How Meditation Can Alleviate Your Burnout
Written by Chris Heath
Whatever you’re trying to achieve in your professional life - growing a business or trying to find more clients - it can be all too easy to push yourself too hard, too fast.
This happens so often partly because our culture fetishises overwork: we believe it is noble to cause oneself harm in the name of success.
But what if you could easily achieve everything you wanted without experiencing any burnout at all?
The secret is to use specific meditative techniques before the problem even arises.
Photo by Mariana Beltrán
What is Burnout?
Burnout is an all-too-common experience, and yet most of the time, a person experiencing it won’t necessarily know what it is.
Regardless, it can make daily life burdensome, causing disruptions to your work, as well as the rest of your life.
Burnout is effectively just a physiological reaction to prolonged stress.
When stress is particularly drawn-out, it can lead to a state of acute exhaustion - physical, mental, and emotional.
This is what we refer to when we talk about burnout.
Fortunately, there are preventative measures and proactive solutions to burnout.
One of the most effective of these is meditation.
How Does Meditation Help with Burnout?
You might be wondering how meditation can possibly help with burnout, even if you are an experienced meditator already.
Actually it can help in a number of ways.
For many, meditating is all about taking some time out of the day to simply be - to sit quietly with one’s thoughts, or with the breath, and allow everything to just flow around you.
Doing this can be enormously beneficial if you are on the verge of feeling exhausted - and it can even bring you back down if you are already experiencing burnout.
In general, most practitioners find that meditation increases their energy levels considerably, both immediately and in the long-term.
Having more energy means that you are much less likely to burn out in the first place.
Meditation can also help you recover from burnout by returning you to a simpler state of being, even if only for a few minutes a day.
As long as you take some time out each day to meditate, you will find that dealing with burnout is a lot easier.
As it happens, there are certain meditation practices that are known to be particularly helpful for dealing with burnout.
Which Meditation Practices are Best for Burnout?
If you are keen to try meditation as a possible solution for your burnout, there are a few in particular that are worth trying first and foremost, as they are known to be particularly effective.
Here we will take you through a few of these in detail.
Breathwork
One of the most effective meditations for burnout is a simple breathwork exercise.
Starting your day with this will often counteract any exhaustion you might otherwise experience throughout the day.
The process goes like this:
Close your eyes.
Slowly, take ten deep breaths into the diaphragm - counting each one on the outbreath.
Don’t try to clear the mind or force yourself to be calm.
Repeat as necessary.
Just doing this once or twice can work wonders, especially if you do it daily.
Samatha
A traditional Buddhist meditation technique known as Samatha can be very effective for increasing energy levels and countering burnout too.
The practice is as follows:
In an upright sitting posture, and eyes closed, allow the attention to gently come to rest on the breath - that is, the sensations at the nostrils as air passes through.
Don’t force it too much, but don’t become lulled into dullness either.
You are looking for an alert, gentle vigilance.
Keep your peripheral awareness open at the same time.Simply ‘watch’ those sensations, and when your attention becomes distracted - by a thought, a sound, or a feeling in the body - just note it and gently return to the breath.
Ideally, continue for at least half an hour.
Again, doing this once a day, every day, can be one of the most beneficial practices of all, and could solve your burnout problem permanently.
Walking Meditation
Here’s a great one to try on your lunch break:
Find a place where you can walk up and down, or in a circle, without too much disturbance.
Walk slowly, paying careful attention to the sensations of your feet moving.
As with the Samatha practice above, gently return your attention to the feet when your mind gets distracted.
The portable nature of this meditation makes it a great one to do during the day if you are starting to get tired - and it can really reinvigorate you!
As you can see, it’s possible to achieve your work goals without burning out, by applying the right meditation technique at the right time.
Start doing this yourself, and you’ll soon see the results. ◼︎