My Burnout Induced Hiatus – How to Prevent This from Happening in Your Life!

#BURNNOUT

Hiatus is defined in the dictionary, as a temporary gap, pause, break, or absence — not forever, just for a little while. 

Sometimes a hiatus is inevitable, even if the activity it suspends involves what one lives for!

I live for translating science and my lessons from burnout into practical guideposts to help others prevent and heal from burnout.

However, my friends, at this juncture in my life’s journey, I have to take a hiatus from my passion to have spinal surgery, which is what I define as a “Burnout induced hiatus!”

If you have followed my articles over the last year or so, you are probably aware that I had to pay a lofty price for success. I failed to respond to my body’s notifications that I had exceeded my capacity to meet life’s demands without harming my well-being. This led to significant consequences to my physical health, including damage to my spine.

Living with a spinal condition at a young age has not been easy. 

But this injury has also been my greatest teacher and one of the most transformative experiences of my lifetime. It is because of it that I have chosen to dedicate the rest of my life helping others overcome and avoid the negative consequences of chronic stress and burnout, and shield themselves from what I have experienced.

Myndzen was my response to the insidious impact of stress on our health and happiness.

Through Myndzen, I systematically organize the great body of knowledge in the science of stress into practical strategies we can all incorporate in our lives to safeguard our wellbeing and be healthier, happier, and more productive. 

I feel a great sense of joy and pride witnessing the efficacy of my burnout and compassion fatigue “treatment plan” every day. As a certified integrative wellness practitioner, there is nothing more rewarding than to watch my clients overcome burnout and return to optimal health in a matter of months. I am grateful to my burnout adventure for all it has taught me.

 But as a human being, my biggest goal is to ensure that my fellow human beings avoid experiencing what I did!

So on the eve of an intimidating surgery to reverse the negative impact of stress on my body, I wanted to leave you with my favorite stress resilience tips. These tips come right from my heart, not as a stress resilience speaker and coach, but as a fellow human being who suffered the ultimate negative consequence of stress. You could say these are the biggest lessons I learned from the latest research in neuroscience, integrative medicine and my own healing journey towards sustainable stress resilience and optimal health.

May they give you comfort and love and inspire you to take good care of you, today and always.

1. I wish you more self-compassion and less self-criticism. 

Contrary to our conditioned way of thinking, your approval is the only approval you needStrive for excellence, but avoid perfectionismBe kind to yourself, and practice self-compassion toward any negative traits, limiting beliefs, and automatic responses you have inherited. But be accountable in embracing your power to change what does not serve you.    

You are built for greatness and you are amazing just the way you are. 

You are enough.

You already possess all the inner resources you need to succeed in every aspect of your life. Challenge yourself with acts of love and kindness toward yourself every day. Master the art of saying no and resist antiquated notions that self-care is selfish. 

After all, you cannot love anyone or anything truly until you love yourself.

2. I wish you the kind of happiness that can only be found in the present moment.

Happiness can only be found in the present moment.

Research shows that 47% of the time we are thinking something other than what we are doing in the present moment.

Learn from the past and cultivate the traits that have the power to help you design the future that is aligned with your values.

A simple mindfulness practice is enough to become the master and not the slave of your thoughts, so that you maintain optimal balance in your body systems and the major areas of your life. Here is one that I created especially for you: https://youtu.be/zAavQ4aSzko

The most critical element to true happiness is mastering the practice of directing our attention to elements of life that help us work with and not against the incredible power of our neurobiology. 

3.  I wish you energy efficiency.

We are energetic beings and we only have so much energy per day. Just like balancing your bank account with more deposits than withdrawals, prudence is required to expend our energy on people, things, and activities that give you a high return on your energy investment. Life is too short to spend with people who are not here for us, managers who treat us like disposable napkins, and activities that do not nurture our spirit. Spending time with negative people and activities creates an energy deficit, which ends up costing us imbalances in either the physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual aspects of ourselves.

Be prudent in how and where you invest your energy.


4. I wish you emotional acceptance and resilience. 

All emotions are valuable, as long as we make intelligent use of our emotions. 

Beware of not letting fear drive your actions.

