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Most of us have days when we feel stressed out, overloaded or unappreciated; when the batch of responsibilities we juggle aren’t noticed or rewarded; when dragging ourselves out of bed requires Herculean effort. If you feel like this most of the time, however, you may be flirting with burnout.

While everyone experiences stress, it does not have to lead to burnout. Stress has to do with too much: too many demands on your time and resources, leading to physical depletion.

 

Burnout has to do with too little: too few reserves left to cope effectively with life challenges, leaving you feeling emotionally and mentally empty. Burnout happens as a result of exposure to long-term, chronic stress without appropriate support or coping mechanisms.

When running on empty, it is tempting to grab a quick fix like coffee, candy bars or some high-powered energy drink and keep going. Instead of reaching for an artificial energy boost, burnout means it’s time to find more appropriate ways to support yourself. If you take proper action now, you can interrupt the downward spiral of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion, and turn it around before it causes real damage.

Dealing with burnout requires a three-step approach:
•    Recognize the warning signs of burnout
•    Reverse the damage by managing stress and seeking support
•    Resilience – build long-term resilience to stress with proper self-care at levels of body, mind and spirit.

Step 1: Recognize the warning signs of burnout:

You may be on the road to burnout if:
•    Your state of mind is marked by not having enough: not enough time, resources, energy, enthusiasm, motivation or caring; instead, you feel all dried up and emptied out.
•    You’re feeling physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted or drained.
•    Frequent headaches, back pain, muscle aches or changes in appetite or sleep patterns.
•    You disengage from people, activities and interests that you would normally enjoy.
•    You’ve lost your sense of confidence and faith. Instead, you're focusing on shame and doubt, feeling shaky in the present and insecure about the future.
•    You struggle with a sense of loss: loss of control, loss of goals and ideals, loss of motivation or loss of your ability to cope.
•    Your emotions become blunted: You feel like nothing you do makes a difference or is appreciated, so why bother?
•    You feel increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, angry or resentful.
•    You feel like you have nothing more to give, and you are stuck in a no-win situation.

The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life – including your home and social life. It can also wreak havoc on your health: constant stress has been shown to suppress the immune system, cause chronic inflammation in the body, and make you more susceptible to a host of illnesses. When long-term stress turns to frustration, anger and resentment, it can lead to hardening of the arteries. High blood pressure, hypertension, cardiovascular complications, even heart attacks and brain attacks (or strokes) are potential health risks. Prolonged stress over time also impairs your hormonal and biochemical systems, influencing neurotransmitters such as serotonin that support mood stability.

Step 2: Reversing Burnout

Before throwing up your hands, remember, burnout is not for wimps. A lot of folks reach the advanced stages of burnout because of their sense of responsibility and dedication… taken just a bit too far.

If you recognize the warning signs of impending burnout in yourself, it’s time to take action. You can prevent further breakdown, provided you make some important changes. Remember that it will only get worse if you leave it unattended. By taking steps to get your life back into balance, you can prevent burnout from becoming a full-blown breakdown. Here are some to get you started:

•    Slow down.
By the time you reach the later stages of burnout, adjusting your attitude or taking some vitamins won’t be enough to solve the problem. You need to force yourself to slow down or take a break. Cut back whatever commitments and activities you can. Give yourself time to rest, reflect and heal.

•    Get support.
When you’re burned out, the natural tendency is to protect what little energy you have left by isolating yourself. But friends and family are more important than ever during difficult times. Turn to loved ones for support. Simply sharing your feelings with another person can relieve some of the burden. Seek out professional support to help you change unhealthy habits and find the way forward.

•    Reevaluate your goals and priorities.
Burnout is an undeniable sign that something important in your life is not working. Take time to think about your hopes, goals, and dreams. Are you neglecting something that is truly important to you? Burnout can be an opportunity to rediscover what really makes you happy and to change course accordingly. 

•    Acknowledge your losses.
Burnout brings with it many losses which can go unrecognized. Common losses include:
     Loss of your idealism or dreams
     Loss of your role or identity in life or in society
     Loss of physical and emotional energy
     Loss of friends, fun, and a sense of community
     Loss of esteem, self-worth, and a sense of control
     Loss of the joy, meaning and purpose that make life worthwhile

Unrecognized loss traps a lot of your energy. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional control to keep yourself from feeling the pain of these losses. When you recognize them and allow yourself to grieve them, you release that trapped energy and open yourself to healing.

