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Simple ways to boost your mental health as a digital marketer. Including meditation, gratitude, self-care, healthy sleep tips and more.

The post 10 Ways To Avoid Burnout as a Digital Marketer appeared first on Goats On The Road.

Jobs in digital marketing can be straining, and unfortunately there’s no magic wand to make them less demanding. You’ve probably been told to take more breaks, go for some walks, or spend less time on social media. Maybe you’ve even wondered whether a mental health app might help. 

Whatever it looks like for you, your mental health matters. Here’s why.

Why Your Mental Health as a Digital Marketer Matters

Taking care of your mental health as a digital marketer isn’t optional, it’s a necessity. But neither is it a trend or something that you’ll find in industry guidelines. The field is demanding: constant adaptation, emotional resilience, relentless creative output, juggling responsibilities, little acknowledgment and a lack of stability. 

Digital marketing is one of the few careers where there is no strict line between personal worth and professional success. Here are some marketing-related challenges that contribute to the that mental strain:

• Oversaturation and instability. Regardless of whether you’re freelance or in-house, inconsistent income and unstable job security are all too common. Especially in today’s financial climate.
• Information overload. The expectation to stay on top of every trend, tool, new platform and algorithm shift creates a lot of pressure.
• Emotional labor. Managing clients, campaigns, and audiences requires empathy. Yet, at the same time, digital marketers rarely receive the same compassion in return. Just more pressure from the audiences, clients or management.
• Lack of validation. Creative roles are all too easily dismissed as “non-essential.” Which can make some people start to wonder if the work they do even matters.
• Work-life imbalance. Notifications tend to be happening 24/7 and many of us struggle with drawing a boundary and switching off.

Then there’s the less common stressors such as inconsistent job opportunities, workplace harassment, imposter syndrome, and the high expectations from yourself. Combined together these factors create the perfect storm for burnout, which although temporary, can be deeply detrimental to mental health.

On the other hand, having good mental health boosts confidence, creativity and adaptability. And it’s these traits that function as armor in an unstable world of digital marketing. So in an industry built on drive and constant change, taking care of it matters way more than high KPIs.

How To Avoid Burnout as a Digital Marketer

1. Practice mindfulness

Meditation often gets a reputation for being “too hard” or “unsuitable for beginners.” Not true. But even then, you might not take to it straight away. And that’s okay, because here’s the thing, transcendence in meditation and mindfulness practices is a stereotype. In order to be mindful, you basically have to pay full attention to what you’re doing at the moment. 

Even that creative flow state that digital marketers love is a form of meditation. It’s just not a version that you can rely on consistently without having some level of mindfulness in daily life.

The real benefit of mindfulness is that you disrupt automatic behaviors and thoughts that can accumulate throughout the day, creating anxiety, overwhelm and mental fog. 

But if sitting still in the quiet to meditate sounds unappealing to you, you can start with something smaller and less pressure.

• Devote a few minutes to just focusing on your breath going in and out.
• Pay attention to how your body feels while doing everyday tasks. E.g. In the shower, notice how the water sounds, how warm or cool it feels and where it hits your skin.
• Use gentle guided exercises or calming games if you prefer something more interactive. 

Self discovery apps such as Breeze Wellbeing offer simple tools and exercises such as “mindful breathing” that make it easier to get into the habit without it being like you’re doing “proper meditation”.

2. Choose activities that make you happy

When we do things we love, we’re happier. This is as clear as a fine day, but we also tend to forget this simple truth. We know why this happens: we are just too focused on putting out fires. There’s a deadline here, an important project there and then all our daily needs stacked on top. And so we often just forget to do something nice just for ourselves.

This doesn’t mean that digital marketing isn’t an enjoyable profession. It absolutely can be. You meet a ton of people, and you can combine your analytical, technical, and creative inputs. However, almost every individual experiences a “crisis period” in their profession where the passion fades. It doesn’t mean you hate your job. More likely it’s accumulated stress, burnout, or long term overwhelm wearing you down.

There’s no universal checklist on what to do to be