What Is Spiritual Burnout and How Do You Move Through It? (Transcript)

Episode transcript, ShelbyRADIO · 26 minutes

Short answer: Spiritual burnout is real, and it isn't failure. It's overload. It happens when your awareness expands faster than your body and nervous system can integrate it, so you take in more than you can process. You're usually not tired of growing, you're tired of processing. The way through isn't pushing harder or consuming more content; it's slowing down, simplifying and giving yourself space to integrate what you already know.

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Key takeaways

• Spiritual burnout is a normal part of awakening. It's overload, not failure, and you can go through it more than once.
• It can feel like emotional fatigue, overthinking, being on high alert and wanting to "turn it off."
• It happens when there's too much input and not enough integration, so the nervous system gets overloaded.
• Taking in information from too many sources leads to a mental loop where you over-analyze and lose the simplicity of the process.
• Pushing harder and consuming more doesn't help you heal faster. You heal by allowing integration.
• Exhaustion doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It means your system is asking you to slow down so the change can settle.

Full transcript

Lightly edited for reading.

When awakening starts to feel exhausting (00:00)

Have you ever felt a calling, something deep, something you can't quite explain, that's urging you to step into a higher version of yourself?

There's a point in your awakening where it stops feeling exciting and starts feeling exhausting. You're aware that you're growing and that you're seeing things more clearly, but instead of feeling better, you're actually feeling more drained. If this is you, welcome to ShelbyRADIO. I am Shelby Carino, and we are going to continue the conversation in the Awakening series about spiritual burnout, because this is a real thing.

The hype nobody warns you about (01:24)

This is a topic we maybe don't hear a lot about in Google land, because there's so much hype around it. "Oh, you're waking up. Look, you have so much awareness. Your consciousness is expanding. You found your twin flame." It's shiny ball syndrome everywhere. This looks good over here, and now this, and now this.

There's all this excitement and enthusiasm, and then you get to the reality as you're moving through the process and you're like, "I'm exhausted. I thought I was supposed to reverse age. I thought I was supposed to redo my metabolism at this point. What is going on?" This is very common. It's a part of the process, and nothing is wrong. It's just spiritual burnout, and it's not failure. It's overload.

Awakening isn't one and done (02:20)

I'm raising my hand: I have been through spiritual burnout more than one time. I keep saying this in my episodes, spiritual awakening is not a one-and-done process. It's an ongoing process of self. Depending on where you are in your awakening and what layer of your onion you're peeling, it always feels like you're starting over.

But you're not starting over from where you were in that one layer. You're starting over from a different depth in the onion. So an overload at each depth is different, until you finally get to the root of your onion. That's where things stabilize and harmonize, and life becomes normal again, with all the magic and blessings in there, without feeling like you're getting kicked time and time again because you're constantly learning a lesson. It's a process, and you just keep moving through it.

What spiritual burnout feels like (04:12)

So what does spiritual burnout feel like? It feels like emotional fatigue. You just emotionally cannot handle anything in your world. Maybe you overthink everything. If you're not necessarily an emotional person, you may take it in as overthinking in the mind.

You feel like you're in constant awareness of everything around you, on high alert everywhere. You become overwhelmed by growing, to the point where you're like, "I don't want to take in one more piece of information that has to do with growth," because there's no space in you for it. You just want to turn it off. "How do I turn this off? I woke up, fine. I don't want to wake up anymore."

Tired of processing, not growing (05:08)

Well, you're not necessarily tired of growing. You're tired of processing. That was a huge one for me when I recognized I was in spiritual burnout. I didn't want to stop growing. I didn't want to quit learning. I just wanted to stop feeling so overloaded by what I was processing.

What that catapulted me into was asking, "What can I create in my life so that when I'm feeling overloaded, I have somewhere to go and process?" That's where Joe and I bought a camper. It was first intended as a place for him to stay when he went out hunting, but it turned out to be our oasis as a couple. When we get overloaded and want to leave the house, go into nature and get to the lake, we have our home on wheels, and we do that processing in the camper.

