Category: Happy x Mindful

When you hear the word meditation, what do you think about? Closing your eyes, focusing your thoughts, taking some deep breaths?
Many of us think about meditation as a mindful activity done using one specific technique. The truth is that there are many different types of meditation, each with its own benefits.
“Talking about ‘meditation’ is like talking about the word ‘sport’. It’s an umbrella term that encompasses many different disciplines. There are hundreds of sports and hundreds of meditation techniques,” explains Francisco Mendizabal, meditation instructor and founder of HackSelf. HackSelf is an organization that helps people find the meditation technique that’s right for them through a quiz and consultation, and it provides coaching sessions for the various techniques.
But why does it matter that there are different types of meditation? Firstly, studies show that different kinds of meditation can have unique effects on those who try them. Secondly, people’s personality types and life experiences determine their responses to different types of meditation. If one type isn’t great for you, you don’t need to write meditation off forever; another type might feel completely different—propelling you into a sustainable meditative practice, or at least something you can stick with long enough to experience the effects
If we believe there’s only one way to meditate, we might become discouraged when we struggle to meditate in whatever way we’ve been exposed to or conjured up. In truth, there are many ‘right’ ways to do meditation, and it’s okay if it takes you a while to find the best meditation style for your practice.
“Many people believe that in order to meditate, you must be sitting up tall with your eyes shut, not moving a muscle, in complete silence, hushing your mind—and for extremely long periods of times,” says Jess Kimborough, a yoga and meditation instructor. “If any part of this long list of dos and don’ts seems difficult to carry out, we throw out the entire idea of starting a meditation practice,” she says.
Instead of trying to stick to a long list of requirements, we should find the meditation techniques that work for us, Kimborough suggests. “Your meditation practice does not need to look one particular way and can very well change from day to day,” she says. “You do not have to be sitting, your eyes can be open, you can add in movement with your breath, you can meditate to music or chanting, and your meditation practice can be a very quick timeout.”
Both Kimborough and Mendizabal say that practicing meditation consistently is key. It’s easier to be consistent in your practice when you find something that works for you, which is why experimenting with various kinds of meditation is a great idea.
If you haven’t yet found a meditation technique that appeals to you, or if you’re interested in trying different kinds of meditation, read on to understand the most popular techniques.

Different Types of Meditation Techniques

There are two broad categories of meditation: open monitoring meditation and focused attention meditation, Mendizabal says.
“Open monitoring techniques usually involve being open to anything that enters your awareness,” he says. “Examples include feelings, thoughts, or sounds. All experiences, either internal or external, are simply observed—or ‘monitored’—without reaction or judgment,” he explains. Most of us are familiar with the concept of mindfulness meditation, which is a kind of open monitoring technique.
Focused attention techniques, on the other hand, require you to focus on a specific object, sound, or word. “Common meditation objects include focusing on your breath or a mantra,” Mendizabal says. “Transcendence or mantra meditations are the most common examples of this focused attention techniques,” he adds.
Of course, these techniques have different effects on practitioners. For example, a study suggests that focused-attention meditation improves convergent thinking while open-monitoring meditation improves divergent thinking. Mendizabal suggests that focused-attention meditation increases your ability to concentrate, while open-monitoring meditation improves your ability to relax.

Beyond those two categories of meditation, there are further classifications when it comes to the different types of meditation that you can practice.

1. Mindfulness Meditation

Many of us are familiar with a kind of meditation that involves relaxing, sitting quietly, and observing our thoughts and surroundings. This is mindfulness meditation, and it’s a form of open-response meditation. This is sometimes called observing-thought meditation.
Learning to be mindful is a useful skill that can help you during any form of meditation, at work, in relationships, and in other situations. “Mindfulness is being completely present in the current moment and aware of yourself within your surroundings,” Kimborough says. “My favorite thing about a mindfulness practice is that it can be completely mobile. Yes, you want to be mindful during any meditation practice, but you can also be mindful by taking a shower, riding a bike, walking down the street, or talking with friends,” she says.

2. Mantra Meditation

Mantra meditation is a kind of focused attention technique that involves thinking about a specific word or phrase. Kimborough suggests you come up with a mantra or affirmation that means a lot to you in that moment. As you meditate, try to match the mantra to your breath.
“Suppose your mantra is ‘I am supported.’ As you breathe in, say to yourself, ‘I am,’ then exhale out as you say to yourself, ‘supported,’” Kimborough says. “Imagine the words in your mind fully—the color, font, size of the words. Whenever you notice your mind starting to wander, gently guide your thoughts back to your breath and your mantra, carrying yourself back into the current moment once again.”

