Energy Roller Coaster

I have energy today. It always kind of scares me when I have the energy to prepare dinner (and it’s not even noon), to wipe down the counters AND still have some left over even.

It scares me because the worst kind of not feeling good is the kind that comes after feeling good. It’s like I’ve been gasping for breath, trying not to drown, and then out in the vast sea of not-enough-energy, I find a little sandbar where I can stand and catch my breath and relax and enjoy the sun and enjoy the water, enjoy being able to breathe without panic. And then, little by little the not-enough-energy waves get higher and the water gets deeper, and once again, I just don’t have enough energy to take on the ordinary tasks of life.

It’s a really delicate balance, trying to hold on to the energy I’ve got, taking advantage of it when I’ve got it, getting more energy, and not getting too much. Because that’s another thing that feels really terrible on this energy roller coaster (apologies for all the mixed metaphors in this post)–getting too much energy. Sometimes when I find myself gaining energy, the increase, the climb of “extra” energy (energy that doesn’t already have an allotted need, demanding its use), my experience of that rise in energy, feels physiologically identical to generalized anxiety.

It’s kind of like drinking something with a lot of caffeine and getting the jitters.  Only vaguer, and more comprehensive. That sharp increase in energy feels awful to me, and even worse when it burns off.

I recently had an experience with an adrenaline rush that left me feeling terrible for about a week. We try to get away every now and then to just relax and rebuild and refresh ourselves. I found a place not too far away to go swimming with the manatees and thought that would be a blast. What I didn’t account for was the trouble I would have figuring out the snorkel–I had a terrible time overriding my instincts when my mouth hit the water, and struggled to get my breathing-in-water right. It was quite an adrenaline rush, and after all was figured out and we’d had a happy day in the water and on the boat, I felt great. For less than 24 hours. At first I felt happy and full of energy, and then when the rush of the day wore off, it left me feeling depressed and overwhelmed.  At that point, I decided (once again) that getting away and doing something that helped me feel better, is just awful, if it leaves me feeling depleted and worse, after the energy gain wears off. Part of it is the contrast between feeling good and not feeling good, but I think part of it is that adrenaline, while it gives energy, also demands some extra energy (that most people have stored up in their reserves or margins), and I just don’t have those reserves. So when I come off of having energy, the thing that gave me energy sometimes leaves me even more depleted.

I recently left this comment on the blog of a friend, who was writing about his struggle with generalized anxiety, and realizes that success in dealing with it last year hasn’t guaranteed he won’t struggle with it again:

I hear you. In my struggle with burnout, I think it feels worse than the original problems to have felt better for a time and then sort of relapse (or whatever it’s called). Sometimes I find myself not wanting to do something that helps me get better, just because none of the “fixes” are permanent, and feeling terrible still doesn’t feel as bad as feeling better and then sliding back into feeling bad again. And in my case, being depressed sometimes seems to be the best thing for letting me know the burnout is out of hand, and when I let the depression have its say and walk with and through it for a while, the burnout gets better. So it’s kind of hard sometimes to know whether I should treat the depression as depression or let it shut me down to lethargy for a while so the burnout improves… And sometimes when I rebuild too quickly from the burnout, my body experiences the gaining of energy as intense anxiety, so that kind of makes it hard to feel motivated to “get better” when I know I’m going to have to live and walk through some days of non-specific, but still breath-taking anxiety, to get to the other side of leveled out energy. And then when that leveled-out, sufficient-for-the-day energy is only temporary, wow, it really does seem like life would be easier just staying miserable with the burnout, but not having the roller-coaster.

In any case, thanks for writing honestly about GAD. Life’s not easy and Christians do no one a favor, trying to save face for God, by pretending like it is or by pretending like we’re coping with what’s hard about it better than we are.

