Have you decided what you want to achieve in life?
Then you need to take care of yourself to get all the way there.
Set limits on your time, give yourself time for rest and recreation—prioritize your health and well-being.
Every week I meet exhausted people in therapy and people who want to optimize their performance through coaching.
Burnout and high performance are like two ends of a continuum: hopelessness and paralysis on one side—meaning and flow on the other.
Burnout is a built-up energy debt to oneself: no matter how much you sleep or rest, you cannot pay it back for several months—an energy debt you start paying back only after you stop borrowing. Paying back means figuring out how we ended up in the red and creating habits that ensure we end up in the black: good sleep, rest, and recreation – every day. Here, therapy for burnout resembles coaching for high performance.
Sleep, Rest and Recreation
We need sleep, rest, and recreation every day. Then we have to work too.
Good sleep is almost the same thing as mental health. As soon as it doesn’t work for a few days, we get stressed and unable to perform. I have written about how to fix sleep in a previous post.
Rest is shorter breaks that break off from the repetitive and restore energy, like a movement break if your work is sedentary, and focusing attention through a short meditation if you are doing several things at once.
Recreation is the joyful and rewarding activities that give new strength, meaning, and motivation to life. If you have a creative profession, you may be one of the lucky ones who gets the recreation you need at work.
Finding meaning in one’s life and work is important for both health and performance: For example, if you love hard rock, you can listen to it at a higher volume without damaging your hearing than someone who doesn’t like the genre can. In the same way, you are at a lower risk of burnout if you love your work and your life.
Sustainable High Performance
Meaning and flow, sustainable high performance, become possible when we take a holistic approach to our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. When everything flows smoothly towards a meaningful goal.
It’s a tough balancing act to find the right level of performance and rest, but it pays off to invest in a sustainable solution for life as a whole – in the long run. By taking care of ourselves and our health, we can both withstand burnout and achieve high performance.
In the long run, it is not a question of either-or, but rather finding the right balance between the two ends of the continuum.
Where are you on the continuum? And what do you need to do to move in the direction of meaning and flow?
Don’t hesitate to reach out.
With love,
Thomas
