Understanding Burnout: Signs and Solutions

Are you one of the many people who are experiencing burnout and are just pushing through because you feel like you have no other choice?

Burnout is a popular topic in wellbeing circles at the moment. It is also a very complex topic. So much so that I will do a series of posts on it over the next few weeks. I would like to begin though, with a story of how this started coming up personally for me.

I usually listen to podcasts or audiobooks on Spotify when I am driving round alone in my car. Recently I stumbled across (or maybe was guided to) a book called What’s My Body Telling Me? by Dr Anthea Todd. As soon as I started listening it captivated me. In this book Anthea Todd expresses a wholistic approach to health that makes so much sense to me and she has written about it with great clarity, really effective metaphors and some good Australian humour. She talks about health in terms of green lights, orange lights and red lights with green lights being healthy and good to go, orange lights being warning signals and red lights being signs that you need to stop and attend to some things that need extra care. As I listened, I had a growing awareness of ways in which I was in red light territory in my health and the big boom for me was when I got to the section on the nervous system and I could relate to so many of the characteristics of nervous system dysregulation.

For many years now I have been waking up tired, frequently feeling exhausted, falling asleep if I am sitting for a relatively short period of time and often feeling like I am living on a treadmill of to-do’s and I don’t know how to get off. I haven’t had a holiday of more than 2-3 days in about 14 years, and that was to Auckland with the kids and I was pregnant with my son and had really bad morning sickness. It isn’t just that I haven’t had opportunity, the thought of stopping and having a holiday to “just relax” causes me to feel on edge. It would take several days for my nervous system to unwind even if I did go away.

I have got better at incorporating self-care into my life over the past few years and definitely more confident to voice my boundaries and needs, but as I listened to this book, I realised that I still had stuff going on that wasn’t healthy for me.

The book was a starting trigger. Next, I came across the Groov six pillars of mental wellbeing and reflected that while I do pretty well with the other five pillars, I still struggle with the first one, rest (Chill) as a daily pillar in my life. I realised that I hadn’t directly included rest in the daily focus sheet in my book The Great Life Planner or even given it much if any mention. To be honest, rest is something I have long struggled with, and until recent years, never really valued. It was something I had to do in order to be able to do more. From my experience growing up, my sub-conscious beliefs around rest developed as rest was lazy, it was unproductive, and it was something to be had only after all the work was done (which it hardly ever is for me and my ever-expanding to-do list).

So, I started with allowing myself to rest more. I would make a point of sitting down and relaxing to eat, and come home from work and have a reset lie-down for twenty minutes. While that was good, I knew that there was still something deeper going on. I could make some new external habits, but there were still sub-conscious beliefs and patterns that were driving the fact that I regularly push myself to the point of exhaustion. Two main things began to bubble up. The first I will talk about in this post. The second I will talk about in a subsequent post.

Burnout is rarely caused by a lot going on in our lives. It may appear that way – you have been working long hours at work for months or years, and/or you have been raising a family, and/or you have been navigating a stressful relationship, and/or you have been struggling financially . . . However, in the same way that stress is mainly a result of our internal response to an external event, burnout is usually the result of ongoing stress due to internal drivers such as your beliefs, sub-conscious mental and emotional patterns and level of nervous system resilience.

The truth is, a lot of what people call discipline or ambition is just trauma in a costume. Overworking. Overgiving. Overthinking. Overfunctioning. All of it started as survival. Somewhere back there, you learned that being still was dangerous. That rest equals weakness. That if you don’t perform, you don’t matter.

This kind of wiring doesn’t come out of nowhere. Maybe you had parents who only noticed you when you excelled. Maybe you were punished for failure. Maybe you were the fixer. The emotional sponge. The hero child who kept the peace by being perfect. Maybe no one ever taught you how to feel safe doing nothing.

So now you keep doing everything.

And everyone claps. Until you crash.

Cody Taymore – Kill the Silence

The need to be productive is often wired into us on an individual and societal level. Yes, we all have basic survival responsibilities that need to be taken care of, but how we do that and how much we do within that is our choice, and our choices are informed by our beliefs, patterns and values. If you have a tendency to overwork and over function then it could be just about habits of behaviour, but it is more likely to be connected to something far deeper in your subconscious. If you have difficulty stopping and resting then it is likely that your nervous system is stuck in survival mode.

