I have some very clear memories of red flags: signals from my body and my environment that I was on an accelerating journey towards hitting a brick wall. There was the job-interview for a post-doc position after I finished my PhD, where the interviewers asked: “this book you wrote, it’s very impressive, the amount of work and complexity that went into it, how is it possible that you are not burned out?” All my ego heard was: “It’s impressive.” I missed the: “This doesn’t look healthy”. There was the calisthenics coach, who, as he watched me run into the class 1 minute late, huffing and puffing: “so sorry I am late, I always try to optimize my timing to the minute so I am efficient and able to maximize my work time”, said: “hmmmm, that sounds like a recipe for burnout”. At the time, I thought: “yes, but that’s what makes me effective and productive”. And then there was the moment when I returned from a trek in the Himalayas, and cried the whole plane ride back, thinking: “I don’t want to go back. I can’t take this fucking pressure anymore.” I didn’t tell anybody. I just pushed the tears down, and I powered through.

How ignoring the signs led me to crash

I ignored the signs. I told myself that if I just pushed harder for a little longer, eventually, I would find the relief I was looking for. That if I would get that research funding, that if I would get more publications, that if I would get the next promotion, it would all be worth it. Two years later, I completely burned out from my career as a scientist. I still remember sitting in front of my laptop, bursting out in tears because I couldn’t find the words to type an email. I needed my partner to write it for me because my brain was just refusing to think clearly and it took me minutes to explain this to him because I was stuttering, unable to formulate sentences both in writing and in speech. That first day was the start of a long and lonely recovery process, which led me to reinvent myself, and motivated me to create a structured approach for others, so that they don’t have to walk this path alone and without proper guidance.

During my recovery, I slowly merged my career as a psychological scientist with my new venture into yoga and meditation (which really saved my life). Yoga and meditation gave me what no visit to the psychologist and no science book ever gave me: an intimate physical, emotional, and spiritual connection with myself, repeated self practice, being able to feel my body and my emotions again, and the confidence that I could do this. For my recovery and my transformation into an authentic, somewhat balanced person, this is what I came to understand: knowledge is only part of the puzzle, we need repeated practice and a holistic experience in order to recover, heal, and revive. Intellectual insight takes us up to a third of the way, physical and emotional experience takes us about one third further, and repeated practice and repetition helps us to create new patterns that revive us and make us thrive. Science and psychology brought me insight, yoga and meditation brought me experience, practice, and consistency.

The Mind-Over-Matter Strategy

Before I discovered the importance of an interplay between understanding, experiencing, feeling, and consistent practice, I was a "mind-over-matter person". If I had a goal, I would meet it, no matter what. I prided myself in never missing a single deadline from the day I set foot in my first university classroom. Whatever expectation was set for me, whatever expectation I would set for myself, I would meet it. This was a strategy that helped me do things well and get places. It helped my ace my education, it helped me develop skills at a high level in a variety of hobbies, it helped my get my PhD position, it helped me stand out and win prizes for writing, it helped me be fit and look healthy on the outside. It was my super power. But it also turned out to be my kryptonite.

When the expectations started to exceed my ability to meet them, the whole card house came tumbling down. Even though there was consistent feedback from my environment and my body that my expectations were unrealistic, I would continue to push to get the results I wanted, because that was a strategy that once worked for me. For about three years, I rarely got a full night sleep. By the data on my wrist watch, on average, I got about 5 hours. I would lie awake at night strategizing how I would meet my goals, I would rewrite my scientific articles in bed in my head, I just wasn’t able to switch off.

More and more, as I was stepping onto my bicycle getting to work, I would find myself thinking: is this really it? I get up, I push myself to work, I pull myself through work, I hit the gym, I drink a few glasses of wine because I am unable to relax, I scroll on my phone to avoid the feeling of loneliness that comes from not sharing my fear of failure with anyone, I lie awake half of the night strategizing and worrying about all the results I still need to attain, and then I wake up exhausted to do it all again? This was a job I used to love. Science was my calling: it started out as a venture of pure curiosity: a love for learning and understanding the world, and particularly the people in it. And now it had evolved into a ratrace of ambition, goals, targets, and whipping my body into submission in order to perform. What the hell happened?

After that breakdown behind my laptop where I wasn’t able to formulate sentences anymore, It took me 2 years to find out exactly what happened, to learn to relax again, to learn to deal with stress again, and to balance drive, passion, and purpose, with relaxation, health, and harmony. What I found out, was that "Mind over Matter" is an adaptive coping mechanism to trauma and a learned skill in a society that is all about goals, results, and achievements, but most importantly, that Mind over Matter is not healthy, and much more importantly: not necessary. I know that is a hard to believe statement. The idea that we need to push ourselves and go "all-in" to perform is hardwired into us. Its how our education systems are built. But it really isn’t true. You can be softer towards yourself, listen to your body, and still do your job well.

