burnout Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Combat Fatigue, Reduce Stress & Improve Mood with THIS Arctic Herb

The AHA! Team — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 05:21:24 +0000

Lori Alton via NaturalHealth365 – It’s official: “Burnout” – the feeling of being exhausted, frustrated, and overwhelmed in your life – is a real health problem that should not be ignored. So, today, we’ll show you how rhodiola can help – fast! For the first time, the World Health Organization has added “burnout syndrome” to its International Classification of Diseases – and some experts estimate that the condition may affect up to 70 percent of all working people. World Health Organization has added “burnout syndrome” to its International Classification of Diseases But when addressing burnout, Western medicine falls short (to say the least) – offering only limited treatment options and no acknowledged cure. Fortunately, recent studies showcase the potential of the ancient Arctic herb rhodiola to act against stress and burnout. Reduced professional function, feelings of exhaustion, and a negative or cynical attitude toward the job are all indicators of burnout. Chronic workplace stress that hasn’t been properly managed is at the root of burnout – making stress reduction the first order of business in treating the condition. Research has shown that Rhodiola rosea preparations can effectively alleviate various aspects of stress-induced symptoms, offering promising clinical evidence for its benefits in managing burnout and related conditions. Rhodiola rapidly improves symptoms of burnout – including depression and anxiety, study says Rhodiola rosea, also known as golden root, has long been valued in traditional Asian and Ayurvedic healing systems for its effects against fatigue, lethargy, anxiety, and depression. But can rhodiola’s therapeutic effects be confirmed by scientific research? It turns out the answer is yes. In an exploratory clinical trial published in Neuropsychiatric Diseases and Treatment, 68 participants were given 400 mg of rhodiola daily in divided amounts for three months. At the beginning of the study, the researchers evaluated the subjects using language and sleep quality tests and the Burnout Screening Scale, which measures levels of sadness, tension, loss of interest, and guilt. The effects of rhodiola were swift and profound. Simply put, people felt better. The team noted that rhodiola boosted psychological well-being, promoted more restful sleep, and caused rapid, significant improvement in all measures of fatigue and burnout – including overall stress levels, fatigue, irritability, anxiety, and depression. Rhodiola also brought about a distinct improvement in high-level cognition and decision-making, promoting a calm, alert state of mind. The researchers reported that improvements occurred during the first week and continued to increase throughout the study. Calling the results “encouraging,” the team urged further clinical trials of rhodiola. Additional studies confirm that you can naturally reduce your stress symptoms with the help of herbal medicine Human and animal studies alike have shown that rhodiola can improve symptoms of fatigue, enhance physical performance, reduce anxiety, sharpen cognition, and boost mood. In a study published in Phytotherapy Research, 100 participants were given 200 mg of rhodiola extract twice daily for four weeks. The scientists noted that all tests showed “clinically relevant improvements” regarding stress symptoms, disability, functional impairment, and overall therapeutic effect. The participants all reported some measure of relief from their symptoms of burnout and fatigue, and an astonishing 83 percent reported they were either “much improved” or “very much improved.” Fatigue is generally defined as a feeling of tiredness Note: Fatigue is generally defined as a feeling of tiredness – accompanied by lowered energy and motivation – that is not caused by lack of sleep and is not relieved by rest. Remarkably, rhodiola acted quickly – with notable improvement of burnout symptoms occurring within three days. No adverse effects were reported, leading the team to conclude that rhodiola was both safe and effective in improving life-stress symptoms. Herbal medicine proves to have a positive effect on free radicals and inflammation Natural healers have long recognized rhodiola as an adaptogen that helps the body cope with and adapt to physical, psychological, and oxidative stress. Of course, ashwaganda and Siberian ginseng are two other examples of adaptogens. Rhodiola helps to regulate and balance amounts of cortisol (the “stress” hormone) while increasing levels of a stress-resisting protein called Hsp70. In addition, rhodiola extracts contain rosavin and rosarin – a pair of polyphenols unique to rhodiola with powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory capabilities. Finally, rhodiola increases the synthesis of ATP – vital to cellular energy – while promoting the activity of mood-stabilizing neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine. How and why should I take Rhodiola? Forward-thinking holistic doctors are increasingly advising rhodiola for adrenal fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome, ADD, ADHD, and depression. Rhodiola, which has fat-burning effects, is also sometimes advised to support weight loss and reduce unhealthy abdominal fat. As a supplement, it’s available in tablets and capsule form. Holistic healthcare providers may advise taking 400 mg daily in divided amounts, with 200 mg 15 minutes before breakfast and another 200 mg 15 minutes before lunch. Look for a formulation standardized to at least 3 percent rosavin. For maximum benefit, rhodiola should be taken with black pepper to promote absorption. All of this is generally recognized as safe, but you should first discuss any change to your supplement routine with your doctor to ensure you’re heading in the right direction. Simply put, rhodiola is a remarkable herb that can not only help banish symptoms of burnout but do so without the dangerous side effects and addiction risks that can accompany pharmaceutical anti-anxiety drugs. If you suffer from burnout syndrome, consider enlisting Rhodiola for some much-needed help. Sources for this article include: NIH.gov NIH.gov LifeExtension.com WHO.int NIH.gov To read the original article click here.

