Burnout: How to Manage Your Nervous System Before it Manages You

Burnout is a state of overwhelm that affects our thinking, feeling, and behavior, making it difficult to carry out tasks and practice self-care strategies. It can lead to learned helplessness, autopilot mode, and toxic behavior that impacts professional and personal relationships. Drawing on polyvagal theory and her professional insights as a trauma therapist, Dr. Claire Plumbly shares the signs and stages of burnout, why it stifles our abilities, common causes, how one burnt out nervous system impacts the nervous systems around it, and how to work in sympathy with your nervous system to benefit from a healthy level of stress to remain effective.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 18 July 2024
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

If we persist in a frenzied state of busyness, our nervous system becomes overwhelmed, leading to a trauma response that alters our thinking, feelings, and behavior. This makes it challenging to complete tasks or engage in self-care practices like boundary-setting and mindfulness. We lose motivation and interest in activities we once enjoyed, becoming trapped in a state of learned helplessness, unable to see solutions or care. We continue to function, but in autopilot mode, prone to mistakes and toxic behavior that affects our professional and personal relationships. Drawing on polyvagal theory and her expertise as a trauma therapist working with clients experiencing burnout, Clinical Psychologist Dr. Claire Plumbly offers insights into the signs and stages of burnout, its impact on our abilities to interact, make decisions, solve problems, and be productive and creative, common causes, such as using busyness to cope with emotions, perfectionism, and the draining impact of monotonous work, how one burnt-out nervous system impacts the nervous systems around it, and how to work in sympathy with our nervous system to benefit from a healthy level of stress and remain effective. She also emphasizes the importance of compassion in supporting our nervous system to overcome burnout.

Weight: 370g
Dimension: 154 x 233 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781399733410