Recovery From Stress, Overwhelm and Burnout
April 22, 2008 by robertpaul
Robert Denton will be giving a 90 minute presention on ASR-KEY Therapy at the Conference of the Institute for the Advanced Studies for Health on the 7th September 2008 at Doubletrees Hotel, San Francisco. For more information go to www.nlpiash.org
Stress, Cancer other conditions and spontaneous healing is covered in a new book called Activating Spontaneous Healing by Robert P. Denton.
The book is now available in E-Book form and is expected to be released in paperback format during the autumn of 2008.
Information about ‘Activating Spontaneous Healing’ and ordering can be found at www.asr-key.ch/announcements.
RECOVERY FROM STRESS, OVERWHELM AND BURNOUT
Burnout Recovery is all to do with the cause and the degree of burnout. First it is important to know that burnout is not an illness like depression. Burnout is a state of self protection. It is a need for internal healing and recovery from damage to the brain and body, largely as a result of prolonged and excessive amounts of cortisol known as the stress hormone. See previous articles for more information on how cortisol damages and inhibits muscle tissue, poisons brain cells, damages thought pathways and causes loss of short term memory. Some of these articles are as follows: “Stress is to Burnout as LG is to Recovery”, “How Deadly is Overwhelming Stress?”, “Stress Overwhelm and Burnout! The Paradox”, “Emotions; What are They and How Do They Affect our Lives?”
By ‘a state of self protection, internal healing and recovery’, I mean that it appears that an inner body intelligence certainly in the form of cortisol and its hormonal information program, has shut down the ability to work or in severe cases even to think. That is to say thinking or focusing for even a short time will rapidly induce extreme mental fatigue. Certainly part of this fatigue is due to the factthat in burnout substantial thought pathways in the brain have be damaged or destroyed. That is until sufficient healing and recovery has taken place and new thought pathways can be created. Therefore it is important to understand that any recovery strategy is key to what happens next.
Trying to get better exercising the mind is perhaps the worst thing to do, trying simply causes more stress. Certainly in the beginning the most important yet most difficult thing to do is first let go of everything. Next to focus whatever capability to think you have at your disposition, on the pursuit of rest, relaxation, enjoyment and most of all having as much fun and laughter as possible. Why fun and laughter? Well these behaviours reduce performance, competition and other stress activities that produce cortisol. You cannot be stressful while rocking with laughter. Your main objective is to keep cortisol production to absolute normal levels. Reduced cortisol well below normal levels may be as dangerous as too much.
The things to avoid and protect yourself from during your recovery period at any cost are excessive or abnormal levels or ideas of retaining responsibility, duty, working, performance, competition and anything that is disagreeable. This includes, limiting perceptions, negative assumptions, limiting beliefs and all the values and expectations that drove you to disaster in the first place.
This is a period of natural reflection also a time to profit by deeper self awareness of who you are, what is most important to you and what you want in the future
There are many levels of stress, overwhelm and burnout. So speeding the recovery of whatever your level of suffering does depend very much on understanding what is happening at the emotional, psychological and medical or physical levels.
High stress, overwhelm and burnout can hit anyone but these states tend to happen more frequently to people who are high achievers or aim to be high achievers. People who are extremely focused and caring about giving a quality service, who want things in their control to be as perfect and effective as possible are at greatest risk. These groups of people tend to put great effort and long hours of hard work into pleasing and putting others and other matters before themselves or their own needs.
They can also be extremely self critical and thus self demanding, which is one way they raise their stress levels. That does not necessarily mean they are hard or thick skinned. These people may give an external appearance of being tough and highly capable. Underneath they are emotionally sensitive and extremely giving by nature. Learning to be thicker skinned and demanding that others take more of their own responsibility and personal leadership is certainly something for stress sensitive people to work on.
These people can be very intelligent and sensitive to others people’s perceptions, comments and criticisms. The also tend to be good at reading body language also sensitive to untuitive and telepathic reasoning. There in lies their vulnerability to creating their own high stress and eventual burnout. Other people may create situations without any idea how someone stress sensitive people will find that situation stressful. Therefore stress evolves out of our own perception and personal style of inner leadership and drive. Changing these things is not easy and usually requires qualified support.
