If you’ve taken time off or left your company because you thought it was the solution to recover from burnout… but it didn’t actually help you the way you thought it would…
It’s because burnout is an internal experience- not *just* a by product of your work.
Meaning- changing your job or taking that hiatus doesn’t do anything to change your biological stress response.
To truly overcome burnout FOR GOOD, we must work alongside our stress response- or else we will change our job, take time off, start a new pursuit, and find ourselves in exactly the same place later on.
So what does “work alongside our stress response” even mean?
If you’ve experienced burnout- REAL burnout- not just a bad day or even a bad week… you will know that you have actual body wide, physical symptoms.
And THAT is exactly why our biology comes into play.
These physical symptoms are indicative of our nervous system essentially being under attack by demands that we feel we can’t handle.
Let me explain without too much jargon to make it simple:
Before you got to full fledged burnout, you experienced fatigue… and then exhaustion… and anxiety…. and even anger (or you may have suppressed your anger).
You moved through the zone of being able to handle your stress and “bounce back”… to being out of your capacity to deal with the perceived stressors coming your way- and your system shut down (aka. Burnout!).
If we decided our workplace was what was causing these symptoms, we would become victims of our workplace.
Which means we would become a victim of ANY workplace once we started to experience similar symptoms again- whether that’s after a 6 month break or when we join a new company and come up against a new stressor down the road.
Burnout is the chronic condition of perceived demands outweighing perceived resources. – J. Eric Gentry, Ph.D.
Quote by J. Eric Gentry, Ph.D. + Jeffrey Jim Dietz, M.D. from Professional Resilience: Prevention and Resolution of Burnout, Toxic Stress and Compassion Fatigue
What most people find is that their symptoms don’t go away the way they thought they would, and their body reacts to stress again quite quickly.
This is why working alongside our biological stress response is so important for true healing of our burnout symptoms.
When you’ve gotten to the point of shut down, your biological system has a very hard time just bouncing back and being able to handle stressors again.
Your stress response system is ACTIVATED, and the activation doesn’t just go away when you switch jobs or go on rest.
You may postpone it, but you haven’t resolved it- which is why people message me and tell me they’re still dealing with symptoms and they don’t know why.
Would you like to know why the activation of your system doesn’t just go away when you switch jobs or go on rest?
Because instead of resolving the stress, you’ve transferred it.
Here’s an example:
Jessica used to find her clients too demanding, and their deadlines always made her scramble. She would try to make them happy by staying up late and delivering on time, but never felt respected or valued by them for her extra effort.
She left her role and found a new one where she didn’t have to work with those same clients anymore. Instead, she worked alongside a team- but since she was new at the company, she never felt like she measured up to her own internal expectations.
A simple mistake would derail her for days at a time, where she would go over her actions in her head over and over again, wishing she got things right the first time.
Soon she found she was experiencing the same symptoms again- her headaches returned and her sleep began getting disrupted as she tried to perform for her team.
She didn’t have the same clients with all their deadlines and demands… and yet she STILL was “getting activated”…. Aka: stressed out.
The source of the stress changed for her, but the EXPERIENCE of stress was still there.
Changing roles didn’t resolve it for her, it just transferred it.
And this happens all the time to people who message me.
The idea of working with our biology is new for people- and something they haven’t heard before- because we place so much emphasis on dealing with the outside environment of our stress.
Leave the toxic job.
Fire the difficult clients.
Yes, there is so much wisdom for us when we evaluate what’s working for us and what’s not working for us, and this isn’t something I glaze over… BUT-
We will continually miss the mark if we don’t address the truth about burnout:
It’s an internal experience.
Our external environment will change- our role will change, clients will come and go, kids will grow up, things will always CHANGE.
But until we do the work on the INSIDE- we won’t resolve our experience of burnout for good.
Deeply knowing and working with their own biology is exactly how my clients recover from burnout at the root so it never sneaks up on them again.
And this component of the internal experience is foundational to the work we do together in a 1 on 1 mentorship.
What’s so unique about my process is that my clients don’t have to leave their job or take a break from their work- they can find alignment, fulfillment, and lower their perception of stress by focusing on the internal experience they’re having- not on crafting a perfect outer environment designed to guarantee their happiness.
(because, of course, we can work as hard as we want and still never craft the perfect stress free environment)
In our 6 weeks together, we focus on nervous system health and our stress response.
And we also get clear on what supportive boundaries are necessary for our mental and physical well being- both in the office and at home- so our environment *does* become more supportive and our perception of the demands on our shoulders shifts even further by being proactive. (something I haven’t even touched on in this post but is still important for clients to do).
If this sounds like a solution you want to pursue, my 1:1 coaching program is open for enrollment. The investment is in the low 4 figures.
I also offer long term and as-needed mentorship to all clients after going through the initial program with me. I offer that at $500 for a pack of 4 sessions to be used as desired for ongoing support.
You can message me on LinkedIn or contact me here and I’ll ask a few questions to determine if it’s a fit, and if so we can begin as early as this week.
You’re Meant to Flourish!
-Michelle
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Michelle Holmes is a Performance Consultant who supports teams and individuals to increase their performance, resiliency, and creativity so that the individual AND the organization can FLOURISH. She provides workplace wellness workshops + corporate consulting, speaking engagements, and personal coaching.