Insights on Burnout: Whispers, Victimhood and Illusion of The Mind, and Main Reason Behind Exhaustion
My Personal Insights, February 2023
Welcome back to the "My Personal Insights" section of the Conquering Burnout Newsletter.
"My Personal Insights" is a place where I'm sharing my recent insights and reflections about life, nutrition, wellness, well-being, and my burnout journey.
My goal with this section of the Conquering Burnout Newsletter is to share valuable information and insights that I found useful that might help you in your own life and your own burnout journey.
Here we go: here are my three burnout insights from February.
February was a weird and a bit challenging month for me - mainly mentally and emotionally.
The month of January was very busy with a lot going on: working at my job, training and pushing at the gym, working for Conquering Burnout, and social media, etc.
As much as I enjoyed the “grind and hustle” of those 3 weeks of January - it reminded me of my sports career as a volleyball player with busy days of going from school home, studying, going to practice, resting, going to sleep, waking up early and then repeating the process again - I also sneaked a bit back into some of my old patterns that in the past brought me to burnout.
As I wrote about in my recent newsletter The Power Of The Mind: Harnessing the Power of Your Mind for Success and Conquering Burnout, our mind plays a huge role in our health and well-being and sometimes it works against us.
Because I was experiencing a lot of mental unease, I thought that my mind was in fact working against me and giving me trouble, so I went on the offensive.
I used all the tools I knew to fight and shut down the analytic mind - from meditation, working out, releasing stored and accumulated stress and emotions with exercises like “Shaking & Dancing” and “Screaming and Punching”, to different Emotional tools to release and process stored emotions, cold showers which are a great way to quiet the mind and beat fear, more caffeine, napping, and power naps, binaural beats and music with specific frequency healing, working on chakras, etc…
They all helped - but only a bit and for a short period of time. The mental pressures, anxiety, worries, and fears came back again and again. I fought them until I couldn’t anymore - I had to give up.
But after I gave up and take a step back, I gained a breakthrough and learned new insights and realizations.
Don’t let the whispers turn into screams
Once I gave up fighting and I decided that I wasn’t going to push through the discomfort, pain, and rebelling of my mind anymore, I took a step back and took care of myself, all of a sudden my mind quieted down and I experienced relief.
So what I think happened was that because I was ignoring, fighting against and shutting down signals from my mind and body for too long, they were getting louder and louder, until it was unbearable.
As a quote from Aubrey Marcus, one of my favorite thought leaders and influencers, goes:
“If you don’t listen to the whispers, you’ll be forced to hear the screams.”
As I wrote in my previous newsletter, It’s hard to know whether signals, whispers, and intuitive feelings that we get are coming from our analytical, egoic mind or from our soul, spirit, psyche, or higher self - whatever you want to call that deeper, higher and truer part of us.
It’s especially hard when you’re dealing with burnout. It’s difficult to know whether the feelings of tiredness and fatigue are coming from Resistance and Ego that are trying to keep you safe and thus preventing you from growing and becoming better - or if feelings of tiredness and fatigue are coming from your body’s wisdom and trying to tell that you’re really tired and you really need to take a step back, rest and recover.
At the beginning of a burnout journey, it’s really hard to differentiate between the two. Still, with time, exploration, and experience you start to learn the difference between the two - mostly in how they feel.
Things and signals that come from the analytical mind and the ego feel more like a push (“I have to do X”) whereas things and signals that come from the soul feel more like a pull or calling (“I wish to do X”).
The voice of the Ego is usually louder and has a stronger energy charge with a dopamine effect. In contrast, the voice of the Soul is more peaceful and has a calmer energy charge and a more serotonin effect.
So listen and hear whispers, respect them, and honor them so you won’t be forced to hear the screams!
Don't fall into victim mode and self-pity
The second lesson and insight that I learned in February was about victim mode and self-pity - aka feeling sorry for yourself.
Because of everything that was happening, I got sucked into victim mode and self-pity without really knowing it. Victim mode is an internal pattern that runs in my family and has given me a lot of trouble in the past.
Our mind creates an illusion and reality that we live in without us being aware of it. Victim mode and self-pity are illusions in our mind trying to keep us safe and protect us, but they come with bad energy and low frequency: it can be very hard to get out of and if you stay there you won't be able to recover from burnout.
On one particular day, I called my healer and therapist and he made me aware of what was going on: that I’d been sucked into a victim-mode illusion of reality. After he made me aware of it, I was able to make the shift and it was like my world opened up and everything changed: it was truly an amazing and impressive experience.
I really liked what Angela Gargano, a fierce athlete, coach, international fitness model, and speaker said on episode 186 of the Forever Athlete Radio:
"You can feel like this right now but you cannot get stuck here."
Don’t fall into victim mode and self-pity: take ownership of yourself and your life. During tough times, give yourself permission to fully feel and experience what’s going on in your body, mind, and emotional body and what you’re feeling, process it, let it go and move on.
You're not exhausted and burnout because you're working too much
We often think - or at least I do - that we’re exhausted and feel burnt out because we’ve been working too hard and for too long, but that’s not always the case.
You're not exhausted and burnout because you're working too much: you feel burnt out because you’ve been working against yourself, your true self too hard for too long - that’s where the expression pushing comes from.
Think about a time when you really enjoyed what you were doing: when you had fun and you felt a sense of joy, passion, and purpose for what you were doing. Even though you worked very hard and long hours, did you feel burnt out? Probably no.
So, what’s going on here?
Energy in the body is not generated just with good nutrition - eating high-quality food and diet - and lifestyle practices - quality sleep and rest - but also with everything and anything that we do.
According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form, which means that energy is circulating.
When we do anything, we give it energy: when you really enjoy what you’re doing, when you have fun and you feel a sense of joy, passion and purpose, that energy circles back to you and restores that energy you gave to it.
In other words, every activity can either fill us up or drain us.
That’s why when you push against yourself and your true self you end up feeling burnt out.
Commit to prioritizing yourself and your needs before others, and do more of the things that fill you up and less of the things that drain you.
That’s it for this edition of “My Personal Insights”. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting and insightful!
I would love to know your thoughts about it: Let me know in the comments below or by email response.
Take care and see you again very soon! ✌️😊
Such amazing insights here! And I so relate to each and everything you said! I recently wrote about burnout and had a similar message. Working in the consulting world gets too overwhelming several times for me but my mindfulness practice has enabled me to listen to these whispers, catch the initial stories my mind starts to make and release them, so I can truly enjoy my work without the feeling of burnout! Thanks for your writing!
Thank you Namrite for you gratious feedback!
I read your article about burnout and I loved it! Awesome to see that you were able to deal with it, that's a huge win, keep it up!