Swimming safely through life :

When we think about the relationship between anxiety and depression, I think it can be useful to imagine them as each being on the banks of a river. Anxiety on one side and Depression on the other. Of course, it is best to try to swim in the middle. We all sometimes deviate between becoming overwhelmed by either a low mood or triggered to hyper-vigilance shifting us to either side.

What is Burnout?

There is a section of water close to each river bank .. let’s call this area burnout. This is where we begin to find ourselves stretched beyond our adaptive capacity and the warning signs of distress can be evident. Our coping strategies that usually serve us to bring us back to swimming in the middle of the river are taxed and start to fail and we find ourselves moving towards the riverbank.

Why do we Burnout?

When we approach Burnout this is a wake-up call telling you that it is time to check-up and reassess. We want to thank those mechanisms that have allowed us to swim safely to date. But this is a wake-up call telling you that what’s gotten you here isn’t going to keep carrying you safety forward forever.

Crises in our life are moments to re-evaluate. Is this is where you really want to go? Let’s double-check. Let’s make sure that the choices we’re making fill our hearts with meaningful, purposeful steps on the journey. And are we just doing them because that’s what other people say we should do? Or are we doing it because this is what really fuels us and what we want to do. Is this stress we want – positive stress. Or negative stress that is distressing us, sending us to either bank of the river – Anxiety or Depression.

What causes Anxiety or Depression?

Seeing the relationship between Anxiety and Depression as both fear responses of a different shape is also critical. Both are reasonable and common human reactions to overwhelm. Perhaps too common today. The important learning is around recognising the common unmet need and then discovering how we find our way back to swim safely in the middle of the river.

Recognising the signs of Anxiety and Depression :

Mother nature gives us so many beautiful coping mechanisms and signals so that we can read our needs before we are overwhelmed. Examples could include our blood pressure changing and our heart rate changing, sweating, our appetite, sleep and all of these things to adjust to the world around us.

We all come up with our own creative ways to augment our own physiology changing to support coping. But at the end of the day, really, after we’ve used up the strategies and mechanisms to keep going, perhaps against our own biology and our own fatigue and our own ways of the world. It can feel like our external world is speeding up, and at some point we are adjusting to it. And there comes a point where perhaps our coping mechanisms, our strategies begin to fail. And I think that’s when people start to experience that overwhelm that many people refer to as burnout. This is a sign we are approaching the bank.