What is Emotional Exhaustion?
Do you believe that your mind and heart can suffer exhaustion almost the same way your body suffers physical exhaustion?
Emotional exhaustion is the state of being or feeling drained and depleted in your mind. This can be a result of excessive mental and emotional stress over a long period of time.
Stress happens when you’ve been cycling around without resting. Cycling around our personal, social, work, or relationship lives.
Physical stress can comes from doing too much physical work like heavy weight lifting. However, these kinds of activities will make your body sore at the end of the day.
In a similar manner, our minds and hearts can feel strained from lifting too many emotions. Feeling too many things, receiving too many back-and-forth feelings all at once. Too many emotions can be overwhelming.
According to medicalnewstoday.com “When people experience emotional exhaustion, it can make them feel emotionally drained, overwhelmed, and fatigued. These feelings tend to build up over a long period, though people may not notice the early warning signs”.
What are the signs?
Undoubtedly, emotional exhaustion takes many forms and always varies from person to person.
Although it often happens when all the stress you’ve been absorbing gets too much. A compounding of stress over a significant period of time.
Our mind over time develops a shock-absorbing system due to exposure to so many fluctuating emotions. Certainly, this is not always a good thing.
This shock-absorbing system will always break down and need a cleanse. The breakdown is what leads to emotional exhaustion. Therefore, it can look like the following;
Feeling of helplessness
One way I’d describe helplessness is as falling into a bottomless pit. Surrounded by overwhelming doom.
We have been through situations where we had absolutely no control over anything while life keeps falling apart. This is a sign of emotional exhaustion: The helplessness of feeling that everything is out of your control.
Fatigue
A deep lack of inspiration to do anything. An overwhelming feeling of weariness and tiredness in your mind, following a significant decline in physical activities. This is a sign of emotional exhaustion. You need a break from running around too much or too little with your emotions.
Depression
The best feelings in life are the positive ones, even for a short period of time. When we experience greater negative emotions, they can suppress our affective and cognitive skills. This is a sign of emotional exhaustion.
Temperamental
Merriam-Webster defines this as “marked by excessive sensitivity and impulsive mood changes” … “unpredictable in behavior or performance…”. Simple self-analysis will let you know when your emotions are all over the place.
Acting out can possibly be a sign your body is sending you to timeout. Personally, my tell-tale sign of emotional exhaustion is experiencing an all-over-the-place flow of emotions. It disrupts my peace. I absolutely hate being angry in one minute and fatigued or frustrated in the next. Laced with absolute irritation.
Absent-minded
I work full-time as a content creator. The only thing I genuinely wish for is 3 more hours of the day, not 24 hours but 27. I need to utilize my time effectively and this job can create burnout in the initial stages.
My first reaction: ignoring the mental burnout. But that didn’t work because I found myself getting annoyingly distracted by the most random things. I was hearing the things around me but wasn’t listening really or paying attention and it was unintentional. Losing your usual clear head and cool, entertaining distractions and inattentiveness. You might be experiencing emotional exhaustion.
Bothersome
The feeling of being preoccupied with something you probably can or can’t name, confusion. Disturbances in your mind, or just unfounded antsy reaction to things is a sign of emotional exhaustion.
Lack of sleep
Insomnia is another telltale sign of emotional exhaustion.
Your mind manifests all sorts of unease. E.g. restlessness within your mind and soul, unhappiness, sadness, and overwhelming negative emotions, can cause you to lose sleep. Whether you can identify the reason or not, insomnia can be a sign of emotional exhaustion.
Self-sabotage
When you consciously or unconsciously fall into unhealthy habits, this is a sign of emotional exhaustion.
Ideally, no one wants to be unhappy, everyone would rather be just fine.
Exhibiting negative habits can be your body trying to tell you that you are in need of help.
How does emotional exhaustion affect you physically?
We’ve listed the sign of emotional exhaustion. They are undeniable signs that can affect your life physically.
- Emotional exhaustion can affect your ability to associate properly with other people, and kind of make you socially impaired.
- Emotional exhaustion can decrease your productivity obviously. Sometimes fatigue can forward-link to anxiety. There is so much to do but seemingly can’t do anything right now. This creates worry about the work. Worst of all, because of deadlines, it gets more frustrating. Thus, everything blows up and creates a more tangled Web of emotional exhaustion.
