The three mindsets that most commonly lead to burnout are a high-achieving mindset, a people-pleasing mindset, and a self-victimizing mindset.

By contrast, negative challenge is doing things outside of our comfort zone that make us unjustly uncomfortable and don’t align with anything we’re hoping to move toward. Where positive challenge offers value, negative challenge drains us.

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.

When someone makes a suggestion, is my instinct to poke holes in the solution rather than embrace it?

First, there’s that feeling of exclusion, the sense that everyone is doing something fun without you.

Just as there are growing pains, there are also shrinking pains when you reduce the load you’ve become accustomed to. Going from a heavy workload and high stress to a lighter workload and calm can be just as unsettling.

People with high-achieving mindsets might have grown up in households that valued performance and ambition as indicators of worthiness of love and connection.

Guilting yourself into doing things before you’ve even tried to say no

What gives you satisfaction does not need to be “productive” or garner praise from anyone else.