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How To Manage Parent Guilt, Burn-Out & Fatigue

The AHA! Team — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 08:45:29 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #499) and blog, I talk to Hettie, a concerned mother, about balancing work and play time with her children, especially as a homeschooling mom. This is part of a series I am doing on questions you submitted for my new book on children’s mental health. This was Hettie’s question: “I’m part of an avid homeschooling community. Homeschooling moms like me tend to be “always on; always teaching.” It can lead to schooling burnout, and it does! How can we give ourselves and our children a better balance between working our brain, resting our brain, and letting our brain play?” First, it is important to understand that, as parents and guardians, we deserve to rest! This is especially the case if we are homeschooling our children as — in this case, we are not just parents but educators as well. Work-life balance is not just important for our children. We cannot give our best and be there for our children if we are overwhelmed, burnt out and running on empty. This is something I have spoken of on my podcast before, which I call the “oxygen mask principle”. As parents, we need to help ourselves before we can effectively help our children, which includes scheduling in periods of self-care so that our minds, brains and bodies have time to rest and recharge. We need to recognize that although the mind is infinite, the brain is finite, and it needs rest to function well. We can only give our best when we are rested, which is why it is so important that we learn how to be okay with doing nothing as parents. (This takes some practice, especially if you constantly feel the need to do something!) It is important to remember that our children pick up on our emotions and behaviors. If we are stressed out, overwhelmed or upset because we have not given ourselves enough time to rest and reboot, then this can affect our children’s mental health and performance. On the other hand, when we take the time to invest in our self-care as parents, and we explain to our children why this is important, we teach them an invaluable life-skill. This, in turn, will help them learn how to build and maintain their own resilience as both children and adults. Finding the right work-play-rest balance is not just something we should teach our children. It is something we need to model in our own lives. As mentioned, children observe us and pick up on our feelings and behaviors. This means that we do and say, or what we don’t do or say, can affect their wellbeing as well. So, taking care of ourselves and our mental health is not just a “nice” thing to do. It is imperative if we want our children to grow up understanding that life is about balance and that their health is important. For more on parenting and children’s mental health, listen to my podcast (episode #499). Podcast Highlights 3:36 The challenges of homeschooling & balancing work and rest 4:35, 6:47 The importance of self-care as a parent 7:45 How burnout affects the mind-brain-body connection 13:34 How our mood & emotions can affect our children 18:00 Tips to maintain a good work-life balance as a parent 21:30 The importance of teaching our children about mental health & self-care from youth This podcast and blog are for educational purposes only and are not intended as medical advice. We always encourage each person to make the decision that seems best for their situation with the guidance of a medical professional. To read the original article click here.