So, a big part of managing burnout for me is figuring out how to feel better wisely–to feel good without feeling too good.  So today,  I have energy, and it kind of worries me. But (fortunately!) there’s no big adrenaline rush, and I’ve been able both to do things and to take it very easy, treading gently around this tenuous thing called energy, so as not to trample the little new growth that is.  We’ll see if I can come “off” having energy without crashing.

We Are Not Alone

I love geography. We’ve got several maps in our living room and dining room (I’m going to a used curriculum sale, and I have resolved NOT to bring home any more maps, since I’m running out of wall space. My husband kindly suggested we could start posting them on the ceiling . I’ve got an inflatable globe that got stored upside down on the very top of our almost-floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Although it wasn’t intentional, I love it, because our planet is in space, and who says which side is right-side-up, anyway?

At a geography event at my kids’ school a couple of years ago, we got a poster with this “we are not alone” map on it and it hangs just above my desk.  It’s part of a My Wonderful World geography awareness campaign and is a fun reminder of an important geographical and sociological concept.

Today, though, it reminds me of an important part of getting better from burnout–you’ve got to have help. You cannot get over burnout alone.

Sigh, I say that and it sounds like a great ideal, but is it realistic? What if I actually am alone in this struggle? I’ve been a single mom with four little kids. I’ve lived alone with a household of responsibilities, while struggling with burnout.  But, really, even then, when I was so alone, I wasn’t. My friends have walked with me, helped me,  and sometimes practically carried me through much of this struggle.  I think friends are a key resource in dealing with burnout.  You really can’t do it alone.

To get better, you’ve got to laugh. You’ve got to cry. And you’ve got to connect to other people. I’m an introvert, so being with too many people too much tires me out. Being tired out is, of course,  not a good or desirable thing when you’re burned out. So I don’t lightly say you’ve got to connect with other people to get better. But still, introvert or not, you’ve got to connect with other people to get better. You need those around you (and sometimes I’m surprised to find out that those around me, need me in ways that I can actually contribute, even with my tiredness!) Sometimes you might need those around you to make it possible for you to have quiet and rest in your life.

Try any way you can to connect to people–safe people, people who care, people who understand, people who are willing to accept you where you are and help you where you can’t make it yourself.  Healing is much easier when you are not alone. We all need friends, always, but especially when we are in a hurting, needy place. I don’t know how your friends can help you. But you’ve got to let them. Ask them and then receive from them. Lean on them, cry with them, let them help in the ways that they can. If they offer to watch your kids, let them. If they want to cook for you, let them.  Brainstorm with them. My friends’ ideas aren’t always doable with the limited energy I’ve got, but I’ve sure been helped by thinking out loud with them about things that might work, even if they don’t.

It’s easy for me to worry about being too much for my friends, because I’ve been rejected and hurt for having been weak. I don’t have a formula for how not to be “too much”, but I’m learning to worry about that a little less, and trust my friends to have the best insights into what they can and can’t do to help me.  That’s why it’s good to have friends and not A Friend.  I, with all my limitations and problems, really would be too much for any one friend (and maybe sometimes have been!).  But this friend is able to help me out this way, and that friend another way. It’s not that my burnout gives me a license to demand any certain thing from anybody, but just that my friends, individually and together, really are there for me. I am so grateful!

I, admittedly, don’t have a lot to give, in return, to my friends, when I’m struggling with burnout. But I really can be a friend.  It’s been so healing to me, to have my friendship received as a good thing, even when I have so little to give.

Taking time to be with friends and strengthen your friendships is an important part of getting stronger. You need your friends, and they need you, too (even when you’re weak!)

Friendships make you feel better, and feeling better is an important part of getting better.  Your friends really are a great resource for helping you cope with the realities and limitations that are. You are not alone.

