Written by: Andrea Hunt, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
These days, the topics of burnout and mental health seem to be everywhere, especially given the last few years and the Pandemic. On a company level, many executives are realizing that burnout leads to higher staff turnover, lower employee engagement, and negatively affects workplace culture. On a personal level as an employee, we already know that burnout leads to mental, emotional, and physical health issues. Furthermore, after burnout, we may have difficulty trusting employers again or even ourselves when it comes to our own boundaries and work ethics. So what can we do as employees to manage our emotional health better and also emotionally recover from the consequences of burnout in a healthy way moving forward? Read on to learn how an odd-looking mind-body technique called EFT Tapping can help…
Rise of widespread burnout
Burnout can result from long-term, unresolved stress, intense work pressure, and a continuous feeling of being overwhelmed. One report by Microsoft last year stated that 50% of managers feel burned while many employees have ‘productivity paranoia’.
Unsurprisingly, this can have detrimental effects on our emotional health, leading to severe mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and of course, breakdown. The consequences are not only physical and mental but also financial and affect others as well in our lives.
Unfortunately, sometimes we stop only when it’s too late. Often, we can neglect our emotional and mental health pushing ourselves to exhaustion past a point of no return. We might only realize it once it manifests as severe exhaustion, physical pain or discomfort, fatigue, irritability, and a sense of detachment.
It’s important to look at the factors of burnout in terms of external versus internal causes:
External: This can happen when company culture and work environment deprioritize work-life balance and expect unrealistic hours, overtime, and lack of paid holidays. Also, managers have unreasonable demands in workload, unclear communication that causes extra work, unfair treatment of employees that causes fear, and constant pressure with tight deadlines and rigid turnaround.
Internal: This is an important and often overlooked component that we can have more control over in terms of how we react. These internal factors can stem from our own beliefs and internalized work ethics. We might have flexible boundaries, the need to over-control situations or people, the need to be perfect, and we might not prioritize our own self-care.
In the last few years, given the uncertainty of the pandemic, fear of job loss, and intense pressure to perform, it is essential to find effective ways to prevent and manage it to ensure our overall well-being.
EFT tapping: A powerful tool for burnout prevention
In today's fast-paced world, workplace stress is a common issue that can lead to burnout. While we can’t always prevent factors in our environment, we can try to improve our emotional health and manage our stress levels and responses to our environment. There is a powerful tool that can help prevent burnout and promote emotional health – Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Tapping.
EFT Tapping is a mind-body technique that combines tapping on specific acupressure points on the body while focusing on negative emotions being felt at the moment as well as physical sensations that come up to calm the nervous system. This unique combination of light acupressure and emotional release has been shown to alleviate stress and improve overall well-being.
To date, there are around 100 different studies that demonstrate that EFT is effective both as a DIY self-help tool and when used by professionals in mental health settings. Furthermore, EFT practitioners use EFT Tapping for mindset as an instrumental tool for softening and releasing negative beliefs and even fears, symptoms of imposter syndrome, blocks to confidence surrounding people pleasing or not feeling good enough, and even social anxiety.
Benefits of EFT tapping for emotional health
EFT Tapping is a versatile technique that can address a wide range of conditions. One of the key benefits of EFT Tapping is its ability to reduce stress hormone levels, particularly cortisol. Chronic stress can have detrimental effects on our overall well-being, leading to mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.
Moreover, EFT Tapping has been shown to increase the production of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter responsible for regulating mood and emotions. By increasing serotonin levels, tapping can help manage feelings and responses and improve emotional health.
Incorporating EFT Tapping into your self-care routine can be a transformative experience in several ways:
As a way to start your day: using EFT tapping videos in the morning as DIY self-care can help you grounded and calm to improve emotional resilience throughout the day.
Relieving emotional distress during the day: EFT tapping provides relief from emotional upset when it happens as a way to ground, re-calibrate, and let go of negative emotions quickly.
Managing negative beliefs: EFT tapping can release deeper fears, worry, and negative self-talk to reframe and empower to boost confidence.
