Five strategies I used for burnout recovery (part 7)
Therapy, good vibrations and stimulating the vagus nerve
Last week I wrote about the debilitating symptoms I experienced directly after my first burnout episode. This week I dive into my path to recovery and share 5 strategies I found to be effective in dealing with my symptoms in the weeks following my burnout.
A Quick Recap
After spending five years in Japan I packed up my bags and moved to a new country, the Netherlands, where my wife and I decided it would be fun to live for a couple of years. My singular goal was to grow my startup, a coaching platform with a fully remote team. I didn't make time to build much of a network or make many friends. I was heads-down on my business looking for the elusive 'product-market fit'.
This might have been fine were it not for the pandemic, which came crashing down on me and the rest of the world a few months after I'd arrived. This prevented me from taking any holidays abroad. Instead, I locked myself in my room and grinded away even harder. My frenetic workaholic tendencies were exacerbated by isolation. The pandemic pushed me over the edge psychologically. I was overloaded and started self-medicating with copious amounts of sugar and caffeine.
By the time borders were opening up again and I decided to take a break, it was too late. A mixture of poor decision-making, emotional dishonesty, and bad luck created the perfect storm. The chronic stress culminated in serious physical and psychological symptoms, which resulted in a mental breakdown. I was unable to read a book, let alone look at a computer. The meditation and psychedelics I'd done in the past didn't prevent this from happening. I had to take several weeks completely off work.
A few weeks after my burnout I decided it was time to take a solo trip back to the U.S. and see family. I'd be offline for a month and do absolutely nothing except be around my parents, play with my cat and dog, and just chill out. I packed my bags and flew to Minnesota to stay for a month. I literally did nothing. Well, almost nothing. Looking back at the few weeks and months after my burnout, there are a few strategies that helped me.
1/ Good ol' Therapy
"Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” — Brene Brown
The root cause of my burnout wasn't a physical issue. It was a psychological issue that was, like for most people, a bit complicated. There were past traumas I hadn't addressed, like the death of my close friend years ago that I never properly grieved. Not to mention the trauma of isolation I'd just experienced. There were communication issues that I hadn't resolved, like how to be vulnerable and freely express my emotions even when it was uncomfortable to do so. This was a skill I never really learned. And finally there was my relationship to work and a tendency to "push through" even when my mind and body were telling me otherwise.
If you've just gone through a burnout episode, the best thing you can do is rest for a while. Do nothing and relax. As soon as you start to regain some energy, get a therapist. A big mistake would just be to go back to work — likely the culprit of your burnout in the first place. Instead it would make sense to unpack what happened and start working on it. The process can take weeks, months or years. While it takes time to understand, process and integrate what you learn in therapy, I found myself healing just by sharing my experience. There's a lot of power in sharing your story and having someone listen to you non-judgmentally.
This was my first serious exploration into the different types of emotions. Although I'd read emotions researcher Brene Brown's books before, the topic took on a whole new light. I now had the lived experience of going through all of this shit. I actually cared and wanted to understand my emotions so that this wouldn’t happen again. A friend of mine told me that it takes 3-5 years to recover from burnout, and that it often happens more than once.
3-5 years?! Fuck that.
I didn’t want to go through that again. That fear was pretty good enough incentive to get past whatever shame or macho-guy complex I was holding onto and just get some help.
I started off with in person therapy (very specifically centered around burnout) and group sessions with a holistic therapist named Francisco. You can check out his site here, and he offers a lot of online lessons. In a group-therapy session, we did an exercise to let out some anger. I picked up a book and smashed the shit out of it for 10 minutes. It felt pretty good. But I felt some hesitation, like I wasn't supposed to be letting this anger out. There was even some fear and shame around it. Hmm, interesting.
I was encouraged to explore my relationship with assertive anger and later found out that it related to my ability (or inability) at expressing my boundaries. For me, these feelings of weakness stemmed back to when I was a little kid and was confronted with a situation where I felt helpless. For others, it could be the fear of becoming too violent if you've faced violence in the past. Shame is a "secondary emotion" in response to another emotion, like anger or fear, which are more "primary emotions."
When I moved out of the Netherlands I switched to BetterHelp which was fully online. Honestly, I think in-person is better if you can manage it, but BetterHelp does have a solid selection and it's affordable, around $350 a month for 4 hours.
2/ Good Vibrations
I picked up an ukulele for the first time and started to strum it every day. There wasn't much else I could do. Reading, writing, and looking at my computer were too demanding for my brain. I'd been watching some shows on Netflix but that got old fast. I needed to put my attention on something that was active and would make my brain feel good, not dull. A piano wasn't available, so I went with the cheapest string instrument I could find. An uke only has four strings so it's quicker to learn compared to a guitar.
This was highly therapeutic. Strumming, singing, strumming, singing. It didn't really matter what I played. For the first week I just strummed C and F and G and eventually started playing a tune by Johnny Cash, Walk the Line. I suppose his music spoke to me at the time because it was raw and dark at times, but he's also got a sense of humor. It cheered me up. (Random fact: Cash was once kicked in the chest by his pet ostrich and almost died). For a while, my routine looked something like this: Wake up, meditate, eat, play ukulele, play with dog, eat lunch, walk around, ukulele, dinner, watch movie, bed time. This was all I could handle and that was okay.
