“Not all storms are meant to destroy us. Some serve to guide us back to our natural rhythm.”

So says Kate Powell from ‘Wild, sacred journey’ who believes that you shouldn’t try to produce as if you were a machine. You are a creature. And you’ll burn out if you don’t honour your own style.

Kate says that burnout isn’t the problem, but rather a symptom. It isn’t even something you can recover from through enough self-care and work-life balance. Burnout recovery isn’t supposed to prepare us to go back to what was.

“See, your burnout isn’t one more thing to tend to on top of trying to put out all the fires in your life and in the world. It’s actually the same battle. And it doesn’t have to be fought by resisting what you don’t want. It can be fought by saying yes to your own precious aliveness,” Kate says.

We spend so much time fighting what we don’t want, trying to get rid of it, that all our attention focusses on the unwanted, which is often not even clearly seen. We exhaust ourselves by fighting shadows in a dark room. Why not just switch on the light?

Adi Shankaracharya, an 8th-century philosopher, talked about the snake-rope analogy. He described a man walking alone in the dark. Suddenly he sees a snake lying in front of him. Shocked and afraid, the man can’t move. He is sweating and dumbstruck.

After a while some light falls on his path and he sees the truth: it was a rope in front of him and not a snake. Like a switch that got activated in his brain, the man comes back to his normal state of mind.

So, how do you activate this switch? There’s plenty of evidence that shows how we switch off. Paul R Scheele from ‘Genius sparks’ refers to a recent study from a research team at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, published in the journal ‘Plos One’. The conclusion was that work-related stress can have severe neurological consequences including exhaustion, detachment and feelings of ineffectiveness, thereby creating a cycle of more stress.

Nick Ortner from ‘The tapping solution’ gives another example. In a study published in the journal ‘Science’, researchers from Harvard, Princeton and the University of Warwick showed what happens to your brain when you’re worried about finances.

They ran an experiment at a New Jersey shopping mall where they gave people a simple scenario: your car breaks down and the repair costs are very high. After presenting the problem, they tested the people’s cognitive ability.

For those who were financially comfortable, thinking about the expense had no effect on their brainpower. But for those already stressed about their finances, just thinking about the cost dropped their cognitive performance by the equivalent of 13 IQ points.

Nick says that when you’re stressed about money – whether it’s inflation, retirement, unexpected bills, whatever your version is – your brain works with less capacity. Less creativity. Less focus. Less ability to see opportunities clearly.

The worry itself makes it harder to think your way to a better situation. So, how do you break the loop? Nick says you have to address the stress itself, not just the external financial situation. Until you calm the nervous system down, you’re trying to solve problems with a brain that is running at reduced capacity.

Hale Dwoskin, author of ‘The Sedona method’, says: “Remember, a feeling of overwhelm is just a feeling. Often when we feel overwhelmed, we forget that. We try to change the circumstances or avoid the feeling in order to solve it.”

The answer lies in facing the feeling and you have to find a technique that works for you. Whether it’s the Sedona method, shadow work, tapping, breathing exercises, boundary repair, guided meditations or mindfulness techniques, it remains an inside job. Choose something that can help you to fully flourish in the body you have, in the life you have, for the time you have.  

Kate Powell says that the aim shouldn’t be promises of a ‘cure’ so that you can go back to a lifestyle that depleted you in the first place. What if, instead, we could build lives that aren’t killing us slowly, that we don’t need to run away from and we don’t burn out in?

Girlfriend, what if burnout isn’t failure . . . but an invitation? – Angie Kleijn