I know how difficult it is to be in the throws of burn-out, unable to see the forest for the trees. I was there, arguably for most of my career. I put work first, not on purpose, out of habit, and I lost connection to myself, and to my values. I wasn’t sleeping well, eating well, or spending time with the people who mattered most to me.

PTO is a privilege in the U.S. and a requirement in all other parts of the world. It’s one of the things Americans talk a lot about, how other countries get more vacation time than they do. Why then did only 27% of employees in the U.S. use their paid vacation time in 2021?

When we reset something, we give it a fresh start. We hit the reset button and our computer, or modem, starts again, with a clean slate. We clear the browser cookies or our history and we create space. We go back to normal. When we want to figure out what’s slowing down our computer, first we close all currently running applications, in particular, the ones that require a lot of memory.

Self-sabotage is something we all do because we don’t feel worthy of feeling amazing. How could we? The world is full of war, hatred, racism, poverty, greed, and grief…why should we be allowed to feel good? It’s a noble idea, a way of furthering empathy for other humans, and it makes perfect sense to want to feel bad on behalf of others.

This is quite possible one of the things my clients hate the most and resist the most and defend the most. “Jaime trust me, it’s because of my job that I’m miserable.” “Jaime, seriously, the only reason I’m depressed is because of the pandemic.” “Jaime, I’m scared, not because of my thoughts, but because I got laid off and I am not going to find a job in this market.”

I like to start with definitions. Burn-out: cease to function as a result of excessive heat or friction. Note that the definition doesn’t say, ‘limited function’ or ‘slow down’. Cease to function literally means to stop functioning. If you run too long, or burn too long, or create friction for too long, you will CEASE TO FUNCTION. This isn’t to be taken lightly.