A Weapon Against Burnout
“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
- Everyone right now
March 10th, 2025
📍Salida, Colorado, USA 🇺🇸
Greetings from the wilderness!
I know I am not the only empath and highly sensitive person out here struggling to set healthy boundaries for myself around the anxious and often angry energies of humanity right now. People are scared, and rightly so.
It feels like the world as we know it has been literally and figuratively burning down around us. Riding the back of the collective trauma from the pandemic, the emotional weight that people are carrying right now is at an all-time high. This chronic state of fear is unsustainable, and our bodies are facing increased dis-ease in response.
Finding healthy coping mechanisms to support our overall health and well-being has never been more critical. After facing life-threatening burnout in 2020, I had to learn this lesson the hard way.
Chronic stress is the fast track to burnout. Our body's autonomic nervous system (ANS) is constantly scanning our internal and exterior environments for signals of "safety" or "unsafety" and sends chemical messages through the body in response. As a survival mechanism, when this unconscious system perceives a threat (stress), it activates our sympathetic nervous system through chemical/hormonal signals that move us into a state of fight/flight/freeze/fawn.
This evolutionary necessity is a good thing for our survival, especially if we're a gazelle encountering a hungry lion, but it can be an ongoing challenge for the dysregulated and overworked (I see you, parents of small children).
You can learn more about the autonomic nervous system (ANS) here and the effects of elevated stress hormones here. For the sake of this letter, I want to focus on the best weapon we have as a defense against burnout.
"Rest is a weapon against burnout and breakdown."— Jo Saxton
What we need is rest. I'm not talking about sitting on the couch watching Netflix, mindlessly eating junk food in a state of dissociated numbness (this used to be my favorite coping mechanism)—a real rest for our minds, bodies, and souls.
The sympathetic nervous system is activated when the ANS perceives a threat. On the other hand, when our ANS registers our internal/external environments as "all clear," a healthy nervous system will activate our parasympathetic nervous system and move us back into a state of activated safety, known as "rest and digest."
When we do restful things like meditating or reading a good book, our parasympathetic nervous system is at work. This system is responsible for energy conservation and maintaining vital bodily functions, including digestion. This rest and digest state helps the body maintain homeostasis, an internal state of balance with the sympathetic nervous system.
We need our bodies to react quickly when there is a threat, and a well-regulated (healthy) nervous system will move us back to rest and digest once the perceived threat is gone. But many of us living with chronic stress have a dysregulated nervous system—having lived in a chronic state of stress (unsafety), our systems can feel stuck in survival mode, fight/flight/freeze/fawn.
We need to learn how to rest in a way that will activate our parasympathetic nervous system.
The parasympathetic nervous system is activated when the body experiences stimuli and situations that feel safe or relaxing, including deep breathing, humming, gentle stretching, meditation, slow walking, and calming music—All things you will find in our events as pillars of the Loto Wellness "lifestyle."
Life on earth will continue to give us reasons to feel unsafe and reasons to be afraid, but our capacity to respond well and avoid burnout is largely up to us and the lifestyle choices we make.
Don't know where to start? Be intentional by scheduling rest into your weekly schedule.
Don't know how to rest? We can help.
My team of passionate collaborators and contributors and I want to help you learn how to rest well so that you can avoid burnout and breakdown in the face of life's challenges. This is why Loto exists.
While there is no one right way to rest, my prayer is that the online content and experiences we curate for you will teach you how to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and inspire you on your healing journey from surviving to thriving.
Pause your regular weekend routine and explore the basics of nervous system self-regulation through somatic (body-based) practices at one of our Selah: Sabbath Rest online experiences.
Experience the therapeutic benefits of creativity in one of our monthly Artful Communion online events.
Upgrade your self-care practices with resources that help you to engage in the Loto Wellness lifestyle through our latest digital issue of Loto Living magazine.
Drop a response in the comments below 👇 Let me know what you're doing to rest that's working well for you right now.
With Love,
Jennifer
PS- Want weekly updates sent to your inbox? Sign up for Loto Letters below👇
| ||||||||||||||||||
