Tag Archives: selfhelp tips

Protect Yourself from Burnout

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calm african american woman resting on pillow to deal with burnout
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By Books Writer Denise Turney

Burnout is on the rise. Even if you’ve heard about it on the news, you might not know you’re nearing exhaustion. Surprisingly, as bad as it feels, burnout can sneak up on you. To begin, there’s the seasonal change adjustments that you may be experiencing, depending on the part of the world you live in. These seasonal changes can zap your energy. With the autumn seasonal change comes less sunlight, cooler temperatures and more time spent indoors.

Reaching Burnout Point

Exposure to less sunlight can cause drops in serotonin, a natural mood booster. Low serotonin could bring on depression, Healthline shares. Also, getting outdoors is a good way to soak up natural vitamin D from the sun. In addition to being good for bones, vitamin D may also help with mental focus and mood. Days with less sunlight might make it easier to reach a burnout point.

Furthermore, if you’re challenged with seasonal affective disorder, you already know how tough it can be to shift gears. You might not know what’s happening to you yet, although you’ve felt sluggish and less energetic at the start of autumn for years. Despite your efforts to push through the sluggishness and lower energy levels, this nagging fatigue remains.

This could happen whether you’re a resilient practitioner, a frontline worker whose empathy and compassion are sought by those battling illness, including COVID-19. It could also happen if you’re a new mom or an experienced mother dealing with motherhood burnout. Fortunately, there is help. It is possible to become someone who has survived burnout.

Surviving Burnout

A first step toward surviving burnout and overcoming the challenge is to recognize signs of burnout. This includes work stress symptoms. To start surviving burnout, check out these symptoms. Although the list is not all inclusive, it could signal to you that it’s time to take action. After you review the burnout symptoms, keep reading to learn about treatment.

  • Lack of or diminished motivation (especially if there’s seemingly no cause for the lower motivation)
  • Regular fatigue (the fatigue may not be constant – but regular enough to get your attention)
  • Exhaustion
  • Experiencing irritability, impatience and cynicism
  • Frequently strained relationships
  • Seeking food or drinks to fill perceived inner voids
  • Turning to food or beverages to lift mood
  • Poor sleeping patterns
  • Difficulty staying mentally focused
  • Forgetfulness
  • Increased body aches (which may be caused by higher levels of cortisol)
  • Sudden, unexplained weight gain or weight loss

Additionally, work stress burnout could find you constantly checking emails. As much as you may want to unplug, you could shift into workaholic mode. This could keep the cycle going.

More Signs You Need to Take Action to Protect Yourself from Burnout

According to the Mayo Clinic, other signs you may be reaching burnout point, especially at work, include:

  • Being overly critical of yourself or others at work
  • Feeling disillusioned about the work you do
  • Headaches
  • Stomachaches
  • Feeling that you have a lack of input or control over your work life

Of course, in addition to these systems, you might experience general burnout systems. Regardless of why you are experiencing burnout, it’s important to acknowledge that something has changed.

As a tip, try to do this without blaming yourself or someone else. Tempting as it may seem, blame doesn’t solve problems. In fact, it could leave you feeling disempowered. Therefore, if you’ve reached your burnout point, acknowledge that you have.

Help For Burnout

And seek help. You could work with a burnout recovery coach. Other actions that may help with surviving and overcoming burnout include:

  • Meditating
  • Walking in nature (in safe environments)
  • Talking face-to-face with a friend
  • Setting a time to unplug from work, social media, etc.
  • Turning off the news
  • Getting adequate sleep
  • Listening to relaxing music that you love
  • Reading books that help you to unplug and relax
  • Writing in a journal
  • Flexing your creative muscles while adding color to the pages of an adult coloring book

Take the supportive action that feels right for you.

Furthermore, you may sleep better if you go to bed at a set time. You may also find it beneficial to wear a fitness watch to bed. This way, you could track how much deep sleep you’re getting at night.

Ways to Protect Yourself from Burnout

And, if you’re having trouble getting or staying asleep, you could stop drinking water an hour or more before you head to bed. You could also try sitting down and relaxing for an hour before you go to bed. Should there be something on your mind, try jotting down a note on what you’re going to do to deal with the issue in the morning. Then, release the issue and relax.

Here are more ways that you could start surviving burnout. To get good results, you may have to incorporate two or more activities into your day. For example, if you deal with seasonal affective disorder, you might use a full spectrum lamp, walk outside for an hour a day and meditate for 5 to 10 minutes before you go to bed.

Practicing awareness could help you to spot your personal burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle. For instance, you may find that you start nearing your burnout point at the beginning of certain seasonal changes. Or you might notice that, for you, the stress cycle that can lead to burnout starts after you take on a major project or commit to leading a big family event.

