“You're overwhelmed by work and demanding clients. How can you use mindfulness strategies to prevent burnout?”
LinkedIn briefly introduced “collaborative articles”, which were questions that anyone could answer. They wound up abandoning the feature, but I enjoyed responding to them with my own brief mental health focused rants. I also only had 750 characters and no options for gifs, so this is WAY better. :)
So let’s get into it.
“You're overwhelmed by work and demanding clients. How can you use mindfulness strategies to prevent burnout?”
Let’s get this out of the way:
Mindfulness does not prevent burnout.
Say it with me: MINDFULNESS. DOES. NOT. PREVENT. BURNOUT.
It’s great as a recovery tool after you’ve handled the actual stressor. But if your workload is overflowing, your clients are yelling, and your boss keeps piling it on, no amount of breathwork is going to fix that.
We have to stop acting like mindfulness is the solution to toxic systems. It is not.
I mean really, think about this. You’re in a room and the fire alarm is going off. Is the better tactic to:
A. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths
B. GRAB A FIRE EXTINGUISHER
Yeah, I thought so. It makes no sense to sit and meditate and just kind of hope the fire will go away if you breathe deeply enough.
YOU PUT. THE FIRE. OUT.
This is exactly how I feel when people earnestly suggest deep breathing as a strategy for getting out of burnout.
So do that.
If your workload is impossible, start there. Get support. Call it out. Say no. Renegotiate deadlines. Push back on the things that are actually causing the problem. Mindfulness won’t erase structural dysfunction, and pretending it will only leaves people blaming themselves when they are exhausted.
Once you deal with the root cause, then mindfulness can help you recover. It can help you find your center again and remind your body that it is safe. It can help you heal after the fact. But it is not armor against being overworked, under-supported, and chronically stressed.
Mindfulness is not a shield. It is not prevention. It is what you reach for after you put the fire out.
The Threadsmith Group Approach
At The Threadsmith Group, we don’t believe in cookie-cutter advice. We believe in real answers for real people, backed by experience, strategy, and a healthy dose of common sense.
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