Can burnout be self-inflicted?

Not sleeping well? Loss of appetite? Feeling anxious thinking about work? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you could be facing burnout. 
Gerald Tan and Tiffany Ang talk through what job burnout looks like and how to address it. 
Here’s an excerpt from the conversation:
Gerald Tan:
But the strangest thing is, I didn’t experience burnout working for people then, but when I was doing my own business, working for myself.
We are so used to hearing people talk about burnout and my boss, manager, the work, the culture, right? But for me, it didn’t come from there. When I was working for myself, then the burnout started. 
Tiffany Ang:
That’s something that people don’t really talk about much, which is when you set out to be an entrepreneur, you have a mission where you’re so excited about it, you want to create something. But people don’t realise that entrepreneurs can also get burned out. 
Gerald:
I think entrepreneurs are quite crazy. We do very unhealthy things to ourselves. I wrote about it some time back, right? That entrepreneurs, we would try to pack every hour with something. We try to chase every lead because we don’t know what it will lead to.
We try to do our best in everything we do, like we put in 120 per cent because we want to give a good account of ourselves, especially in the pioneering days. So then all of this requires a lot of time, commitment, effort, dedication, and a lot of ourselves. So you give so much towards your work, and then you realise you’re already running on empty. 
Tiffany: 
Yeah, so what exactly is burnout?
Gerald:
For most of us, we recognise burnout as maybe just feeling tired. We just have a sense of what it is.
For most people, when we talk about burnout, we also treat it maybe just as a very temporal situation. We take it as I’m just tired and I just want to rest. But actually, there’s a lot more that goes into it.
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