in reality everything is done exactly the opposite.

From such a dissonance, doctors and teachers feel deceived, unnecessary and burn out. And until the policy of the state changes, they will be at risk. And what about businessmen and people employed by companies?

Emotional burnout and your responsibility for what is happening.

All these reasons and factors complicate your life up to emotional burnout, but you need to take responsibility for your life. You are responsible for what happens to you and no one else. Want to change your life for the better? Take full responsibility for your life.

If you have someone to blame for every difficult situation, then your life will never improve.

1. Professional burnout syndrome - and character traits.

Some people are prone to professional burnout, emotional exhaustion, chronic fatigue. These people are prone to the following traits:

• Perfectionists, idealists - people who constantly try to make everything as good as possible, perfect
• prone to feelings of guilt, taking on too much responsibility, sacrificing one's own interests
• touchy people, as well as those who have high expectations in relation to others, to themselves
• people with "pink glasses" who usually break "face on the asphalt of reality."
• The desire to please everyone, usually at their own expense.

The most difficult thing is that you can stay in these states for decades, even be proud of these traits and not notice how much they harm your life and health. Yes, I myself was touchy, and did not notice that I was offended because of every little thing. At the same time, he considered himself an inoffensive, good guy.

Only burnout made me pay attention to my touchiness, to perfectionism. Moreover, it was so deep inside of me that if someone had drawn my attention to this, I would not have believed them at all.

One way or another, these patterns of behavior need to be tracked down in yourself and get rid of them. Something can be changed in oneself by an effort of will, and something may require a visit to a special training. Why not?

People who live for others are very touchy. Because they sacrifice themselves for the sake of loved ones and therefore are full of expectations of the same victims in return, even if they think that they do not need anything. But the subconscious cannot be fooled. Expectations are an unconscious process. Many do not understand that living for yourself is normal.

Burnout syndrome and profession.

Most often, burnout occurs in those who work with other people and have increased responsibility. Also for creative people.

And it doesn’t matter whether your work really involves a lot of responsibility, risks, or whether you yourself have thought of everything and screwed yourself up.

Particularly at risk are:

• Doctors, medical workers, especially those working in an ambulance. And even ambulance drivers, as shown in the film with Nicolas Cage "Resurrecting the Dead."
• Teachers in universities and especially in schools. Fewer kindergarten teachers.
• Service staff, especially with a large flow of people, not very polite behavior: bars, service centers, call centers
• Sales managers, marketers, managers of different levels, company owners, entrepreneurs, businessmen.
• Creative workers: designers, artists, actors, directors.

Multiple daily encounters with negative mood, discontent, rudeness, in other people. With a general lack of preparedness for such situations and support from management. Virtually guarantees the occurrence of stress, which over time accumulates like a snowball and intensifies, turning first into burnout, and then into exhaustion.

All cases have common signs - loss of interest in work, fatigue. Working with people is very, very difficult, even in the most favorable conditions there will be stress. All people need to be prepared for real life: to be taught to let go of stress, which, unfortunately, we do not have in the education system. You will either learn on your own, or life will force you to learn, but you will undermine your health.

Professional emotional burnout and business.

More and more effort is required to attract customers and sales. Customer orders are decreasing. Bills to pay, obligations and debts are getting bigger. Lack of long term perspective. Uncertainty.

Less room for error. There are more and more possible consequences from errors. The loss of a job or business becomes a very likely event - even companies that have been operating for 50-150 years go bankrupt. This greatly complicates the moral climate in business and creates psychological stress.

Emotional stress at work increases. The amount of time for rest is the same or less. The situation forces you to give all the best and even work harder. Projects require more impeccability in execution, i.e. more mental strength.

Moreover, in conditions where victories are difficult to obtain, the joy of another victory can be the cause of burnout. In general, burnout from positive emotions is 5 times stronger than from negative ones. There are just more negative emotions, and less strong positive emotions, and this is not so noticeable.

2. 10 signs of emotional burnout or exhaustion.

Not all people understand immediately what is really happening to them and why. Often, many perceive what is happening at their own expense or blame others for this - this is the main danger of emotional exhaustion and burnout.

Society has an erroneous understanding of the norm. For example, some believe, if after 40 years it hurts somewhere, then you are still alive". In other words, perceive pain in the body as the norm, after 40.I assure you this is far from the case. If you take care of your health, you will live 100-120 years, and even at 80-90 you will still be in fairly good health.

Age is not a reason for disease. According to Norbekov - with age comes only insanity, and diseases from lack of care for your body. Pay attention to the following signs - many have them. Just do not assume that this is normal with age.

• Early gray hair, hair loss
• Heart problems, diseases, reduced immunity
• Constant experience, fears, irritation, discontent
• Loss of memory, teeth, blurred vision
• Wrinkles, bruising under the eyes, aged appearance
• Heart attack, stroke, grouchiness, insanity
• Drowsiness, insomnia, constant fatigue even after sleep
• Lack of joy, depression, apathy, hopelessness
• Reluctance to have sex
• Alcohol cravings, overeating, malnutrition

All these external signs of burnout are not the age norm.

Many illnesses can be easily managed or avoided without medication. Any disease is not normal. Each of the above signs can be pushed back a dozen or so years. It is enough to regularly perform just a few simple exercises.

Most people cannot be an indicator of the norm - because the majority is initially wrong. An indicator of the norm is some individuals who look great and feel good at 70-80-90 years and even older.

The main character from the Shaman's Laughter trilogy is about 120 years old. At the age of about 100, he looked 50-60 years old and seemed to be stronger than the author of the book at the age of 47. Moreover, at the age of 105-110, he started a civil marriage, not bad, right? There are thousands of such examples. I have personally met many people in their 50s and 60s looking 40 with a health of 25.

With simple, uncomplicated exercises, you can get rid of 95-99% of diseases. And the rest, with the help of doctors, will be much easier to eliminate if you generally monitor your health.

Just start taking care of yourself and your health.

1. Five stages of the syndrome of emotional professional burnout

The progress of emotional and professional burnout and exhaustion can be conditionally divided into 5 stages. Moreover, there may be different reasons for their occurrence, but the stages and causes are approximately the same.

• At the first stage, it still looks good outwardly, but some fatigue is already felt.
• The first external signs: insomnia due to fatigue, decreased concentration on duties, some apathy
• Difficulty concentrating at work, frequent distractions - processing with a decrease in actual work time.
• The first signals from the body: health is deteriorating, immunity is decreasing, colds out of the blue, old sores remind of themselves. Discontent, irritation, pickiness - become a permanent state.
• Fatigue has become chronic and turns into exhaustion, health is beeping big, outbursts of anger, self-pity, resentment, guilt.

4. Symptoms of burnout

I don’t even know if it’s worth talking about the symptoms of emotional burnout, if most people are in chronic burnout. It is believed that emotional burnout has a rather long latent, latent period. And to be honest, I do not quite agree with the scientific explanation of the symptoms.

Officially, it is believed that at first the enthusiasm for performing one's duties decreases. I want to quickly get rid of work, but it turns out the opposite - rather slowly. The desire to focus on what is no longer interesting disappears. There is a feeling of fatigue from work in general and irritability for everyone a little bit.

