7 Tactics to Avoid Burnout and Maintain Consistenty with Achieving your Goals
Here are some of the things you can do to find the motivation to progress in your new goals:
1. Break bad habits first
Some of your existing behaviours can undermine your newly-found goals. For example, if you want to start falling asleep at 10:30 PM, then watching TV until 9:45 PM is probably a bad idea since you expose yourself to a lot of blue light. A great tactic to stay away from your harmful behaviours, especially at the beginning of your journey, is running a journal or using post-it notes. You could write in your notebook every day before going to sleep to reflect on your habit-building and habit-breaking journey. Or, you could even stick a post-in near your TV to remind you why you’ve decided to avoid screen time late in the evening.
2. Take regular breaks to recharge
Burnout happens because we don’t know how much effort and energy we have to put in to progress quickly and achieve peak performance. We often assume that if we work harder than others we will reach our goals faster. While this might work short term, eventually it will lead to exhaustion. That’s why it’s so important to find time to recharge regularly to give our brains and bodies a few moments of rest.
It’s key to take breaks at the right time. If you’re most energetic in the morning, then that’s when you should work towards hitting your goals. Irrespective of whether it’s career progression or getting more muscle mass, tackle your most challenging tasks first when you’re the most productive. When your energy levels start to go down, take a breather – go for a walk or lie down and listen to some relaxing music.
3. Talk to other people
When we’re burnt out, every little task we have to do seems like a massive challenge, and it’s hard to find the energy and motivation to deal with it. But, believe it or not, we have a lot more control over stress than we think. Sometimes all it takes to feel better is to talk to our friends or family. Social interactions are the best remedy for stress relief. Having a face-to-face conversation with someone whom we trust and who is a good listener will quickly calm down our nervous system.
How so? Social support has a positive impact on balancing hormones. It increases oxytocin levels, which decreases anxiety and activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which has a relaxing effect on us.
Bear in mind that the person you talk to doesn’t have to find a solution to your problems, all they have to do is listen to you empathetically, without judgement.
4. Have an accountability partner
If you want to stay consistent, then it’s worth finding an accountability partner. Someone who will hold you responsible and encourage you towards hitting your goals. Whenever you lose motivation, they might give you a little pep talk to bring you back on the right track. It has to be someone whom you trust and who you won’t get offended by when they tell you off for not trying hard enough.
They might call you once a week to ask how you’re doing. Knowing that you’ll have to report on your progress might keep you more motivated to stay consistent and avoid procrastination.
5. Turn your goal into a habit
If you manage to turn your goal into a habit, you’ll have a higher chance of maintaining consistency, because you’ll approach it differently. A habit is something we do without even thinking about it. Here is how to do it:
● Write down your goal. It will be easier for you to visualise it and, ultimately, to achieve it.
● Figure out the steps you have to take to reach your goal – it’s OK if there are a few, write them down. For example, if you wanted to boost your strength you might have to go to a gym to lift weights, have the right diet, etc. These will be your habits.
● Then you’ll need to understand how often you’ll have to perform each habit to achieve your desired result, for example, hitting the gym 3-4 times a week.
● Initially focus on one habit for 30 days and ignore the remaining ones.
● If there are a few habits that you’ll have to develop, start on the second one after a month. Concentrate on one habit at a time, until it’s fully established.
● After you develop all the key habits, your goal will be on autopilot.
6. Stay well nourished
Eating well can help you boost your motivation levels and help avoid burnout even when your goals have nothing to do with physical exercises. Your brain needs nutrients and energy to keep building new neural connections and redirect your attention to the behaviours that matter to you the most.
Usually, just to maintain its “standard” operations, your brain will use up around 20% of your total daily calorie intake. When you’re challenging yourself with learning new skills or practising the willpower to stay away from harmful behaviours, it might need even more nutrients to adjust to the new circumstances.
If you follow a monotonous diet, then your brain won’t have the fuel to support your ambitions. When you constantly struggle with a lack of energy, it will eventually lead to burnout. So, pay extra attention to what you eat whenever you’re challenging yourself with a new goal.
7. Don’t punish yourself for messing up occasionally
Lastly, don’t beat yourself up if you hit a rough patch here or there. We all have better and worse days, so if you mess up occasionally, remember that there’s always tomorrow! There is a popular ‘80-20 rule’, which means that if you stay consistent 80% of the time, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Also, if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, consider taking smaller steps to avoid burnout. For example, if you can’t dedicate 30 minutes to your goal every day, perhaps 15 minutes will be more realistic? Prioritise consistency over drowning in too much ambition.
