Grief: The Secret Root of Burnout
Where do you think that crushing exhaustion comes from?
There are the obvious reasons, of course:
🥱 Not getting enough sleep
🥱 Opressive busy-ness
🥱 No downtime
🥱 Constant stress
🥱 Ever more being loaded onto your plate
🥱 No time for nutrition, movement, or other basic forms of self-care
Etc. Etc. Yes, you know. You’re not a machine, but toxic capitalism is forcing you to act like one. Because you need to pay the bills and people depend on you to be strong and keep it all together.
You’ve heard all this before many times. And whenever someone suggests you rest or take some time off, you only have time to think “MUST BE NICE” before zooming off to the next task on your To-Do List.
This isn’t that.
Let’s look a little closer.
What happens when you force yourself to work like a machine?
You make yourself more machine-like. Duh.
And machines don’t have feelings.
So you stuff yours away.
The only possible way you can keep up with your positively inhuman workload is if you numb the fuck out.
Numb enough not to feel:
😱 Anything that might pull focus from your productivity
😱 The physical, emotional, & spiritual pain of forcing yourself to work past exhaustion
😱 How far away your day-to-day reality is from how you truly wish to be spending your one wild & precious life
😱 How frayed your nerves are
😱 How little bandwidth you have to show up in your relationships in a loving way
😱 How often you’re having tantrums, breakdowns, & blowups that hurt the ones closest to you
😱The lurking sense that something is very, very, disastrously wrong
Because you can’t avoid your feelings forever. It don’t work.
Feelings are part of the human condition, and you are a human- as much as you try to work like a machine.
What happens to the feelings you don’t feel?
Well, they don’t go away.
They just hang out in your unconscious trying to worm their way into your conscious. Because they have really important messages for you.
Like:
📣 “Your body is going to shut down if you keep going like this. You are seriously risking your health.”
📣 “You feel deeply unsafe with this person.”
📣“Your boundaries are not being respected. This is a dangerous situation.”
And as hard as you try to not feel the hard stuff, the messages they bear will make themselves known one way or another. Perhaps via:
📣 Illness or chronic physical pain
📣 Anxiety
📣 Depression
📣 Triggering a trauma response to try to force you out of danger
📣 Pervasive fear and dis-ease
This, my friend, is not a fun way to live. It’s not a healthy way to live. And you deserve better.
Society taught us that grief is not OK
Now, I’m not knocking your absolute top-notch work ethic and numbing skills. You learned how to do that because you’re a fucking badass. You came up or spent some time in scary, toxic circumstances and you survived them like a champion.
But here’s my desire for you:
You design a life that you don’t have to survive. You design a life that is so in alignment with your authentic desires that you don’t need to numb out to live it to the fullest.
Which brings me to the emotion that wants you to know what’s truly important to you: grief.
Now, our society doesn’t exactly excel at encouraging us to honor and process our grief. A 3 day bereavement period for the loss of an immediate family member seems to be the norm for most corporate jobs I’ve ever worked.
First of all, just 3 days? As if.
Second of all, there are so many other types of grief that are just as valid- even though they aren’t as widely recognized. Such as:
🥺 Grieving a lost perception of yourself
🥺 Grieving the loss of a future that is no longer attainable
🥺 Grieving a version of yourself who deserved to exist, but never got what she needed to
All types of grief deserve to be honored and processed. All grief has important information for you. Such as:
🧚 What you value & hold dear
🧚 What dignity, love, & kindness mean to you
🧚 What you wanted and lost or never got to have (yet)
🧚 Where your boundaries are (it hurts when they’re crossed, but it gives you clarity for where they need more advocacy & protection)
🧚 Clarity about the environments, situations, & relationships that are draining more than they are pouring into your energetic & emotional reserves
And when you make space to sit with grief and receive clarity about your values, desires, & boundaries… You can start taking really intentional action.
🧚 You can make room in your life for what it is that you love
🧚 You can act by your values
🧚 You can have standards about the behavior you will and will not accept in the relationships & communities you consent to take part in
🧚 You can set goals that are authentic to what you actually want for your life
🧚 You can communicate your boundaries and remove yourself from situations where they are not respected
🧚 You can spend more time on what fills your energetic & emotional reserves
🧚 You can politely decline requests that are likely to drain you past your capacity
It’s really hard to live an exciting, delightful, healthy life when you don’t have the clarity that grief exists to bring you.
This is why I think that grief is the secret root of burnout. It has been for almost every single one of my Burnout Recovery coaching clients.
Because denying your own reality is exhausting.
Making Friends With Grief
Luckily, honoring your grief doesn’t have to be a 4-hour sobfest of misery. (Though, hey, that can be cathartic too!)
There are somatic tools that will allow you to physically locate, notice, and alchemize your grief. Breathwork is one of my favorites for this. No verbal re-hashing of trauma is necessary at all.
Spending time with your grief can feel heavy & sad, yes, but it can also feel like:
🧚 Relief
🧚 Release
🧚 Catharsis
🧚 Understanding
🧚 Acceptance
🧚 Unblocking
You might even notice some cool side effects like vanished writer’s block, being ready to forgive, or even a rush of gratitude.
Amazing how things start moving for the better when you stop bottling up your emotions.
If you would like to somatically explore the roots of your burnout so you can truly start filling your well, I would love to work with you 1:1 via my signature Burnout Recovery Package. If you check out before Cyber Monday, Nov. 27th, you also get 3 months of free access to my upcoming monthly Breathwork Club.
