In the previous blog we explored beginning to recover from burnout through building social support and physical health.  In this blog we continue this non-exhaustive exploration of some of the ways you can support yourself if you are feeling burnt out.

Look at (if and) where you can strengthen your agency

There’s lots of evidence that carers can struggle to prioritise their self-care (Collins, 2025; Diggory and Reeves, 2022).  However, to give yourself permission to do this means that you are helping the person you are caring for as well as yourself.  The tricky thing here can be navigating between your needs and the needs of the person you are caring for.

One way of doing this self-care can be seeing where you can strengthen your agency.

Whilst reading about recovering from burnout, I’ve come across literature that talks about strengthening people’s boundaries.  A boundary might be saying ‘no’ to doing something that adds more responsibility/tasks for you.  This makes perfect sense: burnout is linked to exhaustion, so saying no to extra or existing ‘load’ can help us recovery.  A boundary, according to Michelle Ellman, is how we teach others to treat us.  Boundaries signal what is us and what is something/someone else; what is acceptable, what is unacceptable.

Typically boundaries can be tricky for carers, because caring often means that the carer’s identity becomes subsumed into the identity of the person they care for.  This is true for how carers perceive themselves and how others perceive them.  I’ve lost count of the number of times people have told me that they have been ignored in processes where, as the carer, they are an expert on the person being supported.  Furthermore, carer boundaries are challenging because carers occupy and switch between multiple overlapping roles: e.g. parent, administrator, advocate/fighter of the system, researcher, potentially also employee in another part of life.  The rules of how people ‘treat us’ in these different roles might look different and make ‘hard’ boundaries difficult to maintain.

Talking with coach Caroline Rigby, I realised just how tricky ‘boundaries’ can be for carers or parents.  Quite apart from the fact that carers and parents have so many different roles, boundaries themselves are inherently ‘defensive’.  The English word boundary derives from Latin and French words for limit, later coming to mean ‘the limits of a territory’ or dividing lines.  As a carer or parent can you really draw ‘dividing’ lines?  What is the impact on others of drawing such lines?  For parents of Pathological Demand Avoidant (or Pervasive Desire for Autonomy) children, for example, setting a boundary can look like a demand or even a rejection to that child.  Drawing boundaries can potentially become about asserting control, and in certain circumstances where children or family members are highly dependent might not feel possible.

So what if we make a ‘coach move’ here and reframe recovering from burnout by setting a boundary, as recovering from burnout by strengthening your agency?  Rather than drawing a definitive line in the sand (a boundary) that feels defensive, disconnecting; agency feels connective.  Agency (which comes from Latin, and means ‘to do’), is theorised in Psychology through Deci and Ryan’s ‘self-determination theory’.  In this theory, people are inclined to grow and they do this by building autonomy, competence, and relatedness: being connected to others.  If we think of agency then as premised on connection, we can then begin to explore what agency/needs does my child/ my family member have, and what agency can I develop?  How could these work alongside each other?  So we have agency and connection.  We can also ask: what do I need to develop this agency?  We can begin to think about how we can build our skills in this area.

In this last blog we mentioned how much of burnout comes from feeling helpless and overwhelmed.  Developing our sense of agency gives us a way to begin to move and to become energised.  Even if it might be tricky to navigate what that agency is in terms of  balancing other’s needs and our own, agency nevertheless keeps us connected with others.  If you want to think through where and how you could build more agency, please reach out to us at info@careforyoucoaching.co.uk.

Acknowledgements: This blog would not have been written without the brilliant insights on self-determination theory by the coach Caroline Rigby.  Thank you Caroline for your support and for challenging my thinking!