How Mindfulness Therapy Helps Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout
Today’s fast-paced world makes it easy to feel stretched thin. Between work, finances, social obligations, and everyday responsibilities, many people are constantly “on.” Though staying busy and productive is not necessarily a negative trait, taking on too much too fast can easily lead to burnout.
If you often feel exhausted, depleted, or burnt out, it can start to affect your mental health, relationships, and productivity. Mindfulness Therapy can help you learn to better manage stress, deal with burnout in a healthy manner if it occurs, and avoid burning out in the future.
Signs You May Be Burnt Out
Burnout isn’t just feeling tired after a long week. It’s a deeper mental and emotional exhaustion that can make even simple tasks feel overwhelming. Burnout can result from stress, but it is different in that it leaves you feeling sucked completely dry of all energy.
Common warning signs associated with burnout include:
Feeling drained, exhausted, and emotionally unavailable
Lack of positive enthusiasm about life
Feeling physically incapable of working or reduced capacity to perform at work
Sleep difficulties, appetite changes, or getting sick more often
Common causes of burnout:
Unmanageable responsibilities and workload
Lack of support and communication from team members
Lack of downtime to balance with work
Taking on a large workload without asking for help
Lack of sleep
Feeling burnt out every once in a while due to a circumstantial and uncontrollable pile up of tasks is inevitable. However, feeling burnt out every few months, or multiple times a year, is unhealthy for both your physical and mental health. Mindfulness therapy can prevent long-term negative effects of burnout.
How Mindfulness Therapy Helps
Mindfulness therapy is an evidence-based approach that combines traditional meditation practices with modern psychological techniques.
When stress piles up, it can feel like you’re frozen, unable to think clearly or move forward, then mindfulness therapy can help you remain grounded and re-align with your life values.
Main skills taught by mindfulness therapy:
Observing experiences with curiosity instead of criticism.
Rather than feeling shame or guilt from not being able to keep up with an overly demanding workload, mindfulness therapy teaches you to experience your thoughts, feelings, and emotions without judgment. This reduces shame and allows stressful feelings to pass more easily.
Being purposefully present with your thoughts and feelings.
Keeping up with work is essential to maintaining daily living. However, if you find yourself ignoring your mental, emotional, and physical needs in the name of completing tasks, then you are leaving yourself more susceptible to experiencing burnout more frequently. Being present with your emotions, a skill taught in mindfulness therapy, is essential to balancing personal needs with life tasks, which helps mitigate stress.
You Can Take Care of Yourself & Be Productive!
Feeling overwhelmed does not mean you are lazy, broken, or incapable. It often means your nervous system is overloaded and needs support. Rather than shutting down or giving up, mindfulness therapy can help. Mindfulness therapy helps you reset before stress turns into shutdown.
If you’re ready to take the next step toward healing, contact us to book a free 15-minute consultation with one of our mindfulness therapists today. We’re here to help you learn how to build healthier ways to cope with an overwhelming workload.
