I’m about to ask you a really important question: How full do you feel right now?
I don’t mean physically full — as in you just scarfed down your dinner and you’re feeling stuffed past the point of no return — I mean emotionally full. What I’m really talking about is the fullness of purpose, energy, motivation, peace, joy, creativity, strength, hope and connection. Maybe it’s easier for you to assess the answer to my question when you think about the opposite end of the spectrum. The opposite of fullness is emptiness. It’s the emptiness of overwhelm, lack of motivation, low energy, fatigue, depression or anxiety, feeling alone, hopeless, apathetic, tired, cynical, and just generally burnt-out.
How full do you feel right now? Or maybe I should ask, how empty? If I asked you to tell me on a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being I feel EXTREMELY FULL and 0 being I feel COMPLETELY EMPTY… what number would you give yourself?
I wish there was an easy way to get an answer to my question. As a professional counselor, I’m often challenging and encouraging people to tune in to how they’re feeling. I would love it if somehow, we could figure out a way to get some of these answers in a more objective way that’s a little easier to determine. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some sort of gauge on our bodies that allowed us to accurately see how full we were feeling, like the gas tank gauge on a car? Imagine if we could see that little needle, starting at F when we’re FULL, and slowly making its way down toward E as we’re nearing EMPTY? I could guarantee you I’d have far fewer clients coming into my counseling office in a state of complete crisis and total burnout if that feature existed on the human body. We could just track our fullness as we went through life, stopping to fill up as soon as our emotional reservoir started ticking below the quarter tank mark on our emotional gas gauge.
But we don’t. Yet, we all have an emotional tank that needs filling. We all have an emotional capacity that we need to be acutely aware of in order to avoid burnout, depression, anxiety, and significant emotional crisis. We all have a responsibility to stay filled in order to live a peace-filled, thriving, joyful life.
Jesus called it living a FULL life (John 10:10). The problem is, so many Christians aren’t feeling full. They’re feeling empty. Which ironically, is the exact way the enemy wants us to live. In contrast to the way of Jesus, living full and abundant, John 10:10 tells us that “the thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy” (NIV). God’s word is referring to Satan, our enemy, the thief who wants to empty out our lives completely; to steal all of our resources, time, energy, motivation, purpose, and joy. He wants to rob us and drain every ounce of our emotional and spiritual reservoir so that we’re either unable or unwilling to live the full lives God calls us to live.
We are completely ineffective when we are completely empty because our level of impact has a direct correlation with our level of fullness. We cannot love and serve others well out of a place of emptiness, which is exactly why the enemy wants to sieve every last drop out of our lives. But God’s will is for us to live filled. Because we can’t live fully until we live filled. If the enemy wants to steal, kill, and destroy — Jesus wants to fill us and restore us and renew us.
LOOK FOR THE SIGNALS
One thing I’ve learned over the years, in both my personal life and in my professional life, is that our bodies are literally trying to tell us something. They are sending us a message. Burnout is our body’s way of crying out for us to PAY ATTENTION. It’s the SOS signal telling us that we need to stop and care for ourselves. But rather than seeing the signs of burnout as a signal to stop and fill up, I’ve noticed that so many people do the exact opposite. They try to push through. They judge themselves for feeling exhausted, depleted, and low. They hide, repress, and numb all the hard feelings and just… keep… going. But that’s like seeing all the emergency lights going off on your car dashboard, and assuming that it will all go away if you just keep driving. I can tell you from experience, that doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with cars and it doesn’t work in life. What ends up happening when you don’t stop to repair is that eventually, you just break down.
LOOK FOR SIGNALS
The signs of burnout are important for us to understand because they don’t happen overnight. And they don’t happen all at once. The signals of burnout pop up here and there. They tend to get more intense and more frequent with time. But if we’re aware of the signs and symptoms, we can see them as a signal that we need to stop and care for ourselves rather than just push through. If we’re aware of what our body is telling us, we can stop to listen and respond before we hit the breaking point. Here are some signs you might be nearing burnout:
- Feeling overwhelmed more often than usual.
- A loss of motivation or energy more than usual.
- Feeling tired, drained, exhausted, or fatigued more often than not.
- Feeling helpless, trapped, or defeated.
- Increased depression or anxiety.
- Feeling alone or isolated, even when you’re with people.
- A nagging sense of failure, self-doubt, or insecurity.
- Struggling with a negative or cynical outlook on life.
- Feeling apathy, irritability, impatience, bitterness, resentment, or anger toward yourself, God, or others.
- An increase in physical symptoms — such as headaches or migraines, aches and pains, stomach or digestive issues, heart palpitations (skipped beats) or tachycardia (fast heart rate) unrelated to underlying medical issues.
- Finding yourself thinking or saying, “I can’t do this…” or “I’m done…”
In general, most of the people who are experiencing signs of burnout report a lack of enjoyment and excitement in life.
As you read through the list above, ask yourself what signals your body may be sending you, but more importantly, how are you responding to those signals? Do you ignore them and keep pushing through? Do you try to tune out the signals by numbing yourself with screens, devices, drugs, alcohol, shopping, porn, food, sugar, entertainment, and busyness? Do you judge yourself with guilt and shame and then try to do even more? Or do you listen and respond to the signals, stop and care for yourself, and bring your body back into alignment?
THE ANSWER TO BURNOUT: SOUL CARE
Maybe in our best attempts at serving God, loving others, caring for our families, and winning souls for Jesus — we’ve actually forgotten what it means to check in with our own level of fullness, to get a healthy gauge on how we’re doing spiritually and emotionally, to stop and take the time to nourish and nurture our own souls. Maybe while we’ve been distracted with our full schedules and our to-do lists, our many goals and agendas, our important ministries, and meetings — we’ve allowed ourselves to slowly tick toward E without ever noticing. We’ve allowed ourselves to live out a place of emptiness, rather than living out of a place of fullness. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ve never actually learned how to fill up. We’ve never learned how to truly care for our souls.
One of my biggest inspirations for the message of Soul Care is the life and rhythms of Jesus. As I studied the Gospels, one thing that stood out loud and clear to me was the fact that Jesus, though He was fully God, was also fully man. He understood the limitations of his human body. He was acutely aware of the fact that his body had a capacity. And He was so intentional about making sure to stay filled, so that He could pour out to the people God had called Him to fill up.
What if we could live with this type of awareness? What if we could honor our own capacity, learn to fill up and stay filled, long before we reached the point of empty?
If this resonates with you, I challenge you to join me as we go on a journey of filling up. We’re not only going to assess our level of fullness, but we’ll also keep track of our level of emptiness. We’re going to learn the purpose and meaning and value of caring for our souls, and then we’re going to discover exactly how to do it through six different life-giving rhythms (each one I believe is both backed up by counseling and psychology, and modeled in the life of Jesus): NOURISH, REST, CONNECT, PROTECT, SAVOR, and TUNE IN. It’s a six-part process that I like to call, SOUL CARE.
Step by step, you can discover some of the most important rhythms that I have been inspired by and learned so much from, through the life of Jesus. Rhythms that I not only apply in my own life, but that I also teach my clients, as well as the thousands of church members, pastors, and leaders that I have the privilege of serving and teaching from all across the country.
Empty people can’t pour out because they have nothing left to give. That’s why we’re going on a journey of filling up, so that we can keep pouring out effectively and indefinitely to those who God has called us to pour into: to our marriage, our children, our families, our friends, our churches, our communities, and our ministries.
It’s time to take seriously the importance of fueling up. It’s time to take seriously the call of living life in all its fullness.
Check out Deb Fileta’s newest book Soul Care, available now, for more information.
