With over half of Australia in lockdown at the moment, there’s no secret that a lot of people are feeling drained and burnt out. The challenge of burn out is that it is highly complex, with many different causes. This is why people will try so many different things to overcome it, but can find that their fatigue keeps coming back. The first step to deal with burn out is to identify the causes of where the burn out is coming from, so that the type of ‘rest’ someone puts in place actually covers the specific cause of their burn out.

So here are the 4 main planes of fatigue someone can experience:

1. Body: Overtraining through physical stress like running, strength training without adequate recovery
2. Mind: Being ‘switched on’ for long hours whether it’s for work, study or something else. Then after hours, still being switched on by thinking about it, or doing other mentally heavy tasks like paperwork for their personal life
3. Heart (Emotional): A lot of emotional stressors, such as the uncertainty and negative news around the pandemic, making decisions out of fear, bottling emotions, constantly building up for races only to have them cancelled…
4. Heart (Spiritual): Living out of alignment with what you deeply care about or enjoy. This might look like having a job that is a mismatch with your passions or values.

From here, you need to rest in a specific way that addresses what is causing your fatigue. For the specific strategies for each plane, listen to yesterday’s episode on ‘The Aligned Performance Podcast’ here or on your preferred podcast streaming platform.