But the fact of the matter is that burnout is emotional. And it may happen that there is interest in work, but a person is criticized a lot, external factors interfere very much - and burnout occurs.

Symptoms of emotional burnout can be divided into 3 groups:

Physical Symptoms of Burnout

• Chronic, constant fatigue;
• weakness and lethargy in the muscles;
• headache
• decreased immunity;
• insomnia;
• eye fatigue, decreased vision;
• joint and back pain

Weight changes due to the fact that usually stress “wants” to seize. There is also a loss of appetite - for example, after a divorce or dismissal. Which leads to a noticeable change in weight and appearance

Socio-behavioral signs:

• The desire to run away from everyone or resentment at everyone, as a result of the desire for isolation, a minimum of communication with others
• evasion of responsibility, dereliction of duty, laziness
• blaming others for their own troubles, resentment, irritation
• envy, complaints, that someone is lucky in life
• complaints about your life and the fact that you have to work hard;
• pessimism, negative is seen in everything

Many people go into escapism or dayshifting whenever they can. Cravings for sweets, alcohol, or even drugs may appear.

Psycho-emotional signs:

• there is indifference to one's life and the events taking place around;
• self-doubt, low self-esteem
• disappointment in others
• loss of professional motivation;
• irascibility, irritation and dissatisfaction with other people
• depression, constant bad mood, life failed

Syndrome of mental burnout, clinically similar to depression. There is an experience of semi-contrived suffering from artificially created loneliness elevated to the degree of doom. In this state, it is difficult to focus or concentrate. However, burnout is much easier to overcome than it might seem at first glance.

5. Implicit symptoms of professional emotional burnout.

You can deceive your mind or yourself. But it is impossible to deceive your subconscious or something in the depths of your soul. If you are tired and overworked, then you will rest. Of course, you can imitate vigorous activity, sit in social networks, read the news, but in fact, it will be a psychological rest.

You may even sincerely believe that you are working. But if the body is tired - then it is tired - and it will rest, whether you like it or not. The body or consciousness will start to turn off, you will sleep on the go, concentration will decrease, attentiveness will decrease, thoughts will start to get confused. Errors in work are possible.

Productivity will come to naught - which means that you will be doing small, unimportant things, routine. But you won’t be able to relax normally either - this is precisely the biggest danger. The next day you will come to work in the same or almost the same condition, which again will tell on your productivity.

Continuing to work in this mode for a long time, sooner or later you will face a decrease in income. And when the issue of money is added to your fatigue, emotional burnout and professional exhaustion are guaranteed.

If you are tired - go to rest! Get out of this corkscrew.

6. Where do professional burnout and emotional exhaustion come from?

I remember in the mid-90s, the guys and I went to a neighboring city 170 km away. The car was 17 years old, "Kopeyka", it just had the engine rebuilt - the pistons and rings were replaced. After such an overhaul, the engine had to withstand 100 thousand kilometers, if you drive carefully, at a maximum speed of 90–110 km / h.

But we were young and hot, we had fun, so we drove by pressing the gas pedal to the floor, which was a speed of 130 km / h. It would seem that the difference in speed is only 20% more, and we drove some 400–450 km. But it was enough to burn the engine. It turns out that we burned the engine using only 0.4% of the resource, i.e. 200 times faster.

Emotional exhaustion and professional burnout affect you in much the same way; by working only 20% harder than your maximum resources, you shorten the rest of your life by 20–200 times. Is it worth it? And don't ask me how to go to bed at 9 pm.

Do not ask - maybe you don't need to run 3 times a week and train your heart? Therefore, when you feel at work that you are tired and not working - go home, rest, recuperate - you may be able to work the next day. The working day should be a maximum of 8 hours - because this is the maximum time for work.

Of course, you can work another hour more, as doctors, businessmen, managers often do - but you need to remember that the next day you will have to pay double the price for this. If today you overworked 2 hours, then tomorrow you will be idle for 4 hours.

7. Consequences of burnout syndrome

And if you are constantly in a state of burnout, emotional exhaustion, physical or mental fatigue, your “ship of life” simply does not have the fuel, the energy to move forward.

If youth knew
if old age could.

In youth, you burn out from the lack of life experience. In adulthood, from the inability to recover. One way or another, burnout and fatigue accumulate over the years, and after 40 years turn into chronic fatigue or exhaustion.

And all because we are not taught to let go of stress gradually. So we collect it on ourselves all our lives, and all the stress of life settles on our body with a thick layer of tense muscles, scientifically this is called a “shell of tension”.

If you do not eliminate burnout, then over time there is a feeling of hopelessness in your life situation. Depression appears. May develop into alcoholism. Constant feeling of hopelessness, disappointment in one's own life, disappointment in oneself. Feeling of injustice. Feeling of deceit.

These are very strong destructive emotions. I would say that they are not compatible with life. You have seen them many times in the elderly. Usually people die quickly after that. Often such people are seriously ill with difficult-to-treat diseases.

As Faina Ranevskaya cynically noted: if the patient wants to live, then the doctors are powerless. Doctors themselves often notice that if a patient does NOT want to live, then doctors are powerless. Hopelessness and disappointment with life - this is the unwillingness to live.

Many people are accustomed to the fact that life is hard, they get tired, get sick, and this way of life seems normal to them. This is an unconscious thought pattern imposed from nowhere. But this is not so - life can and should bring joy, pleasure, despite external circumstances. The crisis will not end soon - why not live now? Not enjoy life?

8. Emotional burnout and exhaustion - accumulate in the body for years.

There is an anecdote: Comrade General, stop the train. In response, the general commanded - Train, stop! One, two.

Emotional burnout and exhaustion are also a kind of "train" - do not fool yourself that you can stop them or manage them in "one, two."

According to Wilhelm Reich: Emotional fatigue, burnout, exhaustion, create muscle tension in the body, which, becoming chronic, further inhibits the free movement of energy flows and blood flow in the body. Sooner or later, this tension leads to the formation of a "muscle shell of tension", which creates fertile ground for the development of neurosis.

Spending every day, for years, since childhood in a similar corset, a person becomes more and more tense and heavy. This stiffness of the muscles throughout the body, arises from the load of emotions that you carry on yourself. Naturally, these constantly tense muscles are terribly tiring and deplete your strength. As a result, a person ceases to notice his stiffness and tension, loses his natural interest in life.

You are so accustomed to the constant tension of the muscles that you do not notice this shell. But, if you pay attention to the tension in the shoulders, neck, face, back of the thighs, near the knees, you will see that many of these muscles are constantly tense.

9. The official scientific methods of letting go of burnout don't work.

The most interesting thing is that 80-100 years have already passed, but so far scientists have not proposed a full-fledged method for releasing this accumulated tension in the muscles of the body. Either they don't know, or they don't want to offer. Therefore, I do not believe that official professors and doctors of psychological sciences will be able to offer you something really effective for burnout.

I contend that any technique for letting go of fatigue, burnout, emotional exhaustion is nothing if it cannot let go of the tense muscles of the "shell of tension."If someone tells me about another super-method of releasing burnout and fatigue, I ask 1 question: does the “armor of tension” let go?

If the answer is no, and the answer has always been no, until now - I don't even want to look any further - the whole dead poultice technique. And it can be used in addition to something, but not as a main technique.

