Healer Q&A: Avoiding burnout among holistic practitioners with Lissy Alden
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
Join us for an invigorating conversation with Lissy Alden, the visionary behind MYNDY, as we unravel the mysteries of burnout among holistic practitioners. This episode promises to equip you with the knowledge to build mental fitness and foster resilience in your healing practice. Lucy brings her wealth of experience to the table, highlighting the unique challenges faced by healers who are constantly pouring their energy into others, often at the expense of their own well-being. Together, we explore practical strategies designed to help you maintain a sustainable practice, emphasizing mental fitness as a proactive approach akin to physical exercise.
Discover how to recognize the signs of burnout before they spiral out of control. We'll introduce you to the "Stop, Slow, and Go" framework, a groundbreaking approach to managing mental fatigue. Learn how rest can be a powerful tool for rejuvenation, how to cross-train your brain with new thoughts and feelings, and why celebrating your progress is vital for motivation. Don’t let the demands of your practice overshadow your own need for care; instead, embrace self-recognition and positive reinforcement as you navigate the complex terrain of mental health.
Building Mental Fitness for Holistic Practitioners
Lissy Alden: We work with people who spend their lives helping others. So maybe that's somebody who defines themselves as a true healer, maybe that's somebody who defined themselves as a parent or a manager, but they spend most of their lives in such a beautiful way thinking of and dedicating their time and effort and energy to other people, but have very little time left for themselves.
We define mental fitness at MYNDY as the proactive practice of doing exercises that help build focus, boost mood and performance in your mind. In the same way, physical fitness is about regular, ongoing behaviors that build strength in your body. We really are here to build strength, flexibility and endurance in your brain, and there are a whole lot of ways to do this, which we'll absolutely be getting into. But when most people hear the word mental fitness, they automatically go to maybe one or two buckets of those solutions like a mindfulness solution, meditation or even yoga, but there's actually hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ways to practice mental fitness.
Recognizing Burnout Signs in Healers
Lissy Alden: As healers, you know you work with people hands-on all day, every day. But how often do you recognize the impact that you have on those clients, the amount of hours and energy you spend working with these folks? Do you have a document, a piece of paper, a checklist, a celebration at the end of every day? No. Most of you probably are like, “Care of everyone, then on to taking care of my family or myself, my house, I have to go clean it.” Checklists are amazing for this. Having some sort of tracker where you understand where your clients started and where they ended, feeling words, actually implementing checks in your practice so that you and your clients are really checking in on this progress together, can be meaningful.
First, You'll typically just notice, when people ask how you're doing, you constantly, nearly every time, say “I'm busy” or “tired”, in a constant state of exhaustion, and whether or not you feel exhausted. That's how you're expressing yourself, you don't even have the energy to give it specific words. Maybe it's to your partner, to a friend, or it's even to your clients, but you just have this very regular response because you can't articulate yourself more specifically.
Second thing is you tend to find more negatives in your day than positives. When someone's asking you how your day was, you tend to talk about all the things that went wrong, which, as a healer, there is plenty of stuff. You've got a lot of people and energies coming in and out. You also show up with your own sense of self and how you're doing. But instead of talking about the one to three to six clients that are fantastic, you're going to talk about that one person who was late and rude and wanted their money back, or the one vendor who accidentally charged you and you just couldn't get in touch with, and they must be faulty, and you're going to cancel your credit card. You're always talking about the thing that isn't going right in your day.
The third thing to keep in mind is you tend to feel less effective at your job. Maybe you're going through a period where you're just not feeling particularly efficacious, maybe you're finding yourself with more difficult clients. Maybe you're finding that within a session, it's taking a lot more energy that you may or may not have, but you're not able to handle your normal workload with the same level of confidence or excitement that you had before. So it's those three things to really keep an eye out for, this regular, repeated sharing of how you're doing and non-positive ways. It's this constant focus on the things that aren't going right in your day, and it's also this focus on you maybe not feeling or doing your best. And from a physiological perspective, when you are in burnout, you're typically in a state of fight or flight when things happen.
Implementing Strategies to Prevent Burnout
Lissy Alden: There are so many studies that show that if you just take a quick five to 10 minute break and you can do anything in that break, list a whole bunch of things. Use that as fun brainstorming. Slow moment for the call, but if you can take a quick break away from your computer, if you're doing any sort of virtual healing, or if you're in person just in a room in silence, you're going to find your ability to not only sustain yourself but, most importantly, feel good while doing that, and then do it without burning out is just immeasurable. If you're doing like four clients, back to back, take a break. In that break, do not look at your email. Do not put on a podcast on. You can read with your eyeballs. You can listen to some light music. You can sit in a room, you can put your head on the desk. You can take a walk, you can stretch, you can have a snack. Chew slowly.
Mindfulness is a fancy way for saying be where you are. During that break, just be where you are. And if you can do that, that's going to be an incredible thing for you. I'm going to challenge you one break in the day, five minutes. Be five minutes late for a client. I guarantee they're five minutes late for you sometimes, but if you can't show up with the ultimate presence in these meetings, not just today, but over time, that's where the toll really starts to take hold. And so start with one break, see if you can put a couple more in there as time goes on. One little break to do nothing really matters.
Starting Small for Mental Fitness
Lissy Alden: Yeah, I think the big thing for all of this mental fitness is I think a lot of people hear this and they're like, oh, simple framework, I'm going to stop. So go every day. Don't pick one just like. Pick one mind movement and one thing within that mind movement that you want to do for one to three minutes a day. Just start there. Our brains like big things but we discount small things and so start really small when you're thinking about mental fitness, especially if you're feeling a little toasty, tired, exhausted, overwhelmed, burned out, and go from there. I can promise you'll start to feel better quite quickly.
