Avoiding Burnout

By: Serena Wadhwa, Lisa Page, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Serena Wadhwa, Lisa Page

Many of us struggle with stress, overwork, anxiety, exhaustion, and other negative experiences from time to time, sometimes in the wake of unpleasant events, but often simply due to the pace and expectations of 21st-century life. While feeling overwhelmed or drained is a common human experience, when do these feelings become something more than a temporary state of being and start drastically impacting your life? How do you know when you have reached the tipping point into burnout? And once you have crossed that threshold, how do you find peace and equilibrium again?

This is what you will explore in the 10 lessons of Avoiding Burnout. With your presenters, Serena Wadhwa and Lisa Page, you will examine the nature of burnout, from symptoms that trigger it to personal factors that contribute to burnout, such as personality and unhealthy coping strategies. You are also invited to answer questions that will help you assess your own level of coping in different areas that can help you get through challenging situations. You will learn the crucial steps that allow you to catch yourself from falling into burnout, build greater resilience, and manage life’s everyday stressors.

As you progress toward the final destination of these lessons - a healthy, balanced life - you will also focus on behaviors such as setting boundaries, managing negative thinking, and learning assertiveness - all invaluable skills that you can develop to keep yourself going during tough times. As you will discover, no matter how overwhelming it may feel, burnout is manageable, and it is preventable. With the proper skills you can come out of a state of burnout even stronger than you were before you entered it and learn how to avoid it in the future.

©2021 Audible Originals, LLC (P)2021 Audible Originals, LLC.

Helpful framing, pdf needed

This course framed a number of things very helpfully, but in slightly more detail than my burned out brain could track without an accompanying pdf.

Great Courses have provided these before, and it’s hard to imagine an instance where it could be more helpful.

super helpful!

as a burned out student, this is super helpful for helping me figure out how to balance my own stuff. I'm excited to use some of the skills with clients as well.

Fruitful

This is a fruitful course. I think they are tools. Use the tools and you can build things. I recommend it.

It is a free course. More might be better.

Can Feel Condescending

This lecture series has a lot in common with the other Great Courses series "Do It Now: Overcoming Procrastination". Yet while "Avoiding Burnout" has similar information, it comes with drawbacks not present in "Procrastination". "Burnout" can feel like it's either being condescending (such as telling you to imagine your happy place on the beach when anxious) or being too cold (such as when a few lectures that focus on burnout only in terms of how the brain works, not with examples of real world implications).

I would recommend you listen to the "Procrastination" lectures instead. I'll summarize what you need to know from these lectures: Burnout begins with an average level of stress that blows up when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, unable to meet the demands of everyday living, and/or as though you’re being yanked in too many directions at once. Burnout symptoms are exhaustion, depersonalization, and a lack of fulfillment.

woke

lot if woke propaganda in this. men are bad and women can do no wrong. unfortunately there is not enough useful information to make looking past the propaganda worthwhile.