Burn Out: Natural Medicine From the Ashes

Burn out: nearly every one can see you're there before you can. While you frantically tweak at the edges of your life - fixing, trying to travel, distracting yourself to the point of exhaustion, waiting for retirement or that payout - it's obvious to others that the spark - the fire - has simply gone.

We picture burnout romantically like this:

Image by LEEROY Agency from Pixabay

bu the harsh reality is it looks far more like this:

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

I hear many stoic older people ready to counter with the inevitable...

you just need to work harder and think less
you need to know how good you have it
stop being self-indulgent and think of those less fortunate
we lived though 2 world wars etc and it just made us stronger

etc etc ad nauseum.

The psychologist Herbert Freudenberger is credited with bringing the term “burnout” into the research lexicon in 1974, defining it as the loss of motivation, growing sense of emotional depletion, and cynicism he observed among volunteers working at a free clinic in New York City. Formerly idealistic mental health workers were finding themselves depleted and weary, resenting patients and the clinic. Source.

Primarily, traditional psychology currently characterizes burnout by a set of common symptoms:

Chronic fatigue
Insomnia
Impaired concentration/ forgetfulness
Loss of appetite
Anxiety
Increased illness
Physical symptoms
Chest pain
Shortness of breath
Dizziness
Gastrointestinal pain
Depression
Interpersonal problems

But perhaps the simplest diagnostic is the fact that we tend to distance ourselves from our stressors as a means to cope.

We take long holidays
We create projects, renovations, distractions
We are endlessly absent from meetings, discussions, our projects
We avoid people asking hard questions
We blame others
We cocoon with people and things that reinforce only the palatable parts of our reality
We procrastinate endlessly

We all know people like this!!

Fascinating clinical research now shows that burn out is a result of prolonged (usually suppressed) stress and that it changes both the structure and the functioning of the brain.

Participants in the burnout group had relatively enlarged amygdalae, and also appeared to have significantly weaker connections between the amygdala and brain areas linked to emotional distress, specifically the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The more stressed an individual reported feeling, the weaker the connectivity between these brain regions appeared on the R-fMRI. Source

...the emotional turmoil of burnout leaves a signature mark in these brain structures. The frontal cortex, a brain area essential to cognitive functioning, begins to thin as part of the normal aging process, but patients suffering from burnout showed more pronounced thinning in the mPFC compared with the controls. The normal effects of aging were also more prominent in the scans of the burnout group. Other brain structures also showed signs of wear and tear: Burnout patients appeared to have larger amygdalae and shrinking in the caudate, which correlated with their perceptions of workplace stress. Source.

More disturbingly, clinical data shows that people who experience burn out are also extremely likely to display hypocortisolism - a condition where the body has reset cortisol production after periods of prolonged stress.

"...research suggests that hypocortisolism induces low-grade inflammation throughout the body, which in turn contributes to severe health problems, including buildup of plaque in the coronary arteries. One large study of nearly 9,000 employed adults found that burnout was a significant risk factor for developing coronary heart disease, which can lead to heart attacks.
The team of researchers, led by Sharon Toker, head of the organizational behavior department of Tel Aviv University, Israel, tracked the routine health screenings of 8,838 employees for an average of 3.4 years. They found that employees who scored in the top 20% on the burnout scale at baseline had a 79% increased risk of being diagnosed with coronary heart disease over the course of the study. Source

Traditional psychology suggests a "simple" 3 step process to alleviating and healing from burn out:

Exhaustion recovery = Reorganizing your goal hierarchy. Setting up your goals efficiently will give you a clear indication of where to focus your energy.
Cynicism recovery = Reframing your approach/avoidance goals
Determining whether you have an approach or avoidance mindset and learning how to mitigate this is key to changing a cynical mindset.
Inefficacy recovery = Rebalancing your want-to vs. have-to goals
Finding the balance between things you want to do vs. things you have to do is essential upping your motivation. Source

From a holistic natural medicine perspective, one HAS to ask the glaring question - address the elephant in the room:

If burn out is caused by prolonged stress, is resolving-removing THAT stress not the key to healing?

If burn out is literally that the fire of passion for the persona-life you have created has died, then is the resolution not starting over?

I'm smiling as I think of a funny, popular Australian TV series I watched 20 plus years ago about burnout, starting over and redefining yourself: Sea Change with Sigrid Thornton.

It caught the imagination of so many, partly in that they thought it a fantasy, an amusement, a distraction. But mostly because so many middle class Australians identified.

Having read through some literature this morning on healing from burnout, I can categorically state that you CAN'T fix it by taking a break and then going back to what was. It is just delaying the inevitable. Because there has been no addressing of the underlying stressors over years - decades - which have created it. The skewed physiological stress response will simply reactivate the minute you return to the source of the stress.

Although there are hundreds (thousands!) of herbs and healing treatments and yoga classes - things one might chase like a junkie if one was burned out and desperate - generally they only ease the symptoms. And only for a while.

True healing from burnout MUST address and resolve the causal stress.

Some suggested natural medicine options to begin healing?

solitude; trying to resolve systemic stress in the presence of a habituated relationship simply doesn't work;
neutral place; taking your solitude in a place without distractions of daily chores, responsibilities or relationship demands;
meditation; simply observing what comes up. Everything that comes up.
creativity; spending time with a good art therapist is highly recommended;
dreamwork; getting some complete alone time - maybe for a month? - and journaling your dreams each and every night;
journaling; free writing 500 words every day, during your alone time, around the same 3 questions: What did I think I wanted? What is or has been stressful in my life till now? What do I really want now? Observe how those answers change over the month of solitude.

It's recommended during that neutral time of solitude to use no stimulants (no coffee, wine, sleeping medicines etc) and to just let everything settle. Without any stimulus.

A month of this will almost certainly identify what the root of the burn out is about.

Then what?

A good Cognitive Behavioral Therapist. For a defined time. To help skill you with some new mental habits and help you formulate a strategy to move towards what it is you really do want.

The fire can be rekindled.

Bodies can heal. Life can be expansive again. But never by tweaking at the edges. The best part about fire? It is alchemical and utterly transformational. What is burned out is actually never able to be re-burnt. Ash is only ever able to be taken to the garden, to nourish the soil to prepare for something new, fruitful and productive to grow.

Life is brief and burnout is the gift that enables & invites you to re-calibrate - to reboot & restart and learn to live ONLY from a place of pure joy, pure intention and pure connection with who YOU are, what YOU want and what YOU choose to be.