Moving Beyond Burnout

Caring for a loved one for 30 or more days without a full day’s break, could be another way the stress cycle kicks off for you. Try to catch yourself early. Spot stressors and signs that you’re headed in the wrong direction early. In other words, get to know yourself.

Consider taking vitamin D if you live in an area with low sunlight. Check with your physician to see if that may be a viable solution. Also, pay attention to when you feel more stressed. For instance, do you feel more stressed in the morning or in the evening? Are you feeling more burned out during certain work cycles on your job?

In the remote work from home environment, you may find it helpful to step away from some Zoom meetings. That way, you won’t feel forced to sit in front of a computer screen for hours. For example, you could ask your supervisor if it’s okay if you dial into a meeting instead of using video to connect to the conference call.

And seek help if needed. If you work for an employer, check with human resources to see if there’s free counseling offered by the firm. Other options include joining a support group. Also, be patient with yourself. It may have taken months to become burned out. Give yourself love, care and the time to bounce back and move beyond burnout.

Trust the Process to Live Your Best Life

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By African American Author Denise Turney

lighthouse offering light by water as part of trust the process
Photo by Anand Dandekar on Pexels.com

Examine your beliefs to live your best life. Beliefs benefit or hinder. In this world, what beliefs don’t do is go away. In fact, wise thoughts may be the greatest investments you can make. Plainly stated, beliefs are thoughts that have been repeated so often you perceive the thoughts to be true, as if they are fact, as if they cannot be examined or changed.

Notice Beliefs that Hinder Your Ability to Live Your Best Life

Of course, it’s your own beliefs that impact you most. As simple as this sounds, it’s not always easy to accept. It’s so much easier to blame feeling stuck, confused or frustrated on another person’s choices, another person’s beliefs.

Based on personal experience, one way out of this trap is to start paying attention to what’s happening around you. This isn’t a tactic to recall every unwanted experience that you have. Instead, it’s an exercise to see how your thoughts, especially your beliefs, link up to your experiences.

And it may take months before you start to see the links. You may not want to hear this. But it could be even longer before you accept the experiences that your thoughts, your beliefs, are making. Please be patient with yourself. It can take a while to get off track, and sometimes just as long to get back on track.

Patience, Acceptance and Awareness Pay Off

So, be patient with yourself. The process is worth it.

Before you start paying attention to what’s happening and how it links to your beliefs, it’s important to know that you don’t have to believe your thoughts create your reality for your thoughts to work, creating desired and undesired experiences for you. In fact, you may have invested in beliefs that you are incomplete, incompetent or, in some other way lacking, without realizing it.

Those beliefs are working beneath the surface. They are creating experiences for you. That’s why it’s important to pay attention so, you can spot thoughts that need changing.

Searching for someone else to blame won’t change your thoughts. Your parents, grandparents, teachers and neighbors may have called you names and told you what you were and were not capable of. But if someone called you a dog that doesn’t mean that you’d bark.

Live Your Best Life Root Experiences

Why? You know you’re not a dog. And you’ve never believed or thought you were a dog. So, you don’t behave like a dog.

Which again shows that your thoughts and beliefs are churning out experiences for you. Those erroneous beliefs can make blocks of doubt, fear and resistance in your thought system. Before you know it, you’ve convinced yourself that you cannot do or have certain experiences. You’ve created inner resistance.

But, once you commit to change, you’ll start spotting the thought/experience links. And you’ll start accepting thoughts you need to stop and replace. After a while, you may see that the world is like an enormous classroom. Trust the process.

Trust The Process

As it regards trusting the process, Mulukan may know this as well as anyone and perhaps better than most. After all, Mulukan was born into a level of poverty that most will never deal with. By the world’s standards, Mulukan really should give up. But she keeps going.

And so should you. Stay open. Pay attention. Try different approaches. Follow inner promptings. Trust the process. And, trust that you really can and will examine erroneous beliefs until you see that they are illusions, until you decide to let them go into the nothingness that they came from. Illusions gone, all that remains is reality, all that remains is truth. And yours is an amazing truth – you’ll see.

You can read about Mulukan’s story in the book Long Walk Up.

Relationship Rescue – Learning To Trust Again

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By African American Book Writer, Denise Turney

happy family smiling from relationship rescue
Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels.com

All types of relationships, face-to-face and long-distance, can benefit from relationship rescue. Fear of rejection, fear of not being in control and especially fear of failure can be released after the rescue, a shift that centers the union on love. Barriers are replaced with hope, trust, care, patience, joy and love.

Learning to Trust Again as Part of a Relationship Rescue

For all of its rewards, love has barriers to get through, which is a reason why getting to a good relationship requires patience. Fact is, despite its benefits, love is viewed as weak. This belief presents a relationship barrier, whether you are seeking a friend or looking for a marriage partner.

It starts in childhood. Pre-teens push their mothers away when they go to hug them. “Don’t baby me. Don’t make me soft,” are demands children make of their mothers. At first glance, it appears sensible.

After all, the world isn’t going to baby, pamper or be soft on kids when they grow up. The world doesn’t coddle adults seeking relationship rescue with colleagues or couple’s therapy. In fact, even while undergoing relationship rescue, the world can feel like a gigantic foe that won’t stop swinging.

Getting off of this mean merry-go-round starts with introspection. It calls for the ongoing practice of self-love. And it requires learning to trust again. Actions that help you learn to trust again include:

  • Releasing the need to control
  • Letting go of the need to know everything

More About Relationship Rescue

Other actions that support learning to trust efforts are practicing forgiveness, accepting reality and grieving the loss of previous relationships. This includes family, friend and romantic relationships. For example, to release a former relationship, you could write your inner self a letter. In this letter, express your love for yourself. Also, share how you will be patient with yourself as you adjust to life without the previous relationship.

You might list specific ways that you will continue to work through grief. For instance, you might do three things a day that cause you to feel joy and peace. Listening to music that causes you to feel happiness and peace is one way. Meditating in a peaceful area and spending time in nature are other options. Additionally, you might stand in front of a mirror and say “I love you” to yourself in the morning and at night. This is important. Because believe it or not, loving yourself is key to any relationship rescue.

Even more, loving yourself is at the core of learning to trust again. And it’s this lesson that can make a relationship good. Yet, there’s still the belief that love is weak. In fact, men still get teased for “being in love”.

Made to be Loved

But if you get to know a man, you know better than to believe that men don’t want deep love, affection and care. In fact, a survey reported in Reader’s Digest reports that men fall in love faster than women. When it comes to falling in love at first sight, men get hooked 48% compared to women, who fall in love at first sight 28% of the time.

Also, men who responded to the survey shared that it bothered them if their partner wasn’t romantic enough. Despite what some men may say and how loudly they voice it, men want and need love. The trouble is that some men are raised to be so outwardly tough, they can come off as emotionally cold.

If men are taught to avoid loving emotions at all costs (least they be perceived as weak), they could go into conflict each time feelings labeled as “bad,” “soft,” or “weak” surface. That alone could produce conflict.

Art of Falling in Love

Yet, if you’re an expansion of love, it’s not possible to be satisfied with anything less than love. That’s why it’s critical that you love yourself. In fact, self-love is a start to the art of joining in love with someone else. So, before you seek a new relationship, work on the relationship you have with yourself.

Practice self-awareness. Become aware of what you really want. Take smart risks. There may be no better way to learn that “nothing outside of you will make you happy”. This includes the image (or illusion) you’ve created of your “perfect match”.

Therefore, in addition to self-love, the art of joining in love calls for failure. Along the way, you may have to invest in relationship counseling. You also might have to invest in psychotherapy to improve the relationship that you have with YOU.

Why not now?

Love and Trust in Rescued Relationships

Succeeding at love is about more than romance. It encompasses all of your relationships. The most influential of these relationships has nothing to do with romance. Yet, this relationship has everything to do with love. It’s the relationship you have with your parents.

Even if this relationship was fractured or bruised, you can still experience love and trust. Start practicing self-awareness, take full responsibility for yourself and make choices that help you to release unhealthy relationships. Focus on doing what causes you to feel joy and peace. Make this a priority and you may develop a sharp emotional compass.

You could spot when someone is devaluing you. And you may lose an attraction for people, including current and former lovers, who mistreat you. In fact, as you practice self-awareness and self-love, you may stir up the confidence to make choices that attract more love to you.

Finding Real Love

If you believe that love is weak or that love is only real in a romantic form, you could spend a lifetime searching for love and thinking you never found it. Fact is love is strong. It may be the only true strength. And love is limitless. It’s not limited to romance.

So, if you really want to experience love, start by getting to know and loving your true Self. And love every aspect of creation. It’s going to require forgiveness, as we all make mistakes. For sure, experiencing true love requires patience. But, if you’ve ever been loved, you know that it’s worth it.

Another thing, each relationship you have impacts every other relationship that you have. Wishing you the strength of love everywhere you are, everywhere you go.

Love Pour Over Me

If you’re struggling to love yourself or if you think love is weak, consider Raymond Clarke’s story. Raymond was told that love is for weak people. He was raised not to need anyone. But he didn’t create himself just as we didn’t create ourselves. Raymond needs love. He just doesn’t know it.