3. Transcendental Meditation

Transcendental Meditation is a widely-practiced form of meditation. The technique is instructed exclusively by a non-profit organization and can only be taught by one of their licensed instructors. Because Transcendental Meditation is a formal practice associated with an organization, you’ll have to pay a fee to learn it. That said, the technique itself involves engaging in a kind of mantra meditation for 15 to 20 minutes a day, twice a day.
While research suggests Transcendental Meditation has numerous health benefits including stress reduction and improved cardiovascular health, many people are also critical of the practice and those who follow it.

4. Loving-Kindness Meditation

Also known as compassion meditation, loving-kindness meditation involves focusing on feelings of compassion toward oneself, one’s loved ones, acquaintances, and the universe in general. You start off by wishing well on yourself, and you gradually work toward wishing well on those around you. This could include focusing on mantras like “May I be well, safe, and happy”.
One small study has suggested that loving-kindness meditation may help improve the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, while other studies indicate that it could help improve connectedness and well-being by promoting positive emotions.

5. Sound Meditation

As the name suggests, sound meditation involves focusing on a sound. You might focus on ambient music or the sound of birds or cars in your surroundings, for example. A pilot study has suggested that Tibetan sound meditation could improve the cognitive function and mental health of breast cancer patients. Another pilot study suggests sound meditation improves relaxation among cancer patients.
“Music has the power to move us—literally! It can make us cry, jump up and down, healing us,” Kimborough says. “During a sound meditation—whether set to live music, singing bowls, or your favorite jams—you would allow the sound to fall on you and notice how the vibrations feel,” she says.

6. Movement Meditation

Movement meditation involves focusing on the movements of your body. You might even match your movements to your breath as one does during yoga, Kimborough says. “In yoga, you are uniting your movement and your breath. As you inhale, you move up and as you exhale you move down,” she says. “Matching up the breath and movement in this way encourages you to be in the current moment.”
However, movement meditation isn’t limited to yoga: You can do it while swimming, cycling, stretching, dancing, or even walking. Kimborough suggests you practice movement meditation while walking. “Be mindful with each step, noticing how your feet connect with the earth, how your arms sway in unison. Notice your shoulders, your neck holding up the weight of your head, and so on,” she explains. “You can move mindfully in any action you choose and call that a meditation practice. A fun practice—if you dare!—is to do this walking meditation while barefoot in the grass, and notice what comes up as you connect to mother nature.”

7. Visualization Meditation

Visualization meditation is a great way to hone your imaginitive skills and manifest your goals, says Kimborough. “When we were kids, we would imagine the most grandiose ideas. We’d say, ‘I want to be a firefighter,’ then continue to imagine this story play[ing] out fully in our minds to the point where we [could] act out the life of a firefighter with just a water hose,” she explains. As we age, we often lose our ability to imagine ourselves and visualize our goals. “Visualization allows us to tap back into this forgotten skill of ours,” she says.
During visualization meditation, you might imagine yourself accomplishing your dreams and goals. “What would you look like? Where would you be? Who would you be with? What is happening around you? Paint the picture fully and sit with it,” Kimborough suggests.

8. Guided Meditation

If you’re unsure where to start with meditation, guided meditation can be super helpful. You could turn to apps like Headspace or Mindworks, or you could find guided meditations on YouTube or in audiobook format. Kimborough says that guided meditations are great for time-keeping and combating distractions during meditation. “The guide will remind you to remain in the present moment with different cues to draw your attention to breath, movement, mantra, and so on,” she says.
Mendizabal believes guided meditations can be useful, but that it’s a life-changer to learn how to meditate without relying on external guidance. “You stop requiring external tools and start being able to access the benefits by yourself,” he says. “You also gain more profound insights and experiences as the practice develops.”

9. Gazing Meditation

Most of us think we need to close our eyes when we meditate, but this is not necessarily the case. Your sight could help you reach a meditative state. With gazing meditation, you focus your vision on something like a flame, a spot on a wall, or even tea in a teacup.
Want to practice your social skills? Gazing meditation could be a great technique for you. “You treat your sense of vision as another sense. Instead of closing your eyes, you focus your gaze on a meditation object, such as a point on a wall,” Mendizabal says. “Since eyes are key in social interactions, this can be great training to be able to look into people’s eyes, keep your gaze calm and confident, and so on,” he says. “The amount of scientific data is limited on this, but the thousands of hours spent by different schools of meditation are enough to be a source to trust.”

Which type of meditation should I choose?

