Joke's on you if you think I’ve figured out how to navigate burnout. I could say many things as a therapist and a People Ops person. However, whatever I say doesn’t take into account all of this (fingers swirling).

It’d be unfair to say, if you do x, you’ll likely feel y. I’ve read the books, I’ve jumped into blistery cold, and sauna-ed like the best of them. I’ve mediated (and hated it), and done the somatic exercise of identifying where “it” lives. Sometimes, it helps. Sometimes, it really doesn’t.

I could discuss understanding your locus of control, which is a key aspect of it. Perhaps that’s where we start – by controlling what you can control. Thanks to Jacky, one of the more profound things I’ve heard lately is “don’t boil the ocean.” According to the internet, the phrase means that when looking for a solution to a problem, don’t take on too much all at once or make the scope so big that it becomes difficult or even impossible to find an answer.

Like the good professional I am, I didn’t understand. What do you mean, I can’t do it all? I want to do it all. But sometimes, all isn’t actually as effective as it seems. While the theory suggests that we narrow what we can control, I also think it’s about identifying the gaps in what you’re doing. So, in other words, what are things that I can control that could help fill the gaps in my workload?

There is no magic wand to accomplish any of this – it’ll require deep discipline and clear communication with your stakeholders. It’ll be less about boundary-setting and more about understanding what you can move forward with and what to expect from others. It’s a give-and-take that will suck in the beginning, but hopefully, it will feel a little less strenuous down the line. It’s about letting go of some of your ego to have short-term losses for long-term gains. It’s also an exercise of self-reflection: What’s your role in contributing to making this thing better or worse for yourself?

While we think of things as being “stressful,” we aren’t really naming stress for what it is – a cycle with several steps, including an external event that activates us to react (so think fight, flight, or freeze) from our resting state to a state of safety. There’s a lot of research on how our central nervous system learns to stabilize and how we can work with our vagus nerve. We’ll save that for another day. Not going to dive deep into it, but, for now, we can acknowledge that we often are in a cycle both on a macro and micro level.

The best people I know are top performers. Often, their performance is an output of stressful events. How we’ve navigated those stressful events is what enabled us to survive in the corporate world. However, those tools might not be the right tools for us to finish the cycle of stress. Instead of completing the cycle, I suspect that most of us pause the cycle. When we talk about completing the cycle, it refers to reaching a state of rest and relief. What are our coping mechanisms to help us recover?

Think about the stress cycle like exercise: the more familiar you become with it, the more you understand what you can control and how to respond to the things that cause stress.

On that note, if you know how to recover, please share. For now, I offer the following:

Have you tried:

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it.

That’s what this newsletter delivers.

The Marketing Millennials is a look inside what’s working right now for other marketers. No theory. No fluff. Just real insights and ideas you can actually use—from marketers who’ve been there, done that, and are sharing the playbook.

Every newsletter is written by Daniel Murray, a marketer obsessed with what goes into great marketing. Expect fresh takes, hot topics, and the kind of stuff you’ll want to steal for your next campaign.

Because marketing shouldn’t feel like guesswork. And you shouldn’t have to dig for the good stuff.

Subscribe Free

Instead of hinged therapist advice, I’m here to plug beehiiv’s Winter Release Event. This is our biggest event + biggest news of the year = very exciting and mysterious !!!!!

You know the drill, RSVP here.