Rejection, adversity, loss, and failure are all part of life. We all suffer, we all fail, we all make mistakes, but we can choose our response to all of those emotions and events.

Accepting them without exaggerating them or catastrophizing them will build our tolerance for gleaning important lessons from them and using them as stepping stones to get closer to our higher self. We need simply to seek a shift in focus. For example, when you fail, don’t focus on all the things you lost. Focus on all the things you learned. After all, failure and its accompanying negative emotions are simply invaluable feedback on the path to success.

Learning to work with all of your emotions, both positive and negative, can have a significant impact on your sense of happiness and well-being.

5. I wish you the incredible contentment that can be found by focusing on what you can control.

No matter how many external elements we may attribute our current quality of life to, ultimately, you and I my friends, are the creators of our reality. 

Granted, not all of us were raised with a silver spoon in our mouths. Yet regardless of where and how we were raised or what tools we were handed or not, every moment of every day we have the opportunity to re-write our story to be a story that is meaningful to us and is aligned with our values.

We cannot control the economy, our manager’s leadership skills, or how others may choose to relate to us or not relate to us. But we can absolutely control how we respond to life situations so that we maintain our balance, our access to our valuable thinking brain, and our well-being. Cultivating self-compassion, self-awareness, and self-accountability are incredible gateways to optimal health and happiness and are 100% within our control.

 With that my friends, I will leave you for now and go on a little burnout induced hiatus to have spinal surgery.

I will be staying in touch with my community members during my recovery, so please feel free to join my community to receive updates. http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen

Keep me in your thoughts and send me positive energy for a speedy recovery.

 Much love,

❤️

Tzeli

The Truth About Love and Heartache.

Love is a powerful shield against the inevitable bumps in the road of your life’s journey.

We all know the warm and fuzzy feeling we experience when we are in love.

But beyond that, research from various scientific fields has linked love to tremendous benefits in our emotional, mental, and physical health, our happiness and even our career and financial success.

Healthy lovers help each other recover faster from illness, reduce stress, depression and anxiety and grow brain regions involved with creativity, emotional intelligence and resilience. No wonder most of the movies we watch, songs we listen to, and commercials we see are all stories of love. 

But why do so many of these stories talk about heartache?

For decades, researchers from all across the world have tried to answer that question. 

The problem is, when our love life suffers, we lose our parachute that keeps us safe during the falls of life. Relationship distress leads to responses to threatening and stressful events that make things worse, reduces our immune function, and leads to depression.  And it leads to us being too jaded to invest in love again.

The good news is that research has also opened the door to recognizing barriers to a healthy relationship and effective strategies we can employ to overcome them and harness the power of love. 

In light of the highly-commercialized Valentine’s Day, which at least places love in the forefront of our mind where it should be, I wanted to share a handful of myths about love that we need to be mindful of in our quest to make love a positive aspect of our life. 

I am hoping my insights will inspire you to assess your current perceptions and perhaps consider experimenting with these principles to enhance your own experience of love. 

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” 

― Erich Fromm

Myths about love

1.    We think Love is something we “fall into.” 

We are constantly bombarded with an idealized version of what love is all about. According to movies, commercials, and songs, when we meet “the one” we will know it, bring out the best in one another, and walk into the sunset in eternal bliss.

This notion is flawed, as it sets us up for failure. 

In reality, we cultivate love through committed actions and hard work to rise up to a disciplined way we choose to interact with another, so that together we can build a safe haven that makes us stronger in dealing beautifully with the ups and downs of life. 

No matter how good our love relationship is, it is always a work-in-progress. 

The work involves choosing to do all the little things daily that keep us attuned to our partner, reflect that we are there for them, and show that we will emotionally respond to them in good times and, especially, in bad. 

Here are some tips from the experts to incorporate in your labor of love:

  • It is the small things you do daily that allow you to strengthen your bond and build trust. Answering the question:“What does our relationship need from me?” is a great way to uncover what these daily small things your relationship needs to flourish.
  • Increasing your tolerance for differences, and gentleness in how you approach your different points of view, allows you to feel more connected.
  • Conflict is not the real problem as long as you are mindful of keeping the positive to negative interactions in a five to one ratio.

Once the foundation is set and we have done the hard work of planting our garden with all the right fruits and vegetables that we need, we then don’t have to work as hard anymore.