Are you fighting for your right to exist?

It may sound extreme to say that you are fighting for your right to exist, but it could be how your nervous system is perceiving the world. It may be stuck on high alert and hypervigilant to any threat or danger, or things going wrong. I have experienced two therapy sessions where I have had memories from in the womb. In both of these, I felt like I was fighting for my life. In one I had the sense that my father didn’t want me and in the other that there was something wrong with my heart. I had severe jaundice at birth and had to have a blood transfusion and be in an incubator. My family used to call me “moaning minnie” and as a child I often felt like I couldn’t do anything right. As I grew older I was very conscious of not wanting to be a burden to anyone else. Looking back I would say that I was born with my nervous system in fight mode and over time this evolved into fawn. Fawn is characterised by people-pleasing and lack of boundaries. In her book, Dr Anthea Todd writes that when your nervous system is in the sympathetic mode of fight or flight this is an orange light, and when you move into your dorsal vagal system behaviours of freeze or fawn then your body is in red light.

When you are in freeze:

• You typically feel numb, depressed, hopeless, disassociated, shut down, low in energy

• You are often forgetful e.g. forgetting to eat meals or forgetting what you are doing halfway through doing it

• You may experience occasional slow deep breathing

• You may have a high pain threshold

• You may think that you are usually really good at coping and be confused about why your body can’t keep up with you now

When you are in fawn:

• You may feel helpless, trapped, like a burden

• You typically people please

• You have difficulty setting boundaries

• You have difficulty asking for help because that will inconvenience someone else

• You are strongly motivated by doing things to make other people happy

• You typically put other people’s needs before your own

• You apologise and say sorry all the time

• You may have a high pain threshold

I have done a lot of healing work and have observed significant transformations in myself through embodiment coaching and practices. As a result I can now often experience what Dr Anthea Todd describes as nervous system green lights such as feeling grounded, curious, safe, playful, compassionate, calm, present, grateful, connected, energised and deeply loving which is what I would also describe as vitality. However, what I have observed is that because my nervous system was in orange and red lights for much of my life, it is not very resilient, and it is quite easy for me to slip back into those heavily ingrained patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour. I think it may be like being an alcoholic. In the same way that an alcoholic can practice sobriety, but it always has to be a conscious awareness because their body still has those addiction circuits ingrained and it is easy to fall back into them, for me, maintaining a resilient, regulated nervous system has to be an ongoing conscious awareness because it is not my default state,. My habituated default is being in a hyperfunctioning stress state. As I said earlier in this post, I am also now aware that there are other things at play for me which I will write about in a subsequent post.

So where to from here if you are also feeling consistently exhausted or burnt-out?

1. Be compassionate with yourself as much as possible. You are not broken and you do not need to be fixed. There are just parts of you that need more awareness, love, and understanding.

2. Start with consciously observing yourself. Notice your behaviours, notice what you are thinking. Begin to gather some information about what is really going on within you. Awareness is the first big step of transformation.

3. Notice your feelings and let all your feelings be okay. I found doing this to be one of the most powerful healing practices I learned to do. I used to suppress or try to rationalise away most of my feelings because I saw them as being bad or inappropriate in some way, or because I thought they weren’t valid because other people were experiencing far worse things than I was. One of the most healing mantras for me was: "my feelings are important and valid FOR ME because they are part of me, regardless of anyone else’s experience". If you want more information about this practice I explain it in depth in chapter 6 of my book 10 Steps to Happiness.

4. Listen to your body and give it what it needs when it needs it. Eat when your body is hungry, drink water when you are thirsty, go to the bathroom when you have the urge. Taking care of your body’s basic needs is a way of showing your body that it is cared for and safe. When your body feels safe it can come out of sympathetic survival mode and into parasympathetic rest and digest mode.

These steps may sound small, but they may be all that you can manage right now, and though they are simple they can facilitate significant shifts and healing. I invite you to try them and I would love to hear any feedback about how they have worked for you.

If you want any further support then feel free to message me or email me at info@janinelattimore.com.

Arohanui, much love
Janine

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