Step 3: Build Resilience

 

To prevent yourself from slipping into burnout again, you need to build resilience to stress by taking excellent care of yourself at the levels of body, mind and spirit.

•    Start and end the day with a relaxing ritual.
Rather than jumping into or out of bed, spend at least fifteen minutes meditating, writing in your journal, doing gentle stretches, or reading something that inspires you.

•    Adopt healthy eating, exercising and sleeping habits.
When you eat right, engage in regular physical activity, and get plenty of rest, you have the energy and resilience to better deal with life’s demands.

•    Set boundaries.
Don’t overextend yourself. Learn how to say “no” to requests for your time without feeling guilty. Remind yourself that saying “no” allows you to say “yes” to the things you truly want to do.

•    Take a daily break from technology.
Set a time each day when you completely disconnect. Put away your laptop, turn off your phone, and stop checking email. This strategy does wonders to help me recharge after an intense week!

•    Nourish your creative side.
Creativity is a powerful antidote to burnout. Try something new, start a fun project, or resume a favorite hobby. Choose activities that have nothing to do with work, and let go of trying to be perfect when engaging in them.

•    Learn how to manage stress.
You may feel helpless when facing burnout, but you have a lot more control over stress than you think. Learning practical techniques to manage stress can help you regain equilibrium.

If you are prepared to make these adjustments, burnout can be a powerful incentive to find more clarity, balance and fulfillment in your life.

 

©Copyright Ada Porat. For more information, visit www.adaporat.com. This article may be freely distributed in whole or in part, provided there is no charge for it and this notice is attached.  

It is a scientific fact that the space around objects is not empty or void; instead, it consists of a cauldron of seething energies or potentialities also known as the zero point field. Any observable effects (such as inertia and gravitation) are merely electromagnetic phenomena resulting from interaction with this field.

Albert Einstein found it is this Field which governs the shape of matter. Physicist Max Planck called this invisible field the matrix. Today, it is also referred to as the Divine Matrix, the Energy Field, or the Life Force. This matrix is the Field that is accessed in prayer, miracles and healing of all types.

This Field not only contains the potentialities of life; it interfaces and shapes our biology through the intricate workings of the mind. Your interaction with this Field governs your individual function and healing at all levels. Wouldn’t you love to enhance that exchange?

To maximize your interaction with the Field, it is essential to recognize that there are two separate parts to your mind: the conscious mind is your creative mind and connects to your identity; while the subconscious mind is equivalent to an Ipod - it simply records your thoughts, actions and emotions, and plays them back.

Another critical distinction concerns the hugely different processing speeds of the two minds. The conscious mind processes information in a linear, serial format. The subconscious mind, on the other hand, processes information in a parallel format faster than the speed of light – its information processing is estimated to be one million times more powerful than that of the conscious mind!

On a daily basis, your subconscious runs your physical functioning around 95% of the time. While you think, work, play, rest or engage in conscious activities, your subconscious keeps your systems functioning so you can stay alive. In a positive scenario, this is great.

However, the subconscious can also get you into trouble. It may just as easily run negative programming because it does not distinguish between good or bad; it simply records and plays back the information you give it.

You may have heard of the placebo effect in medicine, where positive thoughts and attitudes generate healing even when a placebo is administered instead of a proven medication. The placebo effect accounts for some 33 percent of healing in western medicine.

The flip side of the placebo effect is known as the nocebo effect, where negative thoughts and attitudes create negative outcomes. Noted brain scientist Dr. Daniel Amen calls such habitual patterns ANTS, or Automatic Negative Thoughts. Research shows that as much as 70% of the average person’s thoughts are negative and recurring. To get positive outcomes, it is essential to change habitual thought patterns from negative to positive.

How do you do that?

For many years, positive thinking seemed to hold big promise to bring about effective change. Today, the limitations of this approach are obvious because of a better understanding of how the mind functions. Effective change comes about not by arguing the point in the conscious mind, but by changing the programs running in the subconscious mind. In other words, if you don’t like the information playing back from your subconscious Ipod, it may be time to change the programs you’ve recorded there.

To change the programs in the subconscious, you need to do more than positive thinking – you need to bypass the conscious mind. You see, positive thinking is a creative thought formed and held by the conscious mind. Whether you dream of that red sports car you desire, visualize yourself driving that car, or create a vision board to attract that car, you are creating from the conscious mind. Whenever you are creating with the conscious mind, you are pitting the serial processor of your conscious mind against the powerful parallel processor of your subconscious mind.