There are so many types of meditation out there that you might struggle to decide which style to try first.
Mendizabal says that you could choose a type of meditation based on whether you have a type A or a type B personality: type A being particularly goal-oriented and driven, and type B being more relaxed and flexible.
“Type A personalities tend to find focused attention meditation techniques easier to stick to. This makes sense since they are goal-oriented and tend to be always focused on something. So transcendence or mantra meditation is a good approach for if you fall under this category,” says Mendizabal.
Type B personalities benefit from focused attention meditations if they want to be able to concentrate better, although it might not be as easy for them.
“If you don’t have a preference, or [are] looking mainly to increase your ability to relax, go for an open monitoring technique,” says Mendizabal. “Mindfulness meditation is a good approach, and you’ll still be able to improve your ability to focus.”
Kimborough suggests experimenting with different types of meditation and even combining meditation styles until you find what’s right for you. “Get fancy with it and combine a couple and see what jives with you,” she says. “I personally like to combine mantras and visualization. Choose your mantra, pair it to your breath, then imagine that mantra fully realized in your life. How powerful is that?”
No matter the type of meditation, remember that consistently meditating is more important than meditating “perfectly”—however you might perceive a “perfect” meditation to be. Consistency is more important than length, too. Mendizabal points out that meditating for ten minutes every day is way better than doing it for an hour every week.
“Always remember: Every meditation counts, even the ones that don’t feel right,” Mendizabal says. “Each time you sit down and meditate, you strengthen your neural pathways. You are optimizing your brain to live a better life. Every meditation is a good meditation.”

Can a deck of tarot cards tell the future? Well, that’s what I was convinced of when I was 10 years old, and movies like The Craft and Practical Magic filled my mind with the power of the occult. I picked up a deck of tarot cards and a guidebook on a witchcraft-themed trip to Salem, Massachusetts, and spent every evening of the following month learning how to give myself readings. It was pure childhood magic.
But then, those jaded teenage years set in, and I stopped believing in pretty much everything I couldn’t literally see or feel—including tarot. My cards sat gathering dust at my dad’s house. Investing time, money, or headspace to unproven things like tarot felt absolutely foolish to me well into my twenties. Tell me you’re going to see a tarot reader, and you could expect a royal eye roll—judgmental, I know. But what could you possibly learn from a deck of cards with cryptic pictures?
Apparently a lot, but gleaning anything from tarot cards requires a shift in mindset and expectations. My change of heart happened at a recent fashion launch party, where tarot card reader Calley Nelson was offering free five-minute sessions.
Nelson presented tarot as “an ancient form of storytelling.” Hey, I’m a journalist—storytelling’s kind of my thing—so I immediately opened myself back up to the practice. She clued me into the fact that tarot card readings are not about predicting what’s to come, but rather tapping into insights about your life and exploring possible outcomes to problems. All of a sudden, the popularity of tarot made sense again—skepticism be damned. What’s more: Nelson’s tarot card reading definitely opened me up to new possibilities.
“Small tools like tarot can help you connect and find meaning to life,” she explains. “Life isn’t fun without meaning, so why not find it in this ancient way?”
Want to gain insights about your life from tarot cards? Read on to learn about choosing a deck that speaks to you, getting familiar with the meanings of major cards, and giving yourself quick readings that might just spark new ideas about living your best life.

What’s the deal with tarot cards?

With a total of 78 cards, tarot decks seem like a complicated thing to master. But the truth is, these cards actually have a lot of similarities to something that’s probably bouncing around a junk drawer in your home right now: the standard 52-card deck (the one you use for regular card games). Tarot cards have four suits, numbered ace to 10, and four face cards—all of which are part of the “minor arcana.”
The remaining 22 cards are unique to tarot decks. That group is called the “major arcana” and it includes those classic tarot tropes like the Fool, the Chariot, the High Priestess, the Devil, and the Star.
“Those major arcana cards have the archetypes that transcend cultures and ways of life,” explains Nelson. “They’re the topics that everyone deals with in their lives, from justice and the sun to temperance and death.”   

Finding a Tarot Card Deck That Suits You

The artwork featured on your deck will play a huge role in inspiring you during readings. But with thousands of tarot card decks on the market, ranging from a Legend of Zelda-themed deck to Celtic fairy sets, how do you find the right deck for you?
Nelson says that many people start with the classic Smith-Waite tarot card deck, created in 1909 by illustrator Pamela Colman Smith. An attempt to appeal to the art world, the cards depict tarot figures in full scenes that have a timeless appeal.
“This tarot card deck is the most popular. It has very bright colors and it helped Western culture embrace tarot a little bit more,” says Nelson.
However, just because a tarot card deck’s been around for a while doesn’t mean you have to pick that one. Start browsing for options to see which kind of art speaks to you.
“Instagram is a great place to see tarot card art. Since indie publishing has grown, designing decks has become such an art form,” explains Nelson.
You should also consider the quality and size of the cards. Some people like oversized tarot decks, while others prefer cards that slip into their hands more easily.
While you’re shopping for a deck, it’s also worth picking up a guidebook to help you learn the meaning of each tarot card. Nelson recommends that beginners read The Creative Tarot: A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life by Jessa Crispin.

