Nobody wants burnout. It’s extremely costly to all areas of life. It forces a halt in your social life, it damages relationships, it prevents you from working, so you can take a real hit in your income medical bills and more.
Perhaps worst of all, is the incredible level of frustration created from being forced to severely limit what you are able to do – there is such a strong conflict between what you were able to do before and what is possible now, and most people fight themselves on this and don’t navigate it well.
I want to prevent you from ever getting burnout.
I have helped dozens of burnout clients recover, and I promise you, though changing your life to do prevention takes effort, it is far less painful emotionally, physically, psychologically than getting yourself into burnout.
Burnout in Ayurveda is when essential deep tissue called ojas gets depleted. Ojas is a protective fluid that acts in our bodies like coolant acts in the car radiator, protecting us from the internal heat combustion generated from physiological activites, from digestion to concentration.
You can see from this list, if you’re overwhelmed, do the opposite! Get help implementing these one-by-one until they become automated.
- Let your mind override your physical body. I see a clear pattern with burnout, with people who have very strong, driven minds and are able to consistently override their body’s needs. It’s little things, if they’re concentrating, all physical needs are unimportant, they don’t stop to pee, they don’t stop to eat, they take a pill to push away their pain, they drink coffee to disguise the need for rest. Compounded, it catches up to you.
- Get interrupted, short sleep. Deep sleep allows our body to rebuild and repair, clean our minds from the impressions of the day. Short hours, interrupted sleep or even sleeping enough but late hours has dramatic results on immunity & sets off a chain of physiological responses that sometimes only become visible to the untrained eye decades later. Train your eye.
- Stay up late working and concentrating. There’s a particularly sensitive time from about 10 at night until 2 in the morning. If we are awake, you know you get a second surge. People with burnout have learned they can make use of this surge of energy to get last minute work done. But this steals from your energy bank, because actually that surge is the body’s repairing organs shifting into gear – hopefully during our sleep. If we’re awake, the energy goes into our waking activity rather than our deeper repairing needs.
- Put everything else above your self-care. If you are “too busy” or overwhelmed to take care of yourself, it’s time to make a dramatic change. No excuses. Reach out and get in a program like [Vitality Recharge] that you give yourself permission to make you a priority again, and rebuild the skills and mental muscle to do so.
- Graze, or skip meals. Grazing means eating a handful of food here and there but no proper meal. Grazing & skipping meals dramatically interrupts our body rhythms, affecting hormones, causing weight gain, digestive problems, and
- Don’t meal plan. Even loosely scheduling in nutritious meals saves the busy person from vitamin deficiencies, sugar cravings and fatigue. It helps you make sure you get fresh food in the house, and streamlines the preparation so you know you can have dinner on the table in 20 minutes and aren’t so tempted to eat out.
- Stay stressed & anxious. Nothing burns ojas faster than worry. Any kind of emotional tension builds up, and actually needs to be flushed out of the body through meditation, exercise and positive thinking
- Don’t move. Exercise helps drain our stress and relax the nervous system. It pumps blood & lymph around the body. It also shows that you are able to prioritize your self-care. If you’re not moving, and it’s because despite your best intentions, you’re too tired – you’re in the danger zone.
If you’ve had burnout, post your story & tips of what worked/what didn’t work at Facebook.
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