I really believed that I needed this Mind over Matter strategy, to control my impulses, ignore my bodies signals to slow down, to keep performing no matter what. I was affraid that if I would let go of that strategy, I would resolve to laying on the couch all day long. But the truth is, in the long run, the body functions much better if you actually learn to trust it, listen to it, and work with it. Yoga thought me that mind and body are one, and when we understand, feel, and implement this notion into our lives, we learn how to navigate stressful circumstances and challenges in a much more sustainable way. I am now pushing myself less hard, and most of all, if I do use that push and I have a few nights of bad sleep, I scale down, I give myself permission to pause and catch my breath. And I promise you, I am not laying all the couch all day. I am just as productive as I used to be, just a lot less lonely and unhappy.

Finding Freedom

I know this may sound a little airy or wishy washy, but you really do not need candles, incense, cacao ceremonies, or mantras to experience that our brain and our body are part of an integrated system (although you can use them, if that speaks to you!). Much like the earth, we simply can’t just keep polluting our body: there is an ecosystem and everything in this ecosystem is connected. We need to understand and value this connection in order to live a sustainable life. When covid happened, nature started to reset itself naturally. All of a sudden, when the constant ‘mind over matter’ demands of humanity over the earth paused: industries coming to a halt, people ceasing to fly... the world started to heal itself.

So, one of the points of this story I am telling you, and the first step in my personal method towards recovering from burn-out, is to create the freedom for your body to heal itself naturally. We don’t need more tools to relax ourselves, we first need to consider what we need to free ourselves from in order to allow natural healing and relaxation to happen. 

If you do not free yourself first, relaxation tools are just another goal to achieve, another thing to feel guilty about when you don’t do it, another trigger for stress, and most of all, you don’t really allow yourself to reap their benefits. These relaxation tools are only useful for you if you create space for them. If you just do more, and don’t address the core issue: which is that for some reason, you constantly expect yourself to do more than you are reasonably able to do, you will continue to feel stressed and you will burn-out again and again, regardless of how hard you meditate.

There are so many health tools out there telling you that you need to do more in order to relax better (do more yoga, more meditation, more breathwork, more exercise, more healthy cooking, more passion projects, and more sleep routines more social connections). Forget about those for a moment. I agree that all of these things are important for your health and it would be wise to, over time, incorporate (some of) these into your life. But what if we are forgetting a vital step here:

Before we start thinking about HOW to relax, we need to think about WHEN to relax, and more importantly, WHAT NEEDS TO GET OUT OF THE WAY in order for that relaxation to happen. So, the first step in my method to recover from Burn-out, is to find the freedom to relax naturally.

How do you find the freedom to relax?

Step 1. Give yourself Permission to Pause

The first step, is to give yourself permission to pause. Yes. You heard it. If you are chronically stressed out, chances are you have some version of my mind-over-matter strategy, and you do not give yourself permission to pause or slow down. Here are a few reasons why you should give yourself permission to pause:

1. Taking pause will, in the long run, help you achieve your goals because recovery, pause, and sleep are essential aspects or learning, growth, focus and memory consolidation. Even if your goal is to perform better at work, giving yourself permission to pause, is going to help you do that.

2. Taking pause will, immediately, make you a more pleasant person to be around. In order to be kind and compassionate, you need to be able to regulate your emotions, and emotion regulation is one of the first things that suffers from a lack of rest, recovery, and sleep. So even if your goal is to be there for the people around you, taking pause (from them) will actually help you become better at that.

3. Taking pause will help you not burn-out, but it will also prevent a plethora of chronic illnesses in your future. Chronic, ongoing stress increases your risk of diabetes, auto immune diseases, depression, anxiety, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer, heart disease, sleeping disorders, and a recent study showed that we even show signs in our DNA that chronic stress ages us faster. Seriously. You, just for the sake of not wanting to become seriously sick in the future and reducing your lifespan, have the permission to pause.

4. Taking pause, having small moments in time to be able to reflect a little and be present, simply makes you a happier person. We think that its reaching our goals that will make us happy. But actually, when we take pause to be present during our day, those are the moments we realize we are actually often already right where we need to be.

So. Give. Yourself. Permission. To. Pause. Its better for you, its better for those you care about, and its better for your career. Giving yourself permission to pause is partly a mental thing. We often, unconsciously, hold on to the belief that if we pause, we are somehow not productive, not available, or not engaged enough. But as I outlined above, these beliefs simply arent't true. We need pause to be productive, available, and engaged.