Laughter as a Resource

We need both laughter and tears to help us function in society. Crying relieves stress, reduces hormone and chemical levels in the body, and helps us return to a calm state. Laughter relieves stress, stimulates healing, exercises certain parts of the body, and helps in human bonding. That is why crying and laughing are beneficial to us both emotionally and physically.  (From “Why We Laugh and Cry”)

All of us have coping resources. But, if the situation we are coping with inherently takes away our ability to access or use those resources, we are really in a rough place.  It is an unfortunate reality of burnout that when we are stripped of energy, it often includes being stripped of the energy required to utilize most of the resources we have for coping with the hardships life throws our way.

Laughter is a coping resource that seems, at one level, to be easily lost by burnout.  When this happens, doctors and counselors are quick (with reason) to assume that what I’m suffering from is depression. Do you laugh often anymore? Do you find pleasure in things?  With burnout and depression both, the answer is often no.

I remember talking with one doctor (or maybe it was a counselor) and squabbling about the lack of pleasure in my life. I was not often happy, I rarely smiled and hardly laughed. And yet, I’d seen that I could still laugh when pleasure was brought on a silver platter and placed right in front of me. This was an important distinction, though I understand why, to the counselor,  it seemed like a small technicality.

The truth was I had not lost my ability to feel pleasure. What I had lost was all the energy it takes to create or even find pleasure. I couldn’t go looking for pleasure, because both going and looking required energy that I did not have.

What this means is that laughter and the feeling of pleasure were resources for my healing that were still available to me, if I could find ways to get and use them, without expending more energy than I had.

So, how do we build laughter and pleasure into our lives, when we have so little energy to start with?

First, like almost everything else in burnout recovery, this requires me to trust my feelings. If I think about playing a game (or doing some other normally fun activity) with my kids, and my heart sinks, I need to trust that feeling. That sinking feeling usually means I really do not have the energy that this activity takes, which means that, even if I have fun doing it, I will feel worse afterwards for spending energy I did not have. There are days when I can think about playing games without shriveling up with internal “I can’ts”, and on those days, the pleasure from playing games IS therapeutic. There are also days where the opposite is true. I find that my feelings give me the best indication of which kind of day it might be. (I can hear the shouts of angry counselors insisting that this is the worst kind of advice one can give a depressed person. I don’t know. Maybe this is really one of the biggest differences between “ordinary” clinical depression and burnout-induced depression. But, in my case, I have over and over found that not doing what I don’t feel like doing is incredibly healing and restorative).

Secondly, it might mean asking friends to be proactive in coming up with ideas for having fun. When I don’t have energy, my creative juices run slowly. So, chances are, I will not be the one to think of getting together and watching a comedy, or going out to the muffin shop with a few girlfriends. When my burnout is at its worst, I absolutely do not have the energy to think through the most basic of logistics. Any logistics-bearing energy I have, I can almost guarantee, is swallowed up trying to take care of kid logistics. I have found, though, that if friends put ideas out there, there is often one that I can handle, as long as it doesn’t require too much start-up energy from me to make it happen.  I have had some great nights full of laughter, when friends took me out to eat, or to a movie (even the really awful movie, “Over the Hedge” has continued to give me many laughs) or invited me over to play games with their family. (I’m an introvert, so I have to take that into consideration, too. Big, multi-family game nights WEAR ME OUT, but I love going to a friend’s house to play word games with a few people).

Thirdly, I try to keep myself surrounded by things that make me smile and laugh. In my case, this means picking up a copy of “The Orange Peel Gazette,” a local magazine that comes out twice a month, full of advertisements and jokes. I enjoy the jokes in Reader’s Digest as well. Reading usually takes little effort for me, so it is a very energy-cost-effective way to get some laughs.  The other thing that I do is listen to my favorite comedy radio program (for me, it’s CarTalk on NPR).  This program has been very therapeutic for me. It has almost nothing to do with anything in my life, but I love being able to laugh at the bantering between the two brothers, and I actually enjoy learning things about cars, which, ordinarily, I could care less about (as long as mine keeps running!) I love to learn, but that often takes too much energy these days. So this program combines my love of learning and the gift of laughter, all without requiring me to DO anything (no tests or quizzes, and I don’t have to even leave my house). I usually listen to it laying in bed, so I really don’t expend any energy to do so. CarTalk might not be your thing, but I do encourage you to pay close attention to things that make you laugh and find ways to do or listen to those things more often.