That's what we created. You may create something different. But you have to get to an awareness of that overload, accept that you're in overload, and then ask, "Where and what can I do in my life to go and process for a few days, in a way that my soul and my energy body will appreciate? Where is that space for me?" That's a part of taking care of self.

Why spiritual burnout happens (07:28)

Now, why does spiritual burnout happen? I asked myself that question a lot, and here's my perspective. It happens when you go through a rapid fire of expansion. Your awareness is expanding so much, and your consciousness is taking in so much information. That could be your own internal, generational information or collective consciousness information. Whatever it is, it begins expanding your perspectives: how you see things, how you feel about them and what you think about them.

And it happens really, really fast. That's the rapid fire. So the nervous system gets overloaded, because you're taking in information faster than you can run it through your body. When there's too much input and not enough integration, plus that "I need to fix everything at once" feeling, that's where spiritual burnout happens.

Why support helps you integrate (09:20)

When you can bounce what's coming in off of someone else and through someone else, you integrate the information quicker. It harmonizes and stabilizes the nervous system quicker, and it helps unload a lot of the anxiety that comes from the nervous system trying to process it all. So when you're at this level of awareness and awakening, you have to pull somebody in who can help you move through that processing. We're relational beings. That's what we do. But you want to have the right person.

For me, I would call my mentor and say, "Hey, I need a session." She knew how to run the energies and help me get back to a more harmonized state, until I got to a place in my awakening where I didn't need that as much because I was getting stronger. My immune system was getting built in the energies because I was doing so much healing. Then I ran it through my courses, through a tribe and through clients. There's an ecosystem we get into that helps us maneuver the frequencies coming into us, which are sometimes so fast we can't integrate them all at once, and we need someone to come in and help balance that.

I'm very passionate about this, because I'm so tired of watching people spin on a loop when you can really straighten it out. It's not hard. You just have to be willing to accept information and do something with the information that's already being installed within you because of your awakening.

The mental loop (12:36)

This leads me to the mental loop. I'm speaking from my own experience, because I did this. When you wake up, you have so much information coming at you, and from so many different sources. You turn the news on, you hear voices in your head, you listen to gurus, you watch five million YouTube videos, you listen to five million podcasts. You're listening to me right now, right?

When you're picking it up from so many sources, you begin to analyze everything. You begin over-interpreting things emotionally, not just how you feel, but the things outside of you. You try to solve the pattern of what's going on. And what ends up happening is you lose the simplicity behind the process. You've complicated it because you're not grounded. You're swirling and spinning with no direction. That's usually when my clients find me, in the mental loop, because they have awareness without it being grounded.

When it becomes exhausting (14:28)

That's when it becomes exhausting. That's when people's health goes down, they take time off work or they get sick, and they reach a desperation phase where they're like, "I need help." Then they tell me, "I just happened to be on Google and your page showed up," or "a reel showed up on Instagram and I resonated with it." It's funny, because they weren't necessarily logically looking for it. It just showed up. Somewhere in their spirit, they were told, "Go find this person," because they're looking for the grounding.

I moved through the waking-up process in my feminine side long before I met Joe. When I met Joe and my masculine came in, that became the grounding. I've done so much work through my masculine to ground what my airy-fairy feminine was all about back in the day, and it has continued to ground more and more. That's why the content I've put out is from different phases of my awakening. Whatever you're attracted to will meet you where you are, because it's where I was when I was going through it. You're just looking for the grounding so you can move through the spiritual burnout.

The mistake: pushing harder (16:48)

Now I'm going to challenge a belief system. I always say there's nothing you're doing wrong, but here's what people do that's wrong, or at least where you could find a better way. They push harder. "I'm exhausted, so I need to work harder. I need to put more things into my nervous system." They consume more content. "Let me listen to these ten podcast episodes. Let me take thirty courses from thirty different teachers. Let me go find five more friends and get emotionally overloaded by them."

People do this because they're trying to heal faster, and they're not resting. So do not do that. If you find you are doing that, we need to get that under control, because that is not what you want to do.

