Burnout
Recovering From Overwhelm and Burnout
Overwhelm and Burnout: The Role of Expectation
Expectation includes conscious ambitions, plans, dreams, objectives, ideas, wants, fears, and beliefs. Expectations also include unconscious assumptions, biases, urges, etc.
We tend to hold expectations for a long time but are rarely aware of them and even more rarely check them out.
When life, or our experience of it, does not meet our expectations (for example, when we become stressed over time or find ourselves overwhelmed on a regular basis) then we may experience a whole series of uncomfortable emotions and thoughts. Over time, this can become exhausting and result in emotional burnout.
Our mind tries to cope and to make sense of the discomfort that we experience. We may fight to survive, or find ourselves becoming ill, or seek distractions, or fret, or blame.
Eventually the long-term negativity produces a conscious 'need for change' that may or may not be consciously linked to our overwhelm/burnout: "I've got to change this!", or "I've got to cope!"
One symptom of overwhelm is an emotional-level closing-down of enthusiasm. We reach a stage of not caring, of closing down our emotional connection with our own life: "I don't care!"
So, our response to overwhelm has us strongly-motivated to change but not caring about our current circumstances. So, we may become intensely interested in some other, previously unexpressed, aspect of our own life. Or, we may try repeatedly to get our lives back on track. Or, we may seek relief in rest, drink, drugs, alternative activities and ambitions, or adopting alternative personality traits.
These 'changes' may prove effective as temporary distractions but are less likely to reverse the emotional closing-down. This is because the overwhelm/burnout is often not associated comsciously with the actual stress and our own expectations, which often include a demand that we 'cope' with whatever life brings us.
To repair this we need a conscious-level appreciation of the frustration of our expectations, and emotional-level release of our frustrations (which have built up over time), a conscious re-statement of our chosen aims in life along with a choice to move on from the past. Above all though, we need to re-ignite our curiosity about our own life in order to reverse the "I don't care" belief.