If you really want to let go of psychological fatigue, emotional exhaustion and professional burnout, then you should do exercises that release the shell of tension too. Otherwise, it is an attempt to stop the train "by the power of thought" for "one, two."

10. Learn to relax - or how to deal with emotional burnout.

You need to be able to rest. By itself, this skill will not appear. Money does not solve this issue. I know many people who are 10 times richer than me - but they sleep worse, rest, and are less full of energy, especially mental ones. Why? They don't know how to rest.

The difficulty of rest lies in the fact that we must take into account that we have not only a body, but also a consciousness. And they can get tired of both one and the other. Biorhythms may not coincide when the body wants to sleep, but the consciousness does not, and then it is difficult to fall asleep. Therefore, it is highly recommended to prepare the body and mind for sleep. Stop watching TV 2-3 hours before bedtime, turn off your computer and smartphone.

One of the main reasons why it is not possible to rest normally is a sedentary sedentary lifestyle. Working with the mind and reacting emotionally, it turns out that you are psychologically tired. And physically they moved a little, that is, they were full of strength. Go to bed and start counting sheep, unable to sleep when tired.

Here are a few tips on how you can better relax and get enough sleep:

• You need to be outdoors every day for at least 1 hour. Better yet, 2 hours a day. For example, Russian nobles almost without fail walked 2 hours a day. If you violate this paragraph, then everything else is useless.
• Go to bed earlier. To fall asleep earlier at the same time, set your body to sleep a few hours in advance. One hour of sleep in the evening is equal to several hours of sleep in the morning. Isn't that why you sleep in the morning, sleep, but waking up feeling like a hangover? And even the head can ache from too much sleep in the morning.
• Drink water as soon as you wake up, before meals and every hour. Water is needed for 3 main systems in our body: for the brain, immunity and digestion. What people call thirst is more like some kind of dehydration. We don't have the exact sensation of wanting to drink. Therefore, water should be drunk consciously, according to the regime, and not when you want to drink.
• 8 hours of sedentary work should be offset by 1 hour of physical activity. The activity that gives you pleasure is desirable. And you also need to remember that activity should be aimed only at health, and not at the ego, like bodybuilders or fitness enthusiasts, where some parts of the body or joints are overloaded.
• Eat right with enough proteins, enzymes, spices, fiber, vegetables and fruits. If you don't have fruits and fiber in your diet, you're almost guaranteed to have mild or even severe constipation. The same goes for vegetables. The main source of fiber is bread, so our ancestors ate everything with bread.

Food should be tasty and pleasant, easy to chew. Limit sweets. If you need to lose weight, then learn to chew your food more carefully and lose weight by a maximum of 50-100 grams per week.

How to fall asleep faster and get better sleep in order to be full of energy in the morning?

On Monday, he set a record when jogging on skis: 7.7 km in 53 minutes.

The weather was great for skiing. And the skiing was very slippery.

The result exceeded all my expectations: almost 2 times faster than the day before. Almost not tired. Legs on the second day almost did not hurt. A week later, the record was broken by 3-4 minutes. And this despite the fact that I was already running 2 laps, i.e. 15.4 km. And on average, I ran 30-45 km per week.
(By the way, this is very little, the last world record in cross-country skiing is 50 km in 1 hour and 46 minutes.)

Why all this? Why run multiple times a week? Yes, because from a sedentary lifestyle and burnout - probably the most deaths happen every year. About 31.4% die from heart disease alone every year. You need to move a LOT more.

If you have read the Shaman's Laughter series by Vladimir Serkin, then in the third book the author asks him: How long will you be able to maintain life in your body? "Shaman" answered - yes, for a long time. How many people at the age of 120 would you hear this from?

I am sure that 99% of people could live up to 100-120 years.

If only they moved like this "shaman". Well, they would let go of stress, disappointment, and other negative emotions.

Everything that is comparable can be used as a run: skiing, skating, rollerblading, actively cycling, swimming, jogging. You need to run for at least 30 minutes, and preferably 1-2 hours per session, 2-4 times a week. Once a week is NOT ENOUGH to maintain a healthy heart and get enough sleep.

You need to run with pleasure and at a low heart rate. Running fast, at a high heart rate is strictly contraindicated. Running with pleasure is also a must - this is how the parasympathetic turns on, that is, you gain energy.

Jogging without pleasure, that is, in sympathy, means with a loss of energy, loads the joints, knees - jogging is extremely harmful to the knees and joints. Look at the occupational diseases of athletes who, in pursuit of records, overload their bodies. Do not rush to run a lot and quickly. You need health, not records.

You run to drive the blood through the body, to invigorate the heart, and to sleep well at night. Not for records. I have, for example, both skiing and jogging - very poor results at the moment. And I don't need any more. My friends can run 1.5-2 times faster, but their knees hurt after such runs.

An example of physical activity from my life.

Although I set a personal record, everyone overtook me again. This time they overtook - not only old people and grandmothers, but also a couple of children aged 9–11 :-). It seemed that they were moving at least 1.5–2 times faster than me. I wonder what their speed is?

It looks like I still have a huge potential for growth results. I still have a weak balance on skis, I fell 1 time when I hit clean ice from a hill. On cross-country skiing it is difficult to keep balance, and even at speed.

Skate style this time - 4.5 km managed to run. I was less tired than the previous time when I was able to run 1.5 km in skating style. Another interesting thing is that despite the fact that he moved almost 2 times faster than the calories burned, the tracker shows 27% less. How does he count them?

Yesterday I did not run - I rested. I'm going for a run again today, for an hour.

This is how my winter runs go. In the summer I run for 1-2 hours, about 8-10 km per hour. It's pretty slow, but I don't need the speed.

Perhaps someday the results will be many times better, or maybe not. For me, the main indicator is a pleasant feeling, from jogging, how I sleep, and so that my knees do not hurt. Many times I caught myself thinking that I did not want to run, because today I would not be able to repeat my best result. This is what pursuit of results means.

You know, it's hard to work actively for 8 hours a day and at the same time set records while jogging. Then I remind myself that I run for health, and not for the result - and I go running as I can.

Good sleep is essential to eliminate fatigue and burnout.

And you won’t be able to sleep normally without walking in the fresh air and without minimal runs every other day. Someone will say that they are engaged in the gym, fitness, yoga or swinging. Or dancing for an hour a day. Believe it or not, this is not enough for the heart and health.

Yes, it's better than nothing. The heart, except for jogging, does not train anything normally. Even monks in Buddhist monasteries and yogis run for hours. You can swing and jump in the gym as much as you like, but you still need to run, in the fresh air.

If you don’t train your heart, don’t help it pump blood through your body, it means that your heart and other organs are working with a load and even overload. Which means you burn out. You may not believe me, but a sedentary lifestyle is the most energy-consuming for the body.

The processes in the body are interconnected - muscles help move blood and fluids through the body, supply cells with oxygen, cleanse the body, and move food through the digestive tract. If you move a little, it means that each organ individually works with a load. Something like this…

11. The first rule of a spy or moral exhaustion.

We were not prepared either at school or at universities for real life. We are being prepared for a life that "should be", in a good way. There is a huge gap between these two "lives". With such upbringing, the first age crisis occurs already at the age of 18–20, when people first encounter reality one on one and “suddenly” it turns out that everything is a little more complicated.

