How Prioritizing Ease for Seven Days Shifted My Burnout

Ashley Elliott
Feb 17
3 min read

The Seven Day Challenge That Helped Me Recovery from Burnout

One simple seven day challenge played a key role in my recovery from emotional burnout.

That challenge was to prioritize ease every day.

So each day, I would ask myself at least once what would pleasure have me do?

What This Looked Like in Practice

Some of the things I would end up doing were:

Closing my eyes and singing to a song I emotionally resonated with.
Dancing to a song.
Lying on a blanket in my apartment with my eyes closed while basking in the sun.

The Beginning of a New Habit

This one-week challenge was the beginning of a new habit.

This was a question that I would routinely ask myself more and more.

It pulled me away from the activities that drained me and toward the activities that created ease in my life.

Cultural Narratives Around Pleasure and Ease

Culturally, we often view pleasure as inherently unproductive and therefore less valued.

It creates a barrier to experience pleasure.

In Western culture, especially since the Industrial Revolution, productivity has become a part of our moral identity.

We have been taught that pleasure and ease are inherently unproductive, and therefore rest equals laziness, enjoyment equals indulgence, and ease equals weakness.

In a society that values productivity, anything that could disrupt that forward-moving momentum is seen as less valuable.

Many of us have learned from Western culture that pleasure, joy, and ease must be earned through hard work first.

Productivity culture thrives on:

Speed
Deadline
Pressure
Constant future focus

But pleasure and ease require slowing down, being in the moment, and sensing the body.

Culturally, we are trained to focus our time, energy, and attention toward tasks, goals, and output instead of sensations, emotions, and needs.

So, the very skills required for pleasure were deprioritized.

The Systemic Barrier to Ease

From a systems perspective, a person who pauses to enjoy life is harder to extract endless labour from.

Pleasure and ease lead to rest, boundaries, and satisfaction, which does not serve an economy focused on hyper-productivity.

Another barrier many of us experience in the culture we live in is that often guilt is wired into experiencing pleasure and ease.

Since productivity is equated with value, many people may experience:

Anxiousness while relaxing
Restlessness during downtime
Guilt for experiencing ease, joy, fun, and connection
And ask themselves, "Can I have what I truly want in ways that are easier?"

Culturally, many women were taught to put others first, and rest after everyone else is cared for.

So pleasure often feels selfish, which feeds into burnout even faster.

One Shift That Helped Me Create More Ease and Balance in How I Work

One of the key shifts I learned to step out of cycles of keeping busy was to prioritize ease, joy and pleasure.

This looked like asking myself the question, ‘What would pleasure have me do?’ once a day for a week.

This disrupted never-ending to-do lists that I could barely keep track of and had so little interest in doing.

Exploring what brought me ease, joy, fun, and pleasure through:

The five external senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell
And the internal sense of intuition

helped me recover from emotional burnout.

An example of this was closing my eyes and lying on a blanket while soaking up the radiance of the sun’s rays.

If you would like guidance in reconnecting with ease and pleasure in your body, I offer a free guided meditation called Rejuvenate Your Energy After Burnout, which you can access here.

Invitation to Keep Your Freedom and Time For Connection and Fun

Lastly, I invite you to do a seven day challenge as well, to support you in recovering from emotional burnout.

For one week, I welcome you to ask yourself one of the questions listed below once a day for seven days straight:

What would ease have me do?
What would pleasure have me do?
What would joy have me do?
What would connection have me do?

If you would like personalized support in recovering from burnout and cultivating ease, you can book a free discovery call with me here.