We often equate exhaustion with a physical tiredness, however exhaustion is more commonly an emotional condition. Emotional exhaustion is the experience of feeling all used up and empty of energy.

Emotional exhaustion, sometimes known as burnout, is the result of stress overload. It affects all aspects of your functioning deleteriously, sending you into the centre of a maze, lost inside your mind.

When you are emotionally exhausted, everything seems too hard. You can’t think clearly so solving problems or making decisions about even simple things is left undone. It’s as though all your brain cells have gone on strike and are stubbornly refusing to act on your behalf

Easy cheerfulness seems so far away that the only emotion that arises is irritability. Emotional exhaustion leaves you unable to care about much at all. Even the people you love can become annoyances to avoid.

Typically emotionally exhausted people isolate them selves. This is because they can’t deal with the added stimulation of interacting, but it is also because they know their mood is mostly mean and they don’t want to treat others poorly.

A primary dynamic in emotional exhaustion is thinking ill of your self. Then all this negativity compounds with anxiety and often sleeplessness, and in turn things continue to go badly. Often people use alcohol or drugs in a desperate endeavour to feel differently, which of course just makes it worse.

Significant personal disasters can tip you over the edge but it is the insidious weight of an imbalanced life over time that pushes you to the edge of the precipice.

Don’t take the temptation to make radical changes in the haste to escape. It’s likely the external circumstances of your life may need to change, but it ‘s the internal structures of your thinking that fundamentally requires adaptation.

It’s better to build a bridge from the centre of your storm to the calm intelligence that does still exist within you. Self-nurturing activities that are simple, fun and un-pressured will develop your inner resources. Then as your mental clarity expands, the necessary changes to your external world will increasingly reveal themselves.

Martin Hunter Jones is an honorary life member of the Australian Counselling Association. He has a Counselling and Hypnotherapy practice on the Northern Beaches. For appointments call 9973 4997.