We can enjoy feeling more assured, assertive, and confident and view life in a more adventurous and expansive way.

“If you have a responsive love partner, you have a secure base in the chaos. If you are emotionally alone, you are in free fall.” 

—Dr. Sue Johnson

 

2.    We don’t give love the respect and priority it deerves.

We all want to be happy in love, but sometimes it seems that we don’t realize how sacred and powerful love is.

As a consequence, we often sacrifice love in the name of other important elements of our life, such as our career or our finances. Interestingly, the Grant study, Harvards longest study in human development researching the factors that contribute to life fulfillment, reveled that secure relationships were by far the biggest contributing factor to career and financial success! 

What we don’t realize is that the bond we share with our primary mate, when nurtured adequately, gives us access to superpowers!

Research shows that healthy, attuned lovers are able to reduce each other’s stress response, heart rate, and trigger the release of a potent hormone called oxytocin, which actually turns off fear.

Fear prevents us from expressing our full potential in all areas of our life.

If we tend to play small in life, chances are, our primary attachment bonds in childhood did not arm us with the confidence to expect positive outcomes, so we are more fearful. Negative models from past experience create unconscious limiting beliefs and anticipatory responses that prevent us from being bold in life.

Love can actually reshape our brain and replace old wounds and limiting beliefs with confidence, courage, and grit.

And the well-documented way our brain activates to diminish threats that is associated with a secure attachment, leads to incredible physiological and psychological benefits. 

So how do we harness the power of love in a more practical sense?

The next time you experience internal discomfort, remember that your partner is the solution and not the enemy. Instead of shutting down or turning away from him/her, reach out to them instead. Identifying our emotional needs and sharing them with our love allows them to respond to us and offer us the comfort and support we need.

“The power of love can help to free us from the trappings of past experiences and to live in the true sense of joyful wholeness.” 

—James Van Praagh

3.    We perceive depending on others as weakness.

We are hardwired in our core to meet our powerful need for intimacy. Yet, we experience great discord in life because we define dependence as a weakness. 

Central to this issue is our fear of vulnerability and our confusion between healthy interdependence and co-dependency. 

The critical difference of interdependence from unhealthy forms of dependence is how we show up in the relationship. When we have a solid sense of self and self-worthiness, we don’t engage in maladaptive behaviors, such as people pleasing, manipulating, or blaming. We instead balance our own needs with the needs of the relationship and work toward the beautiful balance of giving and receiving without fears of being abandoned or losing our identity.   

We then feel free to be vulnerable and create true intimacy.

As we have learned from world renowned vulnerability expert, Dr. Brene Brown, there is immense power in creating wholehearted connections where we allow ourselves to be fully seen. This includes the courage to go out on an emotional limb to ask for help when we need it.   

Far from the conventional view of this as weakness, being able to reach for our loved ones as a resource to calm and comfort us is a strength.

“It seems to me that if we, as a species, are to survive at all on this fragile blue and green planet, we have to learn to step past the illusion of separateness and grasp that we truly are mutually dependent. We learn this in our most intimate relationships.” 

—Dr. Sue Johnson

4.    We blame love—and our lover—for our suffering.

Every love affair begins with an incredible cloud nine, fairy tale sort of feeling. But sooner or later, pain shows up, right when the initial honeymoon phase ends. It is at that point that we tend to blame the relationship and the object of our affection for our suffering. 

What is actually happening below the realm of our conscious awareness is that once we have allowed ourselves to get swept in by the strong force of love, our nervous system regurgitates our historical sensations of what happened in the past when we depended on another.

If our past did not leave a positive imprint on our neurobiology, our automatic response is to become fearful. We may be afraid of being rejected, losing our self, losing our independence, being abandoned, and the list goes on.

And then what happens is all the things we are afraid of saturate our body and our mind and in the process of fighting these old memories, we project them onto our love!

John Gottman’s 40-year research, which predicts divorce with 90% accuracy, has identified four hallmark behaviors that will absolutely drown even the best relationships. These are: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stone-walling. 

Here are some questions you can ask yourself any time you feel you are beginning to go down one of these poisonous reflex responses. (You can also receive a cheat sheet of these questions along with a feelings inventory in your inbox when you join the Myndzen community by clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen)

—What am I feeling right now?