In reality, it turns out that every man is for himself. And setups, deceit, rigidity, are not only in the movies, but also in their own skin, and they are not at all as cool as in the movies. And either you cope with the tasks, or you are replaced by another and continue to live as you want, where you want.

To fulfill your dreams, you need to plow and plow. And it's not a fact that it will work. This is disheartening. By and large, burnout comes from unpreparedness for life, when the skills to cope with situations are sorely lacking. And the pressure in the form of demands and claims from all sides continues to increase.

In life, the law of the jungle applies, only in the city they are tougher. The first rule of a spy is don't get caught. Well, if you get caught - "the fool himself."

On the other hand, you can learn to cope with burnout, stress, exhaustion pretty quickly. And keeping yourself healthy is pretty easy. You just need to understand that 85% of success in society is possible due to developed social skills. And only 15% thanks to technical education and knowledge.

I recommend developing the following skills in yourself in order to make life easier and not have to overstrain.

• Change. The world is constantly changing - you need to change with it. The ability to change is a skill. Even your body is changing. At different ages, you have different hobbies, routines and diets. Watch your habits - remember that at some point they will become obsolete and you will need to change them for others.
• To study. Life keeps getting more complicated, which means you need to keep learning. Yogis say that life is all learning. When I entered the university in 1991, some IT-related disciplines were so new that even the teachers did not know them and studied them together with the students. When I graduated in 1996, this knowledge was hopelessly outdated. And I had to learn something new, different. And now things are changing even faster. Read, learn, grow.
• Communication. The ability to communicate is a skill. It doesn't fall from the sky. Humans are social beings and that means communication. You need to be able to communicate with people. From the right communication for you with people you are interested in, you can get tremendous pleasure, inspiration and satisfaction. And this means mental forces of the highest quality.
• Building relationships. To learn how to build relationships with the opposite sex and at work, I read a couple of dozen books and went through more than a dozen trainings on each topic.

And voila - I learned how to build and maintain relationships both with women, friends, and at work.

When I got married, I took this whole pack of books, training records and gave it to my wife.

With words, if you want a long and normal relationship, you need to know all this. Read them as quickly as possible. And she read them. All. No questions.

• Health. It's a skill, not a given. Rely on the doctor, but don't make a mistake yourself. 95-99% of diseases can be eliminated - a healthy lifestyle. In the remaining cases, let the doctors help you. But no more.
  Abroad, the waiting list for an operation can be up to one year, there is no way to speed it up with money. It’s better not to get into an ambulance there - how many articles have already been written about this. Therefore, 20% of the population goes in for sports there. And in Russia (CIS) - only 2%. Hard? As it is, that's life. Are you taking care of your health? What are you waiting for: a kick in the ass in the form of a severe illness?

• Sales-purchases. We live in a world where everything is bought or sold for money. But at the same time, we are not taught at all - to buy and sell. I know a bunch of people who earn 2-3 times more than me, but live in worse conditions.

They can't buy and sell - a lot of money is stupidly lost to nowhere, every month. And they can't stop. They didn't buy the car. The apartment was not bought there and needs to be changed. And so several times. At home, a lot of unnecessary rubbish, in the absence of the necessary things. Clothes, groceries, home accessories - from the cannon budget for sparrows.
Moreover: sales, negotiations, persuasion, the ability to negotiate, purchases are, in fact, one and the same skill based on general principles.

Do you consider yourself more brilliant than Vincent van Gogh and Nikola Tesla?

They couldn't make a living from their talents - do you think you can if you don't learn how to sell, buy, bargain and negotiate with people?

• Honesty. Same skill as the ability to tell the truth. If you decide to tell the truth directly, then you will be called a truth-seeker, and maybe even an impudent and rude person. And they can also knock on the head. Yes, and you will also do if someone tramples on you with such honesty.
• Kindness. Oddly enough, also a skill. Kindness should be in moderation and in the right place. There is nothing to feed the pigs with oranges - forgive me for this harsh, but vital statement. If you are too kind, others will take advantage of you. But at the same time, obviously, being angry and dissatisfied is not an option. Although this is what many choose, unfortunately.
• Gratitude. Probably one of the most neglected skills. What people lack the most in our time is gratitude, appreciation. Start giving thanks and giving appreciation to others and you will be surprised how much better you will be treated. You will never be able to pay for everything with money - you have to learn to be grateful not with money, but in a different way.
• Performance. It is necessary not only to work, but to work profitably. Labor productivity is especially relevant for office workers. And even if you have not thought about it until now, now you should think about it. The competition is so high that either you have more productivity or your services are no longer needed.

Having these skills will make your life much easier. One way or another, you need to develop them. But their absence will cost a lot of gray hair and health, a waste of energy. Well, then emotional exhaustion, burnout, psychological fatigue ...

12. Sympathetic and parasympathetic body regulation systems

In order to have a good rest, you need physical activity on the body. But the fact is that not every load is suitable. Most sports are, to put it mildly, unhealthy, because they act one-sidedly on the body. Even running - almost indispensable for training the heart - is very harmful to the knees and joints. It turns out that playing sports heals something, and cripples another. Where is the exit?

And the thing is that we have 2 nervous systems for regulating the body - sympathetic and parasympathetic. But only the parasympathetic supports homeostasis – the desire of the system to reproduce itself, to restore the lost balance, to overcome the resistance of the external environment. Yes, and the internal environment too.

Therefore, you should practice in the parasympathetic system, which has a powerful restorative and healing property.

Going in for sports, fitness or something else without the included parasympathetics is an unaffordable luxury - because the sympathetic nervous system does not acquire, but spends your energy. That is, you will need more strength to recover, and the recovery processes will be weaker.

The included parasympathetic is an eternal elixir of youth - if you know how to use it. Naturally, you need to learn how to work with the included parasympathetic, and be in it as much as possible during the day. Then there will be a sea of ​​​​health, work will bring joy, and there will be no stress and fatigue from it. But this, of course, is aerobatics.

It's worth trying to learn it.

13. Ways out of emotional exhaustion, professional burnout and psychological fatigue.

The general answer to this question is to change your lifestyle. If you have the opportunity to change a job that drains you emotionally, then you should change it. If you have relationships, friends, or relatives who squeeze strength and health out of you, then you should at least reconsider them. You should refuse to communicate with vampire people - you cannot help them - only "life" can help them. But they will beat your health in such a way that it will not seem a little.

Next, you should review your daily routine and make any necessary changes. If you continue the same way of life that you have been up to now, then it is useless to struggle with exhaustion and recovery. Yes, I understand not everything depends on you, but you can change a lot.

Recovery plan for one weekend.

Ask your family and friends not to interfere with you or even help you - take on some of your responsibilities. And spend the weekend like this:

• Go to bed earlier in the evening. Let yourself sleep in the morning.
• Drink water.
• Morning exercises or yoga - for stretching. Any harmonious yogic complex. Perform with parasympathetic on.
• You can have breakfast. Walk 2 hours in the fresh air.
• Walking can be combined with jogging - Jogging / skiing / or swimming - 1 hour (minimum) at the slowest pace, at a low heart rate.
• Take a nap at lunchtime. No TV, movies, internet, smartphone. It is better to communicate with children, friends, parents.
• Relaxation meditation - 15-30 minutes.
• Go to bed early at 21-22 hours. Have sex before bed! (Why not?)
• Repeat the next day.