My own experience of going through the most severe burnout has taught me an incredible amount about my own psychology and about how the body, the mind and body/mind works. Burnout victims invariably take upon themselves responsibility for peripheral issues far beyond reasonable standards. They take matters concerning their work or duties very seriously. Externally it may not appear so, however, internally there is an enormous amount going on constantly. It is this aspect that there is never really any rest or time for complete relaxation and simply having fun. Because stress sensitive people are self motivated they may spend a great deal of their time or thinking time alone and may even be considered ‘loners’. Consequently their life is virtually 24/7 focusing on their work or responsibilities. One important recovery strategy is to find a confidant or mentor who is completely trustworthy. Then begin to share their thoughts. This maybe difficult because it is contrary to their normal behaviour strategies. Everything shared must be in total confidence.
The reader will now I hope begin to understand that the most powerful and destructive essence of high stress, overwhelm and burnout are their beliefs, values and behaviours. Also how these factors interact with their environment. Other important associated psychological issues are perceptions, assumptions and expectations.
The subject and therefore a truly effective recovery process is consequently complex. There is no one cure-all like taking a spoon of medicine, morning, noon and evening. Recovery is in understanding ones own behaviours, beliefs, values, identity, function, perceptions, assumptions and expectations. Then finding what is hurting also those thoughts that are limiting or unhelpful.
A burnout recovery process is like few other illnesses where the objective is to get back to work as quickly as is reasonable. No, quite the opposite. Burnout recovery is about change and not doing what you did that got you in such trouble. Burnout recovery is to re-learn, re-program, learning to do your life in a different way with different beliefs, values, perceptions, assumptions and expectations and very possibly it all starts with examining beliefs about identity and function, (your job).
This issue of learning to do things in a different way is far more important than might be apparent. In my book ‘Activating Spontaneous Healing’ currently only obtainable in e-book format from info@asr-key.ch/announcements and to be published in paperback form most probably in the autumn 2008 In the book I talk a great deal about the body’s inner intelligence and it is something that I found dominant in my own burnout recovery. Inner intelligence is like a self protection process or unconscious control that is perhaps more easily recognised as an internal guardian angel. In reality it is a complex mixture of emotions, muscle memory and hormone production triggered by those other factors. Hormones act like instruction manuals or performance programs. In this case they work like knee jerk reactions. Do the wrong thing, i.e. try to think or worse to work and you will be slapped down and knocked back in your burnout or overwhelm recovery by an instant and relentless crushing feeling of unbelievable mental and physical fatigue. The message is very clear. It simply and crudely says: don’t do that. The more you persist the more you will be slapped down until the day you learn to change and think about your life and future quite differently.
This is like the Pavlov conditioned reflexes, where under certain conditions or stimulants you automatically behave in a certain way. The inner intelligence protection mechanism is guiding or training you with a big stick to wipe out the old automatic behaviour patterns that triggers your reactions to do what you did before. This is an evolutionary process that can take as long or short a time as you choose. It is this simple, nonetheless difficult to understand or put into action. The faster you learn to change the beliefs, values, behaviours, perceptions, expectations that lead to your burnout, the faster your recovery. Once the penny has dropped and you begin to realise exactly what is happening, your recovery will start to progress faster. Therefore, because you are likely quite intelligent you may be able to work out the next steps for yourself. However, if you like reinventing the wheel and everything that came after as a result, then so be it. In which case I suggest you consider taking four or more years in your recovery. Whereas, by taking a little help and guidance from someone who knows what to do, can save you a great deal of time and pain.
While I talk a lot about the power of the body’s inner healer system being the most powerful of all healing arts, one of the paradoxes is that it is not always capable of activating itself. Therefore, for more complex problems such as high stress, overwhelm and burnout, you do really require help from someone with practical and real experience rather than someone with a head full of theory. For those wishing to have positive support I would recommend visiting the website: www.asr-key.ch and contacting Robert Denton direct at info@asr-key.ch.
END
Please give your thoughts, opinions and any experience or questions in the box below or to info@asr-key.ch
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