You heal by allowing integration (17:44)

You do not heal faster by doing more. You heal by allowing the integration. In society, we don't do enough integrating, because we're always doing more. That's why things happen out here, with the weather or back in 2020, that shut us down, so we will rest, so we will get bored, so we will integrate, so we will stop doing. So we can get back to simplicity and process the overload we're bringing in.

If we as human beings living a spiritual experience don't do this on our own, then something outside of us will make it happen, so you will slow down. Because that's what your body needs. Your body needs to slow down. That's where the integration happens. That's where the simplicity happens. That's where you become more present with self, and that's what leads to regulating your nervous system.

Your body doesn't need more awareness when you're in spiritual burnout. It needs a space to process what you already know, what has been coming in through your awareness. That's a huge piece of information I wish I'd had when I first woke up, because it's a game changer if you understand it and allow that process to take place.

Find your space to slow down (20:04)

Sometimes that slowing down only needs to happen for one or two days. Again, without Joe and me realizing what we were doing, the camper just showed up in our world. I don't do tent camping. I've been through the phase of "I can rough it out in the woods." No, I glam. I want a nice cozy bed in the camper. I want a toilet. I'm okay with luxury at this stage of my life. I don't have to prove that I can go live in the woods.

So where are you in your process? For us, it still is the camper. When I know we're both overloaded and need to process, we plan a camping trip for two or three days on a weekend, and our energy runs in unison with that. We go out, we camp, we have a great time, we let go, we sleep really well, we eat really well, and we come back.

Then, the week we're back, we see what we've integrated and processed, and that's how we measure where we are in our awakening. Do we have a trigger coming up? Do I feel more emotionally calm and stable? Am I back at Pilates? Joe has a different way he references where he's at. You have to become aware of your awareness, of when it's time to slow down, simplify, become present and get your nervous system regulated.

This is where change stabilizes (21:56)

All of this to say: if you're in burnout, you need to go through the integration phase. You're not learning something new so much as integrating the learning that's already occurring. The aha moments start going off: "Oh, wow, that's what's happening." This is where change within you actually stabilizes.

That is a necessary part of your awakening process, at every single layer of the onion, however deep you go in this lifetime. Because this isn't where the growth stops. It's where it settles. And it's so important that you let it settle.

Exhaustion means you're doing something right (23:20)

So if you're feeling exhausted right now, it doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. You're actually doing something right. It just means you've gone deep enough in this segment of your awakening, and now your system is asking you to slow down. You have to pay attention to that.

Whatever helps you slow down, whether it's a course you let run through you or a weekend away like Joe and me in the camper, it's the processing, the integration side of slowing down. It's not stacking more in there. It's moving through what's already in there.

Remember, the journey doesn't end here. It's only the beginning. I'll see you on the path.

Frequently asked questions

What is spiritual burnout?

Spiritual burnout is the exhaustion that comes when your awareness expands faster than your body and nervous system can integrate it. It isn't failure. It's overload, and it's a common part of the awakening process.

What are the signs of spiritual burnout?

Signs include emotional fatigue, overthinking, feeling on high alert, feeling overwhelmed by anything to do with growth and wanting to "turn off" your awakening. Often you're not tired of growing, you're tired of processing. If exhaustion is affecting your health, sleep or work, please also talk with your doctor.

How do you recover from spiritual burnout?

Slow down and allow integration instead of pushing harder or consuming more content. Create a space where you can rest and process, even for a day or two, simplify, become present and let your nervous system regulate. Support from the right person can help you integrate faster.

Can you go through spiritual burnout more than once?

Yes. Awakening isn't one and done. Each layer brings its own overload, so burnout can show up again at a deeper level, until things stabilize and harmonize.

Where to go next

• Start here: my free 16-minute audio, When You Don't Feel Like Yourself
• The course: Expanding Consciousness Fundamentals, a step-by-step guide to what's happening during a spiritual awakening
• Listen next: Learning to Trust Yourself Again After Awakening
• Work with me one-on-one: private sessions