“I should, but I don’t wanna mess with it today.” We’ve all been there. We decided doing a thing is worthwhile when we committed to it, and that hasn’t changed. But we’re tired of messing with it and would rather spend our time, energy, and resources elsewhere. Burnout.
No not that sort of burnout, Zeboid*! The sort that leaves you unhappy and unmotivated. Thanks for the image though.
We usually think of burnout concerned with our jobs, or maybe if we’re athletes with our sports, but prepping fits the mold: Something we have good reasons to do but have to spend a chunk of ourselves in a sustained way to get done. If the burnout persists, we’ve got two bad choices: Let the valuable job stay undone and feel bad about that, or wade through a bunch of negative feelings as we do the thing (and probably do a pretty sloppy job of it at that). Better to avoid the burnout in the first place; or get rid of it if it’s arrived. For this, we can take a page out of the sport psychology library.
There are three big contributors to burnout. If we can manage them, well, life is Better. We can do what we value and be happy while doing it.
Self determination
Nobody likes to get bossed around all the time. *Lots* of people, most of them on the internet, are happy to do the bossing. Aren’t those “You’re doing it ALL WRONG” articles the most annoying ever? The key point here is that all those random strangers on the internet (including me) can be good sources of advice (or sometimes not), but it’s your journey. You know what you need best and you’re driving.
On the flip side, you might keep this fact about motivation in mind if you’re working with a reluctant spouse. The spouse no doubt doesn’t want to be bossed around either, and might be a better partner in the journey if made to feel like a partner and not a minion. I’ve gone to considerable extra trouble to do a job myself rather than get micromanaged during the task by a partner.
You may want a prepping minion (as on the left), but being too bossy may get you the minion on the right. Thanks for the image to Shwangtianyuan**
Identity outside the activity
Sure, we’re preppers, or we wouldn’t be here. But if you’re only a prepper … what the heck are you prepping to survive for? When all your identity is tied up with one activity, there’s two real problems.
First, if you are shown to fail in that activity … that makes You a failure, instead of a person who failed at something. The first is a lot harder to swallow. And we do all fail from time to time… search for the category Prepper Fails! on this site for some examples I had a hand in, for example.
Second, if you are all about one activity, after while after while you start to notice all the other things that are missing from your life. That’s a point where a lot of people will lose heart about the main activity entirely: burnout. It’s a much healthier mental place to be where you know yourself to be other things; family member, community member, professional, baker, golfer, supreme commander of your fantasy sports league; whatever floats your boat.
Stress
Stress is, on one hand, hard to address because it’s different for every person. Some people who prep are stressed out about the possibility of an EMP, but it’s almost certain most of your neighbors aren’t stressed about about that at all. On the other hand, stress can be easier to address because it’s different for every person. The world doesn’t stress us out, mostly — our brains stress us out. The prepper who stresses over the EMP and the prepper who prepares for it and doesn’t stress and the oblivious neighbor are all living in the same world.
One way to deal with this is to use the prepping as the coping mechanism. Sure there might be an EMP and we’d all be in a hard place, but hey, those solar flashlights will be handy, and that food supply will give you time to breathe and figure out what’s next. It can be useful to reflect on what we do have ready to roll instead of only focusing on what we still need.
My take-away? Prepping is supposed to make our lives better, so we should go about it in a way that doesn’t make us miserable and burned out right now.
*Zeeboid at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
**By Shwangtianyuan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons