Surmenage: When We Experience Chronic Fatigue

There are times when we collapse. We find it difficult to do what we normally do because stress goes beyond our limits. When that happens, it can be a surprise. When we experience chronic fatigue or surmenage, we can feel really overwhelmed. So it’s important to recognize when it’s happening. Thus, we will be able to establish strategies to deal with this.

What are the characteristics of chronic fatigue syndrome? How to deal with it?  We invite you to understand these issues through our article today. Let’s start!

What is surmenage?

Have you ever felt your mind and body telling you “Enough!”? It may be a surmenage table. It just alludes or refers to situations in which we have reached the limit and which we don’t know how to manage.

Although in some contexts the term is used to talk about stress, it is mainly used to refer to wear and tear in the workplace. For this reason, it is also associated with the stress suffered by people who have greater responsibility in companies.

It’s a term that is becoming more and more common. This is suggested in the article El Agotamiento Intelectual ; in fact, it suggests that it is a word that began to become naturalized in France and that, little by little, spread to other parts of the world.

It can be confused with burnout syndrome; in fact, guidelines for differentiating them have not been established. It’s a word that came up quite informally.

Main features

We can identify that we are going through a surmenage through its characteristics. Some of them are:

• Impatience.
• Strong competitiveness.
• Mental exhaustion.
• Excessive commitment to work.
• Think a lot about the future.
• Feeling that everything has to be perfect.
• Little flexibility or frustration tolerance.
• Feeling of being overwhelmed.
• Progressive decline in energy to get things done.
• Insomnia.
• Physical exhaustion.
• Lack of motivation for activities that were once enjoyable.
• Mood swings associated mainly with: aggressiveness, irritability and indifference towards others.
• Muscle and joint pain.
• Psychosomatic disorders.

When having these symptoms, the person may have difficulties to develop properly in all areas of their life. Therefore, it is something that should not be overlooked.

How to face surmenage?

First, you have to know how to identify him. We can all experience stress, and this is normal, as it actually helps us to be alert, making it an essential mechanism for our survival. However, our psychological musculature also has a threshold beyond which our mood begins to deteriorate.

Now, to recognize it, we must pay attention to the signs ; those emitted by our surrounding environment, those emitted by our body, those associated with our results, etc. They are the ones who will tell us that we are going through a moment of special vulnerability.

On the other hand, we need to try to close the day, that is, disconnect, because if we keep thinking about pending issues or what didn’t turn out as we expected, we can fall into ruminations that harm us.

Furthermore, we can work on emotional intelligence to achieve greater confidence in our own abilities. We must also be more optimistic; we can start by discarding negative thoughts and foreshadowings of the future that do little to help.

One of the reasons we hit the limit is procrastination. So, to avoid a surmenage, we can start to be more productive, setting priorities and redirecting concerns.

On the other hand, let us not overlook other areas of our life. If we focus only on work, we will leave out other activities from which we get important reinforcements.

The surmenage is a place that, due to its space, can welcome us all. Staying away from it helps us to have a better quality of life, because as Jordi Cebrià-Andreu says in his article entitled The syndrome of professional wear and tear as a public health problem , surmenage can plunge us into extreme behaviors that distort our self-concept and install us in a permanent dissonance.