 If you're somebody that works pretty hard, then you're probably not a stranger to burnout or anxiety or insomnia, but in this video, I want to share some of the warning signs that I didn't recognize way back when that were really hinting that I was on the road to burnout and what you can actually do about preventing those things from happening. What's up guys? Alex Hein, author of the book, Master of the Day. Now I've included a free download there for you below, which is all about how to use journaling to reinvent your life. So you can check it out, the first link in the description, and you'll also get an email every few days on how to use journaling to live a better life. So the first thing is that you notice your personality changing. People don't realize that every little illness or pathology is always predated by some little thing, a little seed that's sown. And for me, what I noticed reflecting back on that was that before burning out, for a couple of years, I had this low level agitation, right? I would easily get pissed. I would easily get annoyed. And even if I didn't show it to people I was working with, I felt irritated, way more than normal. And so there's a saying in Chinese medicine that the first sign of the quote separation of yin and yang, of illness beginning, is either mood changes, like emotions or sleep problems. So for me, I noticed that mood changes were the first thing years before. The second thing is sleep problems. So if you've always been a good sleeper like I was historically, and then you notice every once in a while, you either can't fall asleep for a couple hours, or you get a weird night of sleep, or maybe sometimes you have a little bit of anxiety around sleep. And then maybe what happens is you actually have one bad night of sleep, but rather than really sleeping well the next night, you sleep bad again and then you start getting really anxious over and over again. Sleep is the next indicator that something internally regarding your stress, your nervous system, just the state of your spirit, is getting run down. The third thing is that you notice yourself smiling less. Or if you're like me, you don't notice it, but other people do. I had a friend that was always like a very fun, smiley, friendly guy, and then a funny thing happened when he went to law school. After going to law school and studying for all those years and taking his boards, the next time I saw him, the dude was like the most serious, lifeless shell I've ever seen. You know and on some level the same thing happened to me because I was a pretty even keel, not Mr. Smiley, more of a serious kid, but the more I worked and the more I was getting stressed and not having enough rest, not having enough fun, the more I noticed that I wasn't smiling as much. The fourth thing is that you have a hard time feeling excited about things. Whereas maybe previously you're moderately excited about stuff and life's like, you know, some good stuff, some bad stuff, some stuff in between. This time you notice like, I saw this one patient who was a student that was just graduating and the doctor that was seeing him was like, oh, are you excited? You know, next phase of life, you get to practice, you get to see patients, get paid and he just kind of looked off into space and was just like, yeah, I guess, you know, and obviously he's afraid about the transition coming. But practically speaking, you may notice yourself just less jazzed about life. Like the day to day is just kind of bleh, same shit, different day. Unless you have a fun vacation plan, you're not really excited about that much. The fifth thing is that you're struggling with motivation. I mean, the first most obvious thing regarding burnout is that you feel less interested in doing the things you were previously doing, right? So the burnout could be purely mental, like these tasks are so boring, or it could be even deeper physiological. Like if you have a really serious trauma happen where you're not sleeping well, you lose your job, a parent dies or you go through a divorce, like that can be so disabling, you can develop extreme anxiety or depression. And if you're not that motivated, that's obviously tied into all the other things. The spirit, if you're excited or not excited about life, how much you've been working, if you have a good social support network, if you're sleeping well, and so on. But you know you're burning out when you just feel, you're just less motivated about everything and not just your work. Burnout sign number six is you start developing digestive problems. Really, really common, common pathology in people who are overworking is the baby inklings of acid reflux. So maybe you notice yourself burping more, getting constipated more, having looser bowel movements more, getting actual reflux or feeling indigestion frequently. All of these are signs that you've been too much in the sympathetic fight or flight mode and you haven't been resting enough. And obviously digestion is one of the first things that begins to get impaired when you're overworking and you're under resting. The seventh sign is that you can't sit still or relax. You feel like there's something actually wrong with stopping or wrong with a vacation or wrong if you don't work seven days a week or wrong. I recently talked to an entrepreneur friend and they said, why would you ever want to stop your work at five? Like what would I do with the rest of my life? And obviously that's common among entrepreneurs. I lived that way for many years. But the fact that that's considered normal is maybe a little bit interesting, right? So if you think there's something wrong with being off, with recharging, with sleeping enough, with taking a vacation, that by itself shows how warped your mind has become. Sign aid. You may not notice yourself being different, but other people notice that you're not acting like yourself. You might be less smiley, might be more serious, you may be more high strung, you may not be sleeping well, you may have depression or anxiety or the baby, the seeds are being sown to grow that tree. Other people are honestly much, much, much better predictors and judges of how we're doing because they can see little slight shifts that maybe sometimes we miss. Sign nine is every once in a while, you feel anxious, depressed, or apathetic. Maybe you are getting sleep problems like what happened to me and you start developing anxiety from chronic insomnia. Maybe you feel feelings of depression and no motivation and you don't feel anything or maybe you're just completely not jazzed at all about the future and honestly, you don't really care what's going forward because none of it's exciting, like none of it matters to you. And sign number 10 is that you feel like you're on this treadmill and if you stop running or stop the treadmill, it's all gonna fall apart. And I'll give you a hint, it won't. It will not fall apart if you stop running on the treadmill, because that's what you need to do to recover and to heal and to get back to how your normal self was. So this treadmill is this idea that a perfectionist, high performer has to maintain the momentum or else everything's gonna come crashing down. And obviously that's not true. For me, the way I got myself off the treadmill, the most important thing was I said, what if I could work half the hours? Could I get the same result by working smart? And I found that I could both in school and my business. So that by itself is a powerful question to help you reduce your work hours, reduce perfectionism, stop rushing, take time for meals and time for fun and rest. So I hope these 10 signs help you and maybe help prevent you from burning out like I did. Often when you do, it's a multiple year recovery. It's not like a few months, it's like a few years. So if you can prevent it, it's a better thing to do. I'm still in the recovery process myself. So I hope that helps. Again, the free guide down there below is for a free journaling worksheet to help you reinvent your life. You can check it out right there below and then my last related video is right over there.