—What about this makes me feel this way?

—How much of it is true and how much of it is a story based on the past?

—What can I do differently that is within my control?

 Reaching out to our love for comfort instead of blaming them for our suffering will not only help us reduce our internal negative arousal in the moment, but it will also strengthen our bond. They can then become a resource as we grow toward emotional intelligence.

“We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship .”

— Harville Hendrix

5.    We expect love to complete us. 

There is no bigger disappointment than the rude awakening of our beloved asking us to make a change in ourselves right after we believed this was the person for whom we could do no wrong. After all, this one was supposed to be “the one” who would bring out the best in us, right?

Not exactly.

The relationship which protects us from all dangers and threats in life, which gives us the freedom to be ourselves, and supports our growth and our dreams does not work like that.

Rather, it requires two complete, whole individuals who are each committed to personal evolution.

That does not mean that the ones of us who experienced adversity in childhood, wounds, or traumas are destined to miss out.

We all have issues, some of us more and greater than others. However, the difference for our personal evolution is how we handle those issues and what we are committed to do toward our own individuation and self-actualization.

The path to our own healing may seem daunting and we may avoid it by simply changing partners in hopes that our issues will disappear by magic.

But the truth is, until we love ourselves wholeheartedly and commit to our own healing and growth, we will not be able to see the love of a partner and feel safe. This is true even if the archetype of our ideal partner falls in love with us.

After all, the greatest truth about love and heartache, is that until we find harmony within, we cannot create it with another.

 Final thoughts

Love is a powerful shield and a disciplined way we commit to interact with another to powerfully address the ups and downs of life and reach our full potential.

A healthy love relationship has a positive effect on our well-being, our happiness, and our life expectancy. 

To be happy in love, we may want to revisit some current perspectives and default responses that are myths, and not true.

We can recognize and commit to the hard work that is required to rise to love.

We can embrace the power of love and actively engage in doing the “small things often” that will resist the conditioned ways of expressing our pain.

We can learn to speak a new language—the language of emotions—and strengthen our bond through exposing our vulnerabilities.

We can let love be the mirror of our soul and our guide down the path of our own personal development and healing.

Because the truth is, only when we heal ourselves, can we be happy in love. 

Notes: The information in this article was informed by my personal review of studies, my participation in Drs. John and Julie Gottman’s “Art and Science of Love Workshop,” Dr. Sue Johnson’s Emotional-Focused Therapy, and the application of this research in my own life.  If you enjoyed this article, you might want to review an earlier article I wrote listing some of the most significant benefits of love. You can find it by clicking here.


Practical Ways To Love Yourself More

In my last article, I provided an overview of scientific literature, which supports that self-love plays a foundational role in our well-being.

But how do we begin to do the work of cultivating the quality of love for ourselves that can literally transform our lives?

If being hard on yourself has been “the norm” throughout the course of your life, it may seem impossible to imagine how you can transform the stance from which you typically tackle life.

This may be the case even more if being a drill sergeant to yourself has resulted in “status quo” success.  My commitment to excellence, at the cost of my work-life balance, allowed me to synthesize cancer drugs, lead teams from the bottom to the top in performance, and win a myriad of corporate and other awards. It was all great until I fell apart!

The truth is, when I burned out, far from feeling love for myself, I felt like a complete failure. I perceived my burned-out state as a sign of weakness and felt very disappointed in myself. How could a once top performer—someone who synthesized cancer agents and was an athlete— fall apart like I did?

Yet somehow, I allowed my discomfort to become my motivation and discovered the ultimate path to freedom. We can experience amazing joy when our efforts are fueled by self-appreciation and driven by our own values instead of by external approval. 

Here are some of the most effective ways, which I learned from prominent researchers, that we can use to tap into cultivating a better relationship with ourselves, flaws and all.

These science-based strategies not only helped me find my way back home to better health, but they also help me now to transform the lives of my clients when they became too burned out to succeed.

