If you haven’t got a mindfulness practice in place, what else can you do to treat burnout and manage your mental wellbeing? Here are some recommendations.

Stress management techniques:

Techniques to discharge excess energy and adrenaline, such as progressive muscle relaxation, exercise and stretches
Techniques to signal safety to the nervous system, such as rhythmic breathing or social connection with someone who is calm (a hug or phone call)

Trauma-informed mindfulness:

This is a growing trend. It teaches self-soothing and self-regulation before mindful awareness training. Instead of focusing on internal sensations like the breath, you’re invited to focus on something external like music or the space around you. Instead of dropping into stillness with a sitting meditation, you’re invited to do an activity mindfully, such as walking or making tea.

Self-soothing practices

Tending to physical distress in burnout should involve the way you speak to yourself. Softening your inner tone of voice to mimic how you would speak to someone you care about is a good starting point. A default for many when stressed is to talk to themselves with a hard, accusatory tone. When we switch to this alternative, compassionate tone, while using wording that acknowledges how hard the situation is, we tap into our attachment chemistry, which has a calming effect. If this is hard for you, it’s not a sign that you’ve failed, it’s a sign that this skill wasn’t developed in childhood. A good option to try is compassion-focused therapy.

Learning mindfulness with a teacher

Learning mindfulness with an experienced teacher makes a big difference. They will help you understand that you aren’t failing when your mind wanders and guide you through any tricky experiences to gain maximum understanding of this.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programmes are the gold standard for this. There should be one local to you or online.

Dr Claire Plumbly is a clinical psychologist and author. Get more details about the strategies listed here and more in her debut book Burnout: How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You (Yellow Kite, 2024).

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