Last week’s Create Your Restorative Summer workshop was a blast–and inspiring and insightful. I want to share some highlights of all the goodness. 

1. Most of us yearn for the days (even if idealized) of youthful summer breaks with unstructured time available.

2. Now our summers leave us feeling overwhelmed and torn between the things we want to do and the things we have to do. We’re struggling to find the balance. 

3. We crave deep play, creativity, and restorative activities, but we often don’t know how to make the time or  even what to do to tap into those things.

The solution? Deep Play!

With most of my clients, we work on clearing their calendars of the dreaded, the tedious, the frustrating, the not-my-work tasks. It feels great. It feels uncomfortable but right-aligned…

And then the push back comes. Mostly from others, and also from ourselves because we all get so ingrained in the system of urgency. We worry that if you slow down something bad will happen. Or we’ll get so relaxed (read: lazy) that something will get forgotten or not done and it will ruin things. None of that is true.

Slowing down is a mindset shift out of overing, toxic productivity, and unworthiness.

What does slowing down mean? And why do we keep going until we get interrupted with illness, breakdowns, burnout, depression – ours or those we love or both?

I’m having a battle right now.

In my head.

The battle is between Let’s do all the things and have a productive summer! and Ooof, I’m spent and I need some time to seriously recharge my batteries. It goes something like this…

It’s Mental Health Awareness month. And it’s the end of another academic year. I want to help normalize the conversation about exhaustion, disengagement, depression, and recovering from a chronic burnout lifestyle, for lack of a better phrase.

Let’s talk a little about chronic burnout. I talk to a lot of folks who are in active burnout or, more likely, who have been living in chronic burnout for some time. In a recent conversation with a public health colleague, she used 1st and 3rd degree burn metaphor to describe the level of burnout before and after the pandemic started.

I've been thinking about my own (current lack of) routines and talking with clients about theirs. This is often a topic when seasons change or bigger routines change (end of semester, holidays, and the like).  

If we have them, we will fall out of them.

Some of us resist them.

Many of us thrive with them.

And sticking with them is often easier said than done. 

In my recent work with overing, I’ve been exploring the deep connections between guilt, shame, and overworking.

My bike accident a couple months ago triggered a shame spiral, which surprised me. I couldn’t even name it as shame until after about 24 hours of wallowing and emotionally beating myself up. What a gift though - shame awareness. It invites us to be deeply curious about the beliefs and areas of our lives that hold us back.

Last week, I wrote about how we need to talk about some big emotions–guilt and shame–that come up when we start to shift out of our overing patterns. Many of us feel guilty as we start to establish boundaries and center ourselves in our own lives.

Shame is connected to overing, too. For many people I work with, that shame they feel when setting boundaries and prioritizing themselves bubbles up out of the belief that they don’t deserve that level of care and consideration. I’ve felt this myself!

The more you practice living out your inner wisdom, the more you continue to recharge your batteries and get out of overing.

But we need to talk about some big emotions - guilt and shame (within us and from others) that get triggered when we start to make shifts in our lives.

Connecting into your inner wisdom (that talks to you in embodied ways) allows you to get clear on what boundaries are needed and how to live your boundaries.

Being embodied means knowing your body's different signals and what those signals feel like physically. When your inner wisdom talks to you in an embodied way, you feel physical sensations in your body.

Here’s what a client said about overcommitment and overscheduling too many priorities that really hit me in my core:  “I genuinely thought I could do all these.”

Ouch. Me too, friend, me too. It’s taken me a long time to (un)(re)learn myself. Unweaving imposterism myths of academia. Unlearning hyperproductivity of toxic capitalism. Unfucking my mindset from sexist notions of superwoman/supermom. Separating my worthiness out from faux praise and BS rewards - like more responsibility but no pay increase - that came when I overed.

We let our time and energy be squandered by others and through overing–until we create boundaries. That means you’re complicit in your own overing until you create boundaries.

To interrupt these cycles, you need to create timeouts from overing with value-aligned boundaries. I have a coaching client who learned to place colleagues in a texting “time out” (phone silencing) when they violate the boundary to not text her personal cell phone about work during or after work hours. She made sure they knew of multiple other opportunities to contact her in-person during work hours, via office phones, or online work platforms.

Everything we do - all of our actions - requires energy.

Simple enough of a concept, right? But what does it mean to practice protecting, managing, and activating our energy? That might feel much more difficult to figure out these days.

I wish energy management was a course taught. If you’re in service to others, if you care about making life better, if you want to help or fix or change, chances are you are generous and giving of your time and energy.

Giving away your energy without regular recharging is a critical contributor to the overing pattern.