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, 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.

 

By ‘a state of self protection, internal healing and recovery’ I mean that it appears that an inner body intelligence has shut down the ability to work or in severe cases even to think,  until sufficient healing and recovery has taken place. Therefore it is important to understand that recovery strategy is key to what happens next.

 

Trying to get better is perhaps the worst thing to do. 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 left 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. Your main objective is to keep cortisol production to absolute normal levels.

 

The things to avoid and protect yourself from at any cost are responsibility, duty, working, performance, competition and anything that is disagreeable. This includes, perceptions, assumptions, limiting beliefs and all the values and expectations that drove you to disaster in the first place.

 

There are many levels of stress, overwhelm and burnout. So speeding the recovery of whatever level 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 caring about giving a quality service, who want things in their control to be as perfect and effective as possible. Therefore, they 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. That does not necessarily mean they are hard or thick skinned. These people may give an external appearance of being tough and highly capable and 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 to work on.

 

These people can be very intelligent and sensitive to others people’s perceptions, comments and criticisms and there in lies their vulnerability to high stress and burnout.

 

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. Consequently their life is virtually 24/7 focusing on their work or responsibilities.

 

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 beliefs, values, identity, function, perceptions, assumptions and expectations.

 

A burnout recovery process is like few others 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.

 

This issue of learning to do things in a different way is far more important that might be apparent. In my book ‘Activating Spontaneous Healing’ currently only obtainable in e-book format from info@asr-key.ch  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 hormones 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 say: 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. 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, 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 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.