Have you experienced burn out?

You may be suffering from low testosterone. Men with low on testosterone often just don’t care about anything. They may feel like they just “exist”.  Pleasure and desire can also be greatly decreased greatly affecting your career and your relationships.

Perhaps you have some of these other common low testosterone symptoms: depression, mental fogginess/fuzziness, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, loss of muscle, increased weight gain, decreased facial hair and a general feeling of not caring about anything.

It would be a good idea for you to talk to a medical doctor about this.

Good heath to you!

I used to be very happy to volunteer for just about everything, but I finally had too much. I called my volunteer coordinator and quit, cold turkey. I never looked back or regretted it.

That’s what vacations are are for, supposedly. What you need is a week or two where the weather is balmy, there the scent of ginger and plumeria in the air. . .wait. . .you live there.
How about a couple weeks in a colder clime?

Get some help with your theatre project. Delegate and mean it!

As the mother of an autistic son I can relate. I get a few hours a week to rest or work out. I use this to recover. A relaxing vacation might help you. A good work out would help.

You also have a responsibility for your own well being. Leave it so you can get it in proper perspective and then come back to it.Then prioritise, delegate or even say sorry I can’t do it.

When you have too much to do, you have to either go nuts or try to engage in an exercise of priority setting. You list all the things you have to do and why you want to do them, and then you decide which ones are most important. You decide which ones you cannot live without. If you think you cannot live without anything on the list, you have identified your problem.

You then have to force yourself to prioritize things. You work on the top priorities, and push off everything else for later. You also put time for yourself on the list, and give that a higher priority. Then, when it’s time, you take time for yourself and put off those less important things.

This a matter of life and death. If you take on everything on your list, and you don’t do it, you run the risk of getting depressed and you know as well as I do what depression can do to people like us. I was able to survive doing this kind of prioritization and also by asking my wife to take on more. I don’t think you have a spouse to rely on, so you don’t have that option, but if you have friends or children, perhaps you can ask them to take on some tasks that have to be done but that you can’t do.

People like us have a real hard time doing things if we are depressed. We’re super efficient when we’re doing well, but depression is a killer. And letting yourself get overwhelmed can lead to depression. So please make yourself be ruthless about cutting things out of your life, and about asking friends and family to take on some tasks. In one way or another, you must make your life feel manageable. You must! And you can!

I haven’t but I know I am at risk of it.

Things I do to avoid ‘burn out’.

- Acknowledge I can’t do everything myself and I shouldn’t have to. Delegate where you can.
– Set the hour you feel are fair to work and be selfish about sticking to those hours.
– Some things don’t need to be done now but email/SMS and modern technology can make us feel bombarded. Decide how long you will work and then turn off your phone, don’t check your email.
– Put regular weekend/longer breaks in your calendar and take them.
– Factor in coffee with family/friends, a walk on the beach or at least 30 minutes of guilt-free ‘you’ time a day.

Can’t say I live all that all the time but I try to do it much more than I used to.

I agree with previous responses suggesting that you rest up and take a real or virtual vacation if you can.
And I fight burnout (deriving from both grad school type and chronic disease) by making a list of my short, medium, and long term goals, and then arranging them in order of priority, as @wundayatta said.

I burn out every few months at work, or whenever something else goes catastrophically pear-shaped. I invariably decide that I don’t give a whit about the future of the department and step down production to a comfortable plod, which I keep up until I go home and relax for a while.

I was close in the year 2002, but still had enough energy left to make important changes in my life. So, the answer is no. I work in IT as a manager and I personally know dozens of people who have suffered from a burnout or who are still recovering. And the numbers keep increasing.

Being tired as such cannot clearly point to burnout. There are dozens of other reasons. A health check can help. Just getting a complete blood count is very useful.

When I was in NZ, I was working with a business that was going through some really awkward growing pains. I was having to work 60 hours a week (on salary) and still didn’t feel like I was getting anything done because of previous accounting messes I had to try to clean up from the person before me. Added to that, my (now ex) husband and I had just bought a new house and were trying to fix it up and we were trying to get pregnant. I crashed and burned badly. The doctor took me off work for 3 months. My boss replaced me with 2 and a half people. My marriage fell apart. I moved to a new city and started all over, but my crashing wasn’t over, because I was letting go of what I had to let of.

Looking back, if I had gotten rid of the negative crap in my life properly and focused on what I wanted to do instead of trying to do what I thought I had to for other people I could have saved myself a lot of grief. Standing up to my boss would have been a good start. Not letting my then husband bully and control me, even after we separated all would have helped.

I have this happen all the time. I’ve started to use scheduling software and that seems to help. Also, a good nights sleep.