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Hi, I'm Jasmine Nicole. Welcome to the Motivational Mystic, a space for authentic higher conscious conversations to motivate, inspire, and empower. Thanks for listening. Each week I'll drop a new conscious raising episode. Let's dive in. I know a lot of people out there, myself included, are very industrious and task-oriented. Once you complete one thing, you just move on to the next, which is good. It keeps things on track. Operating like a well-oiled machine very efficiently, but you can also experience burnout. Once you're in that burnout phase, you're just running on steam, you're spinning your wheels, and you're not as efficient as you usually are because you're feeling depleted. I'm learning myself the importance of rest, the importance of listening to your body when it's telling you to take a break, or if you're stressed. Dealing with stressful situations, whether that be work, family, or overall life obligations, stress is a big indicator of needing to take a pause or a break and listen to your body and your emotions, which can send distress signals to yourself. Telling you you're out of whack, you're out of alignment, you're starting to experience burnout. So learning to listen to your body, your mind, and your emotions when you start to feel stress, burnout, or just plain old run down shouldn't be ignored. These are signals and indicators that are being sent to you to get your attention. Maybe a change needs to be made. Maybe you just need to take a break. Rather than listening to our body, we ignore these signs, these distress signals that we get and just power through it. And that's not always the best thing. Granted, people will be racing against deadlines and putting all their time and energy into getting things done. But sometimes it can be at the expense of your well-being, your sanity, your health. And in those situations, you have to take a pause and think. Is it better for me to step away for a moment and recollect myself? Or suffer in silence? A lot of us out there are so locked in and caught in the rat race of just doing what you have to do to get by, to make it through the day, to make money, to pay your bills, and put food on the table. You just get hyper-focused on all the priorities you have in front of you that you can easily neglect yourself. I believe that is when our body starts to give us signals when we're out of alignment with ourselves, in the form of stress, or sometimes even illness. So it's important to remember to stay aligned, tuned in, tapped in to all aspects of ourselves, mind, body, and soul. A lot of us get indication through our bodies that sometimes we need to take a rest, take a beat, and we don't listen. We either continue moving forward with whatever we're doing to the point of exhaustion, or until something forces us to stop. If you haven't realized by now, with this podcast, I'm very big on self-care. I'm even learning through experience that if you neglect yourself and you always let your mind run the show, be the main decision maker in your life, it can get carried away to the point where you're neglecting other aspects of yourself. The mind is an instrumental part of us, but it can also play tricks on you. It's good for helping you evaluate tasks, but sometimes our minds can convince us to do things as a means to an end, even if it's not for your highest good. Personally, I learned this lesson quite recently, where something manifested in my body that I needed to pay attention to, and it forced me to stop. It forced me to pause and take a break, and at that point, the mind wasn't running the show anymore. It was a very humbling experience when you're forced to stop and take a break, when your mind is always on go mode and wants to accomplish all of these things, but your body is just like, nope, not today, girl, not today. And then not today turned into not tomorrow or the next day and the next day after that. I needed a few weeks to just rest and recover, and in those couple of weeks, I truly understood what it felt like to almost feel trapped in your own body. So I had to humbly surrender to the circumstances and the fact that I needed to do a better job of prioritizing self-care, and my body needed to rest. It took a long time for my mind to accept that, but it finally sunk in. Now that I'm back on the mend, I can see that situation as not only a humbling experience, but a learning experience. When you're forced to stop and you can't do any of the things you typically do each day, and there's really nothing else you can do but just think because you can't take action. It makes you realize how thin you stretch yourself, multitasking, prioritizing all day every day. When you're forced to pause, when you're forced to stop, it gives you time to consider that maybe this isn't the most efficient and healthiest way to show up every day. Are you getting things done? Yes. But you're working yourself to the point of exhaustion. You're stressed out, trying to get things done, but it's at the detriment of your well-being. And at that point, you start to rationalize what's really important to you. Your health, having a healthy life, or just giving your all to other people, places, and things until you have nothing left for yourself, except the few hours to enjoy free time you do have until you get back to life responsibilities again. It puts things into perspective about what your values are and what's really important to you. I found myself becoming really inspired by people who got to live out their childhood dreams and become what they wanted to be when they were a child. I know I spoke about this a little bit in a previous episode, but if you're someone who knew what you wanted to be since you were a child and you had the perseverance to stick to it and make it happen, people like that are very intriguing to me. People like that are very inspiring because they found their passion early in life and they had the resiliency to turn their childhood dream into a reality. Many people aspire to be things when they were kids, but a lot of us don't actually make it happen and accomplish it for various reasons. So with all this downtime, I had to think, the question that came to mind was, are you fulfilled? People who knew exactly what they wanted out of life early and put in the work to achieve it seem to have fulfillment in their life. They have a career they wake up every day to go to and enjoy it, and other people just wake up every day, put in your time at work, just to get your paycheck. And let's be honest about the people who fit into that category. They're definitely grateful for the opportunity, especially in this economy, to have the ability to provide for themselves, of course. But they're not really fulfilled. There are people that are actually fulfilled waking up every morning, going to their job each day, and seeing what adventure awaits them. And I'm like, hmm, I'd like to know what that feels like. Maybe this