🔥 Burnout Buddies

A guide to herbal friends for navigating stress and overwhelm

🌱💬 Herb.Chat is a monthly herby/foody/flowery advice column (sometimes written, sometimes video, sometimes audio) for paid subscribers of The Dirt newsletter. Paid subscribers are welcome to leave comments at the bottom and 🌈 submit your anonymous questions for future months.

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You've Entered the {🌱💬 Herb.}Chat.

🔥 bonedeep.exhausted:

Q: After the last 4 years, I've been feeling emotionally burned out and exhausted from COVID and everything going on in our world - like full-body physical and emotional burnout. What are some herbs or practices that can support me through this?

🌱herb.chat:

First off, I’m really sorry you are experiencing physical and emotional burnout right now - I’ve been there, and it can feel really isolating, overwhelming, and just down-right saddening.

What I know, though, is that you are absolutely not alone in your experience - Forbes, The NY Times, The Atlantic, NPR, and many more media outlets talk about the rampant burnout that people around the world began experiencing and that continues to be experienced from the pandemic. That coupled with living through late-stage capitalism and witnessing continued human rights injustices/atrocities and climate collapse...well - it’s a dumpster-fire out there, so feeling full-body over-it makes complete sense.

1️⃣ first things first

I’m going to be serving up some herbs and practices to support you through the physical and emotional burnout, but I first want to acknowledge that how you feel is not your fault. So many of the things that are influencing that full-body burden pressure require solutions that are outside of any one person’s ability, that will come through collective and cultural shifts. Since that is the bigger work of culture-change, though, for today’s purposes we are going to focus in on some here-and-now steps we can take to unsaddle some of the weight.

📓🌿 A Formulation for the Weak and Weary

The Framework:

Back in the olden days, there was a term that was used to describe a certain type of emotional and physical burnout: nervous debility.

Nervous debility was a catch-all condition used to describe the weakness, fatigue, depletion, and even loss of muscle or muscular tone, that accompanies an overloaded nervous system and/or a dysregulated endocrine (hormonal) system, often following a prolonged period of stress, illness, or challenging life events.

So, when I think of herbs for the type of burnout you describe - this really long-term, prolonged stressful experience (that can also include prolonged illness for some) - I think of a person with features of nervous debility - tired, depleted, under-resourced, and lacking some of that underlying vital force that brings that va-voom into every day moments.

The Line-Up:

Based on that line of thinking, here are a few of the plant babies that I think have some wisdom around this particular version of weak and weary burnt-out when blended together: