Beyond Physical Exhaustion: The Surprising Secrets of Burnout and How to Overcome It
Lessons from my burnout: it's not just physical exhaustion
Hi, welcome back to Conquering Burnout!
If you’re feeling burnt out, You might think it's just physical exhaustion, but over the years I’ve learned the hard way that there's more to it than that.
In this newsletter, I share how my own experience with burnout taught me valuable lessons about my body, mind, and soul.
if you’re new to Conquering Burnout, I talk about burnout awareness, prevention, and recovery. With these newsletters, I try to give you information and knowledge so you can become aware of burnout, prevent it and recover from it.
This newsletter is also part of an ongoing series called “Lessons from my burnout journey”, where I share with you life-changing lessons that I’ve learned and gained from my own burnout.
A bit of a back story: I burned out in 2017: It was during my last season as a professional volleyball player: I was putting myself and my body under too much — both physically and mentally.
Consequently, my body crashed and I burned out.
My burnout in late 2017 put me on a mission and journey of studying burnout, healing myself and regaining my health, mastering burnout and sharing knowledge with the world, and helping other people do the same.
Early on, one of the first lessons I learned was that burnout is not caused just by physical strain.
When I burned out for the first time in late 2017, I believed that I just pushed my body too much for too long.
I thought that I drank too much caffeine. That I didn’t eat enough for my body’s needs. That I’d pushed with the low-carb and keto diet too much for too much. That I didn’t get enough quality rest and sleep, that I had trained too much and didn’t recover enough.
Sure, all the physical factors and things contributed to me burning out.
Chronically not eating enough, drinking too much caffeine, and training every day put my body in chronic stress and fight or flight mode, which caused my adrenal to overproduce stress hormones, which lead to adrenal insufficiency and burnout.
But later on, as I was getting to know the burnout condition, I started to realize that there was more to my burnout than just things related to the physical realm.
There were other factors that contributed to me being in a chronically stressed-out state and consequently burning out.
I had some digestion problems that caused extra stress.
I had some food intolerances that I wasn’t aware of.
I’ve had a lot of accumulated stress.
I was also under psychological stress in college.
I was full of negative emotions and negative energy.
I forgot about my purpose.
I was doing things and living out of necessity and because I had to, not because I wanted to.
All of these factors also contributed to being in that chronic stressed-out state which resulted in burnout.
In the beginning, I really struggled with my burnout recovery because I was focusing just on physical and lifestyle factors: decreasing the training volume, eliminating caffeine, getting more physical rest and sleep, taking lots of different supplements, focusing on recovery, etc.
Then I started to look at burnout holistically, through four pillars of health: the body, the lifestyle, the mind and emotional realm, and the soul and spiritual health.
When I started focusing on fixing and improving all of them, I’d seen an improvement in my burnout and I’ve been then able to recover and overcome it fully.
I started focusing on my gut health and healing my digestion.
I eliminated all food sensitivities and foods that didn’t agree with me.
I began working on and releasing tension and accumulated stuff from my body - that included accumulated stress, emotional stuff, and traumas.
I started training again to make my body stronger. I optimized my lifestyle and focused on getting quality rest and sleep.
I started improving my breathing and doing breathwork regularly.
I started to learn, understand, control, and process my feelings and emotions.
I started paying attention and breaking down my psychological patterns and belief system and started to get rid of the ones that didn’t serve me.
I started harnessing the power of my mind to heal, end burnout and create a new reality.
I started developing and improving my spiritual energy by cultivating joy, happiness, good vibrations and frequency, and cutting out bad energy from my life,
More about all of the lessons in future newsletters, stay tuned for that!
I always try to emphasize that burnout is a blessing: It can be an opportunity to make an inventory and reinvent our life: we can take burnout as an opportunity to take a step back and analyze our life.
By examining the hidden lessons behind burnout, we can learn what caused us and brought us to burnout, and how to use this opportunity to build a stronger, more resilient version of ourselves.
So If you’ve struggled with fatigue or burnout, I would recommend examining your life.
Analyze what might have caused you to burn out, fix the reasons and causes that brought you to it, leave behind things that don’t serve you, and start living differently.
If you’ve struggled with fatigue and burnout, you might find helpful this newsletter here: it’s a video where I talk about How to learn hidden lessons behind burnout and how to use it to our advantage to build a new, better us.