Can you imagine being told not to let something happen, then the experience keeps happening? Don’t want love. Working hard not to let anyone get close to you. You could get hurt. You might feel like a failure every time you start opening up to another person, which could cause more conflict, more problems. This seesaw experience causes Raymond Clarke to create emotional, psychological and, later in his life, physical barriers, shutting out nearly everyone who tries to get close to him.

Fortunately, love doesn’t give up, proving that love truly is patient, forgiving and strong. Each of us has to open up to love, letting it flow through us. Everyone has to give and receive love. It’s our core. It’s what we are.

It takes Raymond years to accept love’s lessons. How long will you let it take you?

Get your copy of “Love Pour Over Me” Now

Barnes & Noble – http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/love-pour-over-me-denise-turney/1109600654

11 Good Ways to Learn to Love Yourself

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By Books Writer Denise Turney

selflove pour over me book
Learn to love yourself

Discover effective ways to learn to love yourself and you could open up to the good you’ve been seeking. However, it’s important that you find the right path. After all, what works for your friend, neighbor or colleague, might not work for you. Yet, there are smart self-love actions that will work for you.

Catch Yourself to Know When You Need to Activate Ways to Learn to Love Yourself

Practicing self-love seems as natural as breathing, as normal as hearing water running through a kitchen spigot. But, loving yourself isn’t always easy. First, there are those nagging judgments to get beyond, thoughts like “you’re always making mistakes,” “everybody thinks you’re boring,” “your mother never was happy with you” or “nothing ever turns out right for you”.

It’s almost as if those nagging thoughts are coming from outside of you, from somewhere else. After all, who would talk to herself in such mean, painful ways?

Yet, think back. Doesn’t that nagging voice in your head sound just like your voice? Could it be that another part of your mind is hammering you with unkind thoughts and beliefs?

Don’t sit idle. Don’t allow the harsh, unloving talk to continue. You don’t want to start projecting those unloving thoughts, creating unkind experiences for yourself. Instead, learn to love yourself.

There are rewards. In fact, happiness and peace are only two major rewards that you gain when you learn self love. Confidence, improved self-esteem, opening to adventure, newness and playfulness are other rewards associated with self-love.

Reverse the Damage – Learn to Love Yourself

Check out these 11 ways to learn to love yourself. But don’t just look over the list of actions that you can take to express love to yourself. Put a few of these ways to learn to love yourself into action.

  1. Speak one loving thought out loud to yourself in the morning while standing in front of a mirror. Also, speak this same loving thought to yourself at night before you go to bed. Again, stand in front of a mirror when you speak this loving thought to yourself.
  2. Live in the present.
  3. Do something fun outside. It could be as simple as sitting on the porch, riding a bike, walking or reading a book outside.
  4. Write about a situation that you feel fear about (e.g. telling a friend that you’re not going to her party) in a journal. See if the fear doesn’t lower.
  5. Sing and dance absent a care, just sing and dance

More Ways to Learn Self Love

  1. Sit down and do nothing for 15 minutes before you go to bed. Treat yourself to a good night of sleep and rest.
  2. Appreciate the light and beauty in others without comparing yourself to anyone.
  3. Write down thoughts and behavior patterns you’d like to change. List actions you will take to change the thoughts and the behaviors. Be honest with yourself. Exercise your power.
  4. Accept full responsibility for your thoughts and behaviors.
  5. Say “No” when you don’t want to do something.
  6. Forgive yourself when you make mistakes. If you do this effectively, you’ll also forgive others when they make mistakes.

Projecting What You Believe About Yourself

Sigmund Freud wrote about the concept of projection. It’s possible to project and not know it, but you will feel its effects. As shared in Psychology Today, projection is the act of “displacing one’s feelings onto a different person, animal or objects.” And yes. Projection can be positive. Also, projection can occur when you transfer or project lofty thoughts and feelings that you have for yourself onto another person, animal or object.

In fact, this happens when you project inner good thoughts and emotions onto an athlete, actress, business leader or community leader. Before you know it, you may elevate the person into celebrity. Imagine how you would treat yourself if you stopped projecting these positive thoughts and feelings onto another person and focused them on yourself.

Lifetime of Self Love

And if you keep positive thoughts healthy (instead of letting them drift into loftiness), you could start to love yourself in healthy ways. Try it. Incorporate a few of the ways to learn to love yourself shared in this article into your daily practices.

Make three or more of the 11 ways to learn to love yourself part of your inner patterns. Then, pay attention. See if you feel less guilt. Also, notice if you feel more empowered, safe and cared for. And, because self-love is an ongoing choice, be open to adding, removing and changing actions that you engage in to express love to yourself.

One more thing about projection. As you love yourself more deeply, you’ll extend that love to others. And it will be as natural as breathing, as normal as hearing water running out of a kitchen spigot. Learn more about love and its power in Love Pour Over Me.