I acknowledge my fears and anxiety

[Note: this post was originally published on Substack August 6, 2024] 

Part 3 of 10 in the series, “How do I launch a business while on my burnout recovery journey?”

It may seem crazy to launch a business after going through burnout. Where does all the energy come from? How do you manage the stress? How do you keep going? This is post #3 of a 10-part series.

As a burnout survivor in recovery, I’ve realized I was living deep in anxiety and fear for many years. I was disassociated from my body for a very long time, so I couldn’t really “feel” my feelings and emotions. I also had no concept of what it meant to be “self-aware.”

I would have denied these things prior to burnout. Now, I realized how much they contributed to my burnout. There are long stories I’ve told my therapist about how these things arose and stayed around for so long that don’t need to be told here. (And no judgement here, as I said in post #2, these patterns are passed down through generations. You can’t teach what you yourself weren’t taught.)

What does need to be discussed is how I learned to acknowledge that I do have fears, I do have anxiety, and they have been working to try and keep me safe, but their methods no longer serve me.

They were behavior patterns that formed when I was a child. That was my brain’s way of keeping me “safe” back then. It was the best it could do at the time. Then these patterns became embedded in my brain. This was just “how I thought about the world” or “how I lived my life.” I never questioned them. I didn’t try to understand where they came from or if there were better ways to deal with situations now that I was an adult.

Now, I understand that I need to acknowledge my fears and anxiety when they show up. I recognize that this is a message from my inner child trying to keep me safe.

This illustration shows adult me acknowledging the work my inner child has been doing for me and giving her some much needed comforting.

I get the chance to calm my inner child and recognize the work it’s doing for me. Then I get to show it another way we can approach the situation and still be safe. This helps us both calm down.

This is work I have to do regularly. There isn’t a day that I get to skip this step. Some days are harder than others. When I’m having a hard day, and the fears and anxiety are getting the better of me, I have learned to reach out: to my friends, to my coaches, to my journal. I talk things through and find the way forward.

It might seem hard to have to do this every day.

I have learned that it’s really a gift to be able to soothe my inner child and learn a new way through all of the daily challenges.

It’s all part of being a lifelong learner and staying in recovery from burnout.