How do you know if someone has fatigue?
After working for years under pressure, without resting or vacation, your body and mind slowly become exhausted and fatigued. Burnout is the test used to describe that. But how do you know? Of course it is always important to discuss with your doctor if there can be other medical causes, but in most cases there is a large chance that you suffer from burnout if you have the following symptoms: feeling empty, exhausted and burnt out for a long period of time, not wanting to take initiative, losing the ability to focus, and even having your memory become worse. You no longer enjoy the simple things in life such as a sunset or a nice flower. If you recognize some of these symptoms, chances are that you have a fatigue..What is overexertion?
Overexcitement is a state of overwrought irritability of your nervous system that causes even unimportant or unwanted stimuli to enter your brain and be magnified.
- Often, overexcitement leads to peaking, exhaustion, fatigue, or feeling or reacting overly anxious in different situations.
- You can use a simple self test to test if you are overworked so you can perfectly gauge when you can do prevention or take action to address your overwork
How to prevent overexertion or being overworked?
To prevent overstrain in time, it is important to measure not only your conscious stress, but also your unconscious stress with a sensitive self-test. Such a test also allows you to follow up on your evolution afterwards so you can be sure that your unconscious stress has decreased sufficiently to effectively prevent overstrain. Such a test can be found here in one simple click.
What are the risks'of being overworked?
- Short-term overexertion is rarely harmful.
- Chronic overexertion is risky and harmful, though, because it causes chronic overstimulation of your immune and nervous systems, resulting in an increase in (invisible) inflammatory reactions in a variety of organs
- micro-inflammation or inflammation of your neurons or nerve cells in the brain increase the risk of depression, Alzheimer's disease, and a whole range of neurological or psychiatric disorders
- microinflammation or inflammation of your blood vessels can cause arteriosclerosis or atherosclerosis, which in time can cause diseases such as heart attack, cerebral infarction or CVA, micro-embolismën or ultra-small blood clots in the brain that cause accelerated dementia
- This is why it is wise to detect chronic overexertion early via a online self-test and, if necessary, to address it preventively with a professional prevention program.
Am I overworked? How to test?
To know if you are overworked, you need to measure both visible and invisible tension. The sum of both is your total tension. When this total tension lasts too long, you are overworked and your nervous system becomes overexcitable. You usually notice this by the irritability of your feelings and reactions. To accurately test how high your tension level is and whether you are overworked, it is best to take a good online self-test every other month so you can follow your evolution.
What approach or therapy will resolve overstrain?
To resolve overexertion you need to learn to better manage the dozens of mini-triggers that build up your tension. Sometimes you discover some by chance after a good conversation with your best friend. Often you need a more systematic approach. A professional online self-help program can help you do that the fastest because you can start right away and spend 15 minutes daily doing self-reflection to discover what specifically can help you resolve your overexertion without resorting to expensive therapy, or getting addicted to medication or meditation.
Fatigue caused by burnout: a burnt out feeling
A lack of some chemical substances in the brain (called neurotransmitters) cause you to lose your zest for life, become tired and not rested, and sometimes you even start to have sleeping troubles. You seem to lose control over yourself and continuously feel tired and empty. An excess amount of adrenaline or stress hormone makes it so that your body and mind have to work too hard, causing you to become literally and figuratively exhausted. You cannot do anything anymore and do not understand why this is so. You feel tired and fatigued, irritable and difficult, have tens of small complaints like heart palpitations, aching back, tiredness, sleeplessness, apathy, worrying, nagging or headaches. SOmetimes you even become unpleasant to others, or even brusque or aggressive.When you disregard yourself too often
This sometimes occurs when you disregard yourself a lot, meaning you do not set limits toward others and no longer let people know what you can or cannot handle. As a consequence, you bite of more than you can handle, causing an overload in your system, and you keep working until the system breaks. You are mentally burnt out and need a vacation even though you thing you need to keep working harder because you have less energy to do everything that needs to be done.Test for Burnout: Fatigue? Test yourself now.
Burnout can be tested by taking this simple test online. This test shows you your general level of stress, which lies behind the exhausted feeling of fatigue, as well as its facets: tension, anxiety, or even depressed feelings. This test can help you by acknowledging the problem, or by following your development in hindsight after, for example, following the online self-help program for stress and burnout. Give the test a try. Paul Koeck, MD