1. Become your own best friend. 

If your best friend came to you while facing a challenge, how would you support them? I am certain that you would speak to them kindly, listen to them attentively, perhaps make them a warm cup of tea, and hold their hand through their difficulty. Why can’t we be as compassionate to ourselves? The world’s most prominent researcher in self-compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff, has revealed that when a friend fails it presents no threat to us. However, our own shortcomings present as a real or perceived threat to our self-concept. And any threat short-circuits our thinking brain and activates our stress response, which compromises every part of us, including our compassion for ourselves.

But why not use this knowledge to instead make a commitment to extend the same love and support to ourselves as we would to a best friend? Become your own best friend!

According to Dr. Neff, we can teach ourselves to be our best friend by incorporating the three essential components of self-compassion, which are Mindfulness, Kindness, and Recognizing our Common Humanity.

To illustrate how this might work, let’s pretend you were just passed up for a job promotion. Or you could pick your own example of a current or past difficult situation.

The first step is to bring Mindfulness into the situation, recognizing how difficult the situation is.  

You can use any words that are comfortable and natural for you.  You could say, “This is really tough,” or “I am feeling rejected,” or “This is a moment of suffering,” or “It is not going to be easy for me to accept this.” The key here is to choose how we relate to the experience without taking it personally, so that we can deal with our emotions from a calm, balanced state. We need to avoid judging either the situation or ourselves. We would never respond with judgement and blame to our best friend, would we? 

The second step is to invite Kindness in.

This can be something as simple as setting the intention to be kind and supportive to ourselves. Think of the words and the actions you would use to comfort someone you love if they were going through a similar experience. Include terms of endearment, the warmth of human touch, and soothing vocalizations. For example, you could hold your face in your hands and say something like: “Aww Tzeli, I am so sorry you have to go through this right now, my love. But I am here for you.” Don’t worry about looking silly. No one is watching. Remember, your brain does not know the difference between what you are saying or thinking and what is happening in reality. By role-modeling compassion, your brain registers safety. This keeps all of your body’s organs and functions working at optimal performance levels, which allows you to respond beautifully to difficult life situations.

The third step is recognizing our common humanity.

As we go through the ups and downs of life, we may find it hard to be on our own side. This may be  because of the false perception that everybody else is managing life just perfectly and we are alone in our discomfort.  The truth is, not a single one of us is perfect and failures, mistakes or moment of self-doubt, are all part of being human. In moments of doubt, it is important to remind your self of our common humanity. You can comfort your self by telling your self something like, “It is normal to feel disappointed, but there are many others going through similar situations,” or “Discomfort is part of life. I am here for you. I’ve got your back.”

Research reveals significant benefits in investing your energy into becoming your own best friend. Some of these benefits are greater resilience in the face of challenges and faster recovery from physical or emotional traumas.

2. Reconnect with your values.


When our never-ending pursuit of happiness is driven by social norms and the wants and needs of others, we lose a really important source of power: The power of our own values!
When we are taking actions and creating things in life that are not aligned with our values, we experience discomfort and difficult emotions. This in turn leads to coping mechanisms that sabotage us. However, when we turn to what is most valuable to us, we can find strength, motivation, and energy to invest in meeting life goals that are rooted in love, rather than fear. 
To re-connect with your values, I invite you to run an experiment with yourself for the next seven days.
  • On the first day of your experiment, set your alarm ten minutes earlier and begin your day with a short, guided meditation. You can use a guided meditation of your choice, or you can receive one in your inbox by joining the Myndzen community- bit.ly/JoinMyndZen
  • Once your mind is clearer, give yourself few minutes to write a list of single words that represent what you value most in your life in the present moment. For example, some one-word values are adventure, community, love, friendship, integrity, tradition, equality, and so forth. What do you value most? When you have completed your list, review it and choose the three values that make you feel the most joyful, happy, and powerful when you think about them.
  • Then, at any point throughout the course of your day, when you recognize any of your actions causing you frustration or discomfort, pause and challenge yourself to identify what is driving your action. If one of your top three values is not behind your action, this may be the cause of your discomfort. Select a small step you can take to nudge your response to a new action that is more aligned with your values. For example, if your top value is family and you were asked to participate in a weekend work meeting, you could suggest that you participate remotely via an online meeting app instead of physically attending the meeting.
  • Focusing on the top three values you identified, repeat the process of aligning your actions with these values over the next seven days. You might want to keep a list of your new actions.
By the end of the seven days, you will have a list of different actions you can choose to keep you in sync with your top values. These new choices come from a place of self-trust and self-appreciation as opposed to self-judgment. You will be amazed at how much energy you will free up when you choose actions that are aligned with what you care about the most.

