Let’s start with the beginning, what the heck is a naturopath?
Now, I’ll be the first to admit, I’d never seen a naturopath and I didn’t even know what they were until I started studying my degree in naturopathy.
I know a naturopath is a term or a person that people generally don’t know. Don’t know what we are or what we do. So to give you a little background, a naturopath is kind of like a nutritionist, but we also do herbs. A naturopathy degree is a four year degree where we cover diet, nutrition, lifestyle, counselling but we also do herbal medicine. So it’s a holistic approach encompassing your entire health overall from the mind and the body.
This holistic approach that naturopathy uses, focuses on supporting the root cause of why you feel tired or stressed or anxious or overwhelmed so that you get long term relief from feeling this way and can get your body working as optimally as possible long term. Naturopathy doesn’t just give you a bandaid approach and sends you off on your merry way.
Plus, naturopathy has the added benefit of using herbs to get you really quick results too. This is especially brilliant for overwhelm and exhaustion so you’re feeling calmer, clearer and energetic quickly and can feel like a human being again so you can keep working on your business and enjoy your life at the same time without needing to take a month long vacation just to get some energy back.
Because of this reason, naturopaths have a lot in their toolkit to support overwhelm, exhaustion and burnout.
Because burnout is your mind and body’s response to reaching its limit where it has no more to give. No more energy to give. No more motivation and no more oomph. When your body reaches this point, you’ll feel overwhelmed, exhausted, anxious and drained like you’ve just hit the wall and have no more to give.
These symptoms, which collectively represent burnout, is because biochemically, your body can’t sustain you or your energy any longer.
It’s not your mindset where you’re giving up or thinking negatively. It’s not the fact you need motivating to get your oomph back for your energy to come back. Burnout is where biochemically, your body’s reserves have been depleted. Your body has no more to give.
Your body’s reserves need replenishing. And only once your body is replenished, can your energy, motivation and calm come back.
This is where naturopathy works phenomenally well. Because it focuses and supports those biochemical responses that have happened in your body really really well. Naturopathy can use nutrition, lifestyle support and herbal medicine to replenish your bodys reserves.
Naturopathy can replenish your body so that your body has the capacity and ability to work like it’s supposed to. It can support your adrenals, it can support your nervous system and your brain and your gut and everything so that you will feel energized again, so that you’ll be feeling calmer, be thinking clearly and easily, and not be feeling stressed, overwhelmed or anxious.
With all the tools in my toolkit as a naturopath, I’ve found following this four prong approach has worked wonders for my clients to help them ditch their overwhelm and exhaustion for clarity, calm, energy and motivation.
It works phenomenally well and quickly so you don’t have to take time off from your business or your life but can create a really amazing work-life balance that fills you with passion and inspiration and drive everyday.
What is this four pronged approach?
Prong 1: bandaid support
The first prong, and the one I find is critical to feeling energetic and clear again, is bandaid support.
Now we know how to look after our bodies. We know we should eat better, sleep better and relax more for our bodies to work.
But when you’re burnt out and you’re drained and flat, you need to feel better now. Not in 4 to 6 months time when that good food and good sleep eventually replenishes your body. You have a business to run. You have a life to live, a family to be with and friends to connect with. You don’t have the luxury of taking 4 months off to feel like a human being again.
And this is where bandaid support is incredibly beneficial.
We need you feeling energized, we need you feeling motivated and we need you feeling calm and happier. As soon as physically possible.
This bandaid support comes in through use of particular nutrients like magnesium, zinc and B vitamins and specific herbs for particular symptoms like herbs that reduce your overwhelm, herbs that help you feel calm instead or anxious or stressed or herbs that make you feel energised and motivated rather than feeling flat and exhausted.
One particular group of herbs that are vital for burnout, are adaptogens.
Herbs that have an adaptogen action, work on your adrenals to rebalance your cortisol levels. So cortisol is your stress hormone and the hormone which plays a really big role in making you feel overwhelmed, brain foggy and fatigued. So, depending if you’ve got low or high cortisol or if your cortisol rhythm is totally out, adaptogen herbs balance your cortisol levels back to where they’re supposed to be for optimal health.
Adaptogens help to reduce your perception of stress. So, for example if you spilt your coffee, and you’re burnt out, stressed, overwhelmed, exhausted and easily irritable, spilling over coffee can feel like the worst thing in the world and it can make you suddenly snappy and irritated and really frustrated and pissed off. But adaptogens work to reduce that perception of stress. So if you’re taking adaptogens and it’s balancing your cortisol, the next time you spill your coffee. It doesn’t feel like the end of the world. To be honest, it probably won’t faze you at all. It’ll just be like “oh damn, I’ll go make another”. That’s it.
So herbs and specific nutrients work really well to balance your cortisol, and reduce your brain and adrenals perception of stress. So that you’re not feeling overwhelmed, chaotic, scattered and exhausted.
These herbs are also beneficial to revitalize your energy levels back up so that you’re feeling energetic again. So that you can go from feeling drained and flat to suddenly having more energy, being able to make it throughout the day without needing to nap, not waking up dragging yourself out of bed and easily having more clarity in your brain rather than trying to think through a cloud of smoke and sludge.
And these herbs can boost your dopamine levels to help you feel motivated quickly and give you the oomph to be productive and inspired and get work done easily. As well as herbs that help you to feel calmer and happier rather than anxious, antsy or hopeless, so you’re not feeling so scattered or overwhelmed.
These herbs and nutrients are vital to give you the bandaid support you need to be able to carry on with your business and your life in an energetic, motivated and calm way so that overwhelm, exhaustion and burnout doesn’t have to stop you in your tracks.
