Burnout: How hypnosis can help you

March 23, 2018

Moving, forget it. Delivering quality, nope. Being able to be focused, it only seems that way. If you suffer from burnout, you just went on after being overworked and didn't slow down, with all its consequences. Having a burnout is terrible and it is also difficult for many people to get rid of it and not have a relapse.

Hypnosis can help you recover from burnout, read how here

What is burnout

If you’re suffering from burnout, you’re emotionally and physically exhausted. This often makes you cynical and somewhat detached. For example, you may no longer feel connected to the work you do, even though you still believe you should be the best at it. Burnout can make you feel like you can’t get anything done, which leads to frustration because you’re not meeting your goals.

There are many stories going around that when you have burnout you notice it because you suddenly can't get out of bed.

Unfortunately, burnout is something that creeps in. The moment you can't get out of your bed you've probably been suffering from burnout symptoms for a long time, but you're just super bad at listening to your body.

Recognizing burnout

Okay, so when burnout creeps in, what do you recognize that creep in? It's important to make a checklist of sorts for yourself to see if you suffer from the following mental symptoms:

Then you may also suffer from more physical complaints. For example, you may suffer from:

You're sick more often
Lack of appetite/total inability to eat
Chest Pain
Volatile breathing
Cramp
Dizziness
Fainting

Recognizing cynicism and disconnection

In many cases, at first you don't experience the physical and mental stress reactions at all, but more of little things that indicate you are in the process of burnout.

For example, you don't like your work anymore and as a result are more often late or you really feel like (very much like) just leaving. Over time, you try to avoid work, and sometimes this lack of joy can spill over into your private life so that you don't even want to see your family and friends anymore (so then you do suffer from those depressive symptoms).

You start to experience negative feelings. At first, you’re especially hard on yourself. You feel you have to be able to do everything and meet every deadline, no matter how demanding you make these standards for yourself. As you become more stressed and experience more burnout symptoms, you may also become harsher toward your colleagues, which means you no longer trust them and start to feel like you’re completely on your own.

Those negative feelings often also cause isolation.

If you run into the "not getting out of bed anymore" then you just get angry when someone talks to you. (So irritating when you are disturbed while you are working!)

Recognizing the feeling of failure

You might think this feeling should be very familiar, but for true go-getters (a trait shared by most people with burnout), this isn’t always the case.

For example, you don't feel like a failure, but rather that the goal is actually useless. Why actually do what you are doing?

That irritation when people talk to you also has to do with the feeling of failure. You often already feel that you are not efficient and effective. Then when people start talking at you, this feeling only gets worse, because after all, their talking disrupts your efficiency.

Your to-do list keeps growing instead of getting smaller.

How hypnosis helps prevent complete burnout

Now that you know the general signs of burnout, you may also know how to stop it: namely, by being less hard on yourself. Distribute tasks more evenly and simply say “no” every now and then—after all, that’s what keeps your to-do list from growing.

However, if you’re a perfectionist and a people-pleaser, this is something you’ll find very difficult to do. This has to do with the beliefs you hold about yourself and how the world works. Hypnosis helps you identify and change these beliefs, enabling you to prevent burnout, work on your recovery, and experience fewer or no relapses.

Be less hard on yourself

Being less hard on yourself, for example, is very important in recovering from burnout. A hypnotherapist can help you find out why you are being strict with yourself. This can be done, for example, with a Socratic conversation or with regression. The Socratic conversation is actually a why-talk in which you are constantly asked why you do things the way you do them. This often gets you to the core of your beliefs and you can even get to the root of the belief, which helps to change the belief again.

Another way to get to the root of your beliefs is through regression. With regression, you go back to the moment in your life that formed the basis for a belief. Why did you become a perfectionist? Why do you find it hard to say no? These kinds of beliefs often develop early in life—think of elementary school age—and that’s why regression can yield surprising results.

Knowing your beliefs and their basis also makes it easier to change them so that you change your behavior.

This can include repeating hypnotic suggestions during self-hypnosis, such as:

"I get to do my work over a longer period of time."

"I get to take the time to do my work."

"I get to delegate work and ask for help."

These suggestions are mainly about dosing and dividing work. By repeating or listening to these suggestions during self-hypnosis, you will more quickly allow yourself a daily schedule that allows you to work only 8 hours instead of 10 or 12 hours a day and allow for private time. These are just examples of suggestions. If you have other beliefs, a hypnotherapist can help you determine suggestions that fit your problems.

Sensing and indicating limits

Recognizing your limits can be very difficult if you struggle with perfectionism and fear of failure. In that case, you can go through the checklist to see if you’re experiencing the warning signs your body and mind are sending you—but once you recognize them, how do you deal with them?

Hypnosis can also help you recognize your boundaries and then maintain them. Through guided visualization, you’ll learn to recognize when you’ve reached a boundary, what you can do to calm yourself, and how to communicate to those around you that you’ve reached your limit.

For example, guided visualization can go the following way:

"You're at work and in the flow, feeling great for the first time in ages. A colleague knocks on your office door and walks right in. You notice that this irritates you, before you immediately start snapping at your colleague you take a few deep breaths and consciously relax your muscles. Your colleague asks or says he has extra work for you. Work that you really can't have. You take another breath and relax your muscles. Then you say "Sorry, but I already have to work overtime and am busy enough. You'd better give this work to X from department A. After all, I notice that I am starting to get sick and adding extra work right now is a bad idea." Your colleague understands your explanation and takes the work back. This gives you a relieved and happy feeling and you can get on with what you were doing."

In this guided visualization, you teach yourself to calm your body and, in doing so, simultaneously calm your emotions. You will learn how to recognize your emotions and thus recognize your limit. In addition, you can now imagine how to say "no" in a polite way and that this can be very convincing and also gives you peace of mind. Saying no to another is saying yes to yourself. In addition, in this visualization you also learn how to stop giving.

These are just a few examples of how hypnosis can help you cope with burnout. Would you like to learn more about mental techniques that can help you with this? Then come to a workshop or read the book Break Free. In it, you’ll learn all kinds of techniques for standing up for yourself and making your own choices.

Also pin this handy infographic as a reminder: