As a recovering investment banker and current entrepreneur, I am very familiar with burnout. But it wasn’t until recently that I learned that feeling “burned out” was more than just an adjective. Colleagues and I shared that we were feeling “burned out” on some (or many) days but we didn’t realize it was a legitimate condition that has some serious health implications. To learn more, I asked Belma McCaffrey, career coach and founder of Work Bigger, to share the signs of burnout and what we can do to combat it.

Humans, the old saying goes, are creatures of habit. Some of our habits our productive, while others are less than ideal. Many times, we are prone to attributing our habitual behaviors to external forces, when they are really the product of our internal selves and instinctive response. Believe me, I’ve experienced this for myself. Personally, I have a habit of expressing too much emotion at times I don’t want to, later regretting the way I’ve handled a situation.

It's often hard at work to be mindful--the state of fully focusing your awareness on the present moment--when faced with distractions like the constant ping of emails and texts and the fact that we constantly push our brains to the point of fatigue. Gloria Mark, Ph.D., who studies digital distraction, has found that the average person only has about 11 minutes of consistent focus before he or she gets interrupted. And once you are distracted, it can take up to 25 minutes before your mind can again refocus on work.

Trying to balance everything in our lives just stresses us out more. The key to happiness is more about creating work-life harmony. We hear a lot about work-life balance. It’s a nice catchall phrase that tries to explain the daily attention we place on both our work and home life. Can you give equal attention to a career and a family all of the time? I don’t think you can realistically.

Start the new year by creating--and reaching--goals that can elevate your business. Many times, a new year can be when we are motivated to set new personal goals. We may want to get in better shape, save more money, or learn a new skill. But what about your business? It deserves the same attention--but unfortunately often gets ignored. In fact, one survey found that more than 80 percent of the 330 business owners surveyed didn't track their business goals.

Founding a startup is likely one of the most challenging things you will do in your professional life. Taking an idea and turning it into a successful business is no easy feat. Taking the time to reflect, set intentions and take care of yourself can help you to be in prime mental condition to be the leader you would like to be. And there is no better time than the beginning of a new year to take the time for reflection and setting intentions.

Turning meditation into a habit is scientifically proven to improve your concentration and creative thinking in business. Billionaire Marc Benioff does it every day. So does Russell Simmons, Jeff Weiner, and even Arianna Huffington. It's meditation, and these successful people (and many other CEOs just like them) swear that spending a few quite moments with their mind makes them better thinkers and leaders.