Does your anxiety or burnout happen for no obvious reason, with no clear cause? Does it seem to come out of the blue; have you struggled to find a consistent pattern to it?

Have you felt hope when you thought you’d figured out the cause and dealt with it – only to feel more disappointment when the anxiety or burnout continues to happen?

It’s really painful, confusing and frustrating to suffer with anxiety and burnout on a regular basis, yet at the same time not know why it’s happening.

I remember how difficult it was for me years ago, when my burnout and anxiety were threatening my career, wellbeing and quality of life, and yet I had no idea what was causing it.

Perhaps the most difficult part is that if we don’t know why a problem is happening, we don’t know how to solve it. If we don’t know what’s causing our anxiety or burnout, we have no way to truly stop it at the source.

Thankfully there is a solution: A way to find out the cause of our anxiety or burnout, so that we know exactly what’s causing it, and so that we can deal with that cause at the root.

But when I first learned about this solution, not only did I not believe it, it offended me. With that warning given, I’m going to share it with you anyway as an act of care, because I’ve found it to be the truth. Here it is:

• Anxiety and burnout are caused by emotion.
  
  
• But emotion can be unconscious – meaning we are totally unaware of it.
  
  
• The reason anxiety or burnout seem to happen for no reason, and with no predictable pattern, is that the emotion causing it is unconscious. We are totally unaware of the emotion, therefore we are totally unaware of the reason the anxiety or burnout is happening. The result is anxiety and burnout which happen seemingly at random.
  
  

The good news is that we can build more connection with the emotions causing our burnout or anxiety – and if we do, it becomes extremely clear why the burnout or anxiety is happening.

In my experience personally and as a therapist, and as my teachers have shown me, there is always a system underlying anxiety and burnout – it does not happen randomly. When we actually connect with the emotion underlying these issues, the system becomes very clear. It actually follows repeating, predictable patterns, but we need to get in touch with the emotion before we can discover what those patterns are.

Once we’ve found that emotion, we can treat the problem at the emotional level – i.e. we can treat the anxiety and burnout at its source.

So how can we get in touch with that emotion?

First we need to ensure safety. Do you experience high levels of anxiety and panic; eg panic or anxiety attacks? If so, you will first need to stabilise your body and create a level of safety and capacity, before you start to reconnect with those emotions.

Once a person has adequate safety and capacity to do so, and once they feel safe and ready to, they can begin to explore their emotions. We do this by asking questions: (Don’t start trying to answer these questions yet if you have high levels of anxiety/panic; first stabilise the body as I mentioned above.)

What emotions are happening within you? What do they feel like in your body? What happens if you focus on the feeling of those emotions in your body? In the process of trying to answer questions like these, you are literally building a new levels of awareness of your emotions. We call this unity building. It takes some work, but the benefits last a lifetime.

In Clearing Method therapy, we go through a systematic process of stabilising the body, building unity (including ‘unwrapping’ emotions to enable unity to be built – more on this another time), and then exploring into those emotions to find the cause of the anxiety or burnout. We then heal that at the emotional level. This all takes time, but I have not come across a more profoundly beneficial process for improving our well-being.

Early in my therapy, I discovered I felt a lot of fear which I had been very unconscious of: Fear of failing, fear of being alone, fear of not being good enough. This was the first level of emotion beneath my anxiety of burnout. As I went further in my therapy, I went layers and layers deeper beneath that first layer. As I did so, I got more and more clarity on exactly what was causing my burnout and anxiety; I healed more and more deeply; and I grew more and more as a person as a result, transforming my professional and personal life.

Do you have any awareness of the emotions causing your burnout or anxiety? 

I hope this has been helpful.