Let's take a break

How often do you take a break during your day? Does your day run away with you like an express train, until it's 10:00 at night, and you're a train wreck, wondering why you're snapping at the people you love?

Yesterday, I started into preparations for a "4 to 8 hour" (hah!) Biology lab before 8 in the morning, to be ready when my lab partner, Andrea, arrived at 9:30. She was planning to leave town this morning, so we needed to be finished as early as possible to let her get on with all her other last-minute chores. Some time after 9 AM, she called to say she was stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire, had broken her tire jack, AND she would need to stop and buy a new tire, because my house is 100 miles round trip from hers, and she could not use her little temporary replacement tire for the trip.

Ok, you get the picture. That's how I ended up finishing the last details after I forced her out the door so that she could pick up her rental car before the place closed. Then I had to finish the written report last night, so she could see that one of the experiments had changed results to the opposite of what she had observed, after she left.

And that's how I was just completing the typing and e-mailing the written report to her as the 10:00 news was coming on the television screen upstairs, where my abandoned husband had gone, after having watched me type and barely interact with him for 3 hours. Somewhere along the line he had muttered, "Is this what your school experience is going to be like? I just want to know."

Your day is your own variation on this theme. Kids needing you every waking second. Job demands from dawn to bedtime. No break, no time off. The phone, fax, e-mail, Twitter, whatever, is constant and all-consuming. That's how, after not very long, you are burnt out. You no longer want to reach out and touch someone. You don't want to touch ANY one, let alone have them touch you. You want peace. You want quiet. You want rest for your weary heart, soul, mind, body, nerve endings. All your synapses are screaming, "NO MORE! Adios."

Do you want a clue that you're overloaded? You're forgetting things. Some are minor, but some are not. Are you? Your brain has said, "Capacity reached. We're out of here. Bandwidth exceeded."

Another sign: Your concentration is lousy. You can hear the same information several times, and not get it. (See above. Capacity reached.) Maybe you're asking the same question over and over. You can't hold onto the answer. It's not that you're not listening. That is a completely different issue. You cannot retain information. So let your husband/wife off the hook if they're doing this to you.

I won't even ask about the more serious signs, like a car accident, or ongoing over-eating, under-eating, or other unhealthful ways to cope with overload and burnout. Look at Part 2 for some baby steps out of this mess.