Emotional exhaustion is brutal.
It saps you of your energy and time, and it does this from the inside out.
When you’re emotionally exhausted, you can feel it in your bones.
What once was enjoyable now feels like a chore.
And forget actual chores–you’re just trying to get through the day.
If any of the previous statements describe you, you’re likely dealing with emotional or mental exhaustion.
But to give you a complete picture, let’s review a few common experiences that indicate it’s time to make a change for the better in your life.
You’re Experiencing Burnout
Burnout.
A word that gets tossed around like a hot potato. But what does it actually look like?
Burnout can be job burnout. It can be family burnout. It can be taking-care-of-your-child burnout.
What it comes down to is this: you’re experiencing burnout when you’re dealing with chronic stress, whether you’re aware of that stress or not.
Burnout is a massive depletion of energy levels. It’s physical symptoms as much as it is emotional and mental symptoms.
Your Time is Not Your Own
This is what happens when you no longer have control of your life.
It’s what happens when other people’s agendas creep into your brain and dictate what you must do.
By the time this happens to you, emotional exhaustion has moved into your life and set out a welcome mat for mental exhaustion to follow.
If you feel you no longer can control what you have to do, you’re probably mentally or emotionally exhausted.
You are Not the Person You Aspire to Be
This is a tricky one because not everyone sets goals for their personal development.
But let’s look at it this way. You know when you’re at your best, and you know when you’re deviating from that.
If you consistently find that you are not the person you know you can be, it’s time to make a change.
Now, it’s totally normal to go through challenging situations from time to time. That’s how you grow and get stronger.
What I’m talking about is enduring a state of constant and total emotional exhaustion.
That’s not living.
Your Anxiety Has Anxiety
Your mental health is at the center of who you are. It’s your mental / emotional operating system, and it’s directly related to your physical health.
And emotional exhaustion brings with it a frustrating foe–anxiety.
Anxiety makes you doubt yourself. It makes you rehash past events. It also makes you question if you are really experiencing mental fatigue or physical fatigue–and if you even have a right to feel the way you feel in the first place.
It’s maddening.
But this is simply the natural result of long-term stress.
Your Sleep is Suffering and Your Energy is Non-Existent
And it brings me to my final point.
Long-term stress leads to mental exhaustion and emotional exhaustion.
It’s not just having a “difficult time.”
We’re talking about being completely drained of your emotional energy.
It’s at this point that sleep starts to suffer. It can be hard to fall asleep and stay asleep because your body is so amped from being tired all the time.
That sounds oxymoronic, but the only moronic thing about it is that it can happen to hard-working, well-intentioned human beings in the first place.
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