You Think You're Burnt Out, But What Does That Mean?!

What Is Burnout?

Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental depletion caused by prolonged conditions of stress. Overtime it shrinks your Window of Tolerance. This is the capacity in which you are able to best function and thrive in everyday life.

How Does Burnout Make You Feel?

Living in Burnout feels hard. When left unattended, symptoms can lead to feelings of helplessness, deflation and detachment from work and personal life.

Common Symptoms of Burnout:

• Chronic fatigue and lack of energy

• Insomnia or disrupted sleep patterns

• Physical symptoms: headaches and digestive issues

• Emotional exhaustion and overwhelm

• Reduced performance and productivity

• Feeling isolated

• Feelings of dissatisfaction in life

• Disconnection with your body and being

• Low self-esteem and confidence,

• Loss of sense of purpose

• Strained and/or break down of relationships

• Overall apathy towards living.

What Causes Burnout?

There are different circumstances that can lead to Burnout. The commonality is a build-up of dysregulation within your nervous system. Your nervous system’s job is to transition in and out of dysregulation, however, it’s not designed to stay in states of dysregulation for prolonged periods.

This is How Your Window of Tolerance Shrinks

The more that your nervous system has to stay in dysregulation, without respite to ground down, the more depleted it becomes. This means it has less capacity to handle stress on an everyday basis, shrinking your Window of tolerance, and resulting in you becoming more burnt out.

How To Resolve Burnout

Resolving Burnout involves taking small steps towards: Unwinding the patterns and emotions underlying the dysregulation Expanding your Window of tolerance and capacity to self-regulate Learning to recognise and honour your personal boundaries Developing new nourishing habits that support your mind, body and intentions for your life.

The main takeaway I hope you get from reading this Blog post

There are numerous circumstances that lead to Burnout, but the commonality is a build-up of dysregulation within your nervous system, and if you're reading this and perhaps you've tried every healing modality under the sun and it just hasn't worked for you, then I invite you to come back to this:

How you are feeling is not your fault. You're not 'broken' or 'unhealable' or any other description you may have felt about yourself. It's not personal, it's science and it has everything to do with your Window of Tolerance.

The Window of Tolerance (WOT), a term was developed by Dr Dan Siegal, describes the zone of optimal arousal in which you're able to function most effectively and can hold activation of both sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of your nervous system, without going into survival responses.

Each person's Window of Tolerance is so completely unique, that there's no 'one size fits all' when it comes to finding what is going to meet the needs of your WOT. Not every form of meditation, or nervous system hack is going to meet you where you're at and give you what you need in the moment, but it doesn't mean you're broken.

Part of the resolution process is in getting to know your unique nervous system and WOT, and finding the ways that are going to support you best.

To help you along the way, I've created a FREE GUIDE you can use to do just that! It takes the guess work out of Burnout recovery and helps you find out what is going to best support your mind, body and intentions for your life. Click the button below to GET YOUR COPY NOW.