I know we’ve all heard this phrase nurse burnout. Have you ever wondered, what are the signs of nurse burnout? How to recognize it? I’m going to share with you the top five signs that burnout is starting to creep in.
NURSE BURNOUT 5 signs from a nurse
Burnout Sign #1: Feeling Tired & Rundown
What do I mean? I mean, feeling so exhausted, so tired that at the end of the shift, there is no more energy left. Oftentimes, I found myself thinking, “How did I make it through this day?” Sometimes I can’t even recall what happened during my shift, because so many things were going on. Things like emotional overload, physical overload, and spiritual overload. Many times, we’re not only dealing with one person, like the patient, we’re also dealing with their family members, colleagues, co-workers. Maybe we’re having tense relationships with all of these people. On top of that there’s also the worry if we did everything we could in our shift? Did we avoid any errors? Did we catch everything that we could? Did we intervene well, and turn someone’s life around?
Burnout sign #2: It’s hard to get up and face a new day.
I know for me, there were many times when I woke up, and I thought, “I still needed more sleep.” Or, “Oh no, it’s 5:45am I have to get out of bed.” Or maybe thinking, “I think I have a little bit of a sore throat.” Or other times were just feeling overall drained, depleted, and not feeling the drive or the energy to go in for another shift. Especially when the previous shift was really hard, whether that be physically like running around. Or spiritually when there were some difficult codes and difficult patient cases. Or maybe a difficult interaction with a colleague. Or even just having the feeling of not wanting to go in a particular shift. Maybe it’s not a shift that you’re familiar with.
Many times, people always say I’m on the good weekend, or “Hey, you’re going to join the good weekend.” It’s not uncommon for nurses to feel that their weekend is the best. I know I’ve said that the weekend group I was on and I’ve definitely heard it from other people. The reality is, it’s just who you vibe with. There were times that for me, I wasn’t feeling that vibe, and therefore I didn’t feel the energy to go to work or even get out of bed. I know there were even times where I secretly thought, “Oh my gosh, the building didn’t collapse.” “We didn’t have an earthquake.” My alarm clock worked for whatever reason I woke up. Now I have to face another long, grueling day long shift. I especially felt that after working multiple shifts consecutively in a row.
Burnout sign #3: Waking up already feeling tired.
Sometimes there’s a lot of tension that’s residing in our bodies in our muscles, muscular fatigue. It can show up as body pains, like back aches. Maybe some problems with the feet, or the calves that lead us to wake up and not feeling our greatest. I’ve experienced many different kinds of pains throughout the years and the one that struck me in particular that caused me the most physical suffering is having plantar fasciitis. A nurse regularly walks about 22,000 steps, maybe five miles. If you have hospitals or an organization where you walk through multiple buildings. Sometimes walking from buildings to buildings where you’re transporting patients, or you’re having to run to the blood bank, run to the supply room, the actual hospital supply room that’s in the basement or on the ground floor. Just think about all the places that you’re walking to and from over and over again.
All that built up tension of walking, not taking a moment for 12 hours to relax and rest does take a toll on our bodies. For me, that was just the feeling of tight tension in my muscles. I don’t know about you guys, do you go get massages regularly, acupuncture, acupuncture pressure, comment below about things that you do. I know for me every time I went to a massage therapist, they already happened to serve a lot of nurses. They’re massaging the nurse’s body. So they already know saying things like, “Let me get your IT band,” “Let me get that SI joint.” These are the most excruciating places, and I knew I had to get the therapy to allow my body to rest and recover.
Burnout sign #4: Not being able to sleep.
What are some reasons we can’t sleep at night? For me it was reliving the day. Many times. I’m sure it’s definitely happened to many of you out there. You wake up in the middle of the night and think, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t tell the next shift RN that I did this.” “I didn’t tell them that that family member called to keep them update.” “I didn’t tell the doctor one more thing.” “I didn’t tell the next nurse to do that.” A lot of times just having the guilt that I’m leaving a lot of stuff behind for the next nurse. I know there’s saying that nursing is a 24 hour job. I know when I took over from a nurse, if there wasn’t stuff that they could do, that’s fine, because I’m there to be paid to take over. So we keep passing the bucket, the bucket brigade. It’s hard to fight that judgment about well, they could have spiked a new primary bag. And sometimes maybe that person did mean to. Or maybe they were like me, and they had plantar fasciitis. Just taking one more step was absolutely excruciating. Then we have to fight the guilt of calling in sick. Another reason that we can’t sleep is maybe holding on, as I said to the tension in the body. The body cannot rest and let go. Our brains, our minds, are our tools. They keep working, keep keep working. Part of that is to learn about letting go of being awake.
I know that running on our feet, and having to go immediately to bed to make sure we get that six, seven hours, maybe five hours depending on how far you live from your organization. So in this way you can wake up the next day while a shorter amount of sleep. Particularly if you’re working consecutive days, and 12 hour shifts, then we begin this vicious cycle. We’re not able to sleep, we cannot fall asleep, we don’t get good sleep. That is why we don’t want to wake up to face another day. Because we don’t have the energy, we’re feeling depleted, and so on and so forth. So when we’re showing up in the world, whether it’s at work or for our friends and family, we’re really drained and really tired.
Number five, not practicing healthy eating.
Burnout sign #5: Not practicing healthy eating.
Okay, in the first four tips we talked about not being able to go to sleep, not being able to rest and wake up on time. Therefore the last thing you want to do is prepare a healthy meal for yourself to take to work. There’s no energy in our bodies to do so. The other last thing we want to do is eat healthily. For some reason, we gravitate to sugar, salty, crunchy, soft and gooey. This might be some primitive default way for our body to get that energetic zing we are lacking. That burst of caffeine, that sugar rush. Having to do this over and over again throughout the day. This put our body in a state of always working a little too much internally. Maybe adrenal fatigue, what I find that’s always difficult, is working back to back shifts, and meal prepping meal with planning.
So if I never had the foresight about what I’m going to eat the next day, and I had a difficult 12 hour shift, I am not going to go to the grocery store to be around a bunch of other humans after I just left a job full of humans to think about what I’m going to bring to work tomorrow. When I wake up feeling drained, I definitely do not have the energy to stop by the grocery store before work. So not eating healthily, having dietary choices that might not be beneficial to our body keeps us awake. This another telltale sign of moving towards burnout. So these are my top five signs that burnout is starting to creep up closer and closer to me if I’ve not already started the stages of it. This the first category of burnout which is called exhaustion. I hope this video was helpful for you and gave you some insights into recognizing burnout. In our next articles we’ll discover more about burnout, what it is, how we can manage it and how we can live way beyond burnout because it’s totally possible.
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