Daily Dose of English 147
Burnout
Daily Dose of English 147
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, oh, excuse me. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about burnout. Burnout is, So there's the definition that we generally use, which is when you get essentially really tired of something and it's very, very difficult to focus on that thing or to continue with that thing in some way. So it's very common, for example, in work. Maybe you really like your job, you enjoy your work, but one day you just go, ugh, I cannot think about this right now. It's really difficult. I don't wanna do this. That's probably burnout. Burnout is something that we all experience. It's very, very common. And it usually happens when you do something a lot very consistently and don't have good breaks in place or don't have a good, maybe relationship isn't the right word, but you don't have a good system in place to make sure that you're, I don't wanna say healthy with it, but like you're feeling good about it, I guess. And so a really common example is work or things that take a lot of energy or effort, even if you really like them, right? So another good common one is going to the gym or working out. A lot of people really like that and they like going to the gym every day and it's a time of satisfaction for them and they really... feel happy after going to the gym. But even if they've been going for 10 years and really consistently every so often, they're probably going to burn out. They're probably going to find a week or two where they go, I just don't want to go to the gym right now. I'm feeling very tired with it. Maybe you hurt yourself or there's something else in your life going on that makes you feel less inspired to go. So I wanna say it's not necessarily about motivation, right? We often use that word like you're not motivated to do the thing, but it's a little bit different. It's almost like you have anti-motivation to not do that thing, like that thing is not really what you wanna do. for many reasons and I'm sort of feeling that with the whole podcast right now and actually the whole Ben's Language Lab mostly because some things have just changed in my life and it's less inspiring to record them, if that makes sense. I'm still trying to push myself to do at least one every day, but it's just really difficult to push myself to do that. And so I think I'm gonna take a couple days off of recording in order to sort of reset and come back with fresh inspiration to do it. But I wanna clarify something, the way that I set up this podcast is that, that doesn't mean that you're going to experience any fewer episodes. Because I set up this podcast to be very doable and self-sustainable on purpose. So if I take a couple day break, you're probably not gonna notice any difference because currently I have, it is August 1st today as I'm recording this. And so if I, let me look at this content, go to my channel. I have episodes for the podcast all the way till the 25th now. So you're listening to this on the 25th or later of August. And I have everything scheduled until the 12th. or 13th or something like that. My point is that I have over a week of things already pre-scheduled that if I didn't do anything, you wouldn't notice. And that's something that's really important for me is doing things in a way that makes it possible to take breaks and to schedule burnout in a way. So another good example is my boss essentially plans his burnout because he knows that every so often he's going to get burned out. And so instead of assuming that he's always going to be working, he goes, okay, every six weeks or so I get pretty burned out and I'll just sort of put a week on the calendar where I'm not really going to do much new work. It usually does like a couple hours a day and then just can't focus. And, but we know that, like that's sort of built into our process, our program essentially, so that it doesn't actually cause any problems. Because the issue with burnout is that if you ignore it and you don't think it's ever going to happen to you, you can run into big problems, right? So a very common thing with burnout is that somebody gets burned out on something because they've been doing it way too much, they get really burned out and they just stop doing it entirely. instead of having a plan to come back after the burnout. So with this podcast, I'm still trying to do a few days and I'm going to plan then a few days to take some rest and to not do anything. But I'm going to have a plan for when I come back that I can hit the ground running, as we say. Because I know that it's going to happen again. I'm not trying to say that I'll never burn out, but I will have a plan to come back and it won't actually affect my project because I'm not burned out on the project itself. Ben's language lab and making comprehensible input is still very interesting to me. It's still something that I want to do a lot of, but. right now, the actual day-to-day doing of things, that is what I'm burned out on. And so I don't want that burnout to affect the larger project, right? If I just got burned out and then didn't make any more videos ever, that would be me sort of failing my own project, which I don't wanna do. And so instead, I keep in mind that, okay, things are gonna happen. That's why I wanna be about a month ahead of things. Right now, like I said, I'm only, really 12, like two weeks ahead, essentially, let's say. I have more podcast episodes recorded because those are a little bit easier, but they're also daily, so I try to keep them, be more consistent. But because I try to stay a month ahead, that means that I have potentially a lot of time to rest and then bring that back up. So essentially, my plan is to be prepared enough that I can take breaks if I need or when I want or whatever and not feel bad or not feel like I'm failing on my own project because that would just make you feel worse. So there's a a concept that I like that I first heard of in the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. which is a pretty good book. It's nothing really new. As he says, the author is pretty clear. None of the stuff that I'm writing about is necessarily new. It's just stuff that we've been saying for thousands of years, but I put it in a different way that's potentially more that clicks for different people and that sort of thing. That's kind of what all self-help is or all, even a lot of various religions and things, there's a lot of the same messages and things that we teach ourselves is to be people, but then we just package it in different ways. But anyways, the point is that the book is pretty good and one of the ideas that stuck with me is the feedback loop from hell. So the feedback loop from hell is this idea of, so the most obvious one is if you are anxious, then you get anxious, and then you feel anxious about, because you now feel anxious, that makes you feel more anxious because you feel like you're being weird, and then you feel more, it just creates this feedback loop. One thing causes you to feel another thing, which causes you to feel another thing, which causes you to feel another thing. That creates a loop, if you think about it visually. It goes from one to the other, from one to the other, around and around and around. And since it's bad stuff, it's a feedback loop from hell. And burnout can be that way. If you don't feel like working, but you sort of force yourself to, then you feel worse, and then you don't work, and then you feel worse that you're not working, and then it just kind of gets worse and worse and worse, and you eventually spiral off into something else, and you get sad about other things in your life that aren't going super well. And so avoiding those feedback loops is really important for not spiraling is what we say. To spiral is when you spiral out of control and one thing leads to another and suddenly instead of working, you are sitting on the couch every day eating potato chips or whatever, whatever the example is. And so making sure that your burnout doesn't actually create a loop is great. And that's when you can rest, you can recharge and then come back stronger than ever without Hurting yourself or your your long-term goals necessarily There's one more thing that I wanted to say was some of the feedback loop from hell. Oh because I thought of a funny There's always the joke of somebody who's afraid of their own screams Right is would be a feedback loop from hell because if you if you scream for some reason you're afraid of that Which makes you scream more which makes you more afraid which makes you scream more and that's another example of a feedback loop potentially from hell But yeah, so long story short, in the next couple days for me, I'll probably be taking a break. However, you won't notice anything. You won't notice any difference in the videos because I have planned ahead and am now going to take advantage of that planning that I did to relax and reset and come back with videos even better than ever. So yeah. That's all that I have to say on that. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned a little something. I'd be curious to know down in the comments, tell me, do you get burned out? What do you usually get burned out on and how do you approach that problem when it arises? But like I said, that's all that I have for today. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this episode and I'll see you again in a few days for me, but tomorrow for you. Have a good one. Bye.
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