The result will be even better if all the exercises are completed. More precisely, in the complete absence of gadgets and electric light and being outdoors. Well, or at least in the country.

Light and harmonious morning complex for stretching.

For 10 years I have been doing the simplest harmonious yoga complex Suryanamaskar of 33 movements. (Not to be confused with Suryanamaskar of 12 movements).

You need to do it at least 3 times a day. Each approach takes about 5-7 minutes and 1-2 minutes break between them. In my trainings, I tell in detail how to breathe correctly during the complex. How

The benefits of this complex can be described for hours. Deeply cleanses the body from the inside, gives energy, improves immunity, eliminates back pain, eliminates cellulite in 2-3 days, cures a lot of diseases. I talk more in my trainings. Or take a look at my website. I'll put my hands out.

Relaxation meditations.

1. The simplest and most relaxing is the rotation of the microcosmic orbit - from 15-20 minutes.
2. The next one is quite similar - yoga nidra, when you “roll” energy balls through the body in turn with different sensations of heat, tingling, cold. And different colored balloons.
3. Deconcentration of attention - has more than 5 varieties.
4. Well, the most effective meditation is memory, during it you remember your day in reverse order and let go of all daytime tensions.

Different meditations are suitable for different occasions. There are also options for remembering performed with a partner for especially difficult emotional situations from the past, but it can only be taught at live trainings.

This should be enough for you to recuperate over the weekend. Next, you need to lead an energy-efficient lifestyle and let go of the causes of emotional fatigue, as described in the following paragraphs.

Remember that the best and fastest way to relax is don't get tired i.e. lead an energy-efficient lifestyle with elements of recuperation every day. Tired less, and have a good rest every day, otherwise there will be an accumulation of fatigue.

14. Prevention of emotional stress and professional burnout.

Health needs to be monitored every day, and not when "a rooster pecked in the ass." And they also say: “It’s too late for Gogi to drink Borjomi if there are no more kidneys.” It's better not to bring it up.

To do this, you need to create your daily routine in such a way that it includes all the necessary elements of saving your health and recuperation every day.

• Morning yoga - every working day. You can take a break on weekends.
• Drink enough water in the morning, before meals and every hour at work.
• Work in blocks - remember to stand up and stretch every hour.
• Be outdoors every day for at least 1-2 hours.
• At least 1 hour of physical activity 3 times a week. Ideally 2-3 times a week for 2 hours.
• After dinner, when you feel sleepy, meditate for 15-30 minutes. Or, you can even take a nap.
• Meditate before going to bed and during the day to restore strength for 15-30 minutes.
• Let go of emotional clamps and stuff… (in the next paragraph.)

About morning yoga

Many will say that they get up early, do not get enough sleep and go to work, so they cannot do yoga in the morning. I would say that this is self-deception and excuses. Get up half an hour earlier and do yoga every morning. It doesn't matter how early you have to get up. Go to bed half an hour earlier for this.

I know builders who started work at 5 in the morning and left the house at 4.30. In order to have time to do yoga - on my recommendation, they got up at 3 in the morning, and went to bed at 19-20 hours. This is such an unusual daily routine - but they like their work, so they adjusted to it.

30 minutes of yoga in the morning is equivalent to 1-2 hours of sleep, plus the elimination of back pain, support of the immune system and the whole body in order, which leads to the elimination of 95-99% of diseases.

Is it possible to do without running?

Only a short-term replacement like skiing, skating, rollerblading, swimming and nothing more. But still, alas, you can’t do without running completely. I looked for a replacement for a long time, but found nothing. For a sedentary lifestyle, physical activity needs to go through the legs, and be for the heart. It is the legs that we have the weakest element in the body, and not the breath. When you start running, you will feel that the legs are the weakest, and breathing quickly gets used.

You need to run ONLY at a low pulse - a meditative run with parasympathetics turned on. Run slowly, but run. Starting to run correctly, you will quickly begin to get incredible pleasure from it.

15. Constant stress is the cause of emotional exhaustion.

Resting in stress - it is almost impossible to get enough sleep. And guaranteed is the accumulation of fatigue, which sooner or later will lead to emotional exhaustion and burnout. It is stress that creates the tension that accumulates in the form of a “shell of tension”.

Let go of stress - you need to learn, additionally. It would be great if we were taught this from childhood, but alas, as it is. Few people really understand why and how stress arises, where and how it is deposited, why it arises, how to let go of stress. In our time, this knowledge is vital already.

To get started, get a notebook, which will become your diary, where you will write all your thoughts.

Stress arises from accumulated grievances, discontent, expectations, feelings of guilt, fear of shame, anger, anger, jealousy, envy, self-pity.

Yes, they create emotional burnout and exhaustion for you. It is these emotions that create heartache, especially self-pity.

• Write down in your diary every similar situation that you can remember.
• Start with the simplest and start letting go. Learning to let go is not easy. Then move on to more complex ones.
• You can't confuse the moment of letting go with anything. It needs to be felt. It feels like a very deep release, relief, as if some kind of weight has been removed from the shoulders.
• Letting go of resentment, expectations, etc. is a skill that needs to be developed.
• At first, it may take you several hours or even days to let go of 1 difficult situation, but then it will take 1 second. It took me 3 days for the first offense, but I immediately undertook to let go of the big one - do not make my mistake.
• In the evening before going to bed - mentally remember the day in reverse order and let go of all emotional situations. You will see that there are more of them than you had time to notice before. But they are small.
• As soon as all the situations from the list are over, write the next set of similar situations. Repeat the practice until you release EVERYTHING.
• Set aside 0.5–1 hour per day for this practice.

You need to let go of such situations, and not others. You let go of resentment for yourself, not for someone else. You will be surprised how much health and strength your grievances eat up. And how much better will you feel. I guarantee you that you will have less gray hair, wrinkles and other signs of aging if you do this exercise regularly.

After releasing emotional tensions - you will sleep like a baby! If released correctly. I will cover this in more detail in a separate article. And in my trainings I teach this and give a step-by-step plan.

16. Meditation or how to get rid of deep chronic fatigue, professional burnout, emotional exhaustion.

What has accumulated over the years cannot be released by practices at the level of consciousness. Meditation practices of various kinds are needed. And also “not to get caught during the day”, that is, not to get tired, not to strain during the day - it is impossible without meditation. And also in order not to get tired during the day - you need to let go of stress, which is deep in the subconscious.

There are at least 3 "reactors" of "bioatomic" energy in your body that could feed you indefinitely, if turned on correctly. One of them you already know is the parasympathetic system.

There are 5 meditations, and 3 of them have up to 5 different ways to perform to release different fatigue, burnout, stress in different situations. To restore mental strength.

Meditation is an eternal or endless source of strength and health.

Because it brings back the powers from your past. It was there that your strength was “lost”, starting right from childhood. This meditation will also teach you how to relax during the day.

Another meditation temporarily turns off the armor of tension, which gives a powerful restorative effect to the entire body and releases fatigue.

