Last week I talked about protecting my peace.  I want to continue with this idea of protecting your energy by thinking about blowing fuses and burnout.   

Have you ever blown a fuse or a had to reset the circuit breaker in your house?  If so, this means the fuse was doing its job of protecting electrical circuits.  A fuse is blown if too much electrical current goes through it at a given time.  When the fuse blows it breaks the circuit, so electricity can’t flow through it anymore.  Without the fuse, an overpowered electrical current would fry anything it ran through.  To get things working again, you have to pause and replace the fuse or reset the breaker.

What does this have to do with anything?  When a mechanical device is overwhelmed, the fuse blows, and it stops working.  It’s then OBVIOUS that something is wrong.  It won’t resume working again until it is fixed.  I’d argue that we have our own internal fuses that blow when we get overwhelmed.  The issue is that these fuses aren’t always obvious to other people or even ourselves.  Since a blown fuse isn’t always obvious, we just keep going on and on and on until we fry our whole systems and become burned out. 

If you reflect for a minute, what are some signs that you have blown a fuse and are heading toward burnout?  For me, it could look like any of these things: I’m not working out, not getting enough sleep, eating junk food constantly, and I’m easily irritated at work and at home.  All of these are destructive behaviors that hurt me and others around me.  Now, imagine what would happen if I noticed when these things started to happen AND STOPPED to figure out how to fix things vs. continuing to go and go and go.  Think of how much better off I’d be mentally, emotionally, and physically.  Think of how much better off you’d be if you did the same.  Part of protecting my peace this year is understanding what it looks like when I’ve blown a fuse and then STOPPING to remedy the problem.

The challenges:  What are signs that you’ve blown a fuse?  How will you respond once that fuse is blown?

Bonus- A year ago, I wrote a blog post about surge protectors.  It’s one of my favorite entries.  You can read that HERE.  The surge protector entry was all about being PROACTIVE to set up things that would prevent you from being overloaded.  The ideas work well with this week’s entry which is about IDENTIFYING when you are overloaded.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry