Former charity boss says trees helped with burnout

A former charity director and environmental campaigner has spoken of how burnout impacted her life and how meditation helped her recover.

Natalie Fee ran the Bristol based charity City to Sea for a decade and said she first felt the symptoms of burnout after "two to three years" when a combination of stressful work and home events combined.

She battled the symptoms for a few years until the first Covid lock down when she began meditating under an oak tree in Greenbank Cemetery.

"I noticed that meditation felt different outside, there were fewer distractions and it felt like I was coming more into a relationship with the tree itself, the wildlife and the land around that tree," said Natalie.

Occupational burnout is a health condition that stems from persistent and prolonged periods of stress that can have significant knock-on health effects.

"Burnout isn't just about having a stressful week, it's a profound state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion that happens when we are under constant pressure," said Simon Gunning, CEO, Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM).

"Prevention is best where possible, especially for burnout. Making genuine time for yourself, taking regular breaks, setting boundaries and focusing on the things you can control can help keep those every-day stresses manageable," he added.

Natalie said she felt like she may have been "running on stress hormones for a long time prior to that," but that the first time she experienced what she would class as burnout came in 2017, a few years into running City to Sea.

"It was all go go go, it was really stressful and really demanding," she said.

"[Everything] resulted in absolute exhaustion, fatigue, unable to get up, feeling very blue and feeling extremely tired."

"I think some people might also call it adrenal fatigue, when you've been running on stress hormones and cortisol for a long time, that can very much tire out the body."

Natalie said the charity was very supportive of people experiencing burnout and adopted a four-day working week in an effort to protect staff from it but it was meditation that ultimately helped her the most.

"I would try and still my mind and just focus on my breath," she said.

"Occasionally one can experience a deep state of peace and clarity and spaciousness, its quite extraordinary and doesn't happen every time I sit down and cross my legs," she added.

"It's like a muscle, people might think meditation is like going to an energy gym."

"People might think its woo woo but I embrace the woo woo side."

Stress is built up and can be felt physically in the body through things like headaches and muscle pain.

Natalie said the process of meditation also helped relieve persistent back aches and health anxiety.

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