Ok, so how, if I mentally give myself permission to pause, does this look behaviorally? What action can I take to take pause? Here are 3 options:

1. Schedule your breaks very consciously. When you make your planning for the day, or when you discuss your plannig with someone who is in charge of your schedule, (let them) plan your breaks.

2. Use a timer. If you are not much of a planner, whenever you do a task, whether that is at work, at home, or anywhere else, set an alarm for anywhere between 30 minutes and 1.5 hour, depending on the type of task. When the alarm goes off. Take pause. If you are currently recovering from burn-out, start at 30 minutes tops (and perhaps with less if you notice your attention drifts after 15 minutes)! You will find that the time your attention can focus will grow with time.

3. Cancel appointments. If you notice your body is telling you to slow down, get into that uncomfort zone, and clear some appointments out of your schedule.

"Remind yourself every day that you have permission to pause, and schedule your pause accordingly"

Step 2. Lower your Expectations

The second step, is to lower your expectations of what you think you should do. That includes doing yoga, meditation, breathwork, exercise, and everything else.

Stress is a gap between what you can do, and what you or others expect you to do. Let's call this, the Ability-Expectation Gap. In the short term, this gap is useful, because it increases motivation and drive to bridge the A-E gap by increasing your abilities: you will want to learn something new, or work a little harder, and this will improve your future self. Stress helps us to change, which is great. If you are reading this blog, it is likely that stress is now driving you to change and become more relaxed. That's a good thing. Sometimes. But if you are always trying to bridge the gap by doing more while you continuously and chronically experience this gap (let’s say, for more than a month), your body will start malfunctioning, and if you do that long enough, it can have disastrous results (learn more about stress in this article).

So, if you are currently stressed out and reading a million blogs and listening to a million podcast in order to relax, my advise would be to stop that, and first focus on creating more freedom for relaxation. In the long run, bridging the gap between what you can do and what you are expected to do by working harder, is a recipe for disease. If you aren’t able to bridge the gap, and you wish to stay healthy, you need to lower your expectations (and others need to lower their expectations of you as well). So if you feel chronically stressed, the first question to ask yourself in the morning, should be:

"How can I make things easier for myself?"

Seriously. Put a post-it on your fridge, your coffee maker, or the first thing you use in the day, with this sentence, and see what happens. Further questions can be: Where can I expect less? Where can I cut out something from my schedule? Where can I do 60% instead of 100%? Create the freedom to relax by lowering your expectations of what you should accomplish today.

Step 3. Creating Space for Relaxation

Last, but certainly not least, is to create space for relaxation by freeing up more time so your body can relax naturally. Remember how the earth naturally started to recover when we stopped burdening it? You can do the exact same thing. You need to find out what is polluting your body, what is taking up precious mindspace and energy, and remove that from your environment. Here are some ways to do that:

Remove your Phone

The easiest way to create space fast, is by (partially) removing your phone from your life. Perhaps not permanently (I get it, you need the thing), but at least temporarily. Imagine how many relaxation moments you could have if you weren’t mindlessly scrolling for 30 minutes after just opening the phone to reply to a text message. Imagine if every time you get a message, instead of responding, you would not see it and just go about your relaxing walk. Trust me, you would probably have 30 relaxation moments a day without pushing yourself to do anything extra, and your focus on what matters would be so much sharper, that you would also be more effective at work.

Not having your phone disrupt every task you do, makes it easier to reach your work-goals, and thus close the ability-expectation gap. Your phone is designed to hook you. There really is no point in fighting the apps that are on it, the creators of the device and the software understand your psychology better than you do, and you can’t win that fight. Your only option is to remove the phone from your life in the moments you want to relax or focus. Learn more about addiction to our phones and what it does to our brain in this interview about addiction, and this interview about focus.

I know this might sound extreme, but removing my phone from my life in the evenings and mornings has been the best protector of my relaxation time in the evening, and my creative time in the morning EVER. It took me 3 years to get used to the idea and get myself to actually remove the thing, but I wish I had done it immediately when I heard of it. So that’s my number one tip for you.

I now put my phone in a phone locker from 21.00 (9 pm) in the evening, until 11.00 (11 am) in the morning.

All of a sudden, instead of streaming a series on tv, or checking my text messages, I feel like taking a walk with my partner, and chatting about how we are both feeling. I did not need to push myself to do this, it’s a natural consequence of not having my phone around. Whenever my brain reminds me to do a task in the evening, I simply can't grab my phone and do it, and over time, those reminders of tasks have ceased to pop up in my mind. All of a sudden, in the mornings, I have all this free time to go for a run, to do my yoga practice, or to write things like this blog, undistracted, without pressuring myself to do anything.

