Sneaky Burnout.

I remember burnout - it’s some time ago now and I was sitting at my desk, in a video call, and all of a sudden, everything started to spin. My face got hot and my breathing shallow. Panic was setting in. It wouldn’t go away this time. Previously, the spinning had just visited for a while, but then left.

This time it felt like I was going to faint. I managed to finish my meeting and twisted myself out of my chair onto the floor, where I stayed for a while, until the world stopped spinning. I think I even crawled into the living room and collapsed watching the ceiling. It was not pretty. When the body has to scream and there is no other way, than to listen it can feel so scary.

I felt my heart pounding and it racing. Was I dying? Is this it for me? I still dealt with it on my own, internally for months to come. Until one day, I realised that I just might need some help.

I told her something is wrong. She looked at me and listened and said, could it be stress? Me? No! Of course not.

I’m embarrassed to say that in my mind I was thinking, ‘do you know what I do for a living?’ I think I remember saying something along the lines that “it’s probably not stress, I’m pretty aware of this stuff.” 

At the same time, I can remember another train of thought, ‘oh maybe…shit’. I had been working with people with burn out for a long time, and I couldn’t come to terms with how I could miss it. I read the summary I had about burnout to my husband and realised most of them fit for me.

Nonetheless, a youngish person with a racing heart means I was offered a heart monitor, then an ultrasound of my heart. It was a deeply vulnerable time; what if it was something wrong with my heart? I remember lying in a dark room having a doctor scan my heart, seeing it on the screen pumping. Feeling so vulnerable and tender to this beautiful part of me. Thinking, what have I done? How did I end up here?

Luckily, my heart was cleared. Medically, I was fine. And I had come to terms with the fact that I had completely missed and/or ignored all signs of burnout. Exhausted, poor sleep, rising pulse, sound-sensitive, poor immune system, sore back, unable to plan, easily overwhelmed. You name it.

I tried to look back to understand how I missed the signs, and I guess so many of the signs were just normal like being sleep-deprived, overwhelmed, never feeling like I’ve done enough, taking on more and more work and projects. It was hard to say. It snuck up on me, slowly, slowly, one little sneaky bit at a time.

It was everyday life, kids, life, house renovation, work and… and the inability to know and honour my own limits. Not feeling as if I had the right to, that my boundaries were not good enough, I needed to be able to be more and better. So yes, it goes way back, back to when I had to start overriding my own natural boundaries in my nervous system and body because I needed to be more. When my limits were not honoured.

So much is said and written about boundaries; it tells you to just “say no” and prioritise. Fair points of course, but for the longest time, it pissed me off. I’d think that “if I knew how to do that I would, so telling me to say no more just stresses me out.“

Just another pressure of something I’m unable to do. A demand and something I’m failing at. Yup.

In my own journey and many of the people I work with, we discover that our attunement with our needs and desires have been overridden. I remember attempting to listen into what I needed, and was drawn to, in any given moment and all I could hear was nothing. It was so quiet. No traces or threads to follow. Just a big f-ing void.

What that meant was that I’d end up not knowing what I needed or I’d refer to someone else that seemed so confident in what they wanted. Or conjure up something that seemed fitting in the situation. Again and again have my boundaries breeched. As you can imagine, that doesn’t turn out so well.

So what happened? Not sure about you, but I certainly didn’t grow up learning to listen to my needs, my body’s energy, or to what was right for me in the moment. We can talk about family, culture, school (I’ve got a lot to say about school).

So it all had to go into hiding.

What I’ve discovered is that it is a practice. A practice of continuing to come home to your body, to listen to all parts of you. To start taking your body’s language radically seriously.

How does your limits show up in your body?

A lifelong practice for me.

It would be easy if it was all so clear like “oh that’s my needs”, but then it gets interwoven with past experiences and other people’s interests, but the more we can find ways of listening to our bodies the easier it gets.

So the journey back to myself deepened and continued, relearning to listen and to honour. To notice the tug to override my needs and to practice expressing what my body is telling me. Setting clear limits and choosing radically how I want to spend my time and life force.

So to you my dear, burnout is sneaky, and it’s real. It’s an expression of how disconnected we’ve become from our body and soul.

Burnout is a WAKE-UP call for you to start to deeply listen. It tells you that you’ve been gone for too long. Your body is calling you home.

Are you able to hear it? Calling you home?