Have you ever suddenly lost momentum on your money transformation journey when you were making real progress?
Did you wonder why when you were going so strong did you start reverting back to your old sabotaging patterns?
Did you start oversleeping, eating a lot, avoiding interaction with others or numbing out with TV as a coping mechanism?
Did it make you feel like a failure, a fraud or suddenly super cynical and negative because of it?
Recently a client reached out to me and shared, “Elise, I don’t know how to explain this but I’m just so tired from this work. I don’t understand why, I want to achieve my big dreams and create even more money, there’s no doubt about that, but it just feels exhausting. As much as I want it, I can’t find the drive and passion right now. But at the same time my inner voice is telling me I have to, I need to, I must. Why am I so tired? I get plenty of sleep, but when I think about taking steps to making my money goals happen, I just feel overwhelmed and exhausted again. What do I do?”
I went back to her and said, “Babe, this is burnout. You’re describing burnout.”
I mean, I should know, I’ve burnt out more times than I can remember. Hell, I burnt out twice in the last year from overworking during lockdown and from moving cities three times while experiencing high stress in my personal life.
People think burnout can only happen from too much work, but it can happen with just about anything that induces high stress for long periods of time, including too much personal development work. No, really.
Your mind, just like your body, heart and spirit can burn out when pushed too far. When you go too hard for too long without any break, rest or care, you burn out. EVEN IF THE THING YOU’RE DOING IS GOOD FOR YOU. Because too much of a good thing can become just as detrimental as a bad thing.
This is why it’s so important to recognize the signs to prevent it from happening, or if it has already happened to remind you that its burnout and means nothing about you as a person on your journey.
Signs of Burnout From Money Mindset Work:
- Feeling tired and drained (especially when thinking about your money mindset practice and what you’re “supposed” to be doing for it)
- Becoming self-critical (you second guess yourself a lot and feel like a failure)
- Feeling helpless, trapped, and defeated (comparisonitis can slip in here too)
- Loss of motivation and momentum in your practice
- Serious procrastination towards doing your practice and taking longer to complete it
- No longer enjoying the money mindset work and an increasingly cynical and negative outlook
- No sense of accomplishment after completing your usual practice
- Using food, drugs, or alcohol to escape or numb out from it
- Avoiding or dreading your work and isolating yourself from others
- Taking out your fears and frustrations on others
How to Overcome Burnout From Money Mindset Work:
Turn to others who will support you: My client did the right thing by coming to me, sharing how she was feeling and what she was experiencing because not only was I able to support her but I could actually mentor her through it. If you’re experiencing it I highly recommend you talk to someone you trust who will support you, whether it’s a friend, family member, colleague or a professional. A problem shared is a problem halved and it’s far better to talk about it rather than drown yourself in continuous feelings of doubt and failure and continue sabotaging yourself for longer.
Get your self-care on: When you’re overdoing one area of life, you’re neglecting others. Self-care is usually one of things to go by the wayside early on so that’s why you’ve got to focus on building up a regular self-care practice. This isn’t about pampering yourself, although it is, it’s about taking care of yourself and what that does is helps you to rebuild trust with yourself again. Our heart and spirit needs this kind of nurturing when we’re exhausted, we need to be looked after by ourselves.
- Get regular massages or a facials
- Book a few sessions with a therapist
- Spend a hefty amount of time in nature
- Go for walks or dance (you’d be surprised how much this helps)
- Try breathwork to regulate your nervous system or meditate
- Journal your feelings without trying to fix anything
- Read fiction (this helped me switch my mind off in the evenings)
- Tend to your finances (sometimes looking at your money, where it’s going and what it’s doing can help reassure your financial stability)
I started getting into a really good self-care practice but once we went into our second lockdown, I didn’t keep up with after we came back out.
Stop chasing after or reaching for what you were trying to get: Money mindset work can make you feel like you’re constantly chasing never-ending goals, always adapting to a new technique or like what you’re doing is never enough. Burnout happens when you’re overloading your system with too much of something. The first order of business is to interrupt the pattern of thoughts and feelings that got you to burn out and start to see things differently, that’s when recovery begins.
Ask yourself:
- What have I been consumed by and obsessed with that still feels unreachable?
- What would be my biggest fear come to life if I stop chasing after it?
- What would it look like to surrender the obsession anyway?
Allow this self inquiry process to help you to see calm your nerves on letting go and see new possibilities.
Take time off from it all: Put down the book, close the course, click off my blog, pause the routine, quit the visualizing and scripting and stop anything that’s wearing you out. I know that sounds scary. You think you might revert back to your old patterns that sabotaged your money and finances in the first place and it’s better if you just force yourself to do the work, but trust me when I say, you won’t. You will hate it even more, and the rebound time will take even longer. When I did this I took a couple of months off from my money mindset practice and business to recoup and find joy in other areas of my life and it was wonderful. I deepened my relationships with friends, discovered new hobbies, spent way more time in nature and started a regular fitness routine. When I finally returned to work, I was SO excited and itching to get back into it and my mindset practice.
Start with a week off. Explore hobbies completely unrelated to money or business and focus on meaning, fulfilment and joy. You’ll know when you’re ready to return to the work again because you’ll feel refreshed and restored. You’ll feel excited about getting back into it all again.
Reconfigure the way you approach your money mindset work: The point is not to take time off only to come back and do the same thing all over again. Instead what you want to do is reconfigure the way you approach your money mindset practice, set solid boundaries and adjust it to suit your needs better. If you found you burnt out from chasing after money goals, don’t focus on the goals right now until you can get to a place where it doesn’t consume all your thought and energy. Choose to invest time and energy into another area that will increase your income as a byproduct such as energetic embodiment, tracking your income, inner child healing or learning about personal finance.
The most important thing that I want to leave you with is to remember that the burn out will pass. It won’t be around forever but please don’t let it make you believe anything that doesn’t serve you. You’re still worthy of wealth and abundance, it still gets to be easy, you still get to have it all. And now that you’ve gone through this experience, how can you tweak it to suit it better to your needs so it doesn’t burn you out again.
Have you experienced burn out from money mindset before? How did it come about and what did you do to overcome it?
