Wake windows and burnout

The two biggest things in my life right now are being a new dad and being a founder.

I find myself often taking lessons from one and applying them to the other. Today’s reflection? Baby wake windows and burnout.

When a baby is young, we look at wake windows to support their sleep - essentially calculating how long they’ve been awake to determine when to put them to sleep.

Wake windows are key because as any parent knows, if you miss the window and your baby becomes overtired, it’s much harder to put them to sleep.

Counterintuitively, they also have more disruptive sleep and are likely to wake up again soon after.

The name of the game is to look for any early signs of tiredness and start their nap time routine.

Burnout works similarly.

As we get more burned out, the harder it becomes to get back to a healthy place.

So catching burnout early becomes key to solving it.

But, like with babies, it’s hard to see the signs of early burnout. 

To help with this, I maintain a list of what early burnout looks like for me: poorer quality meditations, more frequent bouts of Sunday Blues, and craving unhealthy food.

Now when I see those signs, I start implementing my “nap time routine” for burnout (i.e. therapy, massages, self-compassion meditations). 

It works a lot more effectively than if I had waited till I was deep in the red.

Thanks for the lesson, baby Sohum :)