Burnout recovery: When things don't go your way
I recently helped a woman who was suffering from an energy leak after burnout. So she is in recovery, but notices that something is not going right.
She describes this as a leak because it is separate. She has energy one week in a month, then it diminishes a bit and the last week the energy leaks away and she is not herself
She’s also tried everything—from eating healthy to exercising—but her energy still seems to be draining away.
In addition, hormones have also been examined, and their cycle and effects are recognizable.
If you’ve experienced burnout, you’ll often try all sorts of things to “get out” of it, such as mindfulness, acupuncture, coaching, and seeing a psychiatrist so you can get medication.
Still, after recovery, you may feel a bit stuck in a certain situation, as if some poison from the burnout is still in your body.
But is this really the case?
How do you know if you have recovered from burnout?
Before you experienced burnout, you probably said yes to everything and may have had proof drives or beliefs that you had to keep going until it was finished, even when you are tired.
That this could undermine the quality of your work might not even have occurred to you then.
When you get back to that level, you haven't recovered from burnout. It may seem that way, but in fact you then just hollow on to your next burnout.
You have recovered from burnout when you can return to work, but at the same time monitor your limits so you can enjoy life.
In any case, you won’t need things like fast food, snacks, or alcohol to do this.
Your life feels normal again, though not as hysterical as it was before burnout. In fact, during recovery you have learned of what to do and what not to do again.
You maintain a healthy balance between work and leisure time and get enough sleep[1].
In addition, it is also helpful if you can use your phone less[2].
Energy leak to link to your burnout?
So everything is going along nicely and suddenly you feel a little tired. It's like you still have a bit of an energy leak, even if you're doing everything right to take care of yourself.
The woman I helped eventually turned out to have problems getting pregnant and that was what ultimately tired her so much.
So, do you feel like you’re still lacking energy even after you’ve recovered from your burnout? Then try to figure out what your real problem is.
Maybe it has nothing to do with your work for a change, but rather a tiring problem in your personal life. Or maybe you notice that you need to find other work.
In any case, if you see signs of fatigue after recovering from burnout, it's a good idea to take a moment to think about what might be going on right now.
- Is something frustrating you?
- Is it related to your work?
- Does it relate to you privately?
Then you may suddenly find that you may have a particular goal that causes you to get a little tired anyway, like the woman I helped so.
Unleashing your new goal to achieve it
You can become incredibly tense—which is very exhausting—when you have a specific goal that you just can’t seem to achieve.
In cases like that, I then like to work with the law of attraction. You then say to yourself, "It's very important to me that X succeeds, but if it doesn't, that's okay too."
If you’re successful at this and can also feel this thought in your body, you’ll often find that you still achieve your goal.
Now that can feel very separate with the goal you have in mind.
Therefore, it is helpful to start with small things. For example, "I want to find a parking space today in which I can drive and then I can drive through when I want to leave again, but if I can't, it's okay too."
If you find that this kind of thing succeeds every time, you can apply that thought to bigger and bigger goals, and eventually to the one that is currently causing an energy leak.
Because a lot of energy is lost when your body is constantly tense. If you can relax your body again, that actually helps you conserve your energy.
And that allows you to achieve your new goal in a much more relaxed way, and with all the ups and downs, because suddenly they are much less important.
Discovering beliefs
If you find yourself heading toward another burnout, even though you want to set and maintain your personal boundaries, it’s important to examine your beliefs.
So it may have been instilled in you that if you start something you must finish it and if you do something, you must do it well.
It’s helpful to examine your beliefs about work and the meaning you attach to those beliefs.
For example, at:
When you start something you have to finish it.
So does it have to be quick? Are you allowed to take breaks? After all, if it has to be quick and without pause, that's not helpful at all. If you make yourself aware of the meaning you give to beliefs, you can also consciously work on giving them a different meaning.
For example, that finishing your work is okay if you need a break for quality.
Because when you do something, do it right.
What does that mean for you?
Haste is seldom good. So delivering quality may mean taking some me-time to relax so you can then look at your work with clarity again.
Figuring out the beliefs that are giving you an energy leak, preventing recovery from burnout from going the way you want, is something that can be done in multiple ways.
Changing Beliefs
Sometimes it is very simple to give those beliefs meaning. A good conversation with the hypnotherapist can already help. Sometimes this can already be done in the preliminary conversation, but this can also be done under hypnosis. This then resembles hypnotherapy with cognitive behavioral therapy, which is also often a form of talk therapy.
Then you get a kind of socratic conversation in which what you say is questioned in order to get to the core of your beliefs and what meaning you give them.
If that isn’t enough to resolve the energy issue and make your body feel different, regression therapy can also be used .
With regression, you can go back to the first moment when you suffered from this tiring feeling. This might first be a moment after your burnout, but that gives you an indication of the blockage you were facing at the time. Then you will probably go back again to the first moment when you were suffering from that particular blockage that is giving you a tiring problem now.
Usually you will end up with a memory from your childhood, because at that point in life you determine how the world works and how you survive in it. Then, with the help of the hypnotherapist, you are going to do something about this.
This could be anything. Sometimes just empathizing with other people who were present at the time can be enough to change your experience and feeling at that memory so that you are no longer bothered by the block.
It is also sometimes necessary to do more with that moment. For example, it may be helpful to have your adult self talk to your younger self or to change the moment in your mind.
Making recovery go the way you want it to
A more advanced technique can help you achieve the life you want. A life with a good work-life balance and a good balance between exertion and relaxation, whether for work or play.
In this case, you can take a look into the future and take steps back in your mind to the moment of therapy. This gives you a manageable plan to fully recover from your burnout without risking falling back into another one.
Want to learn more about hypnosis, keeping good energy and preventing burnout relapse? Then come to the free online master class on hypnosis.
Or enroll directly in one of our training courses if you want to help people recover from burnout.
Sources:
[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-19288-010
[2] https://iaap-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1464-0597.2012.00530.x