How I swapped burnout for simplicity – and you can too with these easy fixes

Daisy Morris, a community and content strategist, describes how she embarked on a quest for inner calm – and found that the answer wasn’t in green juices and wellness classes

Balance is a funny old word, isn’t it? One that gets thrown around like a badge of honour. On podcasts, slick CEOs debate finding the secret to obtaining it in. Gurus write books about it, offering 20-step methods that, quite frankly, make me want to crawl back into bed and draw the curtains. The stress of finding the secret to balance can often feel more overwhelming than the prospect of never having it in the first place.

I always thought I’d get there eventually, but in 2021 it became vital that I did. My body had had enough. I’d been overworking throughout the pandemic, which led to clumps of hair appearing in the shower, an inability to sleep and an erratic heart rate. Not the finest combination.

After a healthcare professional told me – no arguments – that I had to stop, I turned into a “balance guinea pig”, scurrying around trying different healing practices and wellness hacks. In search of that elusive sense of calm, I had pins stuck in my feet, plunged myself into freezing cold water and sought out reiki masters to “heal me”.

In the end, my most profound discovery was not in the ad hoc wellness sessions, it was in finding simplicity – a discovery that went on to birth my mantra: “Check yourself before your notifications.”

It started with intentional breaks, and getting outside. Revolutionary, I know. Yet, so many of us sit there cosplaying little prawns hunched over screens for seven hours straight (often much longer), without seeing the world beyond our home or office.

I’m absolutely not suggesting that you schedule in a daily hike to seek some headspace, and lots of us aren’t able to live next to acres of woodland or a beach. However, drinking a coffee on your doorstep, taking a 20-minute trip to the park, or even simply looking at a tree has been shown to elicit deep feelings of calm.

Reminder: you do not need to earn small breaks and, from experience, I can say that the quality of your work will only improve when you take them.

That’s also true when you uncover the secrets of getting more done by working smarter, not harder. It’s about seeing technology as a friend not a foe, a way to create simplicity within what already exists rather than introduce new ways of being.

In my job, tools such as the new Adobe Acrobat Studio are helping me spend less time going head-to-head with lengthy documents, and more time thinking about and ideating work that feels meaningful. Whether Acrobat AI Assistant is extracting what actually matters from a PDF or filling and organising forms for me, it is helping my quest for balance and freeing up mental capacity in a way that feels liberating and exciting.

Alongside this, I’ve learned to prioritise in a way that supports how I feel mentally and physically. It’s no longer about how quickly I can supercharge my way through a jaw-clenching to-do list. I start the day by working out the absolute non-negotiables, which creates breathing space later on and makes it less likely that work will bleed into the evening, a time when recharging should be the priority.

I once thought of balance as a finish line that would be achieved with green juice, 5am mornings and disciplined routines.

I realise now it’s something much gentler that evolves as you do, through simplicity and small but meaningful moments of peace.

Daisy Morris is the author of Community is Your Currency and founder of content studio and community consultancy The Self Hood

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