4 Ways to Address Burn Out and Lead a Balanced Life

In 2018, I was burnt out. I had 12–14 hour work days most of the year, was never home due to back-to-back business trips, and my to-do list governed my day to day. My life felt like a race with no finish line and I was always exhausted to the point that I wasn’t able to accomplish simple day to day tasks. It was a terrible way to live and the worst thing about it was that at the time, I thought it was OK. It wasn’t until I was too deep into a demanding and overwhelming schedule that I realised my mental health was deteriorating and that things needed to change.

I went into 2019 with one goal in mind: to never let it get to that point again. I knew that in order to create a balanced schedule, one that’s both manageable and sustainable, I was going to have to redesign my life. From learning to rest to improving my prioritisation skills, something needed to be done if I was serious about avoiding a similar situation in the future.

The trick however, was not in completely overhauling my schedule from one day to the next. It was in making small tiny adjustments in my day to day to reverse what had become an unbearable and rushed way to live. After all, the decisions that had led to the situation I was in also happened in small incremental steps. And that’s true for many things in life. The situations we are in tend to be the result of many small decisions we make over a period of time. We don’t go from engaged to burnt out over night. It is almost always a gradual transition that we can manage before it gets out of hand.

Like many of you, I am a multi-faceted human being who wears many hats. However, lately, as the to-dos have been piling up and the exhaustion has started to linger for longer than I would like, I’ve forced myself to go back to the lessons I learnt back in 2019 that helped me design a happy manageable life. As I continue to learn how to best balance multiple priorities, these lessons have been powerful reminders of the adjustments I need to make to get my life back on track. I hope they’ll help you too.

1. Moderation.

You know what they say, too much of anything is harmful. In fact, too much of anything is the opposite of consciously leading a balanced life. Going from 0 to 100 is the simplest way to set yourself up for…