Burnout, Anxiety - How to deal with it?
Many intelligent and driven people like you may feel burnout feeling anxious, irritable, with low motivation. You may have tried many things to feel normal, but nothing appears to work. So now it’s time to take a different approach.
Let’s imagine a boiling pot. It is about to boil over. What would you do?
Yes! You are right! You need to turn the heat off. When the heat is off with the lid open, the boiling water will naturally cool down.
I see many people who are about to boil over try to put a lid on, seal the top, and put many clamps on. All the efforts to prevent the steam from coming out make themselves a super-charged pressure cooker. When the pressure built up, many people resort to drastic measures like drugs or alcohol.
The sense of burnout is the sign that your life is saying the way you live is not sustainable and not suitable for the life in you. You’ve been pushing and pushing yourself to get more and more. Your life has been consistently squeezed to a point it starts refusing to work. It can also bring major physical health issues, too.
Your beliefs that you need to get more, be faster, and be more perfect in everything you do are the fuel that keeps the fire going. Furthermore, your fear of losing any of these is turbo-charging your fire to the limit.
As you correctly answered my first question, “turn the heat off,” our strategy is to divert the fire away from you so that you can cool down and become normal again.
Here’s how to do it.
When you feel tense, relax your body section by section by tensing them up for 3 seconds and then relaxing for 5 seconds. Start from your feet up to your head like the order below.
Feet > Calves > Thighs > Buttocks > Abdomen > Chest > Shoulders > Facial muscles > Scalp
Shift your attention to physical sensations and leave intrusive thoughts alone. Practice it mindfully three times a day, 2 minutes each.
When you walk, eat, and sit, pay attention to your physical sensation of walking, eating, tasting, and sitting. Experience every sensation that your body gives. There’s nothing for you to do. Just experience physical sensations mindfully.
When intrusive thoughts kick in, just note them and simply shift your attention back to physical sensations.
The trick here is to Stop trying to control your thoughts. Instead, just notice them and shift back to your body sensations.
Get help to reassess your beliefs and better understand how your emotions work. If your old tendencies continue to work, the fire will be redirected back to where it was. It is your thoughts and feelings that are creating misperceptions of crisis. It is time to get to the bottom of it.
We learn and grow more through challenges. We learned so many different things about this world while we have never learned how our thoughts and emotions work and how to play with them. Imagine how your life would turn out when your thoughts and emotions work for you rather than against you. You can do it.
Learn more about the definition of anxiety here.