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Why healing from burnout takes time

Updated: Apr 18




This is a transcript from the video above.


hi everyone, welcome back to Burnout Help, stress and burnout first aid.


I hope that you're doing well and I hope that you're not too stressed with the the end of the year rush. It's a very beautiful time but for many people, it seems like things just seem to back up and it becomes very congested before Christmas, with lots of things to do. That can be a very big source of stress, so I hope that you're managing it well.


I want to speak today quickly about healing from Burnout and the time that it takes to heal.


Some of us are suffering from acute or chronic stress, some of us are close to a burnout, and some of us are in a burnout. Depending on the severity of your symptoms, it will obviously take longer to heal. As I explained in one of my other videos, there are many different types of stress and depending on the type of stress that you have, this will also influence how long it takes to you to heal.


I am interested today in discussing the healing process once you've had pretty strong symptoms.

Most people who find themselves in a burnout tend to suffer quite a lot and it usually takes quite a bit of time for them to recover.


What I found with myself and my own experiences with burnout is that I was often very impatient with my situation. I did not understand why it took so long for me to heal.


There can be many reasons for this but the part that I want to speak about today is the fact that most of us have an understanding of healing which is very cognitive-based. I change something and I expect a result. Cause and effect. This is relatively normal in that we tend to think about a lot of things in our world and in our lives based on cause and effect. We are used to seeing results immediately. If you look into a mirror you're used to seeing feedback right away. If you are exercising, you want to feel good immediately so that you can feel more relaxed. There are many other examples where we see effect immediately and that's the way cause and effect works.


Except that, for healing, it often doesn't work like that. It doesn't mean that cause and effect does not apply. It simply means that the reaction to what you're doing can take quite a lot of time. That's because you may have made a decision (up here) to say: 'well, I'm going to start doing this' and then you notice that two days later, you're still not feeling better. And you get very frustrated and you get impatient. But you also can get very sad and disappointed. 'I had this positive thought or I made this positive resolution that I will start doing things like this, so why isn't my body feeling better already?'


And that's because your body has its own way of dealing with things. Your body, as I've explained in another video, has its own neuroception, which means that your body may still be perceiving a sense of threat, or at least, a lack of safety in some of the things that you're doing in the environment. So even though you have a good intention and you are starting something in your mind, something good, something positive, your body is still saying 'well, you know, I have all these memories stored in me, memories of, I don't want to say trauma, but memories of something bad and I'm still very reactive'. Our nervous system is still reactive but we don't always feel or we don't always understand how this works. So we get disappointed and we get discouraged and very frustrated. And sometimes we even stop doing what we started doing because we're not seeing the results immediately.


I want to say for anybody who's going through this, I want to say you're not alone. It's pretty normal, I think, for many people who have gone through great symptoms, difficult symptoms, a difficult burnout, that it will take time, and you must not get discouraged that whatever you're trying is not working yet. It is simply that your body needs time and your nervous system needs time to catch up. All the positive change that you've put into place, it is working. You just don't see it yet. You're not seeing it in the 'mirror', because the mirror of healing operates on a much slower scale. Perhaps not for everybody as some people see changes very very quickly, but I would say that for most people it takes time that's just how it works.


So don't get discouraged. At one point things are going to equalize and you're going to start seeing more and more results, positive results. And you're going to build on upon that and then it's going to become exponential and then you're going to see the results that you wish for.


The takeaway is: be patient, don't rely just on the power of thinking, trust your body, listen to your body, and understand that the body works at a slower speed. And then things will eventually fall back into place.


Okay, have a good day or night and see you soon.



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