Believe It or Not, These Daily Routines Help You Banish Burnout
You ever go to bed without washing your face? Or stretch that hair washing just one or two more days with all the dry shampoo possible? What about showering altogether? Or not flossing or shaving? No big deal, right? Maybe not if it’s a one-off. But if lack of personal hygiene becomes the norm, then it can have a huge impact on your physical, emotional, and mental health.
You may never have thought about it but there’s a relationship between personal hygiene and burnout. And that relationship works both ways. Lack of personal hygiene can contribute to burnout and burnout can cause changes in personal hygiene.
Here’s how.
What is Personal Hygiene?
Personal hygiene is what you do to take care of your body. It includes bathing, brushing and flossing teeth, washing hands, and your skin and hair care routines. It even includes caring for your nails (feet too).
How does any of that relate to burnout?
Personal Hygiene-Burnout Connection
Well, first, I bet you’ve been so tired at the end of a long day that you thought, “F it.” You go to bed without washing your face, because it took everything you had to just quickly pass the toothbrush around your mouth.
Exhaustion, one of the signs and contributors of/to burnout can leave you without the motivation to care for yourself.
Cynicism, another sign of and contributor to burnout can leave you feeling like caring for your appearance doesn’t matter much. “Why bother?”. So you don’t.
The third sign of and contributor to burnout is a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. This can leave you feeling like you aren’t worth taking care of. It’s one other way you put yourself last.
Then, not taking care of yourself becomes a habit. And that starts to chip away at your mental, emotional, and physical health––directly and indirectly.
Directly, because poor personal hygiene can contribute to:
• Increased risk of infection
• Increased risk of skin and scalp problems (like acne)
• Increased risk of depression
• Increased risk of anxiety
Indirectly, skin and scalp problems can further contribute to depression and anxiety, and low self-esteem. None of which helps the symptoms of burnout, especially a reduced sense of accomplishment and cynicism.
And, it’s been demonstrated that sustaining our daily routines, like personal hygiene, helps humans feel capable and satisfied (Hou et al., 2020; Wiese et al., 2022).
Why Routines Help You Routinely Get Ahead
Routines support every aspect of your well-being, even in ways you wouldn’t have thought. For example, a skincare routine of course helps your physical wellness. It also helps your emotional wellness, by providing a soothing form of self-care and reminding you that you are worth taking care of. Less obvious, though, is the fact that the routine decreases stress because you don’t have to think about it. Once the routine and the product selection becomes, well, routine, you don’t have to spend precious brain power thinking over what to use, when, and how.
That’s just one example. Routines help you manage stress because they are routine behaviors that you don’t have to think about (assuming they are nourishing behaviors and not unhealthy ones). For example, Haines et al. (2013) found that households with routines around increased sleep and decreased TV watching, were healthier and the risk of childhood obesity was lower.
Routines can also improve your resilience. For example, Williams (2000) found that people with more daily routines had lower levels of distress when faced with a negative event or health challenges compared to those with fewer daily routines.
There are more studies I could bore you with, but the bottom line is healthy routines take the guesswork out, replenish your mental and physical energy, and they remind you that you are worth investing in. And of course, with personal hygiene routines, decrease the risk of infections, which is helpful since when you're chronically stressed and burned out, your immune system is weaker.
How to Build a Daily Routine
This is the hard part. You know that already. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t, and neither would my clients. Life is hard and it throws a wrench in the best-laid plans. When I work with my clients, I help them build a daily self-care routine and an emergency self-care routine. The latter is for when life throws that wrench at you.
Think about the difference between the two (daily and emergency) to get started.
When you’re exploring what actions to include in your plans, try one thing at a time, give yourself enough time to experiment with it, and don’t beat yourself up when it doesn’t work perfectly right away. The more you practice, the more routine the routine will become (see what I did there?).
If you need more help, book a free discovery call here.
References
Haines, J., McDonald, J., O’Brien, A., Sherry, B., Bottino, C., Scmidt, M.E., Taveras, E.M. (2013) Healthy habits, happy homes: randomized trial to improve household routines among pre-school-aged children. JAMA Pediatrics, 167,1072-1090.
Hou, W. K., Lai, F. T., Ben-Ezra, M., & Goodwin, R. (2020). Regularizing daily routines for mental health during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of global health, 10(2), 020315. https://doi.org/10.7189/jogh.10.020315
Sharma, U., & Black, P. (2001). Look good, feel better: beauty therapy as emotional labour. Sociology, 35(4), 913-931.
Wiese, B. S., Hou, W.-K., Noppeney, R., & Li, T. W. (2022). Staying focused on work and satisfied with the job in times of pandemic: The power of everyday routines. International Journal of Stress Management, 29(2), 166–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/str0000241
Williams, J. (2000) Effects of activity limitation and routinization on mental health. The Occupational Therapy Journal of Research, 20,100S-105S.