- When your mind is bothered, you could make people close to you feel uncomfortable by your snappiness, absentmindedness, and lack of a clear head.
- Emotional exhaustion can make you become unbearable: especially with temper tantrums. As much as we are allowed to be ourselves, we are also advised to be respectful to people we come in close contact with like our family or co-workers, spouses, and close friends.
- Emotional exhaustion can definitely lead you to make bad decisions. As you know, when you’re not in control of things you should be in control of, things can sidetrack and ripple to bigger problems for you. It can lead you to be influenced by other people including the wrong ones.
What causes emotional exhaustion?
Work overload: Jobs that require the greater part of your time, actively demand you be on high mental alert. They will definitely burn you frequently.
“Research suggests that people with high work demands, and those who are preoccupied with thoughts about work during leisure time, are more at risk”
MedicalNewstoday.com
Unrealistic expectations:
we define these as expectations you have from yourself or others, to meet up to your simply higher-than-life expectations of them or of yourself. When you keep yourself within such consciousness, you are open to harmful elements like constant disappointment and self-folly. The simple reason is your choice to be unrealistic about what can or can’t be achieved.
Dealing with exhausting elements
These elements could be other people: co-workers, your boss, friends, etc. Sometimes, it’s no offense to them but they’re just exhausting you even without realizing so. Some do it intentionally. Being around such elements can cause you to burn out really quickly and can hamper your productivity.
Financial stress:
Probably one of the worst feelings in life is not having money, not knowing what to do to get money legitimately. As a person who has been in this position one too many times, I’ve suffered a lot of deep scars because of financial stress. Investing my time and resources into a system with the hope of pay. Further having my hopes ripped to shreds is brutal and takes a while to recover. Especially when you have so little of it.
Family dilemma
Undoubtedly, your family can pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do. Some days are like that. You’re overwhelmed with all the back and forth in your family.
Relationship stress
Do I even need to say more? There’s no perfect relationship without its own weaknesses. You’re two different people with differences and similarities. Although the similarities will always align, the differences will clash most of the time, even with the most in-love Relationships.
Poor attitude towards self:
This basically includes your coping strategies given various circumstances. You’re evidently not finding ways to care, or creating time for yourself. Neither seeking the help you need and never confronting your emotions. When you actually just accumulate things in your heart, especially negative things, the negativity will spill into your life and manifest, while causing you to age improperly.
How to manage emotional exhaustion
Seek the help you need
consult with a professional. Today with the help of technology you can get the help you need with your mental health from your phone. Don’t give in to the overwhelming negativity, seek light and find help.
Honest communication:
Emphatically be honest about your feelings. The one thing that sets a healthy family apart from an unhealthy family is the mode of communication.
Talk!, let them know, including your children, that their mindless actions make you feel a type of way and you’d like to find a compromise with them. Don’t hold grudges against the people you love, it’s polluting.
Talk to co-workers or bosses that treat you in a way that makes you feel exhausted mentally: Allow them to see that your productivity matters to them and they should at least give you the opportunity to give your best.
Time out:
Always take a break and chill. Your body is a machine that works on fuel nonstop. Even when you’re eating or sleeping its still works to keep functionality.
You owe your body a conducive work environment just like your boss owes you one. You owe your body regular checkups, mental health checks, and breaks from social media or other time-consuming activities. You owe your body care and love and a break from the outside.
Dedicate quality time to yourself:
personal quality time is time set out to be dedicated to yourself and your needs. Take time to recuperate, to know yourself better, and care for your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. You need to reconnect with yourself and re-evaluate.
Identify the cause of your unease
knowledge of self gives you the ability to identify the things that are bothering you. When you are on good terms and in alignment with yourself, it’s easier to identify the root cause of your problems. Talk to people who have your best interest at heart if this helps you get things off.
Actively partake in healthier living styles:
Healthy meals, physical activities like exercises, hanging out with good company, etc. Actively encourage yourself to engage in healthier lifestyles. Ease into this slowly, take baby steps, and don’t break into anything, test your limits slowly. Consciously make healthier choices for yourself and starve the need to indulge your negative tendencies.
Be active and mindful of yourself:
Be active in your life, and conscious of the decisions you’re making. Take time before making decisions, to think. Give yourself space, and be aware of the choices being made in your life. Live consciously and not on the edge. Take control of your narrative your own self, re-write the way you want to be seen, and consciously work towards it.