Stress and recovery

You sleep badly, you are restless, and small things irritate you that never used to reach you at all. Your body is telling you something in its own way, and you carry on anyway, because there is never a good week to fall ill. Perhaps you have already tried training more, meditating with an app in the evening, taking the holiday you had saved up. It helps for a while, and then you are back in the same feeling of never quite landing.

You are far from alone in this. We hear it in almost every conversation we have, and it is rarely because you are doing too little. Usually it is the other way round.

If you are looking for a course to keep yourself from burning out, or to find your way back after exhaustion, then this is a different road from the one you are usually offered. The advice tends to be to breathe deeply, take breaks and set better priorities, and that helps for a while. But stress rarely sits in your calendar. It sits in what you demand of yourself, in which of your own needs you allow to count as important, and in patterns you cannot see because you have lived with them long enough that they feel like you.

Recovery is not quite the same thing as rest, either. If you lie down for an hour but spend that hour solving problems or working out how the evening will fit together, then the part of you that needs it most gets no rest at all. That is why a week somewhere else does something that a free weekend at home does not.

With us you work with the stress from the inside, over seven days and eight nights at Aspö kursgård, on an island in lake Båven. You hand in your phone for the week, so that work and everyday life can't reach you while you work on yourself. Outside the course room it is quiet. That probably sounds unfamiliar, but most people say afterwards that the quiet was the very thing that let them hear themselves.

You are in a group of about twenty people, and the course leaders are there all week. Step 1 requires no previous experience.

Some people get in touch and say that they ought to rest first and come here later, once they have more to give. Sometimes that is right, and then we say so. But often it is the other way round. What takes you to the wall is rarely the workload alone, it is what you do with it: being unable to leave anything undone, taking care of everyone else first, carrying on although your body is protesting. Rest takes care of the tiredness. It does not take care of the pattern, and that is why the pattern comes back.

The week being intensive does not mean it looks the same for everyone. We adapt to how you are doing, and nothing is compulsory. We have people on the team who have worked with burnout for decades. We are not healthcare and we treat nothing, but we do know how a week can be arranged so that it becomes possible even when there is little to spare.

Most people who get in touch about stress discover during the week that the stress was what showed, not what was driving. Underneath it lie things that have been steering for a long time, such as having to perform in order to be good enough, taking the hit yourself rather than asking anyone for help, or a no that feels like letting somebody down.

Those are the things you get to look at during the week, in the group and in individual conversations, and you do it at your own pace. What we do is personal development rather than medical care, so what we can offer is time, quiet and people who have seen this before. Courses have been held in this form since 1985.

Is that where you are now? Get in touch, and we will talk about what a week could look like for you.