Getting Familiar With the Tarot Cards

Before you can learn how to read tarot cards, you’ll need to understand the meanings of the various archetypes. The minor arcana cards tend to symbolize things in life that you’re already connected to. The major arcana are considered “trump cards” and indicate larger events to pay attention to.
Nelson has put together a brief guide to some of the most important major arcana cards and their meanings:

• The Fool (0) is a card of infinite potential. When the Fool is drawn, ask yourself what’s holding you back, and use curiosity to propel you into unknown territories.
• The World (XXI) embodies the completion of a journey, a union between the four suits of the minor arcana: wands (passion and creativity), swords (thought and action), cups (feeling and intuition), and coins (prosperity and security).
• Judgment (XX) asks the player to be more decisive and act with conviction—the worst you can do is nothing.
• The Empress (III) is the eternal mother, the embodiment of creativity and grace—she is confirmation that all ideas can be manifested physically.
• The Star (XVII) asks players to dream big. When it’s upside down, it can mean that you are progressing, that you’ve chosen your North Star and can use it to guide you forward.
• The Wheel of Fortune (X) can be used to manifest your own luck by steering toward the center of the spinning, ever-changing wheel. This element of chance keeps life exciting, so the Wheel asks us to embrace it instead of fearing it.
• Death (XIII) reminds us of our own mortality, and that through our lives we experience small deaths that lead to new things. It reminds us to fearlessly embrace progress and change and to leave behind what we no longer need.
• The Tower (XVI) is an epiphany or natural disaster. It’s an event that rocks your reality and makes you question your beliefs. The tower asks what can be built from the wreckage.
• The Hanged Man (XII) can signal a waiting period. It encourages players to be proactive with spare time, using it for rest, observation, and self-analysis so that it doesn’t lead to stagnation.
• The Devil (XV) should be used to analyze restrictions, like toxic relationships and outdated beliefs that keep us feeling limited. Acknowledging those shadows is tough work, but accepting them as issues that can be worked on can be so empowering.

How to Read Tarot Cards (and Gain Insights About Your Life)

Many believers visit a professional for their tarot card readings. However, the practice is easy to learn, and giving yourself readings might be the best way to tarot for the purpose of tapping into deep insights about your life.
First, shuffle the tarot cards. There are no rules or traditions about how many times you should shuffle or how you should mix up the deck, says Nelson.
Once you’ve shuffled your cards, ask yourself a question to guide your reading.
“You can ask things like, What should I be focusing on today? What should I be looking for or working on? Try to avoid asking about other people, and keep it positive. You can ask anything you want, but tailor your questions so it’s helpful to you,” advises Nelson.
Giving yourself a simple one-card tarot card reading is a great place for beginners to start. Flip over one card onto the table and take a look at the art.
“What does the art on the tarot card remind you about in your current life? A guidebook can help you learn meanings, but how a card makes you feel is more important than what’s in the book,” says Nelson.
If the card is flipped upside-down, it generally indicates the opposite of the traditional meaning. It’s trying to draw your attention, so give it some extra focus, says Nelson.
She also recommends turning your readings into a ritual. Choose a time or day that works for you (she suggests doing it while you have your morning coffee) and journaling about your tarot card reading for a few minutes.
Once you get the hang of one-card tarot readings, you can move onto more complicated spreads.
“Three-card tarot readings are going to be very similar to one-card readings. Draw three cards and look at what each of them means and how they relate together,” says Nelson. “You could think of it as a timeline of things to focus on for the next three weeks, or looking at the tarot cards as a story related to your life.”
The beauty of tarot is that it’s a really free-form practice you can modify to fit into what you need on any day, throughout your life. You don’t need to be a psychic to give yourself a tarot card reading—you just have to have an open mind and a willingness to dive into the intuition that’s already deep inside yourself.  