Because it’s super hard to try and eat better food or do work when you’re so tired you just want to close your eyes and nap.
Prong 2: restore healthy habits
The second prong is restoring healthy habits.
Now that you’ve got bandaid support so you’ve got energy and you’re feeling calmer and you’ve got the space to be able to think easier and have clarity. It’s getting those everyday healthy habits back in place, that might have slipped from your priority list and everyday life.
It’s these healthy habits that are essential to replenish your body to get you out of burnout and prevent burnout from happening again.
These are things like…
- Making sure you’re actually sleeping, and if you are sleeping, are you’re getting good quality sleep? So you’re not waking up during the night, or tossing and turning a lot.
- Your eating habits. So are you eating regularly, what are you eating, your snacking and balancing your meals for optimal energy and health.
- Self care and time out for your brain and for your soul that you can do regularly to keep your cortisol in check and low long term.
It’s the daily healthy habits that are essential to re-energize and replenish your body’s reserves back to an optimal level and allow your body to cope on a day to day level without flatlining or getting depleted again.
Prong 3: lifestyle routine
The third prong is lifestyle. Looking at your lifestyle and seeing if you’ve created a life that nurtures, energises and uplifts you, or a lifestyle that depletes, drains and overwhelms you.
Have you asked yourself…
- What kind of business you want? Not just a business, but how many days and hours you want to work? What kind of work you want to do or what you’d want to delegate?
- What kind of life do you want? How much free time? What relationships and what are they like? What hobbies? What wake up and sleep times?
And are all these answers a far off whimsical dream, or have you set things in place to make that lifestyle – your business and your life – a reality? Are you living that life?
For example, if you only want to work 9 to 5 in your job – are you doing that, or are you working from 7am to 1am everyday, including the weekends?
This third prong is so important to realise what lifestyle you want and what lifestyle will nurture and replenish your health naturally so it makes you feel energised and calm. Rather than constantly living a life where it’s depleting you and resulting in overwhelm, exhaustion and burnout unless you take an extended holiday regularly.
There is a lifestyle where your business and your personal life can fuel and replenish your body and mind, rather than drain you.
Prong 4: mindset
And then the fourth prong is mindset.
This isn’t just mindset in terms of your mindset around your business, or if you think you’re gonna succeed.
It’s the nitty gritties of your mindset.
- Is your mindset currently creating calm, abundance and energy?
- Or are you currently in a thinking pattern and a mindset pattern that drains you, promotes overwhelm and promotes feeling scattered and anxious?
For example what’s your current attitude towards business?
That if you hustle, hit the ground running and work hard your business will be successful?
While this mindset may propel you forward at a fast trajectory in your business, it’s also a one-way ticket to exhaustion and burnout. This mindset keeps pushing you forward and encourages you to work hard, which depletes your body’s energy reserves and your cortisol goes up. It’s the perfect cocktail to feel exhausted, overwhelmed and stressed. Especially when all that hustle isn’t giving you the results you want – you often end up just hustling harder believing success is just around the corner.
Another mindset that drains you is believing things have to be perfect before you put it out into the world.
You may be working on a new program or a free ebook to use as a lead magnet, but you end up spending hours on it because you want it to be perfect before making it available. Because you may believe no one will buy it or sign up for it if it’s not perfect. If the colours don’t gel well, if the writing isn’t spot-on and if the design isn’t super appealing to the eye.
So you work on it and work on it and work on it for days, but because you can’t quite get it perfect, you delay making it available or you never actually end up putting it out into the world.
This mindset around your product needing to be perfect drains your reserves because you spend so long working on it that you end up doing longer days trying to finish it plus complete everything else on your to-do list which leaves you mentally exhausted. And it amps up your anxiety and overwhelm because you worry it’s gonna be a total flop and failure.
Having a mindset that energises, calms and motivates you is crucial to avoid burnout.
As a naturopath, I use a holistic whole picture approach that gets you out of exhaustion and burnout and prevents it coming back.
Prong 1: bandaid support – I can make you feel better, quick.
We’ll reduce your anxiety and your stress within hours, we can boost your energy within days, and we can boost your motivation and your productivity within weeks, so that you can start feeling like a human being again to be able to run your business and live your life without needing a 4 month holiday.
Prong 2: restore your healthy habits so we can sustain your health so that your health will always provide you energy, calm and motivation, even when that bandaid support is gone. Your healthy habits are the foundations to preventing burnout long term.
Prong 3: figure out if you have a lifestyle that nurtures you. So it energises you, promotes calm and productivity rather than drain you and leave you feeling exhausted, scattered and overwhelmed.
Prong 4: if you’ve got a mindset that nurtures you leaving you having clarity and feeling energized, motivated, and calm, or is your mindset currently draining you and make you feel anxious, scattered and overwhelmed.
These four prongs replenish your body and give you energy, motivation and calm so you can continue to create, grow and scale your business and make the life of your dreams a reality.
As a naturopath, I use this four prong approach to…
- Give you the energy and the productivity to create a business where you’re working minimal hours, but you’re still earning bucket loads of profit.
- A work life balance where you’re not doubting yourself and feeling overwhelm with everything you need to do.
- A life where you’re spending the weekends, and week nights, not working but actually spending them with your partner, friends and family and not feeling guilty that you should be doing work.
- Where you have the freedom to do anything you want – go on holiday, go to any event or activity you want and your business will continue to be super successful and profitable.
Naturopath’s have so many tools up their sleeves to quickly get you out of burnout, get you feeling amazing and prevent burnout from creeping back in in the future.
Because the truth is, just because you own and run a business doesn’t mean you should be feeling drained, exhausted and overwhelmed all the time.
