The new year typically brings new desires for life changes ranging from health improvements, financial goals, incorporating exciting dating trysts, and renewed and deepened relationships, but what happens when you get tired of constantly striving to uplevel your life? The inevitable feeling of burnout tends to set in.
Although initially known as a workplace term, burnout can apply to personal aspects of your life. Burnout is a syndrome resulting from chronic stress that hasn’t been successfully managed over time. It can be characterized by three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance and avoidance from one’s responsibilities, or feelings of negativism, cynicism, and despair. In this case, the act of improving your overall life to reach holistic happiness would be considered as “betterment,” a trend popularized on social media, particularly TikTok, as the hashtag #betterment has garnered 4,000 plus video posts, which explains the importance of focusing on your upgrading and refining your finances, health, and dating preferences to living a more satisfying and meaningful life.
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Although some betterment content on TikTok has been helpful, plenty of viewers have found the videos to lead to more stress, as comparison of progress towards specific goals start to set in or simply feeling tired and overwhelmed by how much work is needed to complete plans over the year. As we know, self-improvement trends can be toxic and foster harmful tropes of needing perfection or constantly being on the rise, even when you might not have the emotional capacity to foster drastic or simple changes (which is totally fine, by the way). Simply put, if you are burned out on trying to knock out your 2024 resolutions and goals, you very well may be in your “Betterment Burnout Era.” After all, isn’t it best to be pleased with how you are right now instead of constantly feeling the need to contort yourself into a new person all the time? It’s more than okay to feel rested in who you are in this moment and throughout the year without feeling the need to reinvent yourself – perhaps healthier to do so, to limit stress and unneeded pressure on yourself. Challenge yourself to embrace who you are in this moment, and we suggest you reframe your thought process on bettering yourself to embrace who you currently are, as they may be the year of radical self-acceptance. What an exciting thought!
Remember that it’s okay to rest in your betterment burnout era, but if you’d like to accomplish some of your 2024 goals, here are some tips to help you refocus and restore to execute.
Refocus: Sometimes, a bit of focus is all it takes to get back to where you started. However, muting the noise, outside pressures, and stress can help you refocus and get back to work or reframe your thinking to prioritize rest.
Reflect: It’s essential to take some time to reflect on why you made your 2024 goals in the first place. If you are feeling overwhelmed or stuck, perhaps you can cancel certain events, engagements, or appointments to free up your time to understand your 2024 resolutions and make a different action plan to achieve them.
Reconsider: Although you may not have gotten far on your goals from January, remember it’s still early in the year, and you have time to complete them. Or, after careful consideration, you may decide you’d like to forgo specific goals. That’s OK, too.
