Recent information has come out about "Work From Home Burnout." I have long studied the ill effects of job burnout and the need for work-life balance in our lives, but when you are working from home, the lines start to blur and studies show more and more remote workers are working longer hours and not taking time off for a mental--or physical--recharge.
In this episode, I offer some tips on how to avoid WFH burnout. I hope you will find them useful.
I am also offering the link to the stress assessment I mentioned in the episode along with a link to a cheat sheet on stress management and my ebook on stress management. They are all FREE! Enjoy.
To download the free Stress Assessment, click here: https://kittyboitnott.lpages.co/stress-assessment/.
To download the "Cheat Sheet on Stress Management Strategies," click here: https://kittyboitnott.lpages.co/cheat-sheet-on-stress-management/.
To download my free eBook, Stressed, Stretched, and Just Plain Overwhelmed, click here: http://teachersintransition.com/ebook.
Have questions? Contact me at kittyboitnott@gmail.com.
Recent information has come out about "Work From Home Burnout." I have long studied the ill effects of job burnout and the need for work-life balance in our lives, but when you are working from home, the lines start to blur and studies show more and more remote workers are working longer hours and not taking time off for a mental--or physical--recharge.
In this episode, I offer some tips on how to avoid WFH burnout. I hope you will find them useful.
I am also offering the link to the stress assessment I mentioned in the episode along with a link to a cheat sheet on stress management and my ebook on stress management. They are all FREE! Enjoy.
To download the free Stress Assessment, click here: https://kittyboitnott.lpages.co/stress-assessment/.
To download the "Cheat Sheet on Stress Management Strategies," click here: https://kittyboitnott.lpages.co/cheat-sheet-on-stress-management/.
To download my free eBook, Stressed, Stretched, and Just Plain Overwhelmed, click here: http://teachersintransition.com/ebook.
Have questions? Contact me at kittyboitnott@gmail.com.
Are you a teacher who's feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? Do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing some other kind of job or perhaps pursuing a whole different career, but you don't know what else you're even qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search. You just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you're not alone. My name is Kitty Boitnott. I'm a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt-out teachers just like you deal not only with the stress and overwhelm of your day-to-day job, but to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. Join me for"Teachers in Transition." In some episodes, I'll be speaking to stress management techniques and how you can manage your stress on a day to day basis. In other episodes, I'll be talking about career transition. What tools do you need to be successful in a job search when you're moving from one career into a totally different track? These are questions that you need answers to and I can help you find those answers. My name is Kitty Boitnott. Welcome to"Teachers in Transition." Do you remember when work- life balance was something that we yearned for? And we thought that the idea of working from home sounded like the ideal situation. My name is Kitty Boitnott and I'm a stress management coach and a career transition coach and the host and moderator of teachers in transition the podcast and the YouTube channel. Welcome to episode 76. If you've listened to this podcast in the past, you know that I alternate topics one week, I talk about stress management and on alternating weeks, I talk about career transition strategies. I specialize in working with teachers who are burnt out and ready to look for a new career new line of work this week. I want to talk a little bit about the new, relatively new phenomenon of work from home burnout. It's a thing. Now, job burnout has always been a thing. And in fact, it was a severe case of job burnout that led to my leaving education after 37 years and starting this business. So I know that burnout is very, very real, and it's not something you want to play with because in my case, I was completely and totally exhausted on every level. And I'm only lucky that I did not wind up sick because of it. So I want to urge you to take this concept of work from home burnout seriously, because many of us are working from home and the pandemic and the economic uncertainty and the social unrest has all like a perfect storm built up to create more stress than usual, more anxiety than usual. And add to that. This notion that because you're working from home, you have to be working all the time. It creates the sense of burnout. So I want to suggest to you some things that you might be able to do to avoid if you haven't hit that point yet, avoid work from home burnout or to at least minimize it. Now not everybody's going to be continuing to work from home. I recognize some offices or bringing their colleagues back on a at least limited basis. A lot of the schools are starting up and many of them are starting remotely, which means you're working from home teaching, or you may be going into the classroom where the kids are there, but you're teaching in your classroom where you have your materials handy, or you may be teaching in a hybrid situation. And there are parts of the country where the kids are just coming back to school. Like there wasn't a pandemic to be worried about, and every everything's quote unquote normal. But if you are working from home, whether you're a mid, mid management level, and you've