Chronic stress can impact our physical and mental health. It often leads to symptoms of burnout. Inflammation has become a buzz word for nearly any ailment people are suffering in the USA, but it’s also true that chronic stress leads to inflammation in our body and contributes to physical illnesses from heart disease to Alzheimers. Skye Ross offers therapy in NYC and Denver to target your burnout and help you reconnect to yourself and your loved ones.
Our culture is contributing to chronic stress more than ever with the development of social media, high demand jobs, financial disparity in a capitalist society, systemic racism and white supremacy, white ambivalence after the summer of 2020, and educational, political, and justice systems that actively cause harm to people identifying as LGBTQ+ and/or racial or ethnic identities of the global majority.
What you’ve noticed
After a long day of full-time parenting, working from home, or working in an office, you are beyond capacity to make another decision. You snap at your partner, your kids, or your dog for simply appearing to need your time and attention. Then the guilt hits: Why can’t I be better?
You know you’re stressed, but you can’t seem to snap out of it. Work is demanding and the world feels heavy. You’re burning the candle from both ends and you know something needs to give.
What’s happening in your body, below your conscious awareness
Physiological stress responses:
- Amygdala activation (the stress center of the brain)
- Cortisol release (sometimes thought of as the “stress hormone”)
- Physical sensations (racing heart, stomach clenching, sweaty palms)
- Fight, flight, freeze, fawn response
Signs of chronic stress:
- Zoning out or trouble staying focused
- Feeling disconnected from your body
- Trouble falling or staying asleep
- Perfectionism
- An all or nothing approach to your time, job, friends, family, and/or physical health
- Irritability
- Using substances, sex, smart phone, and/or food to dissociate
This seems like a lot. How can therapy help?
In therapy for burnout in NYC and Denver, we will explore the messages you’ve learned about yourself and the world around you and identify coping strategies. Individual therapy is not going to change the reality of your lived experience, but we can explore the impacts of your experiences to chart a new path forward. It might look like changing the way you speak to or about yourself, identifying new coping skills, setting different boundaries, or identifying how to change your behavior or reactions when faced with something outside of your control. We may use recent-event EMDR protocols to bring down the temperature of what you’re dealing with to support your nervous system so that you can respond from your best self.