#012- The Reality of Burnout

Back with a solo episode this time around. I feel like burnout is such a common word to hear nowadays and I felt like making an episode out of how it is relevant to me, for better or for worse. Enjoy this short listen, and thank you for your support!

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to back to another episode of the Mortal Life podcast. Today's just a solo episode. So it's just me. And it's going to be short and sweet, probably uh 20 minutes or less. But um something been weighing pretty heavy on my heart recently, and because it's become very relevant in my life recently, and that is burnout. Burnout is um how I would describe it is the physical, mental, and emotional over exertion of a person that comes from internal and external factors, um, such as stress, relationships. Um well, I mean, I I guess I I would say it's all rooted in stress at the end of the day. Because there's there's a certain threshold of stress we have as humans, and if we go over that threshold, that is what I would call burnout. Just that kind of sense of I don't want to say numbness, I it's very hard for me to explain. But it's become very relevant to me recently because I haven't in this way experienced this form of burnout yet, and I'm experiencing it now, and it's this sense of you know, having things that need to get done, and even things that I'm passionate about and I care about, and they're just things are just not getting done. It brings me to my first point, which is I feel like today's society we just kind of normalize this like grindset and just like go, go, go, never stop. You know, you gotta get rich, gotta gotta be successful, gotta have a million dollars in your bank account before you turn 20. And it's like that's great. I I I would never shoe someone away from following their dreams, but sometimes you just gotta take a step back, man. Like, time will pass anyway, you know. If if if you're following your dreams, and if if you're doing something that's especially the things that are exceptionally difficult that don't yield much return at first, um, yeah, it's pretty easy to get burnt out if you pour everything into, let's say, social media. I've been posting more on social media, so this is just kind of why I started to think about it. If your main thing is you want to start a social media account and you want to grow this, you have to post multiple times every day on multiple different platforms, stay engaged with your apps, good edits, good content, things that people want to watch for a multitude of reasons, and you have to do that consistently over a very long period of time. But the thing is, if you start out with, say, I don't know, I would give the average account that is just starting to post, I would say you have a couple hundred followers, maybe 200, 300 followers. At first, you could post for literally a week straight, and you could get one follower. It's happened to me before. You know, I started posting consistently, like literally every day, at least once a day on TikTok, about five months ago, four months ago, and I've gained about 200 followers. That's a little more than a follower a day, but I have had some I don't know, I don't want to say viral videos, but videos that did well for me for the size of my account. And they yielded me 50, 70 followers, like from both of those videos respectively. And like that's great, but like other than that, it's hard to see growth at first because you're going from like you start at 300 followers, you post every day. Like, you probably commit, I don't know, five minutes to a TikTok post, but you post five times a day. That's 25 minutes a day. Then you spend another five, ten minutes checking it multiple times a day, you know, engaging with comments, making sure that your videos are getting pushed out, sending it to your friends. That takes another 10-15 minutes out of your day. So you're can you're devoting a half hour to an hour of your day that you would otherwise not be devoting to social media, to social media to get at what feels like at the time, and I don't want to sound ungrateful, because I'm grateful for every single one of my 648 followers, but it gets hard because you it's not a tangible number. Like when you think of oh, like my favorite influencer or my favorite uh public personality, like you follow all these people and you look and it's like, oh, they have 10 million followers, and I just went from 600 to 640 in a month. So by my math, that would take I don't know, 10,000 years to get to that level. And in reality, that's that's just that's not how it is. It's like you go viral, you catch a wave, you go viral again, and then again, and then that becomes the new norm, and it's like a skyrocket, it's like an exponential growth kind of thing. But anyway, all that is to say it doesn't happen right away, it doesn't happen fast, it's not supposed to, because if it was supposed to, everyone would do it, and then there would be no point in doing it because everyone would do it. Um so that was something that I've been struggling with lately, and I just kind of thought that you know talking myself through it might make me feel better about it because who am I to say that I tried it for five months and it I didn't whatever go viral that it like it didn't work? Because that's just not