After those healing, shamanic journeys, I began asking a different question. 

I had always been health conscious, how on earth did I manage to make myself so sick? I mean, I didn’t even gain five pounds, because I ate well and worked out. I didn’t drink coffee daily. I was someone who (it seemed, anyway) was living a healthy life.

How did I miss all the signs and symptoms of burnout?

That following year, I stayed in a monastery in Chengdu, on a trip with some mentors from my doctoral program, and I had a chance to have some life-altering talks with doctors of traditional Chinese medicine:

A monk that I met there told me something interesting: he said, "any emotional state that produces resistance (or resisting anything in your life you do not like) creates energy blockages that create disease."

That’s when I realized my mentality -- constant desire to achieve, not having enough time, having to keep going, always having too much to do -- set into motion a flywheel that began with the “energy” of the body, but ultimately, pushed me physiologically via the nervous system into extreme burnout.

The chronic fatigue, wired but tired, constant anxiety/low grade depression, insomnia every single day… these were just the downstream effects. And they were the result of the last three years of how I'd been living.

And what’s more, this is the reality of millions of mothers, entrepreneurs, high achievers, or people going through life tragedies and traumas every day - they may just not know it yet - until it’s too late.

In the 1900s, a researcher named Hans Selye, who was later nominated for the nobel prize, began studying a new field: the field of stress. Primarily, he was focusing on studying something about what prolonged stress does to animals, and he discovered that there were three stages:

The three phases of stress. Wikipedia commons.

Dr. Selye's 1930's experiments noted that short-term stress produced an alarm response (for example, being startled in the woods), but prolonged stress began to show a whole host of systemic damage to the organism or person:

"The initial nervous symptoms could even reappear instead of go away (panic attacks, muscle aches, sore eyes, difficulty breathing, fatigue, heartburn, high blood pressure, and difficulty sleeping, etc.)."

Long term, if the organism wasn't given a chance to heal, it could develop diabetes, cardiovascular issues, clinical depression, or more. 

Physicians in the east had documented "deficiency taxation" (nervous exhaustion) for well over 2,000 years too. Here's what they said.

Two famous doctors made observations about "nervous exhaustion" going back almost 2,000 years. Famous doctor Sun Simiao and family herbalist Zhang Zhong Jing brought up a term in ancient texts 虛癆 (Xu Lao). This term is sometimes translated as "deficiency taxation" and they noted it can arise from a few circumstances:

- Chronic overwork: For example, a laborer or worker who over-exhausts themselves from doing too much.

- Nervous exhaustion: People who either over worry, over stress, have sources of anxiety in their life (their income, their kids or family, safety concerns, etc.). The stress of loneliness or feeling vulnerable.

- The result of chronic disease: For example, some people are sick for years with autoimmune disease, lyme disease, or have anxiety and sleeping problems for years, leading to general exhaustion of resources.

- The result of battling a difficult illness (or even acute infection): For example, Mozart was sick and struck with a powerful fever; ever since that time, he had a constant feeling he was never the same, and wasn't going to live a long life. And it was true, he didn't. 

- Post-partum: Some women never are the same after childbirth. Many women develop post-partum depression as a result of general exhaustion-- and they need to be supplementing with herbal formulas as soon as possible.

Their advice on healing? Use the traditional formulas to recharge the batteries.

Imagine if, like so many of us, a physician says to just medicate the symptoms away -- but there's no healing involved?