Finally, take every advantage of those around you to laugh with. My kids are getting to an age where their senses of humor are developing and maturing, and it’s a lot of fun to share laughs with them, on the same level of humor as them. My daughter, for example, loves Tim Hawkins, and it takes very little energy expenditure to sit and watch his videos and laugh with her.

I’ve got a friend, who is waaaaayyyyy funnier than I am, even on my best day and her worst. Her kids are hilarious, too, and sometimes it’s fun to just sit in their house and look and listen and laugh with and at them. I know they’ve often wanted me to loosen up and participate more in the humor, but really, it’s healing just to watch and laugh. BEing funny really would take more energy than it gives. But having fun is truly healing and restorative to me, in little doses.

Laughing with someone else may not quite double the benefit, but I do think it increases the mileage of the laughter to experience the humor of a situation or a show firsthand and then secondhand as well. (Secondhand laughter–I like it!)

Tears as a Resource

One of the things that burnout reveals is how very stripped I’ve become with regards to my coping resources. I have nothing left, no reserve energy, and hardly any way to deal with the ordinary, daily challenges that come my way, let alone bigger challenges.

One of the contributing factors to my burnout was abuse I experienced. One of the side effects of that abuse was losing my ability to cry. I tell you, I don’t know when I’ve ever been so happy to get something back as I’ve been to get my tears back!

I remember one counselor telling me that people feel better after crying, because, much like sweating, crying allows the body to rid itself of the toxins it’s released, either from exercise or physical exertion (in the case of sweating) or from dealing with stressful situations.

I don’t know much about all of that works, technically, or on a chemical level in our bodies, but this article, “Why We Laugh and Cry” explains, in a way that is comprehensible to me, some of what goes on in our bodies when we cry, and why it is good for us.

I do think crying is an important part of burnout recovery.

• You’ve got a lot to cry about. There is much grief in facing all the things you can no longer do. Crying helps you walk through the sadness, facing up to it as the real sadness that it is, instead of carrying it as a never-to-be-relieved or faced up to sadness.
• Crying does bring a temporary relief and release. Appreciate it, use it, enjoy it (well, maybe that’s an ironic way of putting it, but, seriously, if crying makes you feel better for a time, receive that as a gift, even if it’s temporary and you soon find yourself needing to cry again).
• Crying about our limitations as we face up to them, helps us to move on to the next step of accepting our limitations and ultimately, figuring out how we’re going to survive WITH the limitations. When we’re still fighting the limitations as if they don’t exist or are not that bad, we don’t cry. But when we cry about them, we are taking steps towards accepting what is and figuring out where we’re going to go from here.
• In my experience, burnout brought with it a lot of chaos, uncertainty, unpredictability. This is excruciating to me. I love to have my life organized, to know what I can expect, what I am going to do, etc. But, with burnout, I can’t plan very far ahead.  This takes a real toll on me emotionally, and tears are both necessary and helpful in coping with that toll.
• Crying makes us stop. And that, in burnout, is a really good thing. It’s hard to make onesself really stop and do nothing. But when we cry, we’re stopped from doing the things that exhaust us, while still doing something.  Bonus points when that something is actually restorative.
• Yes, crying makes me tired sometimes, but it’s a good kind of tired, the kind of tired where I feel more peaceful and able to sleep. Anything that helps me sleep better is a good friend to have in burnout recovery.

And so I say, Hooray for the tears! I have very few resources that are doable–that don’t demand higher energy than I’ve got, in order to even start using them. But tears, I can do tears, without a huge outlay of startup energy. And so I cry. Not just because I can’t stop myself from crying sometimes, but also because the tears are a gift, a resource, given to me to help me cope and move on through my struggles, towards healing.

