SOLUTION FOR BURN-OUT: DISCOVERING YOUR TRUE REST

For those who have been following this blog, I apologize that I have not yet continued the entries about my trip to Yosemite and elsewhere in May.  I do plan to finish those, but had gotten bogged down by quite a bit of other tasks in my life and that that continued to increase in intensity, so I just couldn't make the time to sit down and work on that entry some more.  

Meanwhile, now that this is summer, I have several friends and relatives suffering from severe burn-out from the past year of work, and now they are facing valuable vacation time that they are really counting on for refreshing themselves.  But instead of expecting relief, they are instead piling even more stress on their hoped for vacation, which is burdened by the duty of having to carry away all this burn-out.  You know that it is bad when your vacation is adding to your burn-out instead of relieving it!

I had gone though this myself a decade ago, and learned what the solution is, tried it out (there was nothing to lose), and discovered that it worked extremely well for me.  I have been following that concept ever sense.

I decided that I would write about this solution for one of these people and send it to her.  Once I had done that, I figured that it might help other people, to, so I decided to post it here on my blog.

What you need is what is called TRUE REST.  I had actually gotten this concept from something called "The Michael System" (and many of its various permutations, of which you may find several).  The Michael System offers quite a lot of other valuable lessons and concepts, but here we are concerned only with this particular issue.

Everybody has three "centers", their intellectual center, their emotional center, and their moving center.  You know in your own life that sometimes you think, other times you are emotional, and other times you are in the midst of action.  Those are the three centers, Intellectual, Emotional, and Moving.  You can think of "being" in one of these centers at any giving time, which really refers to which of the three is taking most of the focus of your energy.  You aren’t in all three of them at the same time, but move around among them as you experience various events.  Almost all of us have our number one favorite center to be in, but will also move to the others, and a great deal of people have a center they really don’t like and aren’t in it very often.  What I just described are the basic centers, but you also have three higher centers, but those are for special moments, you couldn’t be into those very long without suffering a burn-out from that, because those are too intense.  Peak experiences are meant for peak moments, not for all the time.

So you only need to analyze the three basic centers and figure out your order of favorite to the least.  For example, me, I am most comfortable in my intellectual center, that means that my normal behavior when something happens is to think about it, to analyze it intellectually.  You might say that I am mostly in my mind.  Next for me is my emotional center, which means that I will access my feelings.  So after I think about something, I might then cry, or laugh, or get very angry, and so on.  But those things don’t happen first.  When I am emotional, you might think that I am then in my heart.

Regarding my least favorite center, the moving center, I actually even have a block to it.  Not everybody has blocks to one of their centers, and it’s not really a problem, although it would be healthier to have a smooth flow among all three.  This doesn’t mean that I NEVER go into my moving center, that would mean that I would never get anything done.  How it works with me (but other people might be different) is I have what I think of as “inertia”, which means that whatever state I am in, it is hard to get me to move out of it.  So mostly that means that I do a lot of procrastination, meaning, no moving, but a hell of a lot of spinning around through my intellect and emotions.  For example, my brain may think of a wonderful story to write.  I might even write it completely in my head (I do something like that almost every single morning when I am preparing breakfast.)  So I have MILLIONS of ideas.  Now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I then moved into my moving center and then actually wrote the book or story or whatever?  What a huge success I might have been!  But no, I then slide into my emotion center, and then come the doubts, “nobody would want to read this”, “I really don’t know very much about the subject matter”, “I can’t think of how to solve this particular plot issue”, or then my aversion to my moving center chimes, “oh, it will take so LONG to write that,” “now that you already know the whole thing in you head, can you think of anything more BORING than just sitting down to write the whole damn thing out, it is so much more interesting to think of another story, instead.”

So, it takes a lot of energy to get me moving.  In your case, you may not have a block against any of the three centers, but manage to move freely among them as appropriate to what is going on with you at the time.  Still, though, there will be one of the three that you do like the least.

Back to me, there was another wrinkle as to how my block worked.  Like the definition of inertia, if I DID finally get moving, then I wouldn't want to STOP.  Inertia has to do which changing motion, from starting it, to increase it, to diminishing it, or to stopping it.  Is your "train" stopped at the station?  It takes a lot of energy to get it moving, or alternatively, are the brakes broken and the train is running away down a mountain, requiring a very great deal of energy to top it?

So there was a time when I was in my 20s, living in New York, and I wrote a novel that actually got an agent who got a publisher willing to consider publishing it, but first he wanted me to do a complete re-write.  Being very young, I took that to mean that was a rejection, which I now understand really wasn’t, or at least, not yet--a lot of very successful writers say that they aren't writers, they are re-writers, and I have met one writer who wrote a book that required extensive historical research in Russia, and her publisher made her re-write her book three complete times, each time requiring more extensive historical research back in Russia.  Ultimately that book of hers came out and it was wonderful.