If your subconscious conditioning is not in alignment with your goal because it says that you don’t deserve it or are unworthy of it, you are stacking your best efforts against an instrument one million times more powerful – and guess who’s going to win?

Another fact to take into consideration is the relatively low activity level of your conscious mind. Research shows that your conscious mind is operating only about five percent of the time, leaving most of your daily functioning to the resources of the subconscious!

Unless your beliefs are in agreement at the levels of the conscious and the subconscious both, your positive thinking will not work. To maximize positive results, it is therefore essential to find congruence between the two minds.

Your conscious mind can run any aspect of your body, including involuntary functions such as your heart rate. However, its capacity is very small because it is a serial processor; it cannot focus on all aspects of function simultaneously. For that reason, the subconscious tends to take over automated functions to free up the conscious mind for creative thinking.

Whenever your mind is not focused on some specific task it floats into daydreaming, and your subconscious takes over to run the show. Even when your conscious mind is focused on the past or future, it is not noticing what the subconscious is doing. Whenever your conscious mind is busy or distracted, it is unaware of the automatic negative thoughts and programs running in the subconscious that can hurt it.

Subconscious behavior manifests whenever you are distracted or preoccupied with other things. Others may recognize the shifting patterns in your behavior, yet you are oblivious. Whenever you operate from the subconscious, you are being run by programs you are unaware of! How does this serve you – or not?

If life doesn’t work for you, you may want to blame the outside world; instead, it is your subconscious programs that need to be looked at. First the bad news: The discrepancy between what you consciously want and what shows up, comes from programs driving your life at a subconscious level. Looking for causes outside yourself and blaming them for your life outcomes, is a cop out.

The good news is that you can change your outcomes because your own subconscious mind is responsible for creating your outcomes. You can change your life by changing the programs in your subconscious mind!

Today, there is an amazing range of resources available to you to start deprogramming and reprogramming your subconscious mind. Behavioral Kinesiology, the Sedona Method, Matrix Energetics, Theta Healing, and Emotional Release work are some highly effective methods that come to mind. They work because they offer ways to bypass the conscious mind and to clear the limiting recordings in the subconscious.

Are you dialoguing with your problems or arguing with yourself in your head? If so, save your energy for better things! You cannot argue or dialogue with the subconscious because it is merely an instrument that records and plays back data, it is not a person. Perhaps you are begging for God to come and rescue you from your life?

No more! It is up to YOU to push the stop button and change the recordings in your subconscious! Instead of complaining about your life, you can learn how to effectively clear and align your subconscious mind.

You have an innate ability to heal yourself. And yes, you can heal your life as well – but only when you take back your power from the institutions and people you gave it to. It is time to reclaim your inherent power to create, to heal and to transform!

Your subconscious is continuously recording what you think, feel and say. Likewise, your genes are turning on or off through the power of your conscious and subconscious mind, creating sickness or health in response to your thoughts.

Your mind can create great outcomes or limitations. It’s your choice, so step into the Field of possibilities and choose your thoughts wisely!

©Copyright Ada Porat. For more information, visit www.adaporat.com  This article may be freely distributed in whole or in part, provided there is no charge for it and this notice is attached.

We are living during truly momentous times in history. People are awakening and speaking up for change everywhere. These winds of change have the power to affect our experience of life at every level.

For some, the passing of the old guard is welcomed and celebrated; for others, it is dreaded and change avoided at all costs. During the ensuing upheaval, it is helpful to remember that change is not the enemy: it is essential for renewal of life and growth. By choosing to participate in a proactive manner, we can navigate periods of change with more grace and ease.

Physical change can stir up a lot of dust and debris. Think spring cleaning – a good spring cleaning calls for deep scrubbing, putting away extra blankets that are no longer needed, and airing out our homes. During such a major cleaning project, we are often amazed at how many dust bunnies we find!

Proper energy hygiene refers to hygienic practices at all levels of your being: body, mind and spirit. When you do a physical detox or you experience some powerful bodywork, blockages in the body’s energy pathways are cleared and toxins released. The process can make you feel tired, moody and out of sorts for a day or more as debris is lifted from the cells and released through the various elimination systems. You know the feeling, right?

