Today I want to talk about burnout. I talk a lot about burnout and balance in business. In fact, I wrote a whole book on it. The reason I wrote a whole book on it is because I personally have been affected and had to learn ways to manage burnout. It’s also something I see ALL the time in helping other Naturopaths, Nutritionists and Practitioners in our profession.
Burnout is so prevalent in our industry because we are a give give give profession. We also love a good whack of martyrdom, and we love what we do so much that we completely forget that we’ve got a human body which we need to keep doing what we do.
One time I ran an online webinar series and I interviewed ten epic practitioners including Deanna Minich, Rachael Arthur, Patria King and other amazing peeps. Everybody had a story about burnout. Some even to the point of closing their doors for a week or a month and not actually being able to do the thing that they are so amazing at.
I have had enough!
I think that working ourselves into the ground is not helping anybody. In fact, by not managing the signs of burnout before we wipe ourselves out is taking us away from helping more and more clients!
I want to have a conversation about burnout and the shame around getting sick or taking time off, and how to be okay with having the downtime as well as the up-time.
All of the definitions about burnout change so often but many of us have experienced burnout in the context of adrenal fatigue. Again, the definitions of adrenal fatigue change all over the place as well, but essentially what we’re looking at especially into the adrenal fatigue factor, is a a dysregulation of your cortisol levels.
If we’re talking about the biochemistry of burnout, it’s the dysregulation of your cortisol levels enough that your symptom picture looks something in the vicinity of exhaustion such as fatigue.
You may notice that mornings are slow and sluggish, and then some lulls during the day, and then come night time you are a raging night owl where you just need to get all of your epic stuff done on your business and on your computer with all of the screen time telling your brain and body that it’s wide awake time and not sleep time.
The interesting thing about having this conversation is that 99% of you are going to actually know and teach other people about this exact thing, and yet I want you to consider, how does it actually affect you?
So stop for a moment.
Instead of going “yeah I know about adrenal fatigue“, stop for a moment and consider your adrenals.
Are they going under the pump?
Do you just keep pushing “it’s go time!” even though they are sending messages to rest?
When it comes to your adrenals, what message is your body giving you at the moment?
This is the thing right, we teach our clients this stuff, and yet we don’t listen to our own bodies. Even me personally. This week I have experienced the down-side of going so spectacularly hard at a launch of the Natupreneur Club, making sure that everybody gets all that they can out of the Revolution Series Tour, wrapped up the epic Scavenger Hunt, as well as running the two retreats beforehand. I am living proof that I love helping people so much that I forget I too have a body and need to take care of it!
That’s why I wanted to have this conversation.
Because even though during those retreats:
- I was very specific with my time my boundaries,
- I went and had my massages,
- I was getting my kinesiology balanced,
- I was looking after myself through my food choices,
- I stayed in locations close to the event spaces so I didn’t have to travel.
All of these things to reduce my stress load. And, even though I ticked all the boxes for looking after my adrenal glands, all of the constant pushing and doing and thinking pushed the limits on my adrenals and my body took the toll.
This is the difference for us practitioners, because we know the knowledge bit and the thinking bit gets in the way sometimes. We don’t just need to know it with our head, we need to feel it with our body because we often go:
- tick I did my meditation
- tick I did my yoga
- tick ate my I had my smoothie
- tick I had my herbal supplements
and it’s a tick kind of scenario rather than dropping in to knowing what your body actually needs.
I’m telling you this because I wanted to make sure that it’s a conversation that we are having as practitioners and that it’s not something that we just go “oh yes I treat plenty of people with adrenal fatigue and I do all the right things (like I mentioned above), therefore I know a lot about it and I’m managing burnout.”
I think there is something missing in our profession in that we don’t talk about the hard stuff.
We don’t talk about closing the doors because we’re burnt out.
We don’t talk about the days that we are so overwhelmed and busy that we send out the vibes so that clients don’t come so that we don’t have so much on your to do list.
Often the biggest thing contributing to burnout as a practitioner is boundaries.
We know from telling our clients that the ability to say no to things is just as important as the ability to say yes.
Being able to discern what you say no to is one of the greatest things that you can do as a practitioner and business owner. At the beginning of your business journey you want to say yes to all the opportunities that come up, and I would highly suggest that you do, until you get a really big hell no! This is where you know where your boundaries are.
Sometimes FOMO, the fear of missing out, can be so huge but you don’t recognise that you’re actually exhausted. Forget everything else and surrender to your body’s needs. Put yourself first for a change.
Managing burnout in business
The beautiful thing about having your own business is that you can actually manoeuvre things around to have the time off that you need.
Now in saying that I want to highlight that we often have these inner bullshit rules, Brules as Vishen Lakhiani calls them, that we’ve bought into such as “I have to work nine to five, five days a week”. That’s a load of crap. When you run your own business you dictate what timing you have at work.
If your body is better asleep until 10:00 a.m., then start at 10:30! If your body kicks off in the in the mornings, start earlier. It’s totally up to you.
This is the thing about being in alignment with your business, and your business being in alignment with you, is that you can create whatever you want. You totally have permission. You’re in charge.
Just because you used to do it one way doesn’t mean you can’t change it.
Support your body system. Without your body you can’t do what you do!
Take action to manage burnout before it happens!
My action for you this week is to consider: what does self-care look like for you? What’s one of the best things that you could do to look after your body this week?
And number two is: what does your ideal week look like?
I hope that you take some type of action this week that specifically helps you and your adrenals so that we don’t continue to have this epidemic of burnout that happens in our profession. I know that we can come back into balance because we are all spectacularly human and we all have these wonderful lessons to learn.
Hugs,
Tammy x
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