Emotional Burnout at Work: How Inner Work Helped Me Heal the Pressure to Succeed

 By the end of this episode, you’ll hear how the real source of my exhaustion at work wasn’t my job at all, but an old story from childhood I hadn’t realized was still running the show.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith. A facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover what emotional burnout looked like for me and why no change in how I approached my job. Seemed to help. How listing out my stressful thoughts gave me a clearer path through the overwhelm and the unexpected connection to my mom, and the subtle but powerful shift that followed.

This is an addition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path toward inner freedom for the past few months since I delayed the release of my new course. I had been feeling overwhelmed by all the stuff that I need to do. I felt like I didn’t have as much energy as usual, and all of my projects started to feel like they were looming over my head with no real end point in sight.

Basically, they were large projects and they didn’t they weren’t gonna be done just even in a few months. And I was just delaying and. Just a few weeks ago, I took a vacation, a staycation, and I took plenty of time to rest, so I thought, yeah, that will help. And the problem was I never felt fully relaxed, even on my vacation.

And then when I came back to work, I still felt stressed and it just kept going on and on. And so I wanted to explore what was going on here, what was underneath this feeling. Which seemed to be sitting in there, it was almost like a sadness. And it was just zapping my energy and I couldn’t really get a handle on it.

I did a little bit of work in the beginning. I found a little bit of of distance on it, but it continued to bug me and it affected my sleep Sometimes I remember thinking, I don’t think I’ve had a good night’s sleep in like days, maybe weeks, and. Just this low grade almost, I would call it depression sitting in there.

And so I wanted to take a look. So the first thing I did was to make a list of the stressful thoughts that were running. Just a random list that out of my head, stream of consciousness. And I always find this really helpful just to get it out, have a little bit of distance between my thoughts and what I’m experiencing.

And so I did that. I just wrote a list and it started stuff like, I can’t relax. And then I started thinking about it’s not possible to finish everything this year. I can’t finish my work. I’m a failure. Like these are heavy thoughts. I can’t rest because I’m a failure.

And even if I, if I could rest, then I’d be more successful. Like the real circular kinds of logic. And what I was paying attention to as I was doing this was the feeling like this emotion inside, there’s just this sadness. And I’m like, what is that? Thoughts come up like, what’s the point?

I’m never going to manage it. And then I had the ideals of what I was trying to live up to, having a smooth experience for my clients and participants and. And fear of rejection. I thought maybe that’s part of it. I don’t want them to reject me. I don’t want people to be turned off if my website isn’t fully done or if there’s some, I’m having to keep delaying this course, which people were interested in.

So this is just the brainstorming process of getting some of these thoughts out. And I like to write them down because I do the work of Byron Katie, which is a way of questioning thoughts. If I can get the thoughts onto paper, then I can question them and often find a different perspective. So that’s where I started and I started doing the work on some of these thoughts, and it was helping.

I, I found a little bit of distance, I found a little bit of clarity, I questioned it’s not possible to finish everything this year. I realized that was an exaggeration, and okay. That helps me just come back down to size a little bit. It’s not that big a deal, but as I kept going, I realized there’s something more this feels old.

There’s something here that is not just in the job itself. It’s not, it certainly didn’t have anything to do with my time management or my efficiency. Or prioritization or anything like that. It probably had more to do with the thinking and the thoughts like, I can’t get this done, or I’m a failure.

Those definitely zapped my energy, but it still didn’t feel like it was getting to the bottom of it. So as I kept looking for what it was that bothering me, I started seeing some images from the past of when I was young and my mom would. Be wanting me to get good grades. She was the one that cared about the report card.

I always felt like I was getting good grades for her and I don’t know how she communicated it ’cause I never remember her being upset with me or anything. But it was really clear that I should be getting good grades and so there was a certain pressure there. I even remember in college, I used to get good grades for her and.

Partly because she was paying for college, but partly because I somehow needed that approval. And so as I started exploring that, I realized that when I went from university to living in an ashram for 10 years in my twenties, it was like I, my mom did not fully approve of that. I was. I was off the map as it were, and I was not getting good grades according to her.

And so I started sitting with this and I started feeling this sadness. I started feeling this shame actually, and as I continued to think about it and thought, what is it that is, what are my emotional interpretations of what she is thinking or feeling? I came up with some ideas, like she thinks I’m not good enough.

She thinks I’m a failure, she disapproves of me, she thinks I can’t do it. And she thinks I’m just like my dad. And I even went as far as to say, she’s she’s disgusted. This, my mom’s been dead for 15 years, so I’m just imagining this, but it’s based on a feeling that I had back in my twenties.

So I ended up working with. A thought. She’s deeply disappointed by my life, and this was one that came up for me when I was living in the ashram, when I wasn’t taking the career path that she might’ve hoped for. And as I, I really took this into inquiry and started questioning it, doing the work and finding turnarounds.

And what I discovered is that, that it’s as if mom is still right here in my mind. I. And I need to prove my current job success to her. I need to get a good grade. And just seeing that gave me a huge lift, like a, it felt like a weight was already starting to lift off of my shoulders because I realized, oh, this is just mom stuff.

This is not my job. This is not anything that I need to do differently. It’s not even how I’m thinking about my job. Except for one thing is that I’m using my job to try to prove myself to her to try to get that good grade in her book, and so I really dove deep into the stressful thoughts and identified a bunch of them like that.

I wanted to see that I’m a good person. I want her to see that I’m successful in the world. I want her to be patient with me, happy with me, proud of me. That kind of thing. And so I went on and on with that and made a re very complete list. And now I have this worksheet with all of these stressful thoughts connected to my mom, connected to the past, but also connected to this present experience.

Just getting those out already loosened it a lot, but now I plan to spend several weeks or maybe longer working this worksheet nice and thoroughly. So that I can loosen all the different aspects of it. ’cause now I know it’s in my sights and I am, I’m really excited to get in and do this deep inner work on my mother.

What a perfect opportunity. So it looks like overwhelm, looks like something bad happened, but if you’re interested in inner work, it. Is a doorway, and it’s a doorway in to work on stuff that may have been affecting you your whole life. And here’s the chance to look at it with fresh eyes and to re-experience it, to find a new way of seeing it and possibly to transform that.

In this episode, we looked at what emotional burnout looked like for me and why no change in how I approached my job. Seemed to help. We looked at how listing my stressful thoughts gave me a clearer path through the overwhelm, and we also saw the unexpected connection to my mom and that past experience and the subtle but powerful shift that’s already starting to happen.

Just seeing that and now knowing where my direction of my work will be going. It’s exciting to discover the beliefs that are holding you back. That’s why I love inner work. So thank you for listening. Thanks for being a part of this podcast. I bring out new episodes three times a week on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

So join us next time for Self-Compassion Wednesdays where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people. By exploring the unique traits that shape our experience