My Brain on Burnout

Physiologically speaking, I don’t know a lot about what my brain actually looks like, burned out. But this is what my thinking often looks like while I’m still struggling with burnout:

I find myself seeing something that I need/want/should or wish to do. When that happens, I very often have an “I can’t” reaction as I analyze the energy I currently have available. The energy available is, quite frequently, not enough for the thing I’m thinking needs to be done. That is the actual reason behind my feeling of “I can’t”.

And then what happens is my brain starts scanning for something I can do. But what it encounters is a myriad of other things that I can’t do. It scans, like the searcher on my computer, for something, anything it recognizes as doable. And the search dots just keep cycling, telling me to wait, while the search continues. Bringing up nothing.

This is part of the sadness, the depression of burnout for me. Seeing things that need to be done. Lots of them. But not seeing things that are doable. There is a human joy and pleasure and satisfaction in seeing things that need to be done and knowing that I can do them. More often than not, I don’t have that satisfaction. Instead, my brain scans and searches and keeps coming up empty. Or maybe not empty, but imbalanced. On one side all the things my brain has found that need to be done. On the other side, nothing that I’ve got the energy to do.

This post does not end with an answer. I don’t have a good answer (though I’ve tried and discarded some possible answers) for this problem. But it is about a reality. There is some measure of peace for me in putting words to some of my reality and being able to grieve what is. When I told my husband last night about my brain scanning for a doable task to settle onto and not finding one, he looked at me very sadly. And that was healing. Being sad, with someone else (especially someone who loves me, as is, in this reality) about the struggle I live with, inside of my own head, was restful and healing to me.

Therapeutic Depression–Part of My Story

It’s one thing to believe that depression can be helpful in burnout. It’s another to live that out, day to day, with all the misery and limitations of depression.

Here’s some of my experience with depression and how I’ve found it to be therapeutic and a helpful part of my healing.

I was a single mom for several years, and every weekend my children were at their dad’s house. This was emotionally difficult, and I hated many things about that arrangement.   At some point, though, I began to notice how very good it felt to be very down during the weekend. I would lay around in my pajamas, not take a shower, not eat much of anything (I know, that is a TERRIBLE thing and not a good idea for burnout recovery, so I’ll talk more about my struggle with eating and burnout later), and just be overall depressed.

As miserable as I was, it felt wonderful, on some level, not to have any pressure to feel better, not to have to get up and do anything, not to even have to exert myself, to push through the hard and dark feelings to do anything. What I began to notice was that letting myself fall into the lethargy I battled against all week was actually restorative to me. I gained energy by not doing anything I didn’t feel like doing, which pretty much meant I didn’t do much of anything at all.

My friends and family worried some about me, when I didn’t want to get dressed or go out or do anything. I asked them to trust me on this, but I also appreciated their care. I didn’t want them to stop caring or worrying, even though I felt pretty sure I was needing those depressed days to feel better.

There is a risk I recognize in letting myself be depressed for a couple of days–the risk that I will start to feel worse instead of better. The risk that I make the depression worse by giving into it. The risk that I will spiral further into depression and having a harder time coming out.

I don’t always know when my depression is helping me or hurting me. But I do know that my experience with burnout has helped me understand one of the main differences between what I experience with therapeutic depression and burnout and what I hear other people describe with depression. With straight up depression, I hear that when people make themselves do things like go for a walk or accomplish one task, they often feel better for having done so. With burnout, I almost always feel much worse when I make myself do anything, no matter how helpful others say it is.

Now that the burnout is getting better, I think I’ve moved “up” a bit to ordinary depression, and I’ve begun to occasionally experience the phenomenon of pushing myself to do something I don’t think I can do, and feeling better for having done it. But that is rare. More often it is still true that I feel better when I listen to my feelings of depression and do nothing when I don’t feel like doing anything.

