Benefits Of Meditation And Relaxation For Burnout

Do you ever feel that your life is becoming too hard, too busy, with too many demands and no down time to slow down, let alone recover?

In a session with a client this week, she spoke of how everything around her just seems to be going faster, that she constantly feels as if there is a pressure on her to hurry.

Hurry through work, her chores and her shopping, hurry when getting ready to leave for work or to go out, hurry in activities with her partner, with her friends and her family, hurry to read her emails, to read the headlines of the paper, if in fact she gets time to read it at all, hurry to hang out the clothes, hurry to finish her work out routine, hurry in the car to get somewhere.

In fact she described all this as the imagined feeling of being in charge of putting on the lids of bottles on a malfunctioning conveyor belt travelling at high speed without access to an off switch.

Whilst her metaphor of the conveyor belt may be unique, her circumstances are not.

In fact there is a book that is written about this very subject. In the book by American science writer, James Gleick (1999) entitled FASTER, the acceleration of just about everything, the author says..Were speeding up; our technology is speeding up; our arts and entertainment and the pace of invention and change its all speeding up. If we dont understand time, we become its victims.

It is fair to say that many of us truly feel victims of hurry hurry disease.

Dr. Gershon Lesser, a cardiologist at the University of Southern California, says, The Hurry-up Disease claims millions of victims. Further, he comments that Time urgency impatience is what physicians call this chronic sense of time pressure, and it's become an epidemic. He warns of the health risks involved due to the over stimulation of the cardiovascular system and the need to learn to relax.

Relaxation and Meditation practices are immensely effective when trying to cope with the time pressures of life and work and the expectation pressures imposed upon us by others as well as ourselves.

When not addressed we may well find that we advance into a state of BURNOUT and this can be both serious and harmful to our health and general wellbeing at a physical, emotional and mental level.

Burnout can sneak up on us. We find ourselves experiencing a range of symptoms over which we seem to have little or no control. These can include:

paper shuffling from one side of the desk to the other
reduced levels of productivity and performance
low levels of self motivation to either begin or complete tasks
feelings of low self esteem and confidence
growing intolerance and impatience with diminished listening
less concentration and retention and feeling muddled
panic attacks,dizziness, breathing difficulties, lightheadedness
cover-ups of mistakes
talking fast and with higher pitch
self blame or blame of others

There are many more and medical intervention is wise to consider if this list resembles the way you are feeling right now.

Many people ignore Burnout. They feel that they should be able to cope and get through this by themselves and in many cases pretend the symptoms do not exist.

Burnout is especially common in professional people who make decisions every day, look after others in helping professions, and those who take on high levels of responsibility in whatever field they are in.

This is why many of these people feel that they should be able to manage their circumstances on their own and resist any form of intervention.

What I will say about this, is that for all these people in these categories , there is an even greater need to be diligent about our own self care as our state of health and wellbeing effects not only ourselves but all those who depend on us in any way.

Not only in my consulting work but within my relaxation and meditation groups I encounter professional people many times who are in a state of Burnout.

Initially the thought of sitting still or lying down seems almost too much. However as they embark and let themselves come to sessions or purchase our audio recordings to utilize in the privacy of their own surroundings and in their own time frames, they begin to notice the difference that they feel.

They learn to breathe more effectively, to be mindful of their own condition and set of symptoms so as to take it on board rather than to ignore it.

They learn how to read the signals of their own body and what their body needs most. As they progress in these useful techniques it often surprises them just how weary they are due to the fact that their body has been hanging on by a thread for long periods of time without acknowledgment for the toll this is taking on them.

Once acknowledged, progress can be made. Fatigue can be reduced, sleep patterns improve, worry is replaced by a sense of purpose, hope and clarity and the enjoyment of what they do begins to return.

None of this happens overnight, but with relaxation and meditation implemented into the daily life pattern of people with Burnout, a sense of being back in controlcoupled with feelings of being back on track, can at least begin and steadily develop.