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5 Simple & Scientific Steps to Detox Trauma and Toxic Thinking

AHA Publisher — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 08:00:56 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – Anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress are all ways of describing natural human responses to adversity. As I discuss in this podcast and blog, we all face adversity in many different ways; challenging events and circumstances are as much a part of modern existence as they were a part of human history. Simply calling these mental and emotional responses neuropsychiatric brain diseases can create a lot of confusion and suffering. Anxiety, depression, burnout, frustration, angst, anger and grief are emotional and physical warning signals, telling us we need to face and deal with something that’s happened or is happening in our lives. They are not a sign of a broken or defective brain. The mental pain, which is very real, is a sign that something is wrong: you are in a state of disequilibrium. It’s not a sign of a defective brain. The brain is going through a process of reordering and reorganizing in response to your experience(s), which are processed through the mind (your thinking, feeling and choosing). The brain and mind are separate. The brain does not produce the mind; the brain responds to the mind. Emotional pain doesn’t need to be validated by a medical label. Mental health struggles are not your identity. These struggles are normal and need to be addressed, not suppressed, or things will get worse. Indeed, how you view your negative feelings (such as sadness, nervousness or hopelessness) will either protect you against some of the harmful health consequences of these emotions, or make you feel worse. Research, including my most recent clinical trials, demonstrates that viewing negative emotions as fluctuating, momentary parts of a natural cycle of life increases our mental and physical resilience. On the other hand, when you ruminate on the negative and see your feelings as stressful and harmful, they can dramatically impact your mental and physical health. In our research, we demonstrated that embracing negative emotions as warning signals, finding the underlying cause(s), AND then managing this by processing and reconceptualizing our thinking results in a significant improvement in bodily inflammation, cellular health and biological aging. It also empowers us to feel in control of our minds, which can increase our feelings of control over our mental health struggles by up to 81%! Feeling bad is not unhealthy if you learn how to manage your thinking! However, in today’s world, many of us are taught from youth that negative emotions are undesirable and even dangerous. To manage these undesirable emotions, modern psychological and psychiatric approaches to mental health mainly focus on the use of drugs like antidepressants and antipsychotics and treatments that numb the pain, rather than addressing the complexity of the human mind. It is thus unsurprising that this biomedical approach hasn’t reduced the prevalence of mental health issues. In fact, things seem to have gotten worse! For example, major depression, which has remained at around 4 percent between 1990–2010, is now on the rise, while population studies indicate that people between the ages twenty-four to sixty-five are dying eight to fifteen years younger than previous generations from preventable lifestyle diseases. Clearly, what we are doing is not working. The system needs to change. We must shift our focus from a symptom-centered biological approach to one that focuses on each person’s complex story and unique experiences IN CONTEXT. You are uniquely, wonderfully you—your quest for optimal health and well-being should be just as singular as you are! This is the approach I’ve taken in my newest book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. After many years of clinical practice and research, I developed my Switch On Your Brain 5-Step Learning Process©. In the years since, I have continued to research and refine these steps, helping people harness the power of mind-management to find healing and fulfillment: Gathering awareness of your physical and emotional warning signals. Reflecting on why you are feeling these things in your body and mind. Writing down your reflections to organize your thinking. Rechecking what you have written and how your thoughts and feelings have changed. Active Reach: taking action to reconceptualize your thinking and find sustainable healing. In my latest book, I teach you how to apply these simple, scientifically-researched and clinically-applied mind management steps to issues such as anxiety, stress and toxic thinking. This 5-Step process will help you define and refine your unique needs and mental self-care regimen. As you go through this process, you’ll find that these steps are sustainable because they are customized to your unique way of thinking, feeling, and choosing—your brilliant mind-in-action! I truly believe that mental mess is something we all experience. It isn’t something we should be ashamed of. This is my profession, and I still have to clean up my mind daily! We need to realize that the events and circumstances of life aren’t going anywhere; people make a lot of decisions every day that affect us all, and suffering on some level is inevitable. That being said, I wholeheartedly believe that although many events and circumstances cannot be controlled, we can control our reactions to these events and circumstances. This is mind-management in action! Managing the mind is more than a lifestyle—it’s a necessity. We can spend lots of money and time on self-help books and seminars, wellness fads, great teachings, and podcasts, but all of this will simply become nice-to-know information if we can’t apply it—more notches on our belt, more knowledge gathering dust. Mind-management, on the other hand, can transform all this great information into applied information. When we learn how to manage our thinking, we’ll learn how to actually use the advice and information we gather as we go through life. When we learn how to manage our mind, we can go from posting inspiring quotes on social media to inspiring others through the way we live. Part 1 of Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess discusses what mind-management is, what happens when we don’t use our minds properly, and how the results of my recent clinical trials show why mind-management is the solution to cleaning up your mental mess. Part 2 of Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess provides my clinically applied and scientifically researched 5-Step mind-management plan. To make this process as easy to apply as possible, I have grouped important lifestyle choices into nine main areas, and given you a 5-Step mind-management strategy for each of these areas. These lifestyle choices include dealing with sudden acute stressors, overcoming toxic habits and trauma, dealing with identity issues, developing deeper connections, the power of brain-building, and how to sleep, eat and exercise mindfully. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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My Clinical Trial Results: Anxiety and Depression Reduced By Up To 81%!

