4 Ways To Know If You’re Burned Out

Balanced Growth Counseling

What does it mean to be burned out? What does it actually feel like and how are you supposed to know if you’re burned out?

Hi, I’m Holly Grupe, owner and a therapist at Balanced Growth Counseling, where we help anxious, depressed, and burned-out women confidently live a life they love.

So, here are four ways to know if you’re burned out:

First, Feeling lost

If you’re feeling like you don’t have any idea what to do next, how to prioritize your needs and function at the capacity you’re used to, that can be a good indicator that you’re burnt out. Feeling lost often means you’ve lost a connection to experiencing your life and are defaulting into what you think you “should” be doing or just trying to keep up with what everyone around you is doing.

Second: Decision making is more difficult

When you’re experiencing burnout things start to jumble together, and it’s hard to keep multiple factors in mind at once. This signals that you’re on overload. It’s okay to outsource some decision making to friends and family, but when you start to feel paralyzed on what to do without someone else's input it makes it nearly impossible to feel like an active participant in your own life.

A third sign of burnout is Being exhausted

We aren’t always going to show up the same every day. Some days we’re more focused and have more energy and some days we are more distracted, but if you’re noticing that you’re consistently sluggish and run down, it could be a sign of burnout. Constantly being in the to-dos of life is exhausting. Without a way to really mentally recharge it’s very challenging to move back into a more energized state.

A fourth sign of burn out is Numbing out

One of the most challenging parts of burnout is feeling numbed out to yourself, friends, family and the world around you. This disconnection makes it hard to care sometimes. If you’ve ever lived next to a train or freeway, eventually you stop noticing the noise. Numbing out is a way of managing the overload, but it could also leave you feeling lonely and may be an indicator of burn out.

Burnout is your systems way of turning on your warning lights and letting you know something has to change.