One of the ways that I try to protect myself from spiraling too far into depression (because I really do have to function most weekdays) is to plan something fun, that requires almost zero energy to do, for Sunday nights. For a long time this was eating something nice and listening to Car Talk. I’d take a shower (finally!) drive out to Subway or Taco Bell and get something I enjoyed, prop myself up in bed and laugh my way through CarTalk.

The great thing was, I actually had energy after doing nothing Friday night, all day Saturday and most of Sunday (sometimes, but not always, I went to church, but I kept it low key and didn’t talk to many people while I was there). I couldn’t really bare to listen to something funny on Friday night. But by the time I’d given in to my depression for a couple of days, I had the energy to have fun again. At least a little bit .

I don’t know what to make of my experience medically. I’m not a doctor and I’ve not really found a doctor who thinks that being depressed is a very good idea. But I do know that I’ve come to trust my experience a little bit more. Sometimes my husband has to remind me, when I start to feel really depressed during the week, that my depression usually signals how depleted I am energy-wise. It is extra hard, during the week, to let myself be as depressed as I sometimes feel. But when I do, I always feel better. Recently when it happened I went out and laid in the hammock for an hour or so, till I overheated and was truly physically (as opposed to just mentally and emotionally) exhausted, then came back inside and fell asleep. When I woke up, I was able to do the laundry or some little task that had felt overwhelming and impossible for a few days.  Before the hammock and the nap, all I wanted to do was cry and sigh and give up. Turned out, giving up in that moment was exactly what I needed to do. Fighting the depression was getting me nowhere, but when I gave into it, I found it didn’t take all that long for me to feel up to doing something again.

Like so many of the things I’ve been talking about, I’m surprised, myself, to see progress. A full weekend of letting myself be lethargic and depressed used not to be enough to make a big difference. Now, a few hours of giving into those feelings is often enough to give me strength for the next task.

It’s a little scary putting all of this into words, saying things like “giving up”; “Being depressed is helpful”; trusting myself when I say “I can’t”. It’s one thing to sort of believe those things in the quietness of my own home. It’s another thing all together to say them out loud, to other people, pulicly. My story is not the only story and the things I find healing may not be helpful at all to another person.  Shoot, my own story is not always even helpful to me. Sometimes I can’t be as depressed as I need to be. And sometimes I just don’t want to be depressed, even though I might need the lethargy. And sometimes nothing seems to make me feel better, neither fighting the depression nor giving in to it. But little by little, I’m able to look back and see myself in a different and better place than I was a few months ago. And that gives me a bit of hope for the hard places I still find myself in.

The Helpfulness of Depression

Today has been a hard, depressing day for me. This past month has been a long, intense, emotional and difficult month. I think depressed is probably exactly what I need to be. But still, I hate it and wonder if I’m a little bit crazy to keep believing this kind of depression is good (or at the very least, productively helpful) for me.

Yes, I’m a pretty big believer that some types of depression CAN be therapeutic, especially when related to burnout.

I think about this kind of depression as analogous to pain.  Pain indicates that something is wrong and out of whack. And I believe, with burnout, that depression is a lot like that.  I also think it’s more than that, though—sort of like a built in mechanism that forces me to stop. The lethargy that I feel when I’m this kind of depressed, the pointlessness I feel of doing nothing that causes me to do nothing, is, when given enough rein (but not too much), really strength building for me.

One of my favorite books about Pain is The Gift of Pain, by Dr. Paul Brand, who worked with leprosy patients in India for most of his life and later with diabetes patients in the US. Both leprosy and diabetes often cause people to lose feeling in their extremities. And with the loss of feeling, comes the inability to feel pain. With the inability to feel pain comes a loss of injury prevention.

I think burnout-related depression is somewhat akin to dehydration related headaches. I live in Florida, and when I don’t get enough to drink on a hot day, I sometimes get a really bad headache. I’m all for taking an inbuprofen when that happens. But there can be a problem with that. If the ibuprofen makes my feeling of a headache go away, and I go back out in the sun and play some more, without addressing the problem the headache pointed out, the result will be a much worse problem than a headache.