been told you work from home, as much as you can. I know at the university where I adjunct all of the professors and faculty, folks, and office, people have been asked to stay home when they can to work from home when they can, and to only come on campus, if it's absolutely necessary, because they're trying to keep the campus in something of a bubble. So regardless of whatever your situation is, if you are working from home more than not, then here are some things that I would recommend that you do in order to minimize the danger of creating work from home burnout for yourself. And the first thing of course is to create a workspace now, depending on where you live and depending on the number of people in your household that may be easier or more difficult. It just depends. In my case, I live alone and I have a two bedroom townhouse. So I created an office space in the second bedroom and I have the entire space dedicated to my office. So it's easy for me to walk in and walk out and leave it at the end of the day. It may not be that simple for you. You may not have a spare room that you can set up as an office. You may need to look for a nook or a cubby somewhere, but I would recommend is that you not take over family space and let work intrude on your family or your family time. So create a space that's just for work and then fix it so that you can walk away from it at the end of your work day. And then along with that, you want to create an, a work schedule that allows for when you are starting and when you will be done so that you close the computer and walk away from it at five o'clock or whatever the time might be for you. One of the things that causes teacher burnout is not being able to turn it off. You know, whenever you're not teaching, whenever you're not in front of the classroom, you're planning, you're grading, you're, you're getting prepped for some new something that's going on. It's hard to turn it off. Even on the weekends. You know, I, I remember doing a seminar for a group of teachers one year on the topic of stress management, and I offered them a self assessment. And I have a self assessment that I'll offer at, in the show notes for this episode. And one of the young women in the group created a 20. She had a 25 on her stress assessment, which is, I mean, there were only 32 questions on the, on the assessment. She, she scored 25 and then she admitted that she felt guilty about being at this conference over the weekend because she had so much schoolwork today. So don't fall into that trap. There will always be stuff to do, but don't feel like you have to be doing it every single waking moment, because that's not good for your mental health, not good for your physical health either, but certainly not good for your mental health. So create boundaries, set a start time and an end time and walk away. Don't strive for perfection. You're not ever going to achieve it anyway. So why, why strive for it do strive for doing the best you can for sure, but forget about striving for perfection and then set a schedule and stick to it, arrive on time, leave on time. Be sure you work in some exercise every day, because that will help you to stay stronger mentally and physically, and it will make you feel better as well. It'll create, uh, endorphins that will flood your bloodstream and make you feel better. So do some kind of exercise, whether it's yoga, lifting weights, some sort of aerobics walking, running, walking is always good. Don't forget to eat well. Don't load up on a lot of sticky sugary snacks, eat fresh fruit fruits, fresh vegetables for the nutrients that you need in your body to stay well and alert. When you turn off your work, turn on to socializing with your family or friends. And if you live alone, be sure to schedule in some kind of social time with a friend, a quick phone call with someone, be in touch with someone so that you don't feel so isolated and alone. The pandemic has certainly contributed to a lot of feelings of being alone, feeling anxious about not being able to go out and get out and, and be sociable. So create opportunities for yourself to check in with your family and friends socialize that way. You may not be able to socialize in person, but you can certainly get together through the magic of technology. At the end of the day, the important thing is for you to, to practice self care. And no one can do that for you, but yourself. You're an adult. So don't blame it on other people that you're not making the time that you need to make, to take care of yourself. If you're beginning to feel symptoms of burnout, which include not being able to focus, not being able to stay on a tack, not being able to complete tasks on time, if you're experiencing any of those symptoms, then you need to pay attention to the possibility that you're already experiencing work from home burnout. You can find articles about other ways that you might be able to manage your work from home burnout. But the main thing that the best thing to do is to try to avoid it. So create that space for yourself, set those boundaries for yourself, take care of yourself, practice self care every single day, and I'll see you next week. So there you have it, an episode of"Teachers in Transition." I hope you enjoyed the information and I hope you'll plan to come back. Please subscribe to"Teachers in Transition" so that you can be alerted of future episodes. And let me know if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to specifically cover in a future episode. I'm more than happy to help with individual questions as well. So email me at KittyBoitnott@BoitnottCoaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. Hi, I'm Kitty Boitnott and this is"Teachers in Transition."