Why Nourishing Your Soul Is Essential To Healing From Burnout
It’s not just your body and mind that need to restore. Your soul needs soothing, too.
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We often think of nourishment in terms of what we eat. In healing from burnout, nourishment goes far further. Nourish means attending to your unique needs and doing what makes you feel soothed, enlivened and at ease. This means nourishing your body, mind and — yes — your soul.
As you nourish, you give your body, mind and soul the care and input they need to heal. You engage your parasympathetic nervous system so the body can repair and find calm. You give your whole being a strong message: “You deserve to be nourished. You deserve to be cared for. You deserve to be the priority.”
Nourishment is not tokenism: It is not taking a bubble bath and then going back to a work situation that is making you miserable. Nourishment is founded on deep self-compassion and a firm, fierce conviction that your health and wellbeing matter. That you have intrinsic value. That you deserve to be nourished because you exist.
Why nourishment needs to go beyond body and mind
Nourishing your soul might seem more abstract than body and mind, yet it is just as important. Burnout is often accompanied by an existential questioning — a loss of ‘self’. As we heal, we start to search for that sense of self. By paying attention to nourishing our soul — whatever we believe our soul to be — we empower our true self to emerge.
“You deserve to be nourished. You deserve to be cared for. You deserve to be the priority.”
For me, nourishing my soul as I healed from burnout involved the following.
- Seeking to understand how I had come to burn out and how to make healthier choices in the future.
- Doing things that reminded me of who I really am, not who I think I need to be.
- Actively letting go of internalized unhealthy beliefs about work and coming to know at a deep level that I have intrinsic value.
- Reacquainting myself with spirituality through reading books and joining a yoga…
