TABLE OF CONTENTS
Running a business is a gratifying experience. It allows you to be responsible for your life, provide for your family, and determine success on your terms. Being a business owner, however, does come with its downsides. Long hours, often overworked, and you have less time for yourself and your family. Work that requires this often leads to burnout.
Since COVID, we have reevaluated our working lives, recognising that work-life balance is crucial. To reduce burnout and ensure they prioritise self-care, business owners must also find their work-life balance.
Let’s look at how you can manage burnout as a business owner and take care of yourself.
What is Burnout?
Before we can effectively deal with burnout and consider strategies to avoid it, it is important to determine what burnout is and what it looks like. Burnout is an emotional and physical condition caused by the environmental stresses of work. Burnout manifests through any number of symptoms, and signs of burnout include:
- Emotional, mental and/or physical exhaustion
- Depression and/or anxiety
- ‘Work dread’
- Overwhelmed, the feeling of ‘treading water’
- Behavioural inconsistencies (short temper)
- Insomnia/trouble sleeping
- The feeling of having no time for anything
Causes of Burnout among Business Owners
The causes of burnout vary, but they lead to similar symptoms nonetheless. The causes of burnout can be separated into two categories:
Physical burnout causes
Physical causes of burnout arise from the excessive working environments that business owners subject themselves to. Physical causes include:
- Long working hours
- Poor diet due to work commitments
- Overworking
- Stacking of work and personal responsibilities
- Management of staff
Ultimately, physical burnout will lead to your body breaking down, leaving you unable to muster the energy to get out of bed. Without taking care of yourself, you can compromise your immune system and create new or worsen medical issues.
Mental burnout causes
Mental causes of burnout occur due to the physiological tolls that excessive work places on business owners.
- Lack of recognition
- Constant pressure to perform
- Management of other staff’s emotions
- Work stress from financial hardships
- Lack of control
- Harmful coping mechanisms (substance abuse/avoidance)
- Limited social support and interactions (no family access)
The physiological aspect of burnout can be self-induced, as the success of the business can take the place of an individual’s well-being and their immediate family and friends. The pursuit of success can often cause us to lose sight of what counts: our health, family and friends.
Burnout Example
Jessie, Cafe Owner
Jessie is a coffee enthusiast, and so are his customers. Jessie started his business to serve good coffee and make a living with their passion. The pressures of owning a business and passion can feel like they clash for Jessie. Jessie is feeling:
- Emotional exhaustion from managing staff and customer expectations
- Insomnia from financial pressures and fear of failure
- Work dread, despite loving coffee
- Short temper with staff over mistakes
Causes:
- Physical: long hours (6 am – 9 pm), caffeine abuse, lack of food due to workload
- Mental: lack of support, no recognition from customers, limited time spent with family, and stress from financial pressures.
Despite his passion, Jessie experiences burnout due to the demands of owning a business. Even those who love what they do can feel the effects of burnout. This shows that burnout affects both business and personal life. Circumstances can vary, but the cause and symptoms are universal.
Managing burnout strategies for business owners
If you own a business that captures most of your time, you may experience burnout, or you may already have it. Statistically, between 25% to 53% of business owners experience burnout at some stage of their working life. To combat burnout requires real change and commitment to those changes.
Focus on self-care
Physical exercise and self-reward are effective ways to combat the mental and physical pressures that owning a business can demand. Physical exercise can start small, like a 30-minute run or strength training at the gym, but self-reward is individual-specific. Self-care through reward will require business owners to discover what they enjoy doing when they unwind. Even the act of doing nothing, such as not using phones, tidying your house, cooking a meal, and staying hydrated, is a small but effective self-care activity.
In our example, Jessie, the cafe owner, is passionate about coffee. Self-reward for Jessie could be as simple as sipping coffee from his favourite producer and taking the time to truly enjoy it. Self-care may be small, but it is the act itself that is mentally beneficial. Physical exercise and self-care build resilience for the burdens of owning a business.
Adjust your mindset
Adjusting your mindset can be done in a number of ways. Common examples include getting support via a therapist, business mentoring, and focusing on mindfulness. Opening a dialogue with a therapist or a mentor to share your experience can have a lasting effect on your emotional well-being. Making sure that you get support from licensed individuals and proper business mentors is a must, as they provide advice and perspectives that are either objective or experienced (or both).
Commit to work habit changes
To combat burnout, you also need to make changes to how you work. This includes taking leave and holidays, turning off your phone, allocating time for your personal life, and sleeping.
Part of owning a business is the assumption that you are needed 24/7, which is impossible, but the sentiment is hard for business owners to escape. Burnout occurs if a change isn’t made due to the belief that the financial and personal commitment invested will suffer without constant availability. Creating a strict schedule that includes downtime, adjusting your mindset, and committing to acts of self-care will help business owners manage burnout.
Implementing burnout management for small business owners
Managing burnout requires change and commitment. Burnout affects not just your business but also your personal life and those around you. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy fix; you must implement strategies that effectively change how you operate. You are breaking habits learnt to cope for the short term.
As your business grows, the coping mechanisms that once worked may no longer be effective due to changes in its dynamics and operations, which in turn require you to adapt and function differently. But these strategies can be started small and rolled out over time. Ultimately, these changes will improve not only your business but your personal life.