Can shifting your body’s natural energy help you stay healthy and heal faster? Absolutely, according to practitioners of reiki, an Eastern technique in which a healer channels energy through a person’s body by placing their hands on and above your chakras.
While I try to be open minded about wellness (there’s no one path to self care!), I have to admit that I’ve always been skeptical about reiki. The idea of tapping into some invisible energy field just seemed too far fetched to be real.
I wrote off the practice as a scam and forgot about it until reiki started popping up everywhere. Everyone from Cameron Diaz and Angelina Jolie to Gwyneth Paltrow has reportedly been doing reiki. Even Jax Taylor from Vanderpump Rules calls it the highlight of his week!
Why do so many people swear by it?
I had to learn more, so I sought out some answers from Dana Carretta-Stein, a licensed mental health counselor at Peaceful Living wellness center in Scarsdale, New York. A certified reiki therapist, she uses the technique to help people with panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other concerns.
“A lot of times, clients who have been through traumatic events have a hard time talking about it, so reiki helps me heal their emotional trauma and get them to relax and open up,” she says. “A lot of people experience relief after just one session.”
So reiki works for some people, but would it do anything for me? I had to get to the bottom of this healing technique—and put the practice (and my skepticism!) to the test during a session.

Before we go on, let’s level set. What is reiki?

“Reiki is hands-on energy healing. The practitioner uses their life force energy to heal blockages in the receiver. It’s about using our own healthy energy to cure someone else’s stagnant or blocked energy,” explains Carretta-Stein.
The word “reiki” comes from the Japanese words for spirit (rei) and vital force (ki), which loosely translates to universal life force. The technique stems from the theory of chakras, which are centers of spiritual energy that line our bodies. Supposedly, we have 114 chakras, of which seven are major (you might already be familiar with these if you practice yoga).
When the flow of energy between our chakras is blocked or imbalanced—which can be caused by stress, anxiety, conflict, and other negative emotions we experience every day—it shows up as other ailments in our bodies.
Got self-esteem issues? Headaches? Stomach pains? A low sex drive? Writer’s block? Blame your blocked chakras. Then schedule a reiki session to get it fixed, believers say.

How does reiki work?

Okay, so I get the philosophy, but how exactly does reiki work?
It all stems from something called “attunement,” the part of the training that activates the healing power of reiki in a practitioner’s hands, says Carretta-Stein.
“To become a reiki practitioner, you have to be trained by a reiki master who has gone through all three levels of training. The reiki master is able to attune your energy by putting his or her hands over your head to open up the crown chakra and align your energy with the highest good. By doing that, the practitioner can then help others,” she explains.
Once they have undergone attunement, a reiki practitioner can begin healing clients during sessions at spas and wellness centers by placing their hands on or above different chakras in need of attention. The healthy energy then transfers from the healer to the client’s body to clear their blockages.
“As I go over the troubled spots and set the intention of letting the life force energy from my body go into theirs, it can help heal trauma,” says Carretta-Stein.
The reiki practitioner may also use other healing modalities, such as crystals, essential oils, and guided meditation, to enhance the experience. But none of the techniques, including reiki, will work unless you intend to be healed, Carretta-Stein notes.
“Reiki is right for someone who is wanting to be healed and open to receiving healing. It’s about intention. Our thoughts are really powerful,” she says.

Why do people try reiki?

You’ll try just about anything to find relief when you’re in chronic pain, suffering from a disease, feeling stressed out, or creatively stifled. These are frustrating issues that often don’t have quick-fix solutions. While some people go for exercise, meditation, and acupuncture, others turn to reiki for respite.
“Working with energy centers can help heal emotional trauma, physical or sexual abuse, chronic pain, cluster headaches, migraines, and inflammation in the body. Reiki can work on anything in the mind, body, and spirit,” says Carretta-Stein.
The idea of using something as non-invasive and peaceful as reiki to heal some pretty serious issues sounds amazing, but unfortunately, there might not be a lot of evidence that supports those claims. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, few high-quality studies have been done on this technique, and reiki hasn’t been proven to be an effective technique for health-related purposes. Bummer.
But, let’s take a step back and look at the potential upsides of reiki. You take some time out of your busy, stressful week to go to a calming environment, rest on a comfortable bed, and have a healer focus on you. For one hour, you leave the hustle and bustle of the world for a little TLC—which isn’t a bad thing.
“The biggest benefit is a deep sense of relaxation from the inside out. That stress relief may, in turn, help chronic inflammation go down, headaches get better, and overall give you a renewed sense of self,” says Carretta-Stein. “After reiki, you’ll have better moods, feel more balanced, and be less on edge.”
I can definitely get on board with these kinds of benefits, even if they’re not easily measured. But would reiki give a skeptic like me true tranquility? I had to try it for myself.

