How To Prevent Burnout
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Hi, community:
Thanks for being patient with me last week. I sprained my ankle and just needed to rest my brain and body. In fact, this whole week I’ve tried to adopt a little more slowness. Injuries do that, don’t they? It’s a forced respite from our quicker pace. I also believe that our body makes adjustments for us to cue a slowdown, even if we resist it.
September is a month of many mental health themes: Slow Down September, Self-Care Awareness Month, Suicide Awareness Month, and Sober September to mention a few. September is my favorite time to slow down, and being forced to pause this past week got me thinking about our chronic pace and its implications. So, let’s dig in.
TOOLS
There are also very real emotional effects of stress.
Stress is a basic, physiological response to anything that requires your action or attention.
Stress is not anxiety. Stress goes away once the threat resolves whereas anxiety persists after the trigger is resolved. Anxiety = cognitions driving the bus.
Stress can be good. Stress activates and gets us to react. Good stress might be related to things that are exciting to us like having a baby, moving, first days of school, blind dates and roller coasters.
While stress puts strain on our biological, emotional, and psychological systems, we can choose how we perceive our stress.
GRATITUDE
This week I had the opportunity to facilitate an intimate workshop for a group of executive women leaders from a local Fortune 500 company. We did meditation, yoga, and lots of self-reflection over stressors and reactions and even threw in some gratitude.
Our new group space in the Northville office
One of the biggest concerns they had was how to respond to all the things they cannot control about their work. Things like the pace, sense of urgency, crises that just happen, expectations from leaders, never-ending to-do lists, and requirements for high standards.
Of course, all of these things cause them stress. They feel irritable, unbalanced, exhausted, reactive, and burned out. So we did a deeper dive into their habitual behaviors and belief systems. And what did we identify?
These women leaders have chosen this stress.
Yes! Before you throw a book at me, it’s true! As stated previously, stress can be good when we are excited about the strain. Strains like deadlines, being of value at a company, meeting benchmarks, and completing projects are within our choice to resist or embrace.
And yet, how many of us resist the inherent strains on our lives? We lament the schedules, children’s demands, laundry, household chores, car-pooling, pressure at work, endless emails, texts from friends, and cleaning the house.
Ah, but my friends - haven’t we chosen these things?
INNOVATION
There are things we cannot control: war, weather, and the many, many traumas that happen to us.
However, as one of my favorite researchers, Dr. Gabor Maté says,
“Trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. Trauma is that scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended.”
And with this, can stress also be something that we choose how to react to it? We know that the strain of stress impairs our health. However, how we perceive stress can dramatically change our relationship to that strain.
FEELS
When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. - Dr. Wayne Dyer
When I teach the Reset Cycle of Stress to groups, I offer them the idea of establishing a new life philosophy. Yes, we cannot control many of the incoming stressors in our lives but we can control our responses.
When I begin those familiar feelings of stress: headache, irritability, nervous stomach, impatience, and adrenalin rush I can determine how I wish to internalize the strain. Can I avoid the upsetting phone call, the big presentation, or the wails of my children? No. Can I manage the behaviors of others to create an environment of constant safety and peace? No. Can I control world hunger, climate change, and war? I mean… kidding! Absolutely not!
But I am in control of my response. I make a point to learn how to regulate my nervous system so I can practice resilience in the face of strains on my system. I can set boundaries so that I approach my stressors with a more regulated nervous system and settled brain and body. I can practice building and not depleting my prefrontal cortex and the brain that I need to help me stay organized, rational, intentional, and adaptable through things like meditation, mindfulness, and compassion.
I can stop resisting what are the natural stressors of my life, as it is, and allow for a more easeful unfolding of what is.
And lastly, if you are sitting here saying, “I DID NOT CHOOSE THIS LIFE!”, then I ask you - what are you willing to endure to change it? When we resist what is and do not hold ourselves accountable to change our circumstances, we stay stuck. The feelings of being out of control, helpless and overwhelmed by our stressors are the building blocks of burnout.
Yes, things happen to you. Yes, life is hard. So, what can we do to try and change your response to it all? When you see and feel the stress building up, I empower you to use mindfulness (observation of what is, curiosity, compassion) to choose your reactions to your stress.
I’ll leave you with my all-time favorite quote from Holocaust survivor and psychologist, Victor Frankl:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
