Beyond Burnout: 4 Yogic Practices to Restore Your Vitality

Burnout is a buzzword for a reason: people are tired beyond what could be remedied by a good night’s sleep or a rejuvenating rest. Burnout has dimensions that are lesser explored, like apathy and depletion (all dried up, nothing left to give, or too done to care) that can often fly under the radar. This can look like being extra distracted, scrolling, wasting time, and phoning it in just to get things over with. You might wonder ‘what’s wrong with you’ and miss the underlying cause.

States like burnout are painful, and as they persist to any degree, we might find that we are alive but not living as fully as we would like to be. If we are measuring our lives by whether we exist, and for how long, we are missing an integral metric: vitality.

Vitality is our energy, our capacity for life and growth, our vigor. It is a quality of aliveness that allows us to transpose the essence of who we are into what we do and how we do it. Without vitality, we might feel flat or even despondent. Through a practice of yoga, there is ‘life force energy’ to be cultivated, so to speak, and there is so much vitality to be generated and harnessed.

Here is a fourfold yogic approach to revive, vivify, and sustain us regardless of our life circumstances:

1. Postural practice promotes vigor and energy, whatever your level and ability.

Not only are your strengthening and opening the body, you are also learning Yogic precepts in a way that is embodied. Yoga philosophy can be life changing when posture, facilitated in certain ways, allows it to become the lived experience of the practitioner who can then transport it off-the-mat.

2. Pranayama (breath control) balances your physiology.

Become less reactive and more responsive, empowering you to take actions aligned with the life you want. Pranayama can measurably change your biochemistry as well as your mental patterning over time, so that rather than dispersing yourself, more of your own inner resources are collected and available to you.