We all have bad days at work. But what do you do when the bad days run into weeks, months, even years? When they start affecting your relationships with family and friends outside work and your whole attitude to life? If this is happening to you, you may be suffering from burnout. It’s important to recognise that burnout is different to stress, although chronic stress at work may eventually lead to burnout.

If not dealt with properly, burnout may lead to emotional and physical exhaustion. The first step to dealing with burnout is to recognise it. Common signs include:

· Feeling drained

· Lack of focus and struggling to be productive

· Impatience and irritability

· Feeling on edge

· Angry outbursts

· Feeling disillusioned and dissatisfied

· Feeling trapped

· Feeling lonely and disconnected

· Hopelessness

· Low emotional intelligence

· Lacking empathy

· Altered sleep patterns

· Relying on food, drugs, alcohol, or other behaviours to ease difficult feelings

· Lowered immunity, headaches, or digestive problems

The next step is to seek support. This may mean seeing your GP, opening up to your partner, family or friends or reaching out to a manager or colleague. It’s important to be completely honest about how you’re feeling.

Then, with support, you can start to work out how and why you developed burnout. From there, you can find a way forward. This is likely to involve re-examining and re-evaluating your priorities and making a detailed plan for your self-care.

It’s important to be realistic and to be kind to yourself. Recovering from burnout may take some time, especially if your symptoms have developed over many months or years. Sometimes it’s easier to talk through your feelings with a counsellor who will always be objective and non-judgmental. Depending on your individual circumstances, counselling may involve identifying the negative and positive patterns in your reactions, looking at how you manage your emotions, and understanding how your past may be affecting your present. You’re likely to gain new perspectives on yourself and your relationships with others which help you feel more authentic, and positive about the future. This can be highly rewarding. Things may seem bleak right now, but in fact, looking back on their recovery, many people describe burnout as a blessing in disguise.