Getting Back Into Advocacy After Burnout

Reaching complete physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion is a serious threat that can occur in a variety of life situations – not just in the career field.

Living with chronic illness, we are even more at risk, as chronic illness requires a lot of physical, mental, and emotional energy to simply function the best we can on a daily basis.

Pacing is self-care

We see this even more when we push ourselves too hard – especially on our better days – to complete activities without adequately pacing ourselves.

This often requires a recovery period of a day or more, and each time this cycle repeats itself, our recovery period can grow longer, which is why pacing is actually a self-care practice.

How will I resume advocacy activities after burnout?

I struggled with this cycle within my everyday life, and it even affected my rare disease advocacy efforts. Once I learned how to maintain self-care practices and found ways to lighten my load of activities, recovering from feelings of burnout, I found myself with more time – time I would like to use for my advocacy efforts.

However, I am also thoroughly enjoying periods just for me, without any scheduled obligations. I can choose what I want to do with my free time. So, then the question became: what should I do with my increased free time, and how do I get back the motivation to use at least some of it for my advocacy efforts?

How do I prevent future burn out?

I don't want to risk burning out again by dedicating all my free time to advocacy, but I'm also savoring the extra free time I haven't had in over a year. A part of me just wants to continue savoring, which is fine to do, but for how long? Because I also want to continue advocating for rare diseases.

I'm still implementing my self-care practice of giving myself permission (without guilt) not to do advocacy or activity when I'm not mentally feeling up for it, even if I am physically. And I'm setting goals and deadlines to aid with my motivation for remaining active in advocacy.

Set realistic goals for better outcomes

For optimal outcomes from goal setting, a goal must first be realistic. Unrealistic goals set us up for failure, which will diminish our likelihood of not just success but also trying again in the future to achieve that same goal.

I ask myself: what steps am I realistically willing to take to achieve this goal? Once I identify my realistic overall goal, I can break my ultimate goal into realistic steps to achieve that goal I want to complete. Doing so also lets me identify how I will know I'm progressing toward my goal.

Set realistic deadlines to prevent exhaustion

The next important question I ask is when I want to complete the goal or when I want to complete each step toward the goal. Again, this deadline has to be realistic – not just in what I am willing to do, but also in the time allowed to complete the step or entire goal.

Suppose I set a goal of scheduling 10 guest podcast interviews to be completed in 1 week. In that case, that is not realistic for me as I do not have the time to be interviewed 10 times in 1 week, nor do I have the capacity to do so without becoming mentally and emotionally exhausted.

How do you recover from or prevent burnout?

This practice can be applied to any goal-setting aspect, not just advocacy, but I have found this to be particularly helpful in my efforts to return to advocacy after recovering from burnout.

Have you ever experienced burnout? What have you found helpful to prevent or recover from burnout? Share with us in the comments below.