Beat burnout: tips to reduce or recover from burnout

Burnout is one of those words – like resilience – that we hear often, but don’t always fully understand. Dancers are at risk of burnout because they tend to be highly motivated, feel that dance is a big part of their identity, and face a high level of physical and psychological demands. But what is burnout, and how can it be avoided?

Dancers face a huge amount of pressure: high physical workloads combined with psychological stressors like competition for roles and financial worries. They often tend to be quite perfectionist, setting extremely high standards for themselves and working through fatigue, illness and injury on the quest for continual improvement. Some dancers are also highly anxious, ruminating over past mistakes and worrying about the future. Taken together, these factors are the perfect recipe for burnout. Burnout can happen at any time, whether we’re in training, performing professionally, or working in any of the other varied jobs in dance like producing or teaching. Freelancers, who juggle a variety of roles while dealing with job uncertainty, may be particularly prone to burnout.

Burnout basics

Burnout happens when we are facing lots of demands and getting insufficient rest. Essentially, too much work or training combined with too little rest leads to burnout. We can feel stressed, exhausted, and depleted. We may find even simple tasks overwhelming, and can struggle to make decisions. We may lose interest in and motivation for dance, and feel that no matter how hard we try, we just don’t seem to be getting better. Other symptoms include:

• Lower immunity; getting ill more often

• Frequent headaches and muscle tension

• Having an increasingly negative outlook, feeling cynical, helpless, and resentful

• Procrastinating, delaying making decisions or tackling tasks

• Withdrawing from social relationships and events

• Changes in appetite and sleep

Recovering from burnout

The key ingredient for recovering from burnout is rest. Our bodies and minds need time to recuperate and recover. In an ideal world, we would take around 3-5 weeks off to truly recharge, but this isn’t always possible. For example, freelancers don’t typically receive sick pay and may be unable to afford to take time off.

In this case, try to rest as much as possible, and prioritise sleep. Important biological processes occur when we sleep, such as cell repair, energy restoration, the reorganisation of nerve cells, and the regulation of hormones. Aside from sleep, try to engage in restful activities as much as possible to activate the parasympathetic nervous system (aka the rest and digest system). Restful activities include:

• Deep breathing

• Yoga

• Meditation

• Walking in nature

• Massage

As well as sleep and rest, focus on the basics to help you recover from burnout: good nutrition, gentle exercise, and spending time with friends and family (for more, see this blog on getting the basics right). This is the time to prioritise you: training or work can wait, but your health cannot. And if you find it hard putting work aside, remember that you’re unlikely to do your best work when you’re burned out, and you may find you have to redo some of it anyway – so looking after yourself will actually save you time in the long run!

Avoiding burnout

It’s impossible to predict whether or not we might experience burnout, because workloads and stressors are often outside of our control. However, there are useful things we can do to try and reduce the likelihood of burnout occurring.

1. Reduce your workload – or your standards

Ideally, try to reduce your workload by delegating tasks – this can be at work or at home, by asking colleagues, friends or partners to help share the load. If this isn’t possible, consider whether or not you can reduce your standards for certain tasks. Does it have to be perfect, or would good enough be good enough?!

2. Ask for help

If you find that you withdraw during times of stress, you probably find it difficult to ask for help. But this is ultimately counterproductive: there is great strength in vulnerability and in knowing when you need help. This could be as simple as simple as calling a trusted friend, or could be more structured support such as coaching or therapy.

3. Develop a well-rounded identity

It’s easy for dance to become our whole lives, especially when it’s gone from our most loved hobby to becoming a full-time job or training course. Our identities can be dominated by dance, and we may start to feel that our worth is dependent on our progress or achievements. To combat this, try to find other activities and hobbies that you enjoy, which have nothing to do with dance. Activities that absorb us work best, as they give our busy brains a break from overthinking or ruminating. Painting, exercise, gardening, puzzles, crafting, spending time in nature, and volunteering are all good examples. The most important thing here is to schedule them regularly: try to find at least 10 minutes every day to do one of these. It’s essential to help you develop a more rounded identity, and to create more balance in your life. When you start doing this, you might be amazed by how much this helps.

4. Rest and relaxation

Refer to the above list of rest and relaxation activities to help you regularly activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Don’t wait until you’re experiencing burnout to start doing these – they are an important part of your prevention toolkit.

5. Track your symptoms

Finally, be aware of your burnout signs and symptoms and keep track of them so that you can put prevention measures in place. Use this worksheet to help you do this.

Hopefully this blog will help you to understand what burnout is, and how to avoid it. If you want more information on this topic, try my Work-life Balance course where we take a deeper dive into these issues.