How I wrote that in the first place was I sat at my desk (which was also my dining room table) with my typewriter that was set up in the bay window that I could from time to time glance outside onto the street four stories down below me, and not move from there for about 30 hours as I wrote and wrote and wrote. Then I would be tired, and find a stopping point, and would go to bed and sleep for eight hours.  And then I would repeat…30 or so hours of solid writing, and then sleeping for eight hours.  Somewhere in there I would eat, but eating wasn’t all that important to me at the time, as I was deeply into the writing (moving center inertia).  It got so that sometimes when I woke up from some of my sleeps, I couldn’t tell whether it was AM or PM, because in that neighborhood they had very bright streetlights on all night long, and very dim natural light all day long, dim because of the monstrously tall skyscrapers blocking out the sky.

Sometimes when I really did need a break, or had a plot issue that I needed to solve, I would get up, go outside, walk to the nearest subway station, take the subway down to Battery Park where I would get onto the Staten Island Ferry, and ride across the water, past the Statue of Liberty, up to the dock at Staten Island, but I would stay on the ferry, and then take it back, seeing the gorgeous view of the skyscraper of Manhattan, get off the ferry, take the subway back to where I lived, and walk the block back to my apartment.  What a glorious way to take a break, I never got tired of it, and it only cost me 60 cents, a quarter for the subway one way, multiplied by 2, and one dime for the Staten Island Ferry, where I only had to pay for one way, since I didn’t get off at Staten Island.  It is only now, all these years later, that I realized that those breaks that I just outlined were an example of my getting out of my intellectual center (writer) into my moving center (on the move from the Upper East Side to Staten Island and back again). I wasn't even really thinking, the plot issue solved itself, or whatever else needed to be done somehow got taken care of during those treks.

I wrote that whole novel in about a month.  Now it takes me over a week to write just one blog entry!

Apparently a "normal" writer, if there is such a thing, works every day for a certain amount of time, such as a page a day, or in Ernest Hemingway’s case, he would write during the morning in his special writing room, and then would go out for lunch and drinking and fishing and whatever else he wanted to do for the rest of the day.  I really liked the idea of that method and thought I could do that once I was retired (I sure couldn’t do a page a day while working like some writers can), but I managed to stick with that for only the first month or so.  Starting it was hard, and if I had other things that needed to be done, that would derail my efforts to just sit there all day and write (which I very often do with shorter things than a novel!).  

So anyway, that’s me, so you might want to see how you apply yourself to the the three centers.  Here is the trick. Most people think, ah, vacation, I’m burned out, I need to RELAX.  I found out that I could NOT relax.  Relaxing made me feel sick…and depressed…and dark…and alone.  Oh sure, I could relax for one day, or maybe two, certainly not a whole week.  YOUR TRUE REST is going into the center that you go into the least.  Let me reiterate that--True Rest isn't going into your favorite center, it is purposely going into the center you like the least.

Think about that for a moment, because it is different from what you would expect. And especially if you have a center that you are blocked from, which means that you rarely go into there, or you have this peculiar way of handling it like I to, that is actually a very underused center, and that means you are unbalanced.  Nothing wrong with that, that is how almost all of us are made, but sometime you are going to have give some serious attention to that often ignored center.  And what about your favorite center, IT is what has the BURN-OUT!  Doesn’t that make sense?  You’ve worked that poor center to death, whereas your least used one is sitting there craving your attention.  Thank goodness I figured out that for my vacations, I must do “moving” things.  Fly somewhere far away, walk all over the place, explore, ride motor scooters, go on zip-lines, snorkel and body-surf in the oceans, go dancing, go on long road trips.

For people who avoid their intellectual center, their True Rest might be to read a very detailed and complicated book, begin and continue with a new class, such as start the learn a foreign language (and then sticking with it), or learn how to fix a car engine, or spend the time finishing your dissertation.  You fill in the blank, what would you want to do in this underused center. 

For people whose least favorite center is the emotional one, maybe they should go to an opera festival, volunteer to read to terminal children in a hospital, help find missing cats.  A person who needs to get into their least-liked center will know what they should do once they understand the concept.  Pure relaxation, meaning just sitting around by a swimming pool with a drink in your hand just keeps you in your normal center unless your normal center is the moving center, in which case you need to give all that physical activity a rest and poolside doing nothing but getting a tan genuinely IS relaxing for a change!  In previous times when so many people had physical jobs, farmers, factory workers, that kind of vacation was a God-send and that probably was responsible for the bedrock idea of that kind of vacation being relaxing since it genuinely was the True Rest of most of the people.  People were moving way too much and really needed to give that a rest.  But as much as I THINK I love that, I do know that it drives me crazy.  I can lie in the sun for about fifteen minutes while on a vacation before I want to get up and go do something.   Funny for a person who is blocked from his moving center, but deep inside us, we really do know what is good for us!  

If any of this makes sense to you, please try it out.  I think you will like it.  With me being retired now, people think I ought to be more relaxed then ever, by instead, my mind fills me with irrational worries.  Good thing I have scheduled coming up an eight day backpacking trip in the wilderness.  The trail I am taking is rated a 7 out of 10 for difficulty.  That ought to do it, moving center, here I come!  For you, I hope your vacation will be your least favor center that is waiting for you.  If this works out for you, please leave me some comments telling me about it!