A Skeptic’s Experience Trying Reiki

The first week of May was a tough one for me. I somehow fell uncharacteristically behind on all my deadlines, my tasks were taking three times as long as usual, and I couldn’t seem to get enough rest no matter how much I slept. Oh, and did I mention it was my time of the month?
Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling much like myself.
My first reiki session could not have come at a better time. On Friday afternoon, I hopped on a subway downtown to Modrn Sanctuary, a luxury wellness center in Manhattan’s Flatiron District that offers just about any alternative treatment you might be looking for, including aromatherapy, life coaching, acupuncture, and hypnotherapy.
My reiki session kicked off right in the lobby, where intuitive energy worker Alexis Alvarez had me fill out a questionnaire on an iPad. I answered questions like “Are you disorganized?,” “Do you have an aggressive nature?,” and “Do you find it difficult to be loved?,” and looked at a color spectrum to choose hues that I felt attracted to and repelled by. My responses would give a sense of my state and which chakras needed work, Alvarez explained.

When you’re burned out on your work, nothing seems satisfying. You’re working long hours, and you start to disassociate; you feel as if you’re watching someone else do your job. You’re cynical, and even when you’re succeeding professionally, you’re not able to appreciate your accomplishments.
Psychologists typically associate these symptoms with burnout syndrome, which is recognized by the World Health Organization as a diagnosable mental health disorder and is included in the 10th International Classification of Diseases (ICD 10) as an undefined additional diagnostic term. Although it isn’t yet recognized in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), several countries (including Sweden) consider it to be a legitimate reason for taking sick leave.
The good news—and yes, there is good news—is that you’re not alone. According to one Swedish study (remember, Sweden has acknowledged burnout as a significant problem, so they’re decades ahead in terms of research), about 13 percent of workers suffer from burnout, and women tend to have higher burnout rates than men.
Why the discrepancy? To some degree, that’s still up for debate, but some psychologists believe that women might provide more emotional support in the office than their male colleagues. For instance, if a co-worker is feeling stressed out, you might feel responsible for consoling them, but your male co-workers might not feel the same responsibility. Institutional sexism, we meet again.
Successful, career-driven women are especially vulnerable to burnout. When Emilie Aries was only 21, she’d accomplished some incredible things; she was the youngest state director in the nation working on behalf of President Obama’s Organizing for America campaign, and she was in a leadership position in the midst of the Great Recession.
“For all intents and purposes, I was doing well—on paper,” Aries tells HealthyWay. “I was doing work I cared about. And who was I to complain? I’d achieved everything I wanted, straight out of graduation.”
Behind the scenes, however, Aries was suffering. She was exhausted from work, but there’s more to burnout than just working long hours. The Stanford Social Innovation Review lists lack of rest, feeling a loss of control, and not having a strong community in your life as contributors to burnout, too—and Aries was experiencing all of these.
Today, Aries runs Bossed Up, an organization that raises awareness for occupational burnout while providing supportive resources for professional women. Her goal is to promote sustainable careers, and yes, she’s as awesome as she sounds.

We spoke with Aries to learn more about her experience and to find out how we can recognize—and deal with—the symptoms of burnout.

HealthyWay: Before we discuss burnout, could you briefly explain what Bossed Up does?

Aries: We’re a training company that helps women navigate career transitions. We have a special eye towards preventing burnout so that women can craft happy, healthy, sustainable career paths.

I started it back in 2013 after burning myself out in the world of organizing and advocacy. And it was ironic, because I got very good at helping people make their voices heard and advocating on behalf of the causes and campaigns that I believed in, but I really had trouble advocating on my own behalf. I couldn’t draw the healthy boundaries I needed to be sustainable.
I had to bottom out to recognize that this is something a lot of women face. We’re living in a world that’s not quite sure it likes women who advocate on their own behalf.

So I set out to really understand that problem better, and in doing so, I learned so much about how to sit in the driver’s seat in my own career that I had to share it with other people. We have a ton of free resources online and a very active community of women who are doing just that through online and in-person training programs.

When you experienced burnout, what was it like? What were some of the signs you noticed?

Well, I think burnout is so troubling in that it really afflicts the highest achievers in an organization. That was certainly true in my case.
I was sad, and I felt like I dreaded going to work. I didn’t know how to turn off. I was working all the time. I was glued to my Blackberry and iPhone before my feet hit the ground every morning. It made me realize that even though I care a lot about this work, it makes the people who are the most passionate—well, it makes them become not passionate. It dims the light of the people who were once so ambitious.

Was there a tipping point, or a single event, where your occupational burnout became overwhelming?

I distinctly remember driving through campus at my alma mater, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and I was bone-tired. It was one of those days where I had events all night, up and down the state. I was rushing from one thing to the next, and I stopped at a crosswalk and saw these young students who were only three years younger than me.
They were rolling their bags home for Thanksgiving break. Something in me just snapped; I felt so jealous of those students—even though I was supposedly ahead of them in life. I paid attention to that jealousy. I caught myself feeling bad for feeling sad. That meta-level of emotions—I should not feel ungrateful, I should not feel unhappy, I should be grateful for any job—helped me realize that [I was burned out].
I was jealous of these students because, in my professional life, I’d been waiting for permission to take a break. I was waiting for someone to tell me that it was the end of a semester. You know, life doesn’t work that way after graduation, and that’s when I realized I needed to make a change.