I cannot teach you all the intricacies of meditation through an article. I also cannot describe to you in detail all the plans for letting go of various fatigue, stress, burnout. I will write a separate article about letting go of stress, but this will also not be enough to let go of the deep stress accumulated since childhood. Everything is too individual.

Such situations require individual adjustment and direction, which can only be given in training. That is why I have compiled a detailed training to quickly eliminate fatigue, stress, burnout, exhaustion - for different stages of neglect.

There are 2 participation packages - and the simplest one - costs a penny and is affordable for everyone. However, the most expensive one is also available to everyone, with a strong desire.

How to quickly increase the amount of strength at times and return the joy of life.

After completing this training, you will increase the strength and productivity of work at times, and with it, increase your income.

I am sure that even on medicines you will save many times more than the most expensive training package.

Save your time and money. Choose the right package and let's go through it all together. If in doubt about which training package to choose, choose the simplest one. And then, if you like it, pay extra, and take the next one.

PS
If you have not read the Shaman's Laughter trilogy by Vladimir Serkin, be sure to read it. I donated 20 of these books and, on my recommendation, another 300 people bought or downloaded them on the Internet. Each time I heard only positive feedback and thanks in return for this book.

PS3
To quickly regain your strength, build an energy efficient regime and double your productivity, I recommend that you take my training -

There are several participation packages - the simplest 5 lessons. Average - 5 weeks. Full instillation of skills, reaching a new level of strength, health, productivity - 12 months = 1 year. Follow the link and register now. Prices are symbolic and will rise after the first flow.

It often seems that you can only manage to do all the work things if you constantly stay late at work in the evening, take part of the work home, and then work a little more on the weekends, just to be sure. But in reality, this approach only harms productivity and can lead to professional burnout. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness in the book "At the peak. How to Maintain Peak Efficiency Without Burnout provides many examples that prove that rest - from short breaks during the day and normal sleep to a long vacation after a big project - is extremely important for work. T&P publishes several excerpts from the book.

The secret to sustainable success

Think about what you need to do to make muscles - such as biceps - become stronger. If you try to lift too much weight for you, then you are unlikely to be able to do it more than once. And even if you succeed, you risk injuring yourself. However, by lifting too little weight, you will not achieve anything either: the biceps simply will not grow. So, you need to find the ideal solution - a weight that is difficult for you to lift, which by the end of the workout will bring you to extreme fatigue, but not to injury.

But finding the perfect weight is only half the problem. If you lift every day, several times a day, with little to no rest between workouts, you will almost certainly burn out. If you rarely go to the gym and almost never give your best, then you are also unlikely to become much stronger. The key to training your biceps - and, as we will learn, any muscle, be it physical, cognitive or emotional - is a balance between the right amount of load and the right amount of relaxation. Load + rest = growth. This equation holds true no matter what you're trying to pump.

periodization

In sports science, this cycle of stress, or workload, and rest is called periodization. Stress - we don't mean a fight with a husband or boss, but rather some kind of challenge to our abilities, like lifting weights - poses a challenge for the body. This process is usually accompanied by some breakdown: remember how weak our hands seem to us after a hard workout in the gym. But if you give your body time to rest and recover after a difficult period, it will adjust and become stronger, allowing you to achieve more next time. Over time, the cycle begins to look like this:

You isolate a muscle or ability that you want to develop.

You push her.

Rest and recover, allowing the body to adapt.

Repeat the procedure, this time tensing the muscle or ability a little more than last time.

World-class athletes have honed this skill. At the micro level, they alternate between hard workouts, during which they push themselves to the limit and complete collapse, and light workouts, during which, for example, they jog. They also place great emphasis on recovery, time spent on the couch and in bed, which is just as important to them as time spent on the treadmill or at the gym. On a macro level, great athletes follow a hard month of training with a week of light exercise. They schedule their season so that it includes only a few peak events, followed by periods of physical and psychological recovery. The days, weeks, months, years that make up a professional athlete's career are a constant ebb and flow of stress and relaxation. Those who cannot achieve balance either get injured or burn out (too much stress, not enough rest) or get stuck in one place and reach a plateau (not enough stress, too much rest). Those who can find the right balance are champions for life. […]

The brain is like a muscle

In the mid-1990s, Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., a social psychologist who was then teaching at Case Western Reserve University, revolutionized our understanding of the brain and its capabilities. Baumeister discovered the causes of such banal problems as, for example, why we feel exhausted after we diligently work out a difficult task. Or why, when dieting, we are more likely to break down at night, although we have carefully avoided junk food all day. In other words, Baumeister was trying to understand how and why our will and mind are suddenly rapidly weakening.

When Baumeister began working on this task, he did not need modern brain research technologies. All he needed was some biscuits and radishes.

For their cleverly designed experiment, Baumeister and colleagues gathered 67 adults in a room that smelled of chocolate chip cookies. After the participants took their seats, freshly prepared cookies were brought into the room. When everyone was salivating, the situation escalated. Half of the participants were allowed to eat cookies, and half were forbidden. Not only that: those who could not have cookies were given radishes and offered to have a bite to eat.

As you might have guessed, the cookie eaters had no problem with the first part of the experiment. Like most in this situation, they happily ate dessert. Those who got the radish, on the other hand, suffered: “They showed a keen interest in the liver, to the point of looking longingly at it, and some even took the cookie to sniff it,” writes Baumeister. It's not easy to resist cookies.

All this looks predictable. Who doesn't mind refusing a treat? However, the situation became even more interesting in the second part of the experiment, during which the suffering of the radish eaters continued. After both groups had finished their meal, all participants were asked to solve a seemingly simple but in fact unsolvable problem. (Yes, it was a brutal experiment, especially for those who got the radish.) The radish eaters lasted just over eight minutes and made 19 attempts to solve the problem. Those who ate the cookies lasted more than 20 minutes and tried to solve the problem 33 times. Where did such a difference come from? The point is that the radish-bound exhausted their mental muscles by forgoing the cookie, while the cookie-eaters had full tanks of psychological fuel and were able to expend more energy on the task at hand.

Baumeister developed several more variations of this experiment and observed the same result each time. Participants who were forced to use their brains—whether through abstinence, solving a difficult task, or making a difficult decision—performed worse on the subsequent task, which also required mental effort. Compared to them, the control group, who were given an easy task at the first stage, such as eating a delicious cookie, showed better results.

Refusing cookies is a dangerous game

It seems that we have some kind of reservoir of mental forces that are spent on all acts of consciousness and self-control, even those that are not related to each other. When people were asked to suppress their emotions during a test—for example, not to show sadness or frustration when watching a sad movie—they subsequently performed worse on a wide range of unrelated tasks, such as refusing tasty food or memory exercises. This phenomenon affects other areas as well. Even physical exercises (for example, squats) are performed worse if we strained our mental muscles before them. The study showed that even when the bodies of the participants did not get tired, the physical performance of those who were mentally exhausted fell. In other words, the line between mental and physical fatigue is not as clear-cut as we think. […]

Inside a weary brain

Instead of experimenting with cookies and radishes, researchers are now studying mental muscles using sophisticated medical technology. What they found is very interesting. People with depleted mental muscles were put into MRI machines (a technology that allows you to observe brain activity). It turned out that the brain of a tired person works in a curious way. When shown a compelling image, such as a delicious cheeseburger, activity in the part of the brain associated with emotional response (the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) is increased - compared to the activity in the part of the brain responsible for thoughtful, rational thinking (the prefrontal cortex), when he is asked to solve a difficult problem. Other experiments have shown that after someone is forced to resort to self-control, activity in the prefrontal cortex decreases even more. It is no wonder that when we are mentally exhausted, we are not given difficult tasks and self-control and we choose cartoons and cookies.

