Our Use Case Spotlights post series highlight user stories and tips that can help you as you set up your own tasks, refresh things to add new challenges, or just get more motivated to keep at it! This round, we asked people about how they use Habitica to recover from the dreaded burnout. When you’re exhausted from all your tasks, a life situation, or other factors, how can you use Habitica’s format to make sure you get the rest and recovery time you need? Let’s hear from some Habiticans in the Use Case Spotlight Guild:
Fishdye starts us out with some tips on what to do when you’re overwhelmed by your Dailies:
There’s one thing I do to help me feel more like I’m running Habitica, rather than Habitica running me.
I have a LOT of Dailies, but they are things I really should be doing every day/on the days they’re active — many of them being things to think about during my day, so for many of them, simply reading through them carefully really is enough to count them complete and check them off. HOWEVER, there are just a handful that I’d like to be doing daily, but it’s consistently not happening due to all the things I have going on right now.
When one of those Dailies comes up, I move the start date to the beginning of the next month. (I’ve just done that with four of them today.) This way, I get a reprieve from feeling guilty from not checking them off (and from having them be what keeps me from a Habitica perfect day), and I can decide in the not-too-distant future whether to have another go at them. (I realize I could make them Habits instead, but, for me, if the task is something I need to be doing daily, converting it to a Habit undermines that.)
It’s tough when I feel like my regular slate of Dailies is perfectly doable, and yet I’m not accomplishing them. By moving the start dates, I maintain the position that they’re doable, but give myself the grace to work up to them.
Sternauge has a very thoughtful entry in the Guild that’s too long to include in its entirety here. We’re sharing a highlight, but encourage you to go read the whole thing!
I also have a triplet of rather generic but very important habits that especially help me when I’m overwhelmed (they all imply a break to an overwhelming task). I keep them at the top of my short habit list and I try to keep them always blue:
- A mindfulness or mini-meditation habit that I can adapt to almost every situation and every short break. I could use it to just sit or stand somewhere and observe myself breathing for a few moments, feeling the ground beneath my feet, conciously relax as many muscles as possible, … I also use it when I’m feeling overwhelmed right now to observe myself and maybe find out why that specific situation is overwhelming me.
- An exercise habit not only intended for bodily fitness but also to allow my mind either to wander freely during that time or to focus on something completely different. Currently I mostly tick it off for each 30 min of walking which is also one of the best ways for me to deal with overwhelming days.
- A habit called “Did something REALLY fun”. This is actually a quite new habit and inspired by the current Take This Challenge. It is intended to help me find and remember all the little joys during the day.
CJLottie gave us another great set of tips for coming back to Habitica after recovering from prolonged burnout. The full text is too long to include here, but you should definitely go read the full post in the Use Case Spotlights Guild!
A little new here, but this topic really spoke to me! For context, I haven’t used Habitica in over two or so years due to just overwhelming mental health and personal life challenges. Then COVID hit, and well… things just took a turn for the worse once again. I only recently started to get back in the swing of Habitica again, and it’s helped in a major way with recovering from two plus years of burnout! Here’s what I did:
- Cleared out every single one of my old tasks. Even the ones that were helpful. Went for a blank slate. Now, my initial response was to just overwhelm myself with tasks. Which led me to step two.
- Picked one simple daily. Just one. For me, it was taking my meds. The key here is that it was something I was already fairly good at, so I could watch the counter progress tick up. This was deliberate – to make sure that I could have the most success and not get even more discouraged, I wanted my brain to register that Habitica was a positive stimuli. Tap into that rewards pathway to get a sense of success!
Do you have tips for using Habitica to prevent, ease, or recover from burnout? You can share those in comments here, or hop into the Guild to chat with other users.
Be sure check out all our past Use Case Spotlights for more ideas. We’ve written on all kinds of themes and shared a lot of users’ wisdom there!
get organized. stay motivated. have fun. 