Your mindset is the lens through which you see the world. If that lens causes you to judge yourself, live in fear of what others think, ruminate on stressors constantly, hold yourself to unattainable standards, or never be content, you will be more likely to burn out, and to burn out more often.

Listening to our thoughts and acknowledging when we might be erroneously projecting helplessness is the first step toward correcting this behavior.

When you stop people pleasing, you quickly realize that being a person with an opinion or needs doesn’t diminish your morality; it’s just part of being human.

A self-victimizing mindset is a combination of feeling helplessness for an extended time and being skeptical about finding long-term satisfaction.

“Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”

Burnout by volume is the result of having too many items on the docket for an extended time. It is, as Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, would say, “doing more today than you can recover from tomorrow” over, and over, and over again.

What conditions tend to trigger burnout? Certain seasons of work? Certain types of projects or deadlines? When you spend excess time with certain stressful people?

Boredom in short bursts can actually be helpful—it tells us we’d rather be doing something else, so (ideally) we change things up and get busy with a more stimulating pursuit. But when we’re burned out because of chronic disengagement, we may not have the momentum to get ourselves going again.

Social burnout afflicts people, like Lisa, whose battery is consistently low because they aren’t sticking to their social limits.