When I wasn't playing the ukulele I was humming a tune. It feels good and it decreases your sympathetic response. A quick refresh on what that means: The autonomic nervous system has two different branches, the sympathetic "fight or flight" system that puts you in a state of stress, and the parasympathetic "rest and digest" system which balances you out. A study out of Nepal found that people who did a 5-minute exercise where they just hummed (making a z noise like a wasp) and kept their breathing deep were able to decrease their blood pressure and heart rate. Yep, just 5 minutes to decrease your stress response.
Don Campbell, author of the Mozart Effect says that "Humming actually massages the body from the inside out." Further studies showed that specifically chanting Ommm created the most limbic deactivation and decreased sympathetic response; so, there might actually be something special about the Omm compared to other sounds.
Here’s an Omm chant on Spotify that I enjoy and use frequently. Easy to follow along.
My meditation up to that point was silent meditation, but I was starting to see the power of reciting a mantra out loud. Not only because it was meditative, but because it felt good to vibrate my vocal chords. If you don't want to sing, that's fine, but anyone can hum Aaaaaaaa or Zzzzz or Oooooooommmmmm.
3/ Long Walks
My body couldn't handle running yet. I would get too fatigued. In fact, one meta-analysis of aerobic and strength training regimen for burnout patients didn't show any improvement in recovery time. That's likely because there's disregulation with your cortisol levels (they're usually lower, actually), and any additional stress on your body just extends your recovery time. Slow and easy is best.
So I walked.
As a serious runner, at first I found it a little bit disheartening that I couldn't run. But I could plug in an Audiobook or podcast and feel pretty energized afterward. I also found out that while cycling/running is obviously good for you, walking actually significantly increases blood supply to the brain, too (which, naturally, improves brain function and cell growth in many ways). There's a mechanism related to the number of average heartbeats/minute and how syncing our steps close to that rhythm can “optimize brain perfusion, function, and overall sense of wellbeing during exercise.”
“There is an optimizing rhythm between brain blood flow and ambulating. Stride rates and their foot impacts are within the range of our normal heart rates (about 120/minute) when we are briskly moving along.”
About 40 minutes of walking 3 times per week had benefits above other exercise forms (stretching, yoga, resistance training) and walking was shown to increase the size of the hippocampus, the brain’s center for memory. Considering my memory was a bit iffy after my burnout, I probably benefited from this.
4/ Breathing Like a Madman & Submerging Myself in Ice
You might have heard of Wim Hoff, the funny Dutch man who climbs ice-capped mountains shirtless and popularized the ice-bath and holotropic breathing — an immune-boosting breathing technique. The cold, meditation, and breathing in combination is what makes the Wim Hof Method unique. He has some great tutorials here.
Every once in a while, I buy a few kilos of ice from the local 7/11, fill up my bathtub and switch on my favorite Enya track as I lay submerged in freezing-goodness. The trick is to do the breathing technique first and then take an ice bath (don't do it in the bath as it's dangerous if you pass out). The breathing changes the pH levels of your blood, making them more alkaline. In turn, that alkalinity turns on certain pain receptors which make it easier to withstand the cold.
I'd actually been doing this combo of breathing and cold for a while but stopped during the pandemic because I didn't have a bath. The gym I went to had a really nice cold shower but was closed during lockdown. I thought to order a bath and just fill it with ice, but there really wasn't much room in our apartment for that. The breathing is something I could continue easily but to be honest I wasn't keeping up my practice on a regular basis.
After my burnout I found the Wim Hof method really helped to calm me down and energize me. Like humming, the cold and the breathing technique have a similarly positive impact on your nervous system. They are mega stress relievers. The parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system is activated by the Vagus Nerve, which is located at the base of your neck.
There’s a few studies on this already, but here's one that found specifically that applying cold on your neck was enough to trigger this vagal response. In other words, if you are taking a cold shower or cold bath, make sure to submerge your neck! (Note that heat does not have the same effect)
"The results confirmed our main hypothesis that cold stimulation at the lateral neck region would result in higher heart rate variability [a good thing] and lower heart rate than in the control condition."
FYI Scott Carney who spent time with Wim Hoffhas a great book called What Doesn’t Kill Us that goes into the evolutionary price our bodies are paying for our comfortable lifestyles.
5/ A Feline (or Canine) Companion
We adopted Mr. Clooney from a Romanian shelter. He drove (haha!) across Europe with a bunch of other cats to be with us in The Netherlands and has been the coolest pet I've had the pleasure of meeting. There's something very therapeutic about a fluffy creature sitting on your chest making purring noises, isn't there?
Pet therapy is a major in college and is well studied by now. But when it comes to burnout and pet therapy, I honestly couldn't find any great studies. That said, playing with a pet can alleviate anxiety and symptoms of depression. Burnout has traits of both, so it's not a stretch to say that a pet can help in your recovery. It certainly did with mine. Not to mention, pets make you feel more connected.
"During this human-animal engagement production of the hormone oxytocin is increased. Oxytocin has widespread neurological, biological, emotional, and social effects, including attachment, trust, and social processing, while also decreasing anxiety, stress, and aggression."
There was also an unexpected benefit that I didn't think about. I suppose if you have pets or kids then it's no surprise to you. But Clooney demanded my attention. He was too cute, and loud, to ignore. I'd be sitting at my computer and he would pop up and sit on the keyboard. He would meow and purr until I played with him. This would force me to take a break every hour so that I could run around up and down the stairs with his mouse or string. To this day (we also have a dog now) pets require me to get outside, get some sunshine and step back from whatever I think is so important. Establishing this new routine was medicine for my workaholism.
Two Bonus Strategies (for paid subscribers) 👀
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Misha Yurchenko's Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.