true. Like most people do spend um multiple years trying to, you know, grow a social media account. The other thing I want to talk about about burnout is how it can kind of sneak up on you. Because I'll along with the social media, I've also I'm also in my second to last semester as an undergraduate college student, and my classes are not easy, you know, they're not they're not well, they're hard, but they're not like gut-wrenching like studying 10 hours a day. But like, you know, I commit a lot of my time to it, and I I firmly believe that college semesters could not be longer than like a little bit longer than what they are now. 16 week semesters is what I have. I seriously do not think I could do much longer than that. And maybe I'd build up a tolerance, play devil's advocate, whatever. But I firmly believe that I am like so checked out, and like I have finals next week. It's Saturday right now. I just see, I don't even know what day it is anymore, man. Um, it's Saturday right now. Next week is my finals, and then I'm and then I'm done. I'm taking an online class in the summer, but like whatever. It's it's only one class. Um but yeah, like it I would say I got to like week 12 and I was just like just going to school, doing my thing, staying my routine, you know, went on a vacation, that probably helped. I had spring break, and you know, they they have breaks in there for you, so like you don't, you know, it's not like super mentally taxing, but like now that I'm at the end, I I I'm like checked out pretty much entirely, but I still have stuff that needs to get done. Like I have a bunch of homework due today and tomorrow. That'll get done, but like you know, I it's it's hard to like find the will to do it, and I don't want to sound like I I know I probably sound like a wuss when I'm saying this, but it's just I feel like you you go through this schedule, you know, for I've been going through it for three, three and a half months consistently now since the second semester of school started, but it's like you go through this without even realizing it, and then all of a sudden you're just in the dumps. And like I feel like there's been a couple times where I would like let my room get super messy throughout the week because I was busy or whatever, or I wouldn't get my laundry done for a while, and it's just like that stuff like sneaks up on you, and I I need to like take care of it, otherwise it'll just it'll just enter my mind and I won't be able to get it out. Like I won't be able to get it done, but I will start stressing about it and I won't be able to stop. So I like I seriously don't know how that happens. Like, I let I I I see my room clean and I see my room at every step it is before it gets clean, before it gets like dirty, I would say, but I don't do anything about it. I'm not like, oh, if I don't, if I pick this up, I realize that if I don't pick the next one up, my sweatshirt or whatever it is, if I don't pick this up, my room will get dirty eventually. But I'm like, oh it's not dirty yet, don't need to worry about it. I'll do it tomorrow. God, that's so easy to just do that. Like an inf an infinite number of times, and I see I I I I really see how people like there there are people that become like for real, like hermits, and like they never leave their house, but somehow their house is still dirty because they spend all their time thinking about how dirty the house is and it cripples them emotionally, and they can't actually clean their house. Like, I get that. I never understood it, but I I I'm there now, I understand it, and I think that's one of the main reasons I'm making this episode is because I don't want to be that person. Like, the thing is, stress is always going to be in your life, and I think stress is a good thing. Overall, I think it's a good thing, because stress, we've evolved from it to be able to benefit from it, you know? Like when we were cavemen, uh like hunting, like if there's a tiger running at you, like your stress needs to be high so you can like realize, oh, I have to like run away or I'm gonna die. Like it is it is a barbaric evolutional evolutionary primal response to external stimuli. But I also think that it's only helpful because you're able to build a tolerance to it from stress, like by doing hard things, A, that makes B doing hard things becomes easier because your tolerance to stress is higher. And I just it's just so hard to gauge. Like we always talk about being in being in a professional setting and like having to find good ways to control your stress, and not everyone's you know, first thought is like a helpful way, you know. Sometimes they're very destructive, alcohol, drugs, stuff like that. It's like it's like I I get it, man. And I I want everybody listening to this to know that like I I get it, you know what I mean? Like, I get it. Coming from someone who's not perfect, has had good habits in the past, has broken good habits, but has also broken bad habits. Like, I feel like I'm a pretty middle of the road person, you know. I I get it, I can totally see both ends of it. Like, it's it's terrifying, and burnout is just the accumulation of stress over a long period of time and not being able to alleve it, to relieve it. It's like when we talk about you're exercising, and the more you exercise, the more uh like lactate and hydrogen