What did you do to deal with burnout once you realized this was affecting you?

It started with getting help, frankly. I was dealing with a lot. I wasn’t just dealing with work stress—in many cases, burnout is not just a product of overwork.
I was also dealing with a partner at the time whom I cared for deeply, whom I lived with, who was struggling with alcoholism. Anyone whose life has ever been touched by addiction knows that they call it a family disease for a reason. It’s extremely excruciating to watch someone you care about slowly harm themselves.
So I was juggling, in a sense. I was trying to look like I had it all together, and so I was isolated at work and at home.

There were a couple things that really changed the game for me. One was getting help, professional help. I’d never been to therapy before—nobody I knew had been to therapy before—and I ended up talking to my primary care physician about the burnout. That felt good, to finally confide in someone else. She said, “Let’s get you into therapy, and then we’ll deal with your boyfriend, who clearly needs therapy.”

I couldn’t refuse, and that was a game changer. The other variable that really changed was that I applied the products of therapy; I now have the time and space to actually think about myself. It’s socially acceptable for me to think about myself—what I want, where I’m going.
For the first time in three years, I took my nose off the grindstone for a second and didn’t just focus on doing well for others. I had permission to spend some time in that mental space, that headspace.
From that mindfulness, I started creating rituals in my life. I started walking more—I had gone from being a college athlete to avoiding the gym entirely, so I changed that.
Finally, I received support from my community. That’s huge. I had professional help, I had time and space to think about what I wanted for the first time, and I connected with close friends in a really meaningful way. Right after graduation, we’d all scattered across the country, and I felt really detached. I started to change that.

Once you reconnect with the people who really trust and love you, who really see you for the courageous person you are—even if you don’t see that in yourself—that’s a game changer. So those are the things that I recognize now, and the research shows that those things are a huge part of what leads people to burnout: a lack of community, a lack of a sense of agency in your life, a lack of rest and renewal.

It sounds like dealing with burnout was a long process. I wouldn’t think it was easy to realize you were burned out on your career.

It’s sad that you have to learn it this way. That’s the irony. I was a budding political rockstar in the state of Rhode Island, and I had to make this decision: Can I be this fierce of a woman with so much ambition while taking care of myself? Like actually fully embracing sustainability?

And the answer is yes. You have to. Otherwise, you’ll burn out, then you’ll bottom out. Obviously, I didn’t know that, so I was more focused on working more and more. How can I get more done? How can I outperform everyone around me? How can I continue to get straight As?

And that’s not how life works after graduation, right? There’s no syllabus to follow. So I think it was a hard lesson to learn, but it reminded me that I’m the main character in my life, in my career, and I’m the one who’s going to decide what I do with it.

Tell me about how you overcame occupational burnout. I’m guessing it wasn’t easy.

For me, it was a series of very hard decisions. I had to walk away from the career I’d started to build. I left my relationship, which was extremely difficult and dangerous, and that was a very scary thing to do.

That also left me with thousands of dollars of debt, just because of how ugly things became. On top of everything, I chose to move to Washington, D.C.

Why D.C.?

Because I wanted to. [laughs] That’s the thing, there was no good reason. There was no right answer. I’ve been waiting for all these people to give me permission to just pursue a career, and I was done with that.
I decided that I wanted to live in D.C., and I knew I could find a way to make that work given my political background. That meant getting a one-bedroom apartment and sleeping on a mattress on the floor. I found myself rebuilding everything when I was 24 years old.
I got another job, but it wasn’t another state director job—I could clock in at 9, clock out at 6, and pay the bills. I got out of credit card debt. I got in the best shape of my life. I spent more time on myself.

And that physical strength gave me a ton of mental strength, which helped me really reflect on what I’d overcome and how I could help other women overcome it with less isolation.

One of the things I’ve seen that Bossed Up does is kind of fight back against the culture that doesn’t accept that burnout exists. You also tackle the gender discrepancies that make it a common problem for women.

There’s not a ton of great, widely cited research that highlight gender discrepancies, and I think that more research [needs to be] done. What we do know is that stress, in general, absolutely hits women and people of color in different ways than white, male-identifying folks. It has much more to do, in my opinion, with how life looks outside of work than it does inside the workplace.
We know that full-time working women are still doing twice the amount of housework that full-time working men are doing. Sadly, that’s the best that ratio has ever been. I guess the good news is that men are doing more around the house than ever before, but the disparity is so enormous to me. It’s just no wonder that it feels like a very radical act to embrace self-care as a part of your daily or weekly routine, especially after kids arrive.