stress, this forced pause in my life, is meant for me to really become aware of not only me being out of alignment with myself to the point of manifesting a physical ailment, but it's also giving me time to think about what I truly valued in life. It's unfortunate it took this scenario to bring all of this into my awareness, but when you have the ability to think and still use your mind, but you just can't take action on things you want to do, because your body wants to relax. Through this experience, it started to help me gain a lot of wisdom. I'll do a future episode on wisdom, especially if you are lucky enough to have elders in your family or community that can provide you with good insight. However, for the purpose of this episode, being forced to take a pause helped me to develop a deep sense of wisdom and understanding of what's important to me, what values hold true for me, and not needing to push myself beyond my limits to feel like I've accomplished something each day. There's always an efficient way of doing things, and it feels good to check things off of your to-do list each day. But we must remember to always prioritize ourselves first. You can honestly become unable to work one day, and your job will look to easily replace you the next day. So you really just have to keep in mind how much of yourself you give to other people, places, and things while maintaining being in alignment, mind, body, and soul with yourself. Listen to the signs your mind, body, and soul gives you when you need to take a break or give attention to other aspects of yourself that are often neglected and looking for attention. Don't wait until you're forced to prioritize yourself due to burnout, mental, or physical ailments manifesting, and forcing you to course correct and make a change. Utilizing the internal check-in questions I discussed in episode 3, cultivating and preserving inner peace, may be helpful in taking action to prioritize yourself. I know it really helped me to put things into perspective when I was forced to stop and surrendered the control my mind is used to having and navigating each action of my day. So when you are starting to get these signs from your mind or your body that you need to take a break, that you need to stop, please listen to it. Don't wait like me until you're forced to stop because you ignore these signs and these indicators. Honestly, I call it the strals that our body and our mind sends us when we're towing the line of burnout, of stress, of exhaustion, and honestly working ourselves to the point of it causing dis-ease in the body and it manifests in a physical way. There's definitely signals, signs, and symptoms along the way, but you know, oftentimes, me included, guilty as charged, we ignore it. We ignore it, we push through it just to try to get to the next thing that we need to do on our to-do list to feel like we're getting things done. And having that go-getter mindset is great. You know, I think it's a really good attribute to have, but we want to make sure that we're not letting that go-getter mindset completely dominate where we're not recognizing when other aspects of us, maybe your mind or your body or your emotions, are giving you signals that, hey, I need to be addressed, you need to give attention to me. The mind is a powerhouse, it will help you strategize and get from point A to point B. But it doesn't really consider the wear and tear or the stress that continuously being on go mode takes on you, your being, your body, your form. So I would say to people listening out there, use my story as an example, because I know we're all experiencing some level of burnout and stress. This is just a sign of the times. Please don't neglect yourself and forget to implement self-care in whatever form works best for you. Um, but I think it's very important that we, in the midst of getting done what we need to get done, just to make sure you're also checking in with other aspects of yourself, your mind, your body, your soul, just to make sure you're all in alignment within your form, within your being, so that you're not having something that is forcing you to stop or forcing you to make a change. Where if you're just more aware of yourself, of where you are in terms of a baseline of being neutral, right? Not stressed, not overexcited, but just neutral. It's like if you can understand or identify where your neutral point is, you'll have a better like indicator of okay, I'm doing too much, I'm stressed out, or I'm not doing enough, and I need to step up. But just understanding where that equilibrium is within yourself is important. And that's what I've learned through this experience that really being in tune, tuned in, tapped in, in alignment with yourself. So when you know when you're giving too much of yourself, or when you can afford to give a little bit more. Um, but I think that really starts with just checking in with yourself and being in tune with all aspects of yourself and not always just letting the mind run the show. I think that's really important, and that's an important lesson that I've learned myself. So I don't know. I I did want to share that today as someone that's always just kind of in that go-getter mindset, needing to course correct and needing to prioritize myself, and then also get back to that high, functioning, efficient person that I am, but just doing it more responsibly, where I'm not doing it to the point of burnout, exhaustion, and my detriment. So I did want to share that today because I know with people in my circle and just in discussions with people in my everyday life, like a lot of people are really dealing with burnout and exhaustion and not really addressing it, not really course correcting and seeing what they can do to minimize those scenarios, right? Because it's not a sustainable way to live. I mean, obviously, we all have responsibilities and things that we must do to provide for ourselves, but just finding more sustainable, responsible ways to get those things done where it's not at your detriment, I believe is really important. So, and I thought it was a really important discussion to have for today's episode. Also, recognizing burnout is important because a lot of people don't recognize it. They can just be like, oh, I'll catch up on sleep on the weekends, I'll maybe go out to the bar on the weekends to drink away my stress or whatever the case may be. They're not recognizing the burnout, they're just kind of looking for ways to cope and mask it. And I believe that is not only not sustainable, but it can lead to further issues down the line. So also just identifying what burnout looks like is very important, and that's different for each individual, but just recognizing that I think is a key aspect and knowing when to pull back, take a break, restrategize, and come back to doing something later when you're more refreshed and not just spinning your wheels to get something done. That's all I have for today, everyone. Until next time, goodbye.