ions build up in your muscle, making it harder to contract your muscle. That's what like the burning sensation is when you're training. That's literally like burnout is when you hit like we talk about lactate threshold. When you you're there's your body has to shuttle the lactate out so you can continue exercising, but at a certain intensity, a certain point, your body cannot shuttle that lactate out. And the accumulation is faster than the alleviation, and that is what we call fatigue. And not burnout, but that's like that's when you have to, that's when you hit failure. Burnout is literally that, but just with stress, like it is a buildup of stress more than what you can alleviate from your system before more is influxed, and like you're just burnt out, like there's no other way to describe it. You you cannot function, you cannot stick to your daily habits, and I think that's such an important point to nail down because if you want to like redefine yourself, you can't just decide to do it and then just let it be done. That's why so many people quit 75 hard because they have none of these habits, and like even close to these habits, like someone that doesn't read at all is now reading 15, 20 minutes a day, every day, they're not gonna be able to do that. Someone who doesn't drink any water or like you know, has to drink a gallon of water every day, like no, it's gonna be you're gonna do it grilly good for two days, you're gonna get burnt out, and then it's gonna be 10 p.m. on the third day, and you're still trying to do your outside workout, your inside workout, um, you have to read two more pages of your book, and you have to drink a half a gallon of water in two hours, and then your sleep is messed up because you drank so much water and now you're up being all night. That was a really bad tangent. But what I mean to say is take your growth slowly. Because if you don't control it, it will control you. And a good habit is only as strong as you are consistent. So if you're thinking about taking on a new endeavor in life, make sure you clean some space out of your room, that being your mind, and um maybe hire a cleaning crew. Cleaning crew. And what I mean by cleaning crew is a stress alleviator. You know? Go for walks with your friends. Um get in touch with your parents more. Uh do the things that you love that aren't harmful to you. Um, and obviously everything is harmful in in the right dosage, but like if you enjoy playing video games, set aside time for you to play video games so that you don't go so long without it that you just end up binging on it and then not being able to control yourself and just like staying inside all day. Take it slow. Know that whatever outcome you want is there, but your your methods might have to change. Because ideally, if we wanted to just adapt a habit, we could just pluck it in our brain, go out and execute, and then stay consistent. It seems that easy, right? But it's just not that like one thing I've been really struggling with the past few weeks is that I'm not a robot. I'm a human and I function as a human does with stress and emotions and relationships and things that I have to keep intact, or else like everything's gonna fall apart. And yeah, like, yeah, it's scary, but it also is what gives you life. So the next time you feel super stressed, or you know, you feel like you might be on the verge of burnout, take it safe. Take a workout off, take a day off. Um, the people that are the most successful are the people that stay in something for the longest, not the people that go the hardest for a month and then quit. And uh yeah, there's a spot up there for everybody. But burnout is the number one thing that causes people literally to lose their jobs, things that they've wanted to do their entire life. They finally get into their job and they've studied so hard, and they just end up getting burnt out from the amount of work that they've had to do or the emotions that they see at work. Like it's a scary thing, and it's something that we all need to learn to not only recognize but prepare for because you know, everyone's probably gonna go through it at some point or another. So you might as well develop a good method for getting out of it if you find yourself in it. Because like I said, it sneaks up on you. Um yeah. I don't think I have too much else to say on this, but I felt it. It was uh weighing pretty heavy on me, heavy on me to talk about it. And I haven't released an episode in like two weeks. I'm still I'm still finding guests, so we have a couple episodes coming, so stay tuned. But yeah, I'm just reminding myself that you know I am present. I'm I'm grateful to be here, I'm grateful to be alive. I'm so happy to be alive, and I feel like sometimes when we're so stressed out, we forget how grateful we should be that we are here. Because there's people that aren't, and there's people that get removed from this earth every single day, just or unjust, what whatever you want to call it. So be grateful that you have a place on earth and um take advantage of it. Don't let it take advantage of you. Alright. Uh I'm gonna end it here. So uh stay tuned for future episodes. Um I'm I'm gonna get this edited and uh hopefully up by like Monday or so. So alright. Listen to this uh on our next car ride to work or uh study session. That's all. Love ya.