6 Signs of Emotional Exhaustion And What to Do About It
Suffering emotional fatigue can feel like driving a car with no fuel in the tank
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Daily, we all have different tasks and responsibilities competing for our mental and emotional energy. You need to be at your peak energy level if you want to be at your best, whether at work, in your personal life, or when facing a difficult situation.
And because we sometimes get both mentally and emotionally exhausted — which affects how effective we can be at any point in time — it’s critical to take good care of ourselves.
Think of your own emotional energy as the fuel in your car tank. Your car will lose momentum and gradually stop moving if you drive it around for too long without refilling it with petrol.
In the same way, as you carry out your everyday tasks, make decisions, solve your problems, and navigate difficult challenges, you also exhaust your emotional energy.
Emotional exhaustion means you have little or no emotional energy to sustain yourself. It means you have run out of emotional resilience. As a result, you feel overwhelmed, fatigued, burnt out, drained, and overloaded. And this can make it difficult to stay focused, persevere in the face of ongoing stressors, and make optimal decisions that will impact your life and outcomes positively.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, incidences of emotional overload are on the rise worldwide as a result of the pandemic and escalating global political and economic tensions.
So, how do you recognize that you or someone close to you, is experiencing periods of emotional burnout?
You get easily irritable
One of the signs of emotional exhaustion is the tendency to feel irritable; become frustrated or easily upset.
Feeling emotionally drained will make you snap at every slightest provocation. You get irritated by other people’s actions and behaviors and lash out at them.
This happens because when you’re feeling emotionally exhausted, you have a sense that you don’t have control over your own behaviors.
