I hear from so many people across so many industries, vocations, and life situations that they are
burned out.
This Deloitte Study reports that in a survey of 1,000 working professionals 77% reported feeling burnout!
The Mayo Clinic offers several adverse physical ailments of job burnout specifically, including insomnia, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes!
What are we doing to make ourselves so miserable?
Where do we think we are going by working so hard that we are burned out?
Why Are We Burning Out?
Westerners are deeply, deeply distressed. We have been taught to ignore, avoid, or worsen the fundamental things that make people happy and healthy.
Our air is polluted.
Our water is full of all kinds of things (microplastics, antibiotics, arsenic from improperly disposed of cigarettes, and more).
Our nutrition is poor.
Few people get anywhere near the level of activity and body motion they need.
Bad sleep is its own epidemic.
And we’ve broken apart our communities so that few individuals have even a handful of people in their lives to physically love and support them.
There are a lot of factors going on around this, but one of them is the Protestant-Christian work ethic. This work ethic is about getting into Heaven. You have to work hard to earn it. But Heaven is a future statement. It’s over there.
So people are driving themselves crazy to get some place that is never here now.
This and other social beliefs are driving people to new levels of psychological and physiological collapse.
Surrendering Back to Sanity
We have a lot of work to do to come back to sanity.
We’ll start by surrendering.
We surrender to being human beings.
We’re not robots that can work endlessly.
We need rest, healthy food, good breathing, lots of water, and love!
We need to accept these realities, or we will make ourselves sicker.
Healthy spirituality is probably one of the most critical pieces in all of this to remember that we are here now, and we only get this one body for this life. How we treat it impacts how we enjoy or suffer this precious time we have.
2 Comments
spot on!
Thanks, Jen!