One of the most distressing warning signs that someone may be emotionally and physically burnt out is if you start neglecting your self-care and socially withdraw from others. There are concerning changes in your eating and/or sleeping patterns. You stop making an effort to groom yourself or look good, and you tend to spend most of your time by yourself doing nothing because you’re so easily exhausted by even the simplest of tasks. The difference between being burnt out and laziness is stark: you weren’t always this way.
These changes happened gradually.
Finally, but perhaps most importantly, something you should know about burnout is that it develops in stages. All the points mentioned before—losing interest and motivation, especially in things we used to love, feeling detached from yourself and disconnected from everything around you, socially withdrawing and neglecting your self-care—won’t just happen overnight. Studies show that there are actually five major stages of burnout, each with increasing degrees of severity: the honeymoon phase, the onset of stress, chronic stress, burnout, and habitual burnout. Many people begin to experience symptoms as early as the second phase, when there is still a moderate amount of stress, but optimism, interest, motivation, and performance may already start declining. By the time you reach the fifth and final stage, burnout has already become so embedded in your life that the persistent mental and physical fatigue becomes more intense and harder to treat, making you more vulnerable to developing depression and anxiety. Spotting the signs of burnout early makes it easier to get help and recover from it. That’s why it’s so important to raise awareness about burnout instead of simply dismissing it as laziness like most people tend to do.
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