Burnout - The Executive's Malady

You’ve worked hard all your life. You’ve worked harder than most people you know. In school. In sports. At your job. Long hours of hard work. Studying. Training. Working late when most of your coworkers have gone home. It’s something in your nature. You’ve always been like that. You’re competitive. You like to compete. You like to show others what you can do. You like to show yourself.

And the numbers back you up. You like to win and most times you do win. You make lots of money. You’ve advanced through the ranks faster than your peers. Today, you’re at the top of your game, at top of your profession. People listen to you. People respect you. People wait for you to make a decision.

There’s a lot riding on that decision. Jobs. Money. The future of an entire company. All riding on the decisions you make. But that’s a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure riding on your shoulders. The kind of pressure few people ever experience. It’s stress. A lot of stress. In your younger days, you could handle the stress. You’ve been a high achiever all your life. Why wouldn’t you always be able to handle the stress?

But now you’ve reached a certain age. It seems like the stress is getting to you.

Some days you feel dragged down by a combination of physical and emotional exhaustion. Some days you feel detached from your loved ones, your family and friends, even your coworkers. You feel like you’re ineffective, that you’re no longer accomplishing as much as you did before—before this sense of “chronic stress” took over your life.

It didn’t happen all at once. It came on slowly. Over many years. You didn’t wake up one morning and say, “I have burnout.” It happened over time, insidiously, while you were too busy to notice, before you realized what was happening. You’ve developed a sense of chronic fatigue, a lack of energy, a feeling of exhaustion that never goes away. You might not sleep well. You’ve become forgetful. You’ve lost your ability to concentrate. You might even have physical symptoms: chest pains, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness or headaches. You get sick more often and it takes longer to heal. You’ve lost your appetite. You’re anxious. You might feel hopeless or guilty. You’re easily irritated. You’re quick to anger. You lose your competitive edge. The old desire to compete and win seems to have gone away. Your work suffers. Your family suffers. You suffer.

These are the classic symptoms of Burnout—a physical and mental lethargy that sometimes overwhelms high achievers. You don’t care about your work anymore. You feel isolated from your family and friends. You’ve developed a deep cynicism about your life and work. You feel you’re on the road to nowhere, like you might be happier doing something else.

What to do? You’re a busy executive with little time to spare. You need to take action before things get worse. You see that now. You understand that now.

But you also need to find a solution that’s quick and effective.

Here, hypnotherapy can help. It can help you to relax. It can help you to lose that sense of chronic stress that drags you down. It can help you rediscover your desire for the game, but in a new and healthier way. It can also help you discover and heal any deep-rooted psychological issues that may have been bothering you for years.

In a word, hypnotherapy can help you find a healthier work/life balance in a relatively short amount of time, and at a relatively small cost.

Thomas C. Williams

Clinical Hypnotherapist

Copyright © 2018 by Thomas C. Williams