Just as your arms get tired and unable to work properly when you lift a barbell to the point of exhaustion, a tired brain is not able to properly cope with its tasks - whether it is resisting temptation, making difficult decisions, or working through complex intellectual problems. Fatigue can cause you to forget your diet for a cookie, give up on a difficult intellectual task, or stop a difficult physical task prematurely. In the worst case, you may even cheat on your loved one.

The good news is that, just like your body, you can make your brain stronger by either exercising your brain or letting it rest. Scientists have found that the more often we resist temptation, overthink, or concentrate intensely, the better we get at it. A new wave of research refutes the assumption that willpower is not an endless resource, as scientists previously believed: by successfully completing small productive tasks, we can gain this strength in order to perform larger tasks in the future. In any case - whether it's willpower, ego depletion, or some other mechanism - we can't continuously strain the brain (at least effectively) without getting tired from time to time. And we can't take on bigger challenges before we gain strength by tackling smaller ones. All this brings us back to where we started: load + rest = growth.

Performance Practices

Remember that “load is stress”: fatigue caused by one task will spread to the next, even if they are completely unrelated.

Take on one thing at a time. Otherwise, you will literally lose energy.

Change the environment to achieve your goals. This is especially important when you know you are exhausted. The environment has an unusually strong influence on our behavior, especially when we are tired.

Have the courage to take a break

The advantages of rest are obvious, they are confirmed by extensive scientific data. And yet, few of us dare to rest. It's not that people want to be exhausted. The fact is, we live in a culture that celebrates exhausting and relentless work, even if science says it's pointless. We praise the athlete who stays in the gym after a workout to do a few more reps, and we sing of the businessman who sleeps in his office. This is not to say that hard work does not lead to growth. As we wrote in chapter 3, leads. But, hopefully, you now understand that hard work only turns into smart and sustainable work if it is compensated by rest. The irony is that hard work often requires more courage than hard work. Ask authors like Stephen King (“Not working is the real job for me”) or runners like Dina Kastor (“My workouts are the easiest part”). When we leave work, we sink into feelings of guilt and anxiety, especially if we feel that we are threatened by competitors. There is probably no place where this would be more noticeable than among the top managers of the consulting company Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

BCG regularly ranks at the top of the global consulting firms. The company's consultants help CEOs of billionaire companies solve the most delicate problems. And the sooner BCG consultants can find answers, the sooner the company will be rewarded for the next multi-million dollar project. In other words, BCG consultants work in a high-risk environment and under constant pressure from competitors.

Not surprisingly, when the researchers proposed a series of experiments to evaluate the effects of rest on BCG counselors, these counselors responded not only with surprise, but even with derision. Harvard Business Review reports: "The concept of vacation was so alien that BCG management had to practically force some consultants to take days off, especially if they coincided with peak periods of work intensity." Some consultants asked lawyers if they were risking their careers by taking part in the experiment.

In one experiment, consultants were asked to take one day off in the middle of the week. For those who usually work 12-plus hours a day, seven days a week, such a request seemed simply absurd. Even the company employee who promoted the study, because she believed regular rest could improve productivity, “was nervous about having to tell a client that every member of her team would take one day a week off.” So she convinced the client (and herself) that if the work began to suffer, the experiment would be terminated immediately.

The second experiment was somewhat less radical: the group of consultants participating in it was asked to take one free evening a week. This meant a complete shutdown from work after six in the evening. No matter what happened to the project - all emails, phone calls, messages, presentations and other work activities were banned. This idea was also met with staunch resistance. One of the managers asked: “What good is a free evening? Will I have to work more on weekends as a result?

In this group of career workaholics who were not shy about expressing negative attitudes towards the experiment, the idea of ​​free evenings seemed to be doomed to failure. But as the months-long experiment unfolded, something unexpected happened. Both groups have completely changed their views. By the end of the experiment, all the consultants who participated in it wanted to have days off. And it was not only that they liked to take care of themselves, communicate with friends and family, but also that their work became much more productive.

Communications between consultants have become more effective, the quality of work with clients has improved. Participants noted that in addition to these close benefits, they also gained greater confidence in the long term of their work. According to the researchers, “After only five months, those consultants who experimented with time off were more optimistic about their work situation in all respects than their non-experimental counterparts.”

BCG consultants found that it was not only the number of hours spent on work that mattered, but also the quality of the work itself. They worked 20 percent less time, but achieved much more and felt better at the same time. If the BCG consultants - along with top athletes, thinkers and creatives - dare to take a break, so can you. It's not easy, the turn may seem quite sharp. But we guarantee that as soon as you start applying the strategies in this book, including rest in the plan for the day, week, year, your productivity and well-being will improve. […]

Give to return

Burnout usually hits us at the most inopportune moment. If you are an athlete, then you may have been approaching the peak of your form. If you are a businessman, then you may have just achieved a new promotion, for which you went out of your way. If you are an artist, you may have been nearing the completion of your masterpiece. And suddenly you realize that you just can't work anymore. You have lost drive, passion and interest. You are burnt out.

Burnout is closely related to the fight/flight stress response. After a long period of stress, the "flight" response kicks in, requiring us to run away from the source of the stress, whatever it may be. Burnout is very common among people who strive to get more out of themselves. This is because constant growth and progress requires that a person puts himself under increasing stress for days, weeks, months and years. As we wrote in the first section, preventing burnout is about switching between periods of stress and rest. But even if we don't neglect rest by getting too close to breaking point (remember that's the whole point), we run the risk of crossing a thin line. And when that happens, we feel burnt out.

Traditionally, burnout victims are advised to take extended vacations. Sometimes this can help, but often it's not the solution. A potential Olympic champion can hardly just stop training for six months before the qualifying round, and most of us cannot stop working for three months. Not to mention the fact that many, having abandoned the business that led to their burnout, risk losing touch with it and never returning to it.

"We live in a culture that celebrates exhausting and relentless work, even if the science says it's pointless"

But there is also good news. Behavioral science offers an alternative approach to burnout that doesn't require long vacations and even offers some chance to increase your drive and motivation. We will call this practice “Giving to get back.” It is based on a study by UCLA psychology professor Shelly Taylor and Wharton School psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania Adam Grant. The essence of the “Give to Return” idea is that during burnout, instead of quitting your job, you need to do it with even more energy, but in a different way.

“Differently” means to start “giving back” in your industry. This can be done in different ways, for example, it can be volunteer work or teaching. The main thing is that you should concentrate on helping others. Helping others activates the reward and pleasure centers in our brains. Not only will this make you feel better, but it will also help reconnect work and positive emotions. Therefore, this practice often leads to a surge of energy and motivation. In his New York Times bestseller book Take or Give?*, Adam Grant cites research in everything from teaching to nursing to prove that self-sacrifice is a powerful antidote to burnout.

