Recovery from Stress, Overwhelm and Burnout Update 1.

Overwhelming stress or 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. Stress and burnout is a state of self protection, internal healing and protection from damage to the brain and body, largely as a result of prolonged and excessive amounts of cortisol known as the stress hormone.

I have to reiterate the notion that recovery from stress is likely to be a limiting approach to the severe stress problem. Any notion or attempt to think or do anything that is designed in any way to take the sufferer to recovery will be blocked. Trying to go back to the state from where they first developed the high stress thinking patterns will immediately clash with their 7^th sense intelligence protection system. My most recent conclusion on studying stress relief is that the word recovery is associated with going back to where you were before and that is the last thing your 7^th sense will allow you to do. Thus my assertion is that the 7^th sense intelligence system is the master of the game not the stress sufferer. The next thing to realise is that in practically all cases of high stress and burnout the sufferer is doing all the wrong things to affect a happy and confident sate of mind. Starting with, fighting it. Trying to make a supreme effort to recovery. Smothering it with anti-depressants. Trying to be dynamic. Trying to live a normal life. Resisting or ignoring their intuition, 7^th sense intelligence and ignoring a life long talent they have possibly active avoided. Beyond these there are many other behaviours that directly or indirectly feed a growing stress cycle.

I realise the 7^th sense theory is a new concept therefore I will explain more of the subtlety of mind and self protection programming, which is certainly all part of the immune system.

For those readers familiar with the process of cognitive neuro transfer (receiving information from another person, animal or other life forms, also know as telepathy) the 7^th sense process is in essence an internal communication between conscious and unconscious thought and memory and a protection system that is doing its best to stop you doing the very things that are damaging your mental and physical health.

The question I have been asking during this ongoing study is; why should the body/mind want to slow or block itself? I fervently believe that at least one of the answers is due to this internal protection and healing system. What is so important to understand is that our world and the environments we live in and sustain have totally outstripped the evolutionary development of our internal protection and healing systems. What appears to be happening is that the body/mind system has been forced to fallback and depend almost entirely on its back stop of massive emotional trauma, which is now being referred to as overwhelming stress and burnout.

In many countries, particularly the United States of America and now western Europe stress sufferers are depending heavily on anti-depressants and similar drugs that essentially num the mind. Years of study have shown the alarming side effects most of the popular anti-depressants have on the users of those drugs in the long term. The awareness of the words ‘long term’ indicates those drugs are not only dangerous but not really of much use in relieving high stress. Certainly there is the issue of their damaging effects also they simply attempt to treat or smother the symptoms. Medical history is awash with evidence of the folly and the regularity of treating the symptom not the condition.

Modern research into how the mind works has conclusively demonstrated for many years how important emotions are as indicators that some psychological problems have stacked up and have been ignored. We disregard internal emotional signals at our greater peril. Anti-depressants depress and smother emotional signals. Awareness of high or overwhelming stress is awareness of internal emotional signals doing their best to tell us to stop doing what we are doing. This is because we are damaging internal states of balance, which normally permit the immune and health systems to function properly. That is why anti-depressants do not work, certainly not in the long term.

There are many issues to address concerning the anti-stress industry. I will touch on two of them here. One is evolution. Evolution takes a long time and yes, I certainly agree that stress has been around also for a long time. Stress is part of the fight or flight system that causes the body to produce the hormones adrenaline and cortisol, both, of which assist muscle function and performance including mental performance. In small and irregular doses these hormones are highly effective and mostly beneficial. Overwhelming stress and burnout signal that the person has been hugely overdosing on these substances. That signal is an indication of a state that is damaging, dangerous and even deadly.

Go back 200 years when few things changed. What did change was a gradual process. The people of that age are recorded in history to have even so been stressed by those changes. In the world of life, professional or high performance coaching the fact that changing a behaviour is difficult and stressful is well understood. The further back we go in history we discover how slowly evolution can take to change. Take the stone age axe for example, which evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and then when it had reached the peak of its design potential it remained unchanged for 65 thousand years. Now fast forward to today, evolution does not have a chance. We are forced to do the thing evolution cannot do. The modern world people of today do not have the option to take time to settle down and feel comfortable with all the things in our lives. As soon as we have something and just reached partial understanding of it, it is already outdated, redundant and superseded. This is what stress is all about.

The paradox is that the last thing we need to do to manage stress is to long for recover. Recovery is going back into the past. Recovery is trying to create an even worse stress situation. There is only one way in this world and that is to go forward. Therefore my conclusion is that in treating and healing overwhelming stress and burnout is in finding how to go forward under those conditions.

Amazingly the solution is far more simple than could be possible realised beforehand. Finding the way forward is immediately working with the 7^th sense system. Starting the process of working with the 7^th sense system and not against it is the first key to unlock the problem. Once this is started it instantly cuts off the stress hormone production also the emotional feelings of overwhelming stress.  As the 7^th sense intelligence is a new understanding of complex mental processes of the immune system it is wise to reiterate part of its working pattern. That is the part of the mind process designed to protect and heal ourselves. The 7^th sense is devoted to warning us via emotions of stress about behaviour patterns belief and values, which may have had a value in the past but are now redundant and must be changed and avoided.

Recently I was watching a CNN broadcast interview of a young man who had just quit his job. The coach who had been engaged to prepare the man to find a new job asked the following question. Quote:  “Why in this difficult period of job losses and a challenging time to find jobs, have you quit a secure job?” The young man said, “When I took the job I had a goal, a mission and a passion. I have successfully fulfilled that mandate and now the job has changed. The skills required no longer conform to my own skills therefore I want to find a new job, which is within my skill set, challenging and satisfying.” As I herd these words I though, how smart for this young man to listen and take note also act on his 7^th sense intelligence. Had he stuck in his job he would have worked himself into a high stress situation.

For those already in a high stress situation or burnout this is not a silver bullet, one shot and it is all over. First the process requires time to find and understand the cause with its associated factors. The following and most demanding part is the behaviour change process. Even when change is well under way, a person under treatment requires constant guidance. They will need support to sustain the change also to spot and avoid the dangers of falling back into old bad habits especially during the tough times of withdrawal.

Robert P. Denton  Mind-Power and Performance coach