Practicing good energy hygiene also refers to the process of clearing ourselves spiritually from the debris we collect through our daily actions, choices, emotions and thoughts. Every spiritual tradition recognizes the need for spiritual cleansing. We may refer to it as purification, prayer, confession or meditation. Many of us have a deep desire for periodic inner cleansing and we use spiritually motivated practices to do so – including forgiveness, fasting, abstention, or personal service.

The important point is that we need to cleanse our energy fields and our souls even as we shower daily to cleanse our physical bodies, or else spiritual sludge and debris will collect.

Remember how blah the stirring up of physical toxins can make you feel? Now extrapolate that condition to include the sludge of emotional debris at the levels of the mind, emotions and the soul… pretty gross, right? Now expand the field to include the collective debris of co-workers, your community, fellow citizens and all humanity, and you can understand the intensity that seems palpable in the air these days!

As accelerated change sweeps across the planet, it stirs up debris from old traumas, pain and frozen emotions for everyone. When we are not conscious of the process, we drag along this old stuff wherever we go like a grey cloud. This dense energy is often referred to as miasma or memes – an unwholesome atmosphere consisting of negative thought forms, emotions and beliefs that clog our thinking, hanging over our lives like perpetual cloudy weather. According to homeopathy, untreated miasma eventually lead to disease and suffering.

Energetic debris can actually hinder our spiritual sense of connection to our Divine Source. At the mental level, we may find ourselves swept up in the urgency of life, unable to calm our thoughts or make clear decisions. At a physical level, we may experience the effects of this energetic sludge as feeling drained, heavy or exhausted. It can even lead to emotional outbursts as we subconsciously try to push back against it. And when we still don’t get help, it can lead to feelings of depression, apathy and hopelessness: nothing seems to matter, so why bother at all?

It’s time to focus on good energy hygiene to clean things up!

In his book Life Force: The Scientific Basis, physicist Claude Swanson offers a scientific basis for energy hygiene from experiments conducted by Dr. Joie Jones, professor of radiological sciences at the University of California. Dr. Jones studied the effects of healing energy and the residual environment on HeLa (human) cells exposed to cancer-causing doses of gamma rays adjusted to cause 50% cell death in 24 hours. In the process, he discovered the importance of energy hygiene for the healing process.

In one series of fifty experiments, cells were exposed to cancer-causing doses of gamma rays, and then placed in a lab environment where the space had not been energetically cleansed first. In this lab space, subtle energies and energetic debris from previous experiments still lingered. When healing energy was sent to these cells, healing effects were found in only 10% of the experiments.

In another series of fifty experiments in a lab space determined to be energetically ‘very dirty,’ he found no positive effect whatsoever (0%) from the energy healing sent to the cells. The energetically contaminated environment was capable of completely blocking the effectiveness of energy healing!

The same series of experiments conducted in a lab space that had been energetically cleared first, showed dramatically changed results. When healing energy was sent to HeLa cells exposed to the same dosage of radiation in an energetically cleansed lab, the survival rate jumped from 50-70%. Energy healing sent to the cells both before and after radiation increased the survival rate to 88%.

This healing energy also tended to linger on, offering residual effects. Mice that were simply placed in a location where healing happened earlier, derived benefit from that environment. This could be one of the reasons why we experience residual benefit of a sacred space even at a time when no ceremony is being conducted.

Let’s apply this to daily life: If you are living in a contaminated energy environment, your best efforts at health and well-being may be ineffective. Energy debris or contamination in your personal field or in your environment can block the effectiveness of Life Force in your life!

This discovery may be as important as the discovery of germs in Pasteur’s day, giving rise to new levels of physical hygiene in hospitals. Improved sterilization procedures killed existing germs in operating rooms before surgery was performed and led to vastly more positive outcomes.

Doing times of upheaval and change, it becomes more important than ever to practice good hygiene at all levels of being: body, mind and spirit. A regular cleansing practice can go a long way in keeping your energies clear at all levels.

As the Jones studies showed, you can also benefit from clearing your space at home or work from energetic debris so that your environment supports your health and well-being. And when faced with major changes such as surgery, trauma or health setbacks, you can further boost outcomes by supporting the intervention of skilled professionals with good energy hygiene.

©Copyright Ada Porat. For more information, visit www.adaporat.com . This article may be freely distributed in whole or in part, provided there is no charge for it and this notice is attached.