But isn't the job of a teacher or a nurse originally one of the helping professions? Theoretically yes. That is why they primarily attract people who are naturally inclined to care for others. But, as any teacher or nurse will tell you, it's easy to lose sight of the direct impact on students or patients under the weight of day-to-day concerns and feel like a small cog in an inefficient machine. That is why it turned out that if you give teachers and nurses the opportunity to directly help people and see the visible results of this help, their burnout is reduced. Grant writes that “confidence in immediate impact protects against stress by preventing exhaustion,” so he advises those who are stressed at work to actively seek out opportunities to personally help people. […]

Performance Practices

Find opportunities to help others in the context of your work. This can be an intense activity, such as coaching and teaching, or a less intense activity, such as posting tips on online forums.

The rules of this “helping others” are simple: you are doing something related to your work, and you are “giving” without expecting to get anything in return.

While the practice of helping others is very effective in preventing and recovering from burnout, you should still avoid burnout by balancing the stress with adequate rest.

We all have certain obligations in life - both at work and in our personal lives. But by taking on too much, you can be prone to emotional burnout. About the symptoms of emotional burnout, as well as how to avoid it, read our translation. articles from the Help Scout blog.

When we have to choose what to spend our time and effort on, we all have the right to decide what is best for us and defend our position. And you don't have to be afraid of it.

On the one hand, it's nice to be the person who always says yes. You can experience the craziest and most wonderful adventures. There are many such reliable people among the support staff - we like to participate in everything, solve problems, learn new things.Can we help? Can we take it on? Of course we can!

But the more we grow professionally, the more and more often new opportunities open up before us. And in order to make room in life for the things that matter to us, we need to find a balance between when to say “yes” and when it is better to overpower ourselves and say “No”, “I refuse” or “I need to think about it” .

If you want to be the master of your life and career, you need to stop always agreeing with everything and find a balance.

Why shouldn't you agree with everything?

Why shouldn't the answer be "yes" to everything? Why do we need to be careful when making decisions?

Rejection helps us avoid burnout.

Social psychologist Christina Maslach, creator of "Maslach burnout questionnaire(Maslach Burnout Inventory), describes burnout as "a psychological syndrome that includes emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and underestimation of one's own achievements." She identifies six main causes of burnout:

1. Lack of control (feeling like someone else is always at the helm)
2. Insufficient reward (feeling like you are giving more than you are receiving)
3. Lack of fairness (unbalanced or unclear system of conflict resolution or decision making)
4. Conflict of values ​​(lack of unanimity with management)
5. Overload (too many tasks hanging on you)
6. Lack of communication (feeling isolated from the team)

If you notice something from the list behind you, it may be time to think about giving up some things.

Burnout Prevention

Saying "no" can be difficult. In addition, there are many practical and emotional aspects associated with this. So how do we prevent situations that can lead to burnout? To do this, it is worth evaluating new opportunities (or reevaluating old ones) by paying attention to four key aspects: time, growth, safety and pleasure.

1. Consider your time

Before you do something new, calculate what you are spending your time on right now. To do this, you can take a sheet of paper and divide it into three parts. In the first column, write your commitment. In the second column, answer the question "How long does this last?", and in the third, "Do I want to do this?".

Such records can be kept for everything - family, work, self-care. This gives you the opportunity to evaluate all your commitments, as well as a better understanding of what you have achieved, what you are spending time on now, and what you would like to spend time on in the future.

Keeping track of time will help you avoid value conflicts and work overload, two items on Maslach's list. Before you make a new commitment, it's worth considering how much time it will take, whether you have time for it, and whether it's something you want to spend your time on.

2. Identify opportunities for growth

It's nice to be approached because of your knowledge and skills: "Hello, you are a very smart and incredibly gifted person, would you like to join the club of other very smart and incredibly gifted people and be very smart and incredibly gifted together? Of course yes!

But wait... what happens after you give your consent? What is your reason for wanting to do this? It's good to feel appreciated, but is it worth it to sit at the next board meeting, or to leave your family behind and travel across the country to the next conference? The author of the original article found herself in this situation: she came home from work, cooked dinner, put the children to bed, and then worked all night for the benefit of the team, from which she did not receive much return.

Before agreeing, ask yourself how you can apply your knowledge and how you can learn something for yourself. It's good when you can say, "I'm here because I can put my unique knowledge and skills to good use, and also because I want to develop in this area of ​​my life or career."

What do you want to achieve in life or in your career, and will this opportunity help you achieve this? Having dealt with this issue, you can avoid the second reason for burnout from Maslach's list - the feeling that you are not getting enough reward for your efforts. The time and effort you put into making a commitment should be rewarded in the form of growth and development in your key area.

3. Assess your safety

For a productive team, the most important thing is psychological safety. Harvard researcher Amy Edmonson defines psychological security as "the feeling that you won't be judged, rejected, or punished for speaking up." You should learn how the decision-making in the team (and how things are with psychological safety) before joining this team.

How is work organized in a team, how does communication take place, how do colleagues cope with disagreements, conflicts, insults and threats? If it is customary for the team to hold conferences, are there accepted norms of behavior? If issues are resolved in an advisory board, is there a procedure for filing and resolving complaints? Who has worked on this project before? Where are these specialists now? What do they think of the project?

It's worth doing a little research here. It's better to ask people in advance and avoid feeling a lack of control and lack of fairness, two other causes of burnout.

4. Have fun!

If it doesn't make you happy, don't do it.

Here the statement speaks for itself.

Find your tribe.

Find people who understand and support you, in whose behavior you can see a reflection of yourself.

When evaluating a new opportunity, ask yourself if it will help you find your people, "your tribe"? If you can give a positive answer to this, then you will avoid the last cause of burnout - lack of communication in the team.

Take back control of your own time

While the above tips seem to be pretty simple, why do we all too often feel like we're losing control of our own work and our own time anyway? There may be several reasons:

• An exaggerated sense of responsibility/duty. "I really need them" or "I can do it" .
• Fear of being isolated. "If I refuse them this time, what if they will no longer ask me for anything?
• Ignorance of alternatives. "Do I have a choice?

What else can you do to get rid of the tendency to say "yes" in situations where it's better to say "no"?

• Self test. Check back regularly to see how you are doing. Keep track of time, even when nothing new is coming. Is your career progressing the way you want it to? If not, it's probably time to change something or quit. If yes, then it is probably worth looking for new opportunities.
• Collective verification. Regularly check how things are going in the team. Hold open meetings, honestly discuss the four main issues - time, growth, safety and pleasure. Give opportunities to colleagues on a regular basis to consider new ideas, discuss problems and make decisions together, and so on.
• If you are a leader yourselfcreate and encourage an atmosphere of respect in the teamto the time, growth needs, safety and enjoyment of your employees.

The ability to maintain balance is not given to us from birth, and it cannot be received from someone as a gift. It is up to us to maintain balance in our lives. We need to regularly assess our commitments on our own or with colleagues - what those commitments are, how long they take, and whether we want to continue doing what we are doing.

There is nothing wrong with being infallible. If that's the kind of person you are, that's great! Just be aware of the symptoms of burnout. And when a new opportunity opens up in front of you, evaluate it on four aspects - time, growth, security and pleasure.

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