One of the things I love most in life is allowing myself to dream big, setting ambitious aims – and then achieving it, making it happen, feeling the joy of turning my imagination into reality; plus all the rewards that come with that.
So it was one of the most painful things I have ever experienced when, in the height of anxiety and burnout, I began to fear that my worsening mental health would prevent me ever achieving those hopes and dreams.
I was crushed as I went from aspiring, striving and succeeding, to firefighting, damage control, and struggling to stay afloat.
Personal and professional success feeds deeper emotional desires, aka ‘values’, inside of me. The same is true for many of my clients. One of my emotional values is a sense of growth. Whether I’m growing as a person, growing in my abilities to help others or growing a new project towards success, all of these things feed my emotional value of growth.
So when anxiety and burnout were threatening my career and quality of life, it felt like they were constricting and cutting me off from growth, one of my most fundamental emotional values.
Thankfully, I discovered and went through a therapeutic process of removing anxiety and burnout from my life.
That process was, at the same time, a process of rescuing my emotional values (growth and many others) – and then unlocking my ability to fulfil them more than ever before.
To remove anxiety and burnout, we need to stop the psychological root cause. In therapy, we find that the psychological root causes of anxiety and burnout will often sit very close to our most core emotional needs, even becoming intertwined with them.
For example in my therapy, I discovered that my deep need for growth was also linked to deep fears – such as fears of not being good enough. Growth is a healthy value within me, while the fear of not being good enough was part of the psychological root cause of my burnout and anxiety.
They were so closely related that they were intertwined. For example, my drive to achieve highly in my career was fuelled by both my healthy desire for growth, and from a fear of not being good enough!
Many people live for years pursuing their emotional needs, not knowing they are intertwined with a dormant psychological root cause for anxiety and burnout.
Even though their emotional need is twisted up in fears and other difficulties, they may achieve success. But at some point the root cause begins to come alive. Anxiety and burnout start to materialise and threaten their career and quality of life, seemingly out of nowhere.
This is exactly what happened to me, and many of my clients in some form or another.
The really good news is, we can find and heal that psychological root cause. When we do that, not only do we remove anxiety and burnout – we untwine and release our emotional needs, allowing us to fulfil them more purely and fully than ever before.
As I healed the psychological root cause of anxiety and burnout within me, the fear of not being good enough diminished, while my desire for growth remained strong. This meant that my desire to achieve success in my career was more and more purely driven by healthy desires like growth, rather than fears. The result was a deeper, stronger energy and drive, and the stripping away of problems like social or performance anxieties, procrastination or self sabotage, too.
The more I healed the psychological root causes of my anxiety and burnout, the more growth skyrocketed – and continues to skyrocket. In hindsight, anxiety and burnout were an opportunity in disguise for me to discover and unlock my potential more than ever before.
I wrote my free guide for anxiety & burnout to help you move forward on this path – finding and healing the psychological root cause of your anxiety or burnout, so that you too can remove those mental health problems, and fulfil your dreams and ambitions more than ever before. Download it here on my website to get started.
