How to Avoid Burnout for Online Course Creators and Digital Entrepreneurs

5 minute read

Being an online course creator and building your own business has many benefits and can offer many positive rewards to creators.

However, as with any other business or profession, working on something too hard has the risk of leaving you feeling burned out.

It can happen to everyone at some point or another: your life gets busy going here and there — working, helping others, or taking care of your family. Burnout can happen if we get too busy and forget to rest and do things that make us feel better.

But what exactly is burnout?

Burnout is a form of fatigue caused by constantly feeling busy and stressed and a result of excessive and prolonged emotional, physical, and mental stress. In many cases, burnout is related to our job or professional occupation.

When burnout happens, you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to keep up with life’s seemingly incessant demands. The condition of burnout is not medically diagnosed. But burnout can affect your physical and mental health if you don’t acknowledge or treat it.

A study found that burnout affects 52% of workers and employees, and the number increased after the COVID-19 outbreak.

But what about business owners? Do they also fall victim to feeling burned out?

A study conducted on small business owners in 2022 reported that 42% of participants said they had experienced burnout. In addition to burnout, small business owners also have to cope with rising inflation: the same study reports that 71% of small business owners said that inflation had a negative impact on their business in the past months.

While there is not much you can do about inflation, you can control the way you feel and work towards decreasing the symptoms of burnout to a minimum.

If you are feeling burned out and need a break from your business, keep reading below to learn how to avoid burnout for online course creators.

Are You Feeling Burned Out?

Acknowledging burnout can help you take the actions needed to recover from this condition, so keep reading below to evaluate whether or not you are experiencing burnout and how to reduce stress.

You Feel Exhausted Most of the Time: One of the signs of burnout is always feeling tired and exhausted emotionally, mentally or physically. If you lack energy and feel exhausted, you might be burned out.
Lack of Motivation: Another symptom of burnout is a complete lack of motivation toward working on your business and doing things that you normally enjoy, such as a hobby or physical activity.
Irritability, Frustration and Negative Emotions: It is normal to experience negative emotions from time to time; however, knowing when these feelings are becoming unusual for you and happening more often can help you determine if you are burned out.
It's Hard to Focus: People who experience burnout have a hard time focusing on completing a simple task for their job or day-to-day and might get easily distracted. You also might be more forgetful than usual and have a harder time remembering things.
Detachment and Emptiness: Feeling burned out can cause detachment from reality and leave you with a lack of joy and motivation for things that you would normally be excited about.
Poor Job Performance: Whether you are a business owner or employee, your job performance can be affected by burnout. So if you are unsure whether you suffer from burnout, compare your latest job performance with one of the past months.
Not Taking Care of Health: When affected by burnout, some engage in unhealthy coping mechanisms such as drinking too much alcohol, smoking, being too sedentary, binge eating, not eating enough or not getting enough sleep.

How Online Course Creators Can Avoid Burnout

Burnout is detrimental to your physical or mental health. It can seriously interfere with your personal and professional life, exhaust your energy, and harm your ability to work on your business and progress on your online course!

So it is important to know how to prevent burnout the moment you experience the first symptoms: let's see what you can do to avoid burnout as an online course creator.

Set Boundaries in Your Business

Setting strong boundaries in your business can help you keep a healthy balance between professional and personal life.

Especially for online course creators who run their businesses from home, it can be difficult to know when work stops and personal life starts without set boundaries.

Try to establish office hours and adhere to them by organizing your workload every day before you start working and setting goals to follow. Physical boundaries can also help you: if you have the space, create an office area in your home where you only go to focus on your business.

Set Expectations With Your Students and Customers

Offering one-on-one coaching or a community in your online course is a fantastic idea to grow engagement and offer more value to your students. However, it means that you have to actively interact with students and be there to answer their questions.

If you do not set boundaries and expectations, you'll soon find yourself working 24/7, answering students' questions and moderating the community.

You can still run an online course, be successful and preserve your mental health at the same time! Just make sure you set clear expectations with your students and community members about when you are available and when they can reach you.

Build a Routine Doing What You Love

When you are experiencing burnout, you stop doing things that normally make you feel better, like a hobby, physical activity, self-care and so on...

So a good way to avoid burnout before it starts is to build a routine and incorporate your hobby into your daily schedule.

Evaluate Your Online Course Pricing

What does the price of your online course have to do with feeling burned out?

Your stress may be caused by working too much for too few rewards. In this case, it is time to evaluate your online course price and maybe consider increasing it.

A high online course price can benefit you as well as your students. Learn all about it in this article from our blog: Ultimate Guide to Pricing Your Online Course (With Earnings Calculator)

Take a Break When Needed

As a solopreneur, you work around the clock and are the only one responsible for your business, so taking vacation days and completely switching off can be hard.

However, it is a good idea to schedule vacation and rest days in advance so you can plan your workload around them and get the rest you need to avoid burnout. It is common to be fearful of stepping away from your business, but your customers understand that everyone needs a vacation sometimes, and your business will be here when you get back with a clear mind and fresh inspiration.

Conclusion

Burnout can affect business owners and creators of all sizes, even if they love what they are doing and are passionate about the topics they are teaching.

If you experience symptoms such as lack of motivation and focus, exhaustion, irritability, detachment, poor job performance and stress, then you might be burned out and need to reevaluate your working habits.

Try setting clear boundaries for yourself and communicate them effectively with your customers and students, take time off when needed, make time for your hobbies and activities you enjoy doing and even evaluate your online course pricing!

Post Topics: Build and Promote Your Course