The Road To Depletion

(or `How to screw everything up`)

Here is a Life Truth I have learnt the hard way: depletion is the enemy.

Our society is becoming increasingly anxious, overwhelmed, and fatigued. Many of us feel there are too many demands and not enough time. We run around, like human to-do lists, quickly exhausting our inner resources.

Many people feel they have too much stress and not enough rest. We deal with it and go through the motions. We stretch ourselves a little bit more every day. We see ourselves reaching the end of the proverbial rope.

Maybe in your case it shows as feeling of being trapped, or maybe it is the dullness of a silent, daily grind. Maybe you feel the need for a break that is never long enough to do the job, or a little voice in your head tells you that something needs to change, or else.

Many of us have seen friends go down the road of depletion or burnout. Or it could be us who woke up one day and realized that things are getting harder. We feel a little bit emptier every day. A knot in our stomach may show up from time to time, or suddenly we experience headaches that come out of nowhere. We wish for the weekend to give us new air to breathe. There is no rest for the wicked!

It is not only physical. Something is off inside. Everything is becoming a bit... too... much.

The weeds in the metaphorical garden have grown too big.

It happened to me. I was doing excellent, seen from the outside. I had two Masters degrees, I had been working in a communications agency, taken exciting writing assignments for the local cultural press, did my own journalistic research and published articles in scientific magazines. I was taking other creative projects on the side, all the while having an cosmopolitan active social life and being successful at my job as a manager of a big team. Smart, social, emotionally intelligent… Can’t complain, right?

Yet everything had became too much. Things that used to recharge started to deplete me. I did not feel social anymore. I felt a knot in my stomach when I took the underground to work, I felt nauseous when I woke up and normal daily things became very difficult. I went to the hospital with a list of 20 different complaints, all stress related. How did this happen? I lacked tools and insight to change this so I kept doing the same things and even more so: working and trying harder. More projects, more work, more parties. I kept digging on a dry well that was leaving me even more depleted despite all my efforts. I had been doing that for a long time. And now I was done. I felt empty, unfulfilled and detached.

When you deplete yourself so much that there are no resources left, you crumble.

And I did. This is why I claim that everything gets screwed when we walk the road of depletion, when being busy, tired and overwhelmed gradually becomes the new normal.

By diminishing our inner reserves, we also diminish our ability to properly recharge them. We go into energetic debt so we ask for loans to make ends meet. We start a downward spiral that seems manageable in the beginning but slowly gains its own momentum. Our remaining energies are devoted to keeping us going at the cost of dismissing ourselves and other areas of our lives. We have little energy for the important things.

At this point on the road of depletion we may enter survival mode. The weeds have grown unattended for too long and then everything becomes urgent and needs to be done by yesterday. Still, we keep giving our best to the world’s demands at the cost of the one resource that could reverse the downward spiral and build us up again.

But we are too entangled in repeating the very patterns that don’t work.

If we keep on going and going no matter what, our hormones get completely out of balance and the body burns through resources like a car burns through fuel to make it to the finish line. Kidneys and your adrenal glands start to stutter. We might get all kinds of nonspecific, strange ailments. Our sympathetic nervous system is doing overtime while the parasympathetic nervous system is living on the dole and forgetting how to do its job: bringing us rest. As a consequence, we may get sick more frequently, or lose focus. Our careers and family lives could take a hit. Mine did.

And I am not even talking about the kind of person we become in this state. We are not the soul of the party. No wonder! Our amygdala has been shouting Fire! to the brain and the rest of the body for weeks, months or years. Fight-or-flight has become the new status quo (and we get so used to it that we fail to notice it). Our bodies are not meant to process life as if it was a continuous emergency.

So things stop being fun rather quickly. And us too. We become more and more distracted, discouraged and fatigued. Some of us resort to socially-accepted mantras to justify our position to ourselves and to the world: “I am busy”, “I am very engaged in what I do”, “I do not have time for a deep relationship”, “My partner just doesn’t understand how important it is that I work this hard”.

Let’s pause and question what we are doing.

It takes heart to slow down and question ourselves. It takes courage to try something different that challenges our ingrained ways of dealing with life.

It is understandable that we resist change. It is less painful (in the short term) to distract ourselves in all kinds of different ways. So before we face the elephant in the room we scroll for hours on end through Facebook and Instagram, take a Phd in the History of Winterfell, or spend too much time at the local pub.

We know in our hearts that this is not a long-term strategy. Zoning-out does not replenish. You do not zone-out your way into strength. You zone-in.

The time has come to face the dragon of depletion.

We can not keep on pouring from an empty cup. A garden without water becomes a desert. I want your life to be an abundant garden, and for you to reconnect with your natural resiliency, capabilities, creativity… and fun.

This is what I learnt through my own process and my recovery: if we are to conquer depletion, we need to stop playing its game. In retrospect I had been walking a road of depletion for a long time. Burn-out doesn’t happen overnight. There was not only a lot of tension, but difficult emotions, life events that I had been repressing. Pushing it back, and looking outward for solutions. Understandable, but it does not work. Let’s turn the tide around in a way that does work.

This time it will not be an outward effort, but an inward homecoming. For when one feels perfectly at home, what is there to be tense about?

This time we go on a journey to rediscover our inner, inexhaustible well. The journey will require no movement, but stillness. No more fighting, but surrender. The destination is not far away, but readily waiting right under our feet.

No matter how far we are on the road to Depletion, the moment we stop walking we have already turned arpund. The best moment is now.

We came into the world with built-in systems to replenish.

This is another truth of life: “tension is who you think you are, relaxation is who you really are”.

Many of us have never been taught to stop and replenish. Relaxation is associated with lazyiness or being idle and productivity is often a status symbol. Most of us just forgot to look after ourselves as life took over. In this day and age, this natural ability is a skill to rediscover. We think that, if we fix the things “out there”, we will finally relax inside. In my journey back to health, I had to challenge some of those assumptions.

The results spoke for themselves.

When you decide to stop to truly relax, you have already changed the game. This one you can win. You dig into Your Well. You hone into the built-in, nature-given systems of restoration, you gradually become more centered, focused and productive. There is more of you available to tender to your garden, and invite friends and family over. Life is simply better.

It doesn’t take effort. Just the opposite. It is a stripping away.

At the peak of my burn-out, when my life had become filled with anxiety and confusion, I made the decision to devote myself to the study and practice of every discipline and resource that would get me back to life in a natural way. It worked. I never used any medication.

I now guide people on the journey towards a Relaxed and Restored life. It is an art: skill, theory and practice.

I teach the dangers of the road, show the beautiful landscape along the way and celebrate the victories over stress and anxiety. It is a journey of rediscovery of our natural state, of restoration of balance and reclamation of our own treasures.

It is time I invite you to join this adventure. We will travel from depletion to completion, from overwhelm to power, from anxiety to ease, and from tension to who you really are.