Counselling voor studenten
My burn-out recovery model
In my practice I work with a burn-out recovery model which deviates from the standard burnout protocol. The reason for this is that this standard protocol encounters quite a bit of criticism from many clients who are confronted with it. In particular, resuming work as soon as possible and/or regularly going to the workplace can cause a lot of stress. The burn-out protocol is also very much focused on work-related complaints, whereas a burnout is not always work-related. See my blog on other misconceptions about burnout recovery.
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Through my personal experience and the experiences of clients in my practice, I have discovered that there are a number of important pillars that must be taken into account when treating a person with burnout. When one or more pillars receive insufficient or no attention, the recovery can take much longer than necessary. In practice, it appears that in many burnout treatments one or more of these pillars are often underexposed.
In the model below I distinguish four different pillars that are all equally important and deserve attention in order to achieve burnout recovery. I will explain for each pillar how I work and why this is important.
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Pillar 1: Shutting down energy leaks on an emotional level.
In order to be able to recover from a burn-out, it is important that we investigate in which areas you experience stress and use unnecessary energy. In other words, where your "energy leaks" are that cause you to drain energy quickly. These leaks can occur in several areas, including not being able to properly regulate your emotions, automatic behavior and thinking patterns (such as a strong need to control, the tendency to please others and perfectionism) and negative thoughts about your self-image and/or identity.
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Together we look at what you can change in these areas to reduce your energy leaks. As long as these energy leaks are not addressed, you cannot recover from a burnout, or you run the risk of developing a new burnout in the future.
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Pillar 2: Working with a flexible activity schedule based on the color system.
The basis of my burn-out model is to teach clients to work with the activity schedule based on the four-color system. During my burnout I was advised by someone to fill in my weekly schedule with this, and it helped me a lot. Since then I have further developed this system and I have successfully used it with my clients.
The activity schedule is both effective for slowing down people who continue to go beyond their boundaries during their recovery and for activating people who do too little during their recovery and become deactivated.
The activity schedule gives you structure and an overview of what you will be doing each week and helps you see where and when you need to shift to another gear or slow down.
What is the idea:
Pillar 3: A focus on how to deal with anxiety complaints brought on by physical and mental complaints.
When you have a burn-out you lose confidence in your body. You experience physical and mental complaints you have no control over. As a result, you can develop anxiety symptoms that impedes your recovery. The risk here is that a vicious circle will arise, in which you will experience fear of your complaints, which can then aggravate your burnout complaints, slowing down your recovery. For example, you can experience fear of having to go back to work and fear of taking up certain other activities again. “Can I handle this?”.
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To teach you to deal with fear brought on by your physical and mental complaints, I use techniques from ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy). The aim here is to dare to take steps forward despite the complaints and to gain success experiences in this. You will then notice that you gradually become more confident about what you can handle.
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Anxiety symptoms can also be present before your burn-out and be part of the cause of your burn-out. Even then we can investigate together where this fear comes from and reduce it as part of your energy leaks.
Pillar 4: Learning to feel safe (again) in a stimulating environment.
When you experience burn-out symptoms, you are often sensitive to stimuli and you regularly become overstimulated. Even when you have (almost) recovered from a burn-out, you often remain sensitive to a stimulating environment. Going to a busy restaurant, a busy shopping street or even a night out with friends can be very tiring. I often hear from clients who have (had) a burn-out that they can no longer handle the stimuli of a busy city, for example.
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I personally believe that in the treatment of burn-out, attention should be paid to learning to feel safe (again) in a stimulating environment. As a result, you no longer have to avoid this type of environment, you can sustain it better and you don't lose as much energy in these situations.
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For this I use techniques from ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), body-oriented exercises and visualization techniques that help people with, among other things, high sensitivity (HSP) to better handle stimulating environments or situations.