The gift of burnout
Burnout is so common, I see a lot of it, that's for sure, and the reason why I talk so much about it is because I went through the same thing years ago, and I went to see lots of doctors and specialists and healthcare practitioners and nobody could help me.
Nobody could help me feel like I used to feel, to get my energy and spark back. And the reason is because the problem wasn't just a physical problem, but I didn't want to listen to what the real problem was, therefore my symptoms persisted.
The thing that I really want to kind of emphasize is that the symptoms that you're currently feeling or if you know that you're in burnout or you suspect you are, then your symptoms are a wake up call… that's the purpose to your symptoms. They're not the cause.
So often we see symptoms as a sign of something has gone very wrong when it's not always the case. It really is kind of like a signal from your body to look at and have more awareness in other areas of your life.
How do you know if you have burnout? So the really common symptoms are getting sleep but not feeling relieved by sleep. So as to waking up tired, maybe you have a weekend and it comes to Monday and you still feel tired. Feeling irritable, feeling anxious, feeling sad, getting sick more often, recurrent infections, feeling disconnected, feeling empty; all of those symptoms are related to burnout.
So, what is the gift of burnout? Firstly, it's not a sign that something is wrong or that your body has failed you. It is really kind of steering you onto, back onto the path of what is right for you. So it's kind of like an ending to an old world and beginning a new world.
Dina Glouberman wrote a book about the joy of burnout, it's a great book if you have a chance to read it. And she says, we burnout because our soul withdraws its energy from what we are doing. Whether it be our work, our relationship, in other areas of our life, something's changed, and therefore our soul or our spirit is trying to remove its energy from that, in order to remove us from that. It's almost like something that helps us to get us back on our path.
And so, when you burn out fully you have no other choice but to choose a new way to live, because once you're fully burnt out, if you know about this, then you pretty much have a lot of time to look at where you're heading, where your life is heading, and do a life review, because you're pretty tired and you don't have the ability to do anything else.
If this is you, I know it may be hard because it feels quite frustrating to be tired all the time or anxious or sad or stressed, et cetera, but there really is a gift to those symptoms and if you really can slow down to listen to what those symptoms are telling you.
Absolutely when someone is tired, I've never met a woman that's tired that doesn't need rest. So, we need to look at just the basic things like that. And when we do slow down, we can really become more aware of where we are out of alignment in our life.
If you want more information, if you really want to look at how can you start to improve your energy and how to recover from burnout, I'm doing a workshop, it's free to join. I'm going to really talk about how to conquer fatigue, low mood and unexplained weight gain, even when you've tried all the right things before:
