relief stress

We Get 168 Hours.

burnout, conquer stress, manage stress, negative thoughts, reduce stress, relief stress, stress relief, work stress 0

By Eléa Faucheron , Founder MOVE THINK SMILE | Head Coach: Burnout to Badass

We get 168 hours a week. That’s it. With every new year comes the decision to go for GOALS, and the determination and commitment to reach them.

While you’re saying YES to your resolutions, here are 10 behaviors to say NO too. Otherwise, they will devour time and prevent you from hitting those goals.

1 Doing too much at once turns your brain into a frozen blue screen.

Release the valedictorian dream of multitasking. Task-switching leads to wasted time because our brains need more time than we think, between switching gears to prepare for the next task.

2 Being unclear on priorities, so you hit everything with all you’ve got.

Decrease frantic behavior, which often comes from not knowing where to start! Increase proactive behavior. Invest 10 minutes out of your morning to design who you are going to be.

3 You let people interrupt you all the time.

Set boundaries, if someone calls you, remember 9 times out of 10, it can wait. Designate a time in the day to check email, return phone calls, send texts and take care of other minor interruption style tasks.

4 Being in love with YES, AND...

Practice delegating every day, as if your life depends on it because frankly, it does. Pleasing everyone is impossible, but saying the word NO can sometimes be hard too. If this is you, say: YES, AND . . . “if I commit to doing this I will need to remove something from my goal list. I can’t do that right now, but I will get back to you once I have space.”

5 Thinking BS thoughts makes you feel bad.

Every time you bust your brain allowing BS thoughts to prance across it...like all the reasons why you won’t hit your resolution...stop and put 50-cents in a piggy bank. After 30 days donate the money to your LEAST favorite organization. Then ask yourself, are you ready to stop punching yourself in the face? Ouch!

6 Hanging around people that exhaust you.

Bow out of long conversations with people that affect you in this way. Note: just because being in someone’s presence has you feeling exhausted doesn’t mean they are terrible people. It's simply important to know when you can and cannot be around their energy. Stop letting yourself be sucked dry.

7 Miscommunication. Misperception. Misbehavior. Messy Conflicts.

Manage other people’s expectations of you to the best of your ability and be humble. Just because you think you, said something clearly, does not mean someone heard you clearly. Listen more, speak less, and invest in the first conversation to save time in the following ones.

8 Your cell phone is a dominatrix.

Stop being a slave, an addict, a victim, a doormat, a loser when it comes to your devices. Train yourself to check digital dominatrixes periodically instead of constantly. If it's at all humanly possible, set a timer to get your stuff done and then get out of the time vortex!

9 Always on.

You need me at 10:30 pm, of course, I’m free! What would I be doing? Certainly, not sleeping! STOP. If you can’t stop, then you probably haven’t been beaten down enough to learn this valuable lesson. So take your beatings and call me in the morning. Then I will ask you again if you’re ready to locate the power button and shut yourself down for 7-8 hours?

10 Thinking you never have enough time.

I would exercise but I’m too busy. Terminate the BS. You’re more powerful than that! Don’t fall for the drama your mind is drumming up. Recognize that what you are likely trying to say is: I don’t feel like that's enough of a priority in my life to allocate my time for ‘that’.

You have 168 hours in the week to eat, sleep, work, and do everything else. We can never get back minutes. If you want to reach your goals this year, know that time is on your side if you keep your distractions in check. Life is too beautiful, too big, too short to get devoured by empty minutia.

This year, you get another chance to claim WHO YOU WANT TO BE. When you declare this, you will make time for what is important and let all other details to find their proper place; perhaps they’ll even move right off your plate!

Want to kick stress & burnout to the curb? Book a FREE call with us: movethinksmile.com/talk

Get the book Move Think Smile BurnOut to BadAss on Amazon in paperback, epub, or as an audiobook.

Check out other articles written for Oblique Magazine in Charleston SC.

Part 1: Is Stress The New Norm?

Part2: Why Is Negativity Like SuperGlue?

Part 3: Feeling Out of Order?

Part 4: Why I wrote BurnOut to Badass

Part 5: Cone of Shame

Part 5: Doing Hangover

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Do You Have SDD?

burnout, conquer stress, manage stress, negative thoughts, reduce stress, relief stress, stress relief, work stress 0

Left to Right: Eléa Faucheron

By Eléa Faucheron , Founder MOVE THINK SMILE | Head Coach: Burnout to Badass

Photographer: Abigail Marie

Spiritual Deficit Disorder, SDD, has a nagging relentless thought: I am utterly alone. Logically, you know you're not, there are people everywhere. But you're swept away by only what your eyes can see. Even though stuff is happening all around you, affecting you, that cannot be seen. Like gravity, magnetism, bad breath, wireless internet, and UVB rays. Yet we are burden by concrete reality and the limits it provides.

When my SDD hits, it looks like BurnOut. Followed by attitudes that make me want to stuff hot sauce up my nose rather than work while fantasizing about shopping for an armored minivan, 18 gallons of rice, fireworks, a potato launcher with a 500-foot range and buying a ticket to burning man so I can just get outta dodge.

When I was in the worst of my BurnOut, I was desperate for an intervention. “God, Zeus, Jesus, Titus, somebody with a name ending in OD or US. . . do it NOW with lots of thunder and lightning . . . change my life!” But I couldn’t get connected, I was too wrapped up in the tactile world. BurnOut created a scary blackness in me that said, “there is no real purpose to life. We are born, we die. End of story. Now shut up and get back to work.”

Yet the paradox is, what better way to work on your relationship to faith than by going through hard times. If you want to feel like the world is your oyster, you can’t be walking around with SDD. It comes down to this ridiculous question: Do you to be miserable or do you want to believe in extraordinary possibilities to come?

I am not sure who coined the term, but author Dr. Paul Pearsall, in his book titled "Toxic Success" discusses SDD as suffering from a constant nagging feeling of self-doubt and feelings of "not enough". And that, when you are driven by something external to validate you, you lose connection with your Spirit. To me SDD is a loss of faith and focus which leads us to search for our relevancy in places it isn’t.

I can’t tell you the number of people I talk to who don’t feel like they are enough, and the catch is, material success does not sway that feeling. A Course in Miracles says, “A person who is only believing in what they see is the blindest person.” To conquer SDD you have to declare there is more at play than you can see.

To inoculate yourself from contracting it, start an everyday spiritual practice. And, no, you don’t have to be in a cave contemplating your belly button. However, if this helps you collect trust in unseen support, don’t be shy, find that cave. But, most importantly if you’re caught up in a busy blur never taking time to step away, don’t let that be an excuse. Connection to the unseen does not have to “look spiritual or religious.”

We can find mysterious holy moments in nightclubs, traffic jams, restaurants, subways, bathrooms, or other unsuspecting places. We can also find them in our emotions. Yes, you can have the antidote anywhere at any time. Cultivate a daily re-connection to the unseen and you will charge forward unstoppable in the face of life’s obstacles.

And while we are all got the memo that physical health is key, spending a little time every day on your spiritual fitness gives you an amazingly shaped buttress!

Only believing in what your eyes can see is a form of blindness. Being too busy and constantly overwhelmed, will make you quickly forget the unseen exists. Spiritual fitness means regular communication with an unseen force. And, it is an intensely personal endeavor.

Over the coming months, I challenge you to use small moments of time to re-connect. You will be pleasantly surprised. As Albert Einstein said, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

Want to kick stress & burnout to the curb? Book a FREE call with us: movethinksmile.com/talk

Get the book Move Think Smile BurnOut to BadAss on Amazon in paperback, epub, or as an audiobook.

This post is the sixth of a six-part article series written for Oblique Magazine in Charleston SC.

Part 1: Is Stress The New Norm?

Part2: Why Is Negativity Like SuperGlue?

Part 3: Feeling Out of Order?

Part 4: Why I wrote BurnOut to Badass

Part 5: Cone of Shame

Part 5: Doing Hangover

A Doing Hangover

burnout, conquer stress, manage stress, negative thoughts, reduce stress, relief stress, stress relief, work stress 0

Left to Right: Eléa Faucheron

By Eléa Faucheron , Founder MOVE THINK SMILE | Head Coach: Burnout to Badass

Photographer: Christine Lentz

Are you ready to turn your BurnOut into BadAss? Ready to get the freedom you want and start truly living? If so, book a FREE call with us at movethinksmile.com/talk

Does free time feel like a foreign word to you? Do you feel like you have to sneak up on it, hunt it, stalk it, and then wrangle it to the ground? Oh, and what’s a doing hangover?

Here’s the scene: you’ve been running around at Mach 9 for months on end, you suddenly grace yourself with a work-free weekend. But instead of feeling refreshed, you feel oddly empty, fatigued, and disoriented. You’re doing has finally caught up to you, and BAM!—a doing hangover!

This kinda hangover happens when we never give ourselves free time and instead hastily try to consume and do everything that’s coming at us. In the era of information surplus, instant gratification, high-speed everything, we are on the hunt for more and over serving ourselves.

It’s time to say NO to the extra helping of tasks, information, socializing, food, incentives, meetings, cravings, projects, justifications, and put the fork down already. Practicing portion control keeps you alert and agile versus lethargic and hungover.

Overdoing is used by most as a long-term strategy. But it creates disharmony within. You begin to feel worthless, resentful, and ill. But for whatever reason, as long as you can still stand, you just keep working harder and harder until suddenly everything is joyless. Then you think, “wow that happened overnight!” but it didn’t.

Time. It’s a prized currency. And you only have a limited amount of it in this body.

Crazy thing is, for overdoers, when things don’t pan out like we’d envisioned, we think we must not be working hard enough. So, we turn it up a notch.

In a quest to succeed we try to life-proof time. Tech will surely cure our problems! So we organize with hourly notifications—designed to help us start the day at 5am with a tender but no less jolting rise out of our cozy beds to get cracking. From sunrise to midnight, we multitask. Our “work time” is done in conjunction with calf raises at our desks, headsets in our ears, power bars in our bags, emails in our cars, vitamins in our drinks, to-do lists in our head, coffee in our cups, meditation on our mind, all while we juggle the needs of every living human-- real or virtual. However, at 5pm, our day has just started as we dive into that list we didn’t get to the day before. Tired yet?

I often wonder, is there a correlation between how busy we are and how important we feel? We live in a competitive society and we are habituated to carry our overwork, sleep deprivation, and troubles like a badge of honor, often inflating that misery, as a way to show just how dedicated we are.

Glued to appearances and a lost sense of self, we spend hours working for what becomes empty achievements. Looks great on the outside, feels desolate on the inside. You’ve become overly attached. Which drives you crazy, but your confidence rests in being validated by achieving this great outcome, this amazing return, the end result.

We forget all the valuable learning along the way.

So we try to solve all our problems before we can rest, be happy, have peace, or so we think. The trap is that, for every “problem” that gets handled, another one pops up.

Remember this: Productivity isn’t measured by the amount of time you're in a hasty blur. Give yourself more free time—it really makes everything better. And, I’m sure you’ve heard it before but: Managing time is about managing you.

PAUSE. Let that sink it.

Now, here’s my two cents--we don’t get to the end of our life and say, “cool, now I can finally check dying off my to-do list!” So before you wake up with another doing hangover try one or all of these three options today:

ONE.

Make a bold move and put some free time on your calendar. Then enjoy the most underachieving thing you can think of: stare at the ocean, watch the rain, sleep in a hammock.

TWO.

Think differently and ask yourself: What is this busy blur really about?

THREE.

Smile more by deciding not to wait until all your problems are solved to have fun. Do it now! Water balloons? Twister? Surfing?

The more you can bring fun back into your life NOW, the less doing hangovers you’ll have and the better your work-free weekends will be.

Are you ready to turn your BurnOut into BadAss? Ready to get the freedom you want and start truly living? If so, book a FREE call with us at movethinksmile.com/talk

Or get the book Move Think Smile BurnOut to BadAss on Amazon in paperback, epub, or as an audiobook.

This post is the sixth of a six-part article series written for Oblique Magazine in Charleston SC.

Part 1: Is Stress The New Norm?

Part2: Why Is Negativity Like SuperGlue?

Part 3: Feeling Out of Order?

Part 4: Why I wrote BurnOut to Badass

Part 5: Cone of Shame

Cone of Shame

burnout, conquer stress, manage stress, negative thoughts, productivity, reduce stress, relief stress, stress relief, work stress 0

Left to Right: Eléa Faucheron

By Eléa Faucheron , Founder MOVE THINK SMILE | Head Coach: Burnout to Badass

Photographer: Christine Lentz

Herbert J. Freudenberger, an American psychologist who studied stress has been credited with coining the term BurnOut. He was intrigued by patients who would light a cigarette, and then let it sit in their hands and BurnOut without smoking it. Dr. Freudenberger was so dedicated to his work, he never took vacations and barely saw his family.

One day he woke up and literally could not get out of bed. It was here that he spoke into a recorder about his own symptoms and then listened back, analyzing himself. He felt like those cigarettes that his patients just let BurnOut. Dr. Herbert was the first to describe symptoms of professional exhaustion.

What happens you find yourself unexpectedly knocked down by stress?

Disillusionment is one word. Embarrassment is another. You trudge on knowing—eh, maybe you're not certain at this point—you're better than this. Immense shame often wells up over an inability to fix it. You feel deeply lost.

You know big lifestyle changes are in order to get your life back on track. But for many the stumbling block is a pie in the sky notion, that life will run smoothly once you get that next project done. But like creative author Natalie Goldberg so eloquently pronounces: “life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make life so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, drop a jar of applesauce.” Sh*%t happens. . . all the time.

BurnOut exaggerates the disorder of life, especially when you feel like everything hinges on you. Our livelihoods, financial security, and reputations feel like the are tittering on the edge of disaster. This rapidly declines our mental health as stress takes huge chemical draws from the brain. The change in cranium chemistry can result in depression, anxiety, and feeling like a 200lb gorilla is on your chest.

BurnOut creeps in while you’re hopelessly wrapped up in getting stuff done for the sake of, you guessed it, getting stuff done. For that short-lived accomplishment high, addicted to busy leads to doing more but living less.

“I can handle this”, we think to ourselves, as we say yes to taking on more. But in fact, we are poorly maintaining. We don’t notice what is happening until the physical symptoms keep
us from working.

Here is the odd thing: many who experience BurnOut aren’t in a miserable career. But people often equate BurnOut with a bad job or poor career choice. This fact can make BurnOut even more uncomfortable because those who burnout are extremely passionate about their work. Especially when you’ve taken on the persona of superhero impervious to work kryptonite.

A five-letter word pops up: shame. You ask yourself, I’ve got it good, how could I be so utterly stressed? It doesn’t make sense. What was wrong with me? Am I ungrateful? A fraud? Useless? If these questions sound familiar, then you've been down a similar path.

The BurnOut label feels like a failure. Which can lead to irrational storylines. For me, in the worst of my burnout, I had a fear was that the entire world, all 7 billion people, with their 14 billion eyeballs would use their 70 billion fingers to send gossipy texts about my inadequacies.

BurnOut happens only to people who aren’t tough enough, an uneducated part of me thought. This is an example of how our thinking deters us from seeking help. I was feeding myself BS, a habit high achievers take on to keep themselves going when they are running on empty.

Then a life vest arrived. A very wise woman said to me: “In order to burn out, you first have to have a burning passion.”

BurnOuts have a tireless drive. Dedicated to a powerful why and a need to make an impact—this fuels that passion that will either launch you forward or burn you out. But the paradox is, without it, you wouldn’t be able to do what you do. For many, the process of understanding how to succeed and heal from stress is learning how to control the flame.

You have to stop carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, stop taking responsibility for everything, and stop piling on more projects. You have to say YES to yourself, put health first, and say NO to going into energetic debt.

The experience of BurnOut is messy, depressing and ugly. You might feel like you’re wearing a cone of shame. But, I have since realized, it doesn’t make you less than, it makes you more than. The darkest times often create the greatest strength within us. It’s time to walk away from chronic stress. It’s time to stop feeling ashamed, lost, and confused. It’s time to go from charred to charged. Are you ready?

Want to kick stress & burnout to the curb? Book a FREE call with us: movethinksmile.com/talk

Get the book Move Think Smile BurnOut to BadAss on Amazon in paperback, epub, or as an audiobook.

This post is the fifth of a six-part article series written for Oblique Magazine in Charleston SC.

Part 1: Is Stress The New Norm?

Part2: Why Is Negativity Like SuperGlue?

Part 3: Feeling Out of Order?

Part 4: Why I wrote BurnOut to Badass

Why BurnOut to BadAss?

burnout, conquer stress, manage stress, negative thoughts, reduce stress, relief stress, stress relief, work stress 0

Left to Right: Eléa Faucheron

By Eléa Faucheron , Founder MOVE THINK SMILE | Head Coach: Burnout to Badass

Photographer: Christine Lentz

Writing has always saved me. I have piles of journals filled with sometimes rational, but mostly irrational, beautifully emotional expressions of pain and joy. When I was younger, I wrote short stories and poems to ease my mind when my world felt disjointed. As I grew older, I imagined writing a book that would entertain and inspire others. Those fantasies felt touchable in college. As I grew older, I dreamt, but time and focus always escaped me.

In 2014, writing came to my rescue once again. After building an action sports business for over a decade, it imploded and so did I. In my pain and confusion, my body and mind began to crumble and physical symptoms plagued me. Grasping for relief I began writing profusely along with fixing small things around my house to taste the crumbs of accomplishment.

What was I was experiencing? As I began to unravel that question, I came to acknowledge the fact that I was staring burnout, depression, and anxiety in the face. I had always considered myself a very happy go lucky, optimistic and productive person. It was crushing to realize where I had landed.

Chronic stress benched me and I was deeply lost. What was left, was my time and my thoughts. I began to write for short periods and then rather suddenly, I was writing 5 hours a day. Drafts 1-4 read like my personal diaries. Drafts 5-8 shifted from my woes into how could someone experiencing what I was, get out of it?

Two years later, I celebrated the publication of my book MOVE THINK SMILE. BurnOut to BadAss. Eléa’s stress conquering method to get your life back when work burns you out. It is my homage to what stress and challenge can teach us.

Burnout, depression, anxiety are very dark and intense places. For a long time, I felt this might have happened to me because I was filled with some sort of moral weakness. What I later realized is only the courageous and bold can enter this place and come out the other side.

My goal in publishing BurnOut to BadAss was to help others who have found themselves knocked down by stress. Although I focus on work being the outer form that took me down, the forum I know doesn’t make much difference. In the end, when you get knocked down the pain underneath is the same

It’s shocking to know that 4 out of 5 people are burning out according to the Brain Statistic Institute. And, The World Health Organization named stress as the epidemic of the 21st century. If you, or someone you know is suffering from the effects of chronic high levels of stress, this book is a guide through.

I believe we are testing the limits of our mental, emotional, and physical well being in the face of unprecedented amounts of stress. We are facing a time when we must actively seek out better strategies. It is our responsibility to ourselves, our families, and our communities to find new ways to conquer the obstacles that inevitably come our way.

To acknowledge and ask for help is courageous. To find new tools because you realize yours aren’t working is an honor. To say, “I don’t know what to do, but I am going to discover another way” is the start of a BadAss journey out of stress and into health.

My intention was to create an inspiring, entertaining, in-depth, light-hearted read on a tough subject. My hope is that readers will take the simple method I created, MOVE THINK SMILE, and use it to empower themselves out of a dark, frustrating, or fearful place. The dream I keep is that it will enable others to become the greatest version of themselves they can imagine. The mission I hold is to teach others how to see stress differently.

When I look back now, even though I fiercely resisted being benched by stress, I was given the gift of time. It was then that writing came back into my life to uplift me once again. It was as if the universe said, “Sit, now is the time to write.”

May the words in the pages of my book help you feel great and live awesome once again!

Get the book Move Think Smile BurnOut to BadAss on Amazon in paperback, epub, or as an audiobook.

This post is the fourth of a six-part article series written for Oblique Magazine in Charleston SC.

Part 1: Is Stress The New Norm?

Part2: Why Is Negativity Like SuperGlue?

Part 3: Feeling Out of Order?