I was going to ask about that. Pursuing a career while being a mother—it’s not like your responsibilities as a parent disappear when you get to your workplace.

I think that being childless is an often invisible privilege. Folks like myself can take that for granted, especially when it comes to having agency of your own.

And having agency is a really important thing for warding off burnout. That’s even if you have the privilege of having a partner. Maybe you’re a single parent, maybe you’re doing this whole thing on your own, or maybe you’re just a single person who doesn’t have someone else to help with the laundry or make dinner when you’re having a crazy week. So there’s also some burden there on single folks that can be overlooked.

It’s just that the basic mechanics of our workplaces are designed for a traditional family unit that’s not really all that prevalent anymore. Work is designed for someone who has a wife at home, who’s taking care of the home front. If we were all so lucky! That’s just not how things work anymore.

Yeah, that’s a great point. The work day, expectations of work, career paths—those things haven’t really changed that much since the 1950s.

Exactly! So we have to start to look at the structural assumptions we’re making about where employees’ lives happen.

We’re long past the time in which workplace flexibility should’ve been a basic part of the worker’s experience.
I also want to make sure we acknowledge racial disparity. There’s a term in the research called racial battle fatigue, and it really points to this added layer of stress that minority folks [experience] in a majority environment.

That’s any type of minority group, by the way. The “minority” might be men in nursing, for example, or it might mean people of color on a predominantly white college campus. More often, this affects racial minorities, but anyone in a minority–majority environment experiences this added layer of stress due to everyday microaggressions.

How might those microaggressions contribute to burnout among women?

Let’s say there’s only one woman in the office in the board meeting. [And there’s] a seemingly innocuous comment: “Hey Suzie, would you mind taking notes?”

The assumption that Suzie is the note-taker can feel like a microaggression. It makes her pause and think, “Am I being judged based on my gender here?” These types of comments don’t seem to be a big deal, but they can chip away at your sense of belonging, adding to your stress and adding to that feeling of detachment.
The point is that, yes, it’s important to recognize that happier and healthier workers are more productive and that we can craft sustainable workplaces. But the way that burnout manifests for women and people of color—and especially for women of color—is different, as they encounter additional burdens or stressors in a [workplace culture] that’s chronically stressful.

In other words, we shouldn’t assume two people with the same job are experiencing the same amount of stress from that job.

Yes. Exactly.

I think that’s a really important point. What can we do—either as employees or employers—to fight for a more flexible workplace where burnout is less of a problem?

That’s a good question. I think every workplace is different. Every career path is different. From the employer’s standpoint, it requires having courageous conversations with employees about stress. More importantly, it’s about setting expectations for rest and renewal.

If a company says, “We really believe in taking vacation,” but then the CEO and all the managers are sending emails when they’re supposed to be on vacation—you know, they’re not practicing what they’re preaching. You need to create a culture where sustainability is actually practiced.

For employees, I think it requires ditching the martyrdom mindset—the idea that in order to be successful, you must suffer. It’s so ingrained in the American dream; we pride ourselves on our productivity, but we’ve hit the point of diminishing returns. More hours doesn’t produce better rewards.
So instead, we need to recognize our choices. We need to recognize the power we already have in our lives, at every level, and not wait for permission to put our oxygen masks on first in order to help others.

What does that look like? What can a person do if they’re starting to encounter burnout?

Maybe that means meditating a couple of times a day when you’re feeling really stressed.

Maybe it’s about refusing to relinquish control of our lives—saying things like, “I can’t,” “You don’t understand,” “My career path is special,” “No.” It’s recognizing that we all have choices. We all have power over how we bring more community and agency into our own lives.

Figure out what renewal looks like for you because it can be very different for different kinds of people. It’s hard work. In our culture, we sometimes get this idea that we need to sprint to keep up with the Joneses, or maybe the Instagram of the Joneses, for this era. But it’s about enjoying the ride. It’s about crafting a way to do what you want to do in a sustainable way.

When you make it to the finish line, can you really enjoy it if you’re crawling over that finish line? I don’t think so. Success feels so hollow when you’re too burned out to achieve it.
Remember, if you’re suffering from occupational burnout syndrome, the safest course of action is to seek professional treatment. To learn more about Emilie Aries and her work, visit Bossed Up.
Finally, studies show that environment makes a big difference in workplace stress levels, so support your co-workers while demanding the same levels of support. We’re all in this together.
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