The inner drive to “do more” and “achieve more” is significantly impacting women’s health, families, and careers. The problem is that burnout process is so dynamic and so intricately woven into women’s lives, that even the brightest of women are not able to identify the telltale signs of burnout until it is too late. This steady ride to the land of Burnout is caused by a complex and interacting web of stressors, but they all boil down to a few key causes:
- Women’s expanded roles (home, career, children, parents)
- Constant sensory stimulation
- Social pressures to achieve more and have more
- Family and child expectations
- Financial constraints
- Poor lifestyle habits (sleep, diet, exercise, hormone imbalance, and brain chemical deficiencies)
- Adrenaline addiction
Most women have way too many demands in their lives. They are working too many hours and managing too many tasks between work, home, and family. Women are juggling tasks, racing from one thing to the next, and exposing themselves to over-stimulation with their phones by constantly moving between emails, texts, and talking. Your body was not wired for this type of excessive hyper-stimulation and in time, without the right tools, it will show signs of breakdown.
Today medical offices today are flooded with women feeling the physical ailments of stress, high blood pressure, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, breast and uterine problems, and allergies. The fundamental problem with these visits is that the medical community is not paying attention to what is needed to treat the entire female system with regard to stress-induced problems. This is primarily because medical physicians/practitioners today are trained to treat the acute problem and not the underlying condition as it pertains to stress.
The classic symptoms that seem to eventually find their way into women’s lives who are juggling one too many responsibilities are:
- Chronic fatigue
- Insomnia
- Forgetfulness/impaired concentration
- Chest pain, heart racing, palpitations
- Dizziness, fainting
- Headaches
- Compromised immune system (frequently ill)
- Loss of appetite or sugar/starch cravings
- Anxiety/tension/constant worry
- Depression/unexplained sadness
- Anger/irritability/rage
- Isolation/detachment
- Lack of productivity at work
- Breast and ovarian cysts
Here are some tips to help avoid burnout or to get you back on track if you have already hit the proverbial burnout wall!
Step 1: Change Your Diet and Timing
Reduce blood glucose spikes and dips by eating the lean proteins, good fats and high fiber good carbohydrates like veggies, to help eliminate morning grogginess and afternoon fatigue. That means no bagels or muffins for breakfast. Protein is brain food and will improve your focus and memory for the entire day.
Step 2: Take Vitamin C and Stress Support supplements.
Vitamin C is utilized by the adrenal glands in the production of cortisol and other adrenal hormones. Consider taking higher doses of Vitamin C in the morning and noon. Also consider stress support supplement that contain adaptogens. I recommend Balance Docs “STRESS AM” AND “STRESS PM” supplements to balance the day and night rhythm of cortisol. BalanceDocs.com
Step 3: Exercise
Walking, yoga, Pilates, and light strength training will serve you better than pounding it out in a spin class or running. Any type of vigorous exercise will leave your stress glands even more taxed, since one of the causes of the stress syndrome is “over-exercising.”
Step 4: Hydrate
Dehydration is one of the most common problems with fatigue and the physical inability to manage stress.
Step 5: Ignite Your Parasympathetic Nervous System Track
Take ten minutes twice daily to reboot. Breath in through your nose (expanding your belly not your chest) and out through pursed lips while focusing on the exact thing you want for yourself at that moment. Imagine exactly what you want to feel, have, acquire, and be with all of the positive emotions to go along with it. Stay there for 2-3 minutes.
Step 6: Get Deep, Restorative Sleep
Skimping on sleep handicaps the brain, nervous system, hormonal system, and the body as a whole by robbing it of needed recovery from the previous day and hindering the rejuvenation of hormones and neurochemicals to get you through the next day.
Step 7: Began Brain-Training
Avoid negative sayings like “I am so stressed” and replaced them with saying, “I choose myself, and am ready for better health, this is not an emergency, I am in control of my life right now.”
At the end of the day, life is stressful; there is no doubt about it. It would be impossible to eradicate stress completely, and that wouldn’t even be a good idea. A certain level of stress is healthy and necessary. Instead, the solution to overcoming Burnout lies in reducing as much unnecessary stress as possible and adopting a highly effective, extreme self-care plan to cope with the stress that cannot be removed. Beating burnout requires you to be introspective and step into your most authentic self, and that involves confronting beliefs and mindsets that are just not working for you anymore in order to come up with a new plan that will allow you to reach the highest level of success in all areas of your life, all while feeling content and energized.