This is one of the problems I have with treating burnout related depression with anti-depressants. I believe that medicine can dull the symptoms and pain of depression and make one feel better. But, if the lifting of the symptoms allows the person to feel better about doing more again, if the depression is a result of burnout, I believe the result can be a much worse illness and collapse.

I was reading a post about PTSD recently (which I also struggle with, though increasingly less these days). The author, a counselor, was writing briefly about PTSD in the military. At one point he talks about the flip side of prescribing psychiatric meds for soldiers in Iraq:

“While this means they are getting some treatment, others see this as merely allowing them to suffer more damage while still being able to fight the next day.”

Please do not hear me saying anti-depressants are bad and should not ever be used (remember, I DO take ibuprofen when I have a headache, and I’m not opposed to pain relief. ) I believe they can be helpful, and I also believe all depression is not burnout related. But where it is, I think there is a real danger of medicating to make me feel strong enough to face responsibilities I’m not actually strong enough to face yet.  When that happens, the medicine allows me to further injure myself, without feeling the depression which was forcing me to stop and not injure myself (even if it was doing so by making me feel too miserable to do anything at all).

Here’s another analogy. Have you heard of doctors inducing a coma in burn patients? I don’t speak as a professional, who understands all of the benefits and rationale behind this practice. But I do think the lethargy that comes from depression can function in a similar way. We usually think of the semi-comatose, I-can’t-do-anything feeling of lethargy as bad. It does, indeed, feel awful. But I think when I feel that way and, as a result, don’t do anything, my body stops using extra energy I don’t have and begins, in very small ways, to store up and gain energy.

I’m not saying that depression is a magic cure. It’s not. But I do think it is, in and of itself, part of the healing process.

Rest, Not Sleep

When you feel so exhausted from burnout, it’s easy to think that what you need is more sleep. I found, however, that during the months and years of my worst burnout, my sleep was not very restorative–I woke up feeling as exhausted as when I fell asleep. At some point, I read that it actually takes energy for sleep to be restorative, and so your body, in sleep, cannot restore to you energy that it does not already have.

I do not remember where I originally read about this, but here is a link I found tonight, which talks about this concept, as one of a list of myths about burnout (There were several helpful thoughts in this article, and if you struggle with burnout, I’d encourage you to read through it).  The author compares the body in burnout to a dead car battery. No matter how much you let the car battery “sleep”, it’s not ever going to recharge itself. It cannot give itself energy it does not have.

The title of this post is a bit misleading, because I do not actually believe that rest stands in opposition or contrast to sleep. But I do think that focusing much on resting and restful activities during the day will, over time (perhaps a long time, as rebuilding is a very slow process), contribute to better sleep.

I do not know exactly when things changed for me, but at some point, I did gain enough energy so that the sleep I got felt like it counted! I still wake up tired in the morning, but not nearly as exhausted as I used to.  I still wake up quite frequently moaning deeply (just ask my poor husband–some mornings I give our neighbor’s barkless-but-moanful Basenji some fierce moaning competition), because I don’t feel like I have the new energy I need for starting what today requires of me. But this is different, in a very good direction, from how I used to feel when I woke up–like I hadn’t recovered at all from yesterday’s energy expended.

A Prayer and a Picture

(borrowed from Troy and Tara Livesay’s blog, with permission)

Stress Relief

I received this link, “Stress Relief”  from a Dollar-Stretcher mailing list I’m subscribed to.

Most of the ideas given seemed nice, not only because they are for people being frugal with their dollars, but also because many of them seem to be happily frugal in the amount of energy required to enjoy them.

I find with burnout there is no formula for what might help me feel a bit rested and restored on any given day. Lists like these help, not so much because I’ll be able to do all (or even any) of them, but rather because they help me brainstorm and make it a little easier, at times, to think of one thing that I can do, today, with limited energy, to feel a little bit better.