Beliefs around success that can cause burnout
While company culture and work demands absolutely deserve accountability from management and the company structure and hierarchy, there are certain patterns in our own behaviors as employees that we can control and need to look at. Our beliefs surrounding workplace success can be emotionally harmful if they lead us to take on too much responsibility or workload or neglect our self-care.
People pleasing
Wanting to do a good job at work is absolutely commendable and encouraged. However, if we don’t have good boundaries, we might not be able to say ‘no’ when we should and take on way too many tasks and responsibilities. We might also be very attached to proving our worth and receiving praise so that we get addicted to being overly ‘helpful’ or ‘saving’ others.
What’s worse, maybe we even realize that it’s too much but we don’t want to disappoint anyone, so we keep pushing forward, feeling resentful, and we can’t stop. We prioritize others’ needs over ourselves so that we are never able to recharge and ‘fill our own cup’.
Perfectionism
Wanting to ensure quality control is important in any position and helps a team achieve good results. However, sometimes perfectionism can lead us to do work for people because we don’t think they’ll do it well enough. We might not delegate tasks, or we spend way too much time on certain steps to the point that we are overwhelmed or even miss deadlines.
Emphasis on workplace identification: Our jobs and careers are important aspects of who we are as people and can provide fulfillment and a sense of purpose. But they can’t be our only priority, or we might end up neglecting our emotional needs as a result.
These beliefs can cause us to push ourselves too far tying our tasks to our sense of worth and unfortunately cause us to neglect our emotional health. Plus, it can cause us to sacrifice the relationships in our lives as well since we’re putting all of our time and energy into our jobs while neglecting our own self-care and relationships. When we are burnt out, we can react impulsively instead of responding in a healthy way.
How can EFT help with burnout recovery and learning to trust again?
After burnout, one of the top fears we as employees might have is being able to trust the management and the company again. Or, we might have quit the job that burned us out, and we’re now afraid of trusting ourselves in a new role. We might take on a new job that isn’t challenging at all and just pays the bill because we now associate career with burnout and sacrifice.
Healing Past Ego Wounds: EFT can be used to heal emotional wounds from experiences that may have eroded our trust, such as betrayal. This can be helpful if the burnout led to job loss, and we’re carrying around anger and resentment that hurt our confidence.
Releasing Fear: EFT helps release fear and anxiety related to trust issues, allowing us to open up to new relationships and experiences. This can re-frame our perspective which causes us to project old situations onto new ones. Using EFT as a way to manage overwhelm and fear as it comes up helps us to calm down feel grounded and stop our emotional fight, flight, or freeze response.
Building Self-Trust: EFT can help us to develop self-trust again, which is fundamental to trusting others. It can help us trust our judgment and decision-making abilities because we can feel capable of our capabilities once again.
Improving Communication: EFT helps us improve our communication skills, making it easier for us to express needs and concerns in a more confident manner. Learning to Say “No” without feeling bad about it can be difficult and even make us feel guilty. Using Tapping to move through this helps us reframe it be more assertive because we can value our own needs more instead of putting everyone else’s needs first.
Creating New Positive Associations: Through positive affirmations and cognitive shifts, EFT can help us create more positive associations with trust, reducing skepticism and cynicism. Releasing the negative feelings, thoughts, and beliefs first means that we can be open and willing to believe the affirmations.
Conclusion
In summary, there are many things we can do to take care of our emotional health at work in response to stressful situations and to prioritize self-care. We can also create new beliefs that are empowering and help us maintain healthy boundaries or to help rebuild our confidence after burnout moving forward. If you've experienced burnout, working work an EFT Tapping practitioner can be extremely useful for your healthy mental and emotional recovery.
Want to work with me? Check out my programs here.
Andrea Hunt, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Andrea Hunt is an online transformational life coach & EFT Practitioner for expats and digital nomads. A US expat who's lived in 7 different countries, Andrea helps those who boldly took the road less traveled to thrive abroad with confidence. She understands the challenges of planning a move abroad, integrating into a new culture, finding new friends and social circles, rebuilding life after a job loss or breakup while living in another country. She helps you empower your mindset and erase your limiting beliefs to thrive.