3. Befriend your inner critic.

Image by Yuliyam.com

A part of you will always rise up to sabotage your efforts, especially when you are brave enough to step outside of your comfort zone. For example, you may have decided to improve your work-life balance to support your value of family by working less. Then your boss challenges your commitment to your work because you are not working late as much. At this point, you may hear an inner voice that sounds something like: “Who do you think you are challenging the status quo?” We call that voice our Inner Critic.

We have historically viewed the inner critic as an antiquated parental voice, which we have been advised to ignore. However, newer models of therapy such as Dr. Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model, suggest there may be a more effective way to relate to our inner critic. Instead of ignoring it, we can befriend and work with our inner critic. If you really think about it, our inner critic, as annoying and frustrating as he/she may be, is only trying to protect us. The voice and the inhibiting actions it tells us to take are attempting to protect parts of ourselves that have been hurt in the past.

For example, if speaking up and standing up for yourself was punished in your early years, you may experience a lot of resistance from your inner critic when you are braving assertiveness. It will criticize you to prevent you from taking any risks that might cause you pain. This causes discomfort and your inner critic may then lead you to numbing actions like eating or drinking alcohol.

To release ourselves from the voice of our inner critic, we can make ourselves less vulnerable to whatever it is that the inner critic thinks we need protection from.

For example, you can find a safe space to practice speaking up with no consequences, like joining a Toastmasters group. Your inner critic will soon learn that you are not in danger or vulnerable when you speak up. You can also begin recognizing your inner critic as a valuable part of you and engage in journaling practices where you can honor it instead of resisting it. You can use this new relationship with your inner critic to learn more about your vulnerable parts. Here are two sample journaling exercises to help you become friends with your inner critic.

Inner Critic journaling Exercise 1

Identify a recent challenging situation. Then take a few moments to talk with your inner critic in your journal about this situation. Let’s pretend that the challenging situation is that you are trying to decide whether or not to apply for a management position. The dialogue might look something like this.

Inner Critic: You can’t be serious about applying for a management position. You aren’t leadership material!

You: Look, I know you are worried about me struggling as a manager. What are you afraid will happen?

Inner Critic: Being a manager will be too much for you. You’ll become anxious and irritable and you will fail.

You: I understand your concerns, but I have grown a lot. I know how to love and take care of myself now. And I am not afraid of failing. Trust me.

Review what you have written. Pay attention to what words your inner critic uses to criticize you. What is she afraid of? What does she want to protect you from? And how does your current self tell her that you are no longer vulnerable or afraid?

Inner Critic journaling Exercise 2

Use Dr Neff’s three components of self-compassion to let your compassionate self approach your inner critic. Remember that the components are Mindfulness, Kindness, and Recognition of Common Humanity. In your journal, write a letter to your inner critic. It might look something like this:

“Dear Inner Critic,

My dear, I understand that you are telling me that I will fail if I take on this new promotion because you are trying to prevent me from make a choice I will regret. But however well-intentioned you may be, you are causing me pain, which is not helpful to me. All of us make choices that sometimes don’t work out. But I am confident that I will be able to determine the best course of action if things don’t go according to plan. Do you want to work together as I pursue this new promotion.”

Working with your inner critic and not beating him or her up is a great way to reinstate a sense of trust in yourself, which is required to break the spell of the past.

 

Final Thoughts  

I know all too well how hard it is to shift responding to life in ways that honors you and your values first. – Especially if being hard on yourself has been your “lifetime companion.” It was mine too!

However, by becoming your best friend, getting to know your inner critic, and re-connecting with your own values, you can reclaim precious energy that you are currently losing to unnecessary stress.

You can then use that energy to light up the path to a life that is meaningful to you and aligned with your true values and purpose.

And that light, my friend, will not only allow you to live a life free of the cumbersome symptoms of stress, but will also illuminate your relationships, your workplace, and your world.

Image by canva.com