How to Calm a Busy Mind and Avoid Burnout

Humans have anywhere from 60,000-100,000 thoughts each day, most of which have nothing to do with the present moment. We wonder how to make our minds less busy, and turn to meditation to ‘calm the mind’ by turning inward.

The problem is that most styles of meditation require you to ‘not think’ or to focus on one thing to the exclusion of all thoughts. Though we can reach a different state in this kind of meditation, it doesn’t help us release the stress at the source of the busy thoughts. Many people find ‘not thinking’ so frustrating and impossible that they give up on meditation altogether.

Vedic Meditation works uniquely for calming a busy mind because it addresses the stress at the source of all the excessive thinking, and relaxes the body to ultimately help prevent burnout. With a Vedic Meditation routine of twice daily mantra-based meditations for 20 minutes, you can increase your stress resilience and capacity every day instead of decreasing it with busy, stressful, or negative thoughts.

Where do stress and burnout come from?

Stress is a physiological response that is entirely dependent on one’s own condition of rest and adaptability to meet a change in expectation or demand in life.

The World Health Organization explains that stress “can be defined as a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation. Stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives. Everyone experiences stress to some degree. The way we respond to stress, however, makes a big difference to our overall well-being.”

One of the most common misconceptions about stress is that stress is a person, place, thing, or event. We hear so often, “My job is so stressful” or “that person really stresses me out.”

A job can be stressful to one person if they are perpetually fatigued and under-rested.  However, the same job requirements may feel completely manageable to another person who has the adaptation energy and restfulness to successfully interact with the demands of the job.

Any one thing, person, or situation has the potential to trigger a stress response, however, it’s our own internal stage of adaptability, restfulness, and resiliency that determines whether or not we develop a stressful response to that situation. After a long day of reacting to external triggers, it will be difficult to know how to calm a busy mind at night. When you understand where stress comes from and how to release it, you can overcome distractions from a busy mind and burnout from too much stress.

Chronic stress that leads to burnout

Chronic stress develops when we are unable to handle the changes of expectations in our lives without a stress response. In every instance where we are unable to adapt to change in our lives, we download a stress memory in our brains and body. This is a classic second act of the initial fight or flight response that takes us out of our world of safety into the world of perceived threats.

Some say that by the time we’re in our twenties, hundreds of thousands of stress memories and trauma responses are stored in our bodies. When we become a storehouse of stress memories, we become more and more prone to retrigger them and relive those feelings and emotions throughout our day, even through new and different situations.

This is the pattern of chronic stress and why it can feel so hard to get out from under it. Not only are we carrying around the baggage of a lifetime’s worth of stress, but we’re also out there in the world accumulating stress more quickly than we can release it.

This is the experience of modern life.

How to calm a busy mind

The good news is that it’s absolutely possible to eliminate stress – it’s actually our natural state to do so, but we’ve lost the rhythms in our lives to have that proper outlet for our mind and body.

Any time that we’re resting our bodies deeply, deeper than the waking state, we have an opportunity to release stress.

Inside Vedic Meditation, we rest the body significantly deeper than sleep. We awaken the natural stress-release process systematically and reliably. The mantra-based technique is a great meditation for a busy mind since thoughts are allowed while you meditate. While the mantra floats in your consciousness alongside your thoughts, your body naturally drops into a hypo-metabolic rest state that releases stress.

Not only are short-term stresses of the day easily released inside the next Vedic Meditation sitting, but long-term stress memories and trauma responses are also released, which pave the way for a truly stress-free mind and body.

Meditation for managing stress

Meditation is the secret weapon of all high-performers in every industry in the world. Modern leaders are asked to stretch their focus across many business areas, endeavors, and initiatives. This opens up their experience to numerous changes of expectation and an ever-growing list of demands for their time, energy, and creativity. By building a deeply restful meditation practice like Vedic Meditation, a leader will establish their foundation of adaptation, energy, and resiliency which boosts creativity, strategic problem-solving, and fulfillment.

Learn to Meditate

To receive your own Vedic Meditation mantra and start a twice-daily practice, schedule an intro talk with me, or sign up for my next Learn to Meditate Course in Los Angeles or New York. Within a few weeks and increasingly over the months that follow, you’ll notice your sleep improving, your thoughts feeling less busy, and your resilience to stress improving over time.

Learn to Meditate with Susan Chen