Learning About Stress, Burnout and Compassion

Stress effecting your overall health? Burning out - Compassion is the answer!

1. Routine stress related to the pressures of work, family and other daily responsibilities.
2. Stress brought about by a sudden negative change, such as losing a job, divorce, or illness.
3. Traumatic stress, experienced in an event like a major accident, war, assault, or a natural disaster where one may be seriously hurt or in danger of being killed.

• The body responds to each type of stress in similar ways. Different people may feel it in different ways. For example, some people experience mainly digestive symptoms, while others may have headaches, sleeplessness, depressed mood, anger and irritability. People under chronic stress are prone to more frequent and severe viral infections, such as the flu or common cold, and vaccines, such as the flu shot, are less effective for them.
• Of all the types of stress, changes in health from routine stress may be hardest to notice at first. Because the source of stress tends to be more constant than in cases of acute or traumatic stress, the body gets no clear signal to return to normal functioning. Over time, continued strain on your body from routine stress may lead to serious health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, anxiety disorder, and other illnesses.
• We’ll be exploring all the above types of stress, as well as the potential cumulative effects of it, burnout. More importantly, we’ll be thinking and working towards lessening stress and burnout through a variety of approaches, including compassion and self-compassion.
• Feeling stressed out? Need stress relief? Scared you are about to burnout? It's time to use compassion and a deeper understanding brought with the best of social, clinical and positive psychology to work on your mental and physical wellbeing.

Compassion

1. Noticing another’s suffering
2. Empathically feeling the person’s pain
3. Acting to ease the suffering.