AHA Publisher — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 08:00:24 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – We can no longer ignore the rise of anxiety, depression, anger, frustration, toxic stress and burnout in people of all ages in our society. We need to address this head on. Stressors and changes in life situations trigger responses and changes in our biochemistry, brain function and genetics, which not only affects our health, but can also be passed on through generations, which is known as epigenetics. This is both a question of how we want to live today and how we want our children to live in the future. Many current mental health strategies, including pharmaceuticals and interventions with medical devices, have not helped us fully manage or eradicate the devastating mental health conditions that plague our society. Nearly 800,000 people die by suicide in the world each year, which is roughly one death every 40 seconds. Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death in the world for those aged 15-24 years. Unmanaged depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide! The availability of simple mind-management tools for personal use, to address and ameliorate such warning signals as anxiety, depression, toxic thinking, inability to concentrate, irritability, exhaustion, burnout, before they take over someone’s mind and life could potentially help innumerable persons of all ages to experience improved mental and physical health and well-being. Why is mind-management so important? Stressors and changes in life situations trigger responses and changes in our biochemistry, brain function and genetics, which not only affects our health, but can also be passed on through generations, which is known as epigenetics. There is a significant amount of research indicating that the suppression of thoughts, which causes mental distress, is related to telomere shortening and biological aging-our life experiences are reflected in our biology. In our recent research, we proposed a randomized clinical trial with the primary aim of investigating the psychological and neurophysiological effects of a non-pharmacological intervention in subjects with mental health and neurological symptoms. The results showed that the subjects in the experimental group improved their mental health, brain health, blood physiology and cellular health by using the 5 steps of mind-management in the SWITCH app, and so can you! We found that when we learn to manage our thinking, the entire state of the brain and our cellular structure shifts and establishes a new and healthy level of balance in the mind, brain and body! Indeed, preliminary results from our trial demonstrated a significant reduction in depression and anxiety, through mind-management, by up to 81%, in the experimental group compared with the control group. The experimental subjects were learning how to embrace and make the anxiety and depression work for them and not against them, which is a much more sustainable approach than simply trying to numb or remove emotions and feelings completely. These exciting results indicate that, as we gain increased autonomy by taking control of our mental health, we become more aware of both our issues and our capacity to deal with the toxic thoughts and control toxic stress. When we change our perspective, we see opportunities instead of barriers. This process leads us to become more empowered so we can control our lives by controlling our minds! This clinical trial, along with an increasing number of studies in the neuroimaging and mind-brain literature, indicate that with appropriate mind-management training and self-regulation, which is what “cleaning up the mental mess” is all about, people can systematically use their mind to take advantage of the neuroplasticity of their brain to rework and rewire the their thoughts. By doing this, they can transform their neural circuitry, which will enable them to manage and improve a variety of mental and physical states. This means that we can literally take dysfunctional brain networks and physiology and alter them with our minds! We can manage our thinking and clean up the mental mess with habit forming cycles of 63 days, which gives a new thought pattern enough energy to become a habit that influences our behavior and communication. And if this is done continually as a lifestyle, overall wellbeing, peace and wisdom are the reward! The path to empowerment is not only attainable, it is within you! You can guide and direct changes in your brain. Your mind is something you can learn to optimize, with my scientific, 5-step mind-management process. These 5 steps will not only empower you to push through the pain that may come from the healing work, but also give you a structured scientifically researched plan that works and a defined time period for the process, which will further reduce your pain, uncertainty, and make the process more effective and sustainable! To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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