I literally tried everything to heal my nervous system, and it wasn’t until I started doing more of this that I noticed a huge shift.
I knew that healing the nervous system was the answer to my chronic health issues, but like many of YOU, no matter how hard I tried, I struggled to regulate myself.
It wasn’t until I dug a little deeper into what contributes to dysregulation that I started to be able to peel back the layers and uncover what was contributing. I dove deep into the research and understanding how the nervous system becomes regulated in the first place.
Then I wondered why so many people are so dysregulated, and this is when I uncovered a huge key to my healing: burnout culture. It’s a huge part of our civilization.
In our culture, phrases like ‘rest when you’re dead,’ ‘sleep is for the weak,’ ‘no pain, no gain,’ ‘push through the pain,’ ‘always on,’ ‘success never sleeps,’ ‘burn the midnight oil,’ ‘there are only 24 hours in a day,’ ‘you can’t afford to rest,’ and ‘hustle’ are commonly used to reinforce the expectation of constant productivity and overwork.
Many of us are bred and born into a culture that celebrates busyness and burnout. You are a “good person” if you are busy and hard-working, and you are a “bad” or” lazy person” if you’re not.
Not only is there an insanely strong cultural influence, but people also constantly buzz each other through texts, emails, phone calls, messaging apps, etc., and the constant urgency in which we are expected to respond is absolutely absurd and contributes a significant amount of distress to our nervous system.
Once I started to understand how much this was impacting my nervous system, I decided to do this: unsubscribe to burnout culture.
Here’s what this looked like and continues to look like:
- I will not get on my phone, check my email, etc., until I’ve done my morning routine.
- When I am working, I often turn my phone to focus so that I don’t have to be distracted by and feel like I need to immediately respond to every ding, chime, and notification.
- Rather than feeling like I need to be too busy to say no, I say no because I don’t want to be too busy.
- Unlike our culture that is mostly sick, dysregulated, and miserable, I prioritize both rest and recovery. I quite literally schedule it.
- I also prioritize and schedule fun.
- It seems like you’re expressing the importance of not tying your self-worth to how hard you’re working, how much you’re getting done, or how successful you are.
- I’m careful not to gauge my worth by how hard I’m working, how much I get done, or how successful I am.
The cultural burnout influence is extremely strong, and if you’re not highly aware of it, you will become it and no amount of nervous system regulating will help this either.
In my six-part nervous system healing series in the inner circle, I’ll be covering how to become aware of these patterns and stop them in their tracks!