Remove Barriers

Another way to create space, may be to (temporarily) remove barriers that make it difficult for you to relax. Barriers can be things you need to get rid of that take up time, tasks or goals you need to scrap from your to-do list, or they can be people you sometimes need space from. As uncomfortable as this may sound, if you want to recover from a burn-out, or avoid getting one, you will need to create moments in the day where you remove the barriers that make it hard for you to relax. So take a moment to consider which things, what tasks and goals, and which people you need to get rid of or take space from, in order to be able to relax. And remember, in order to do your job well, and in order to take care of others, you first need to take care of yourself. You will be a better person for it, so creating space is not a selfish thing to do, it's better for everyone, including you.

If you are really exhausted at the moment, creating space can be quite disruptive. Things and people I took space from to recover from my burn-out were: My dad, my partner, and my job. At the time, I was so far down the road that it felt like a necessity to recover, but I never had to take that much space. I am happy to say that I now have a relationship with my dad, I am in a happy relationship with the same partner, and I have a healthy relationship with my job. But at that time, I needed to step away completely in order to create space to feel anything at all. This is an extreme example. I am absolutely not telling you to do the same thing. I am sharing this with you because even if you feel like you need to take a big step back, that doesn’t mean you will lose everything that matters to you. I am also sharing it with you, because this is not a matter of blame. The things or the people that stress us out or can cause overwhelm, are often the things or people we love the most. Knowing how to hold them (our jobs, our loved ones) close while taking enough space, is a very important skill to learn.

Fear of loss (of our job, our identity, our loved ones) often holds us back from taking the space we need in order to recover. But if you take a bit more space for yourself when you need it, you might be able to avoid the extreme measures I took to get back on track. Now, because I am much more balanced, I only need micro moments of space because I have learned much better to feel when I need a little space from something or someone.

If you feel like perhaps, you might benefit from some space, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and ask yourself:

"What or whom do I need (some) space from in order to recover and find my bearings."

See what naturally comes up. Give yourself permission to listen to your body, even if the things or people you need space from are very dear to you. You don't have to follow up. Step one is being aware and honest with yourself. Next, you may think about a micro-way that will help you to create this space. This doesn't have to be super disruptive or big. It could be a walk around the block in the evening, it could be taking more time to transition from work to home, it could be saying no to a project with a certain colleague, it could be asking your roommate or partner to schedule one night a week outside the house, it could be asking them to do a task that helps you free up time for you, it could be scheduling a weekend away from your kids. Whatever it is, just know its ok to need space, and ask for it.

Set Clear Boundaries

The last step in creating space, is to set boundaries around that space. It needs to be clear to you, and to everyone involved, that there are certain moments in the day where you are not available, and your priority is relaxation and recovery. That includes your kids, if you have them, and your partner, if you have one, and your parents, if you have them, and your pets, if you have those.

For me, today, in practice, this means my partner often brings our daughter to daycare, which gives me time to do a walk or run outside, to do my yoga practice, and to start my day reflecting and writing. It also means my friends know I am not available for calls in the evening and mornings. It means that I only read email once a day, and it means that I do not answer incoming calls from people I don’t know. I even have a sentence in my e-mail signature saying:

“ Please Note: To remain sane, I follow 2 rules:

1. I only answer (urgent and/or important) e-mails once a workday, for half an hour, around 16.30, so it may take some time to reply.

2. I do not respond to incoming calls. I am very happy to connect through phone or ZOOM at a pre-arranged time.”

This doesn’t mean I don’t want to connect. If anything, I am a super connective person, and I want to be fully present with the people I care about (that includes people who take my courses, people I coach, and people in my yoga classes). But, in order to be fully present in those moments of connection, I need recovery time and focus time.

So, consider for yourself:

"How will I set boundaries to protect my space for relaxation and recovery?"

The Summary

Ok, so the morale of this story is this: yes, relaxation tools are useful. But this is not where the foundation for true relaxation and a balanced life is built. If you want to live a sustainable life where you balance drive, passion, focus, and learning, with relaxation, connection, recovery, and healing, you need to start with creating the freedom to relax first. Before you add any relaxation tool to you to do list, do these 3 things:

1. Give yourself permission to pause. Permission to take more time in between meetings, to take more time traveling from A to B, permission to take that walk, permission to skip that family dinner, permission to say no to a request. Its ok. The world can manage without you, and you will be a better version of yourself for it.

2. Lower your expectations. Start the day by asking yourself: How can I make things easier for myself today? What can I skip? What can I do at 60% of my effort?

3. Create space for natural moments of relaxation. Ideally, remove your phone from your environment at times you know you need space, and set boundaries around time slots or for people in the moments you need relaxation.

Thank you for your interest in science, yoga, and your own journey towards better health.

with love & gratitude,

Inge