How to prevent yourself from burning out

0:02 A listener production. Welcome to another episode of Crappy or Happy Today. I would really like to get into the topic of burnout. We are heading into a new year. If you know yourself that you have pushed yourself to the extreme in the last few years, whether by choice or just because of the circumstances that you've found yourself in with everything that has been going on in life and in the world. What is it, what causes it, what are the contributing factors, how can you potentially prevent it, and one of the best ways to recover from it? I guess because when we talk about burnout, we are talking about more than just stress. You can have a stressful job, you can have a lot of things going on in your life. You can feel exhausted, you can feel overwhelmed and depleted. But when we talk about getting to the point of burnout, we're talking about complete and utter emotional and physical exhaustion. We're talking about psychological issues of being detached, depressed, and being quite negative and cynical towards people and towards the situation, perhaps your job, that you find yourself in. So let's discuss burnout and what it actually is, how it came about where it fits in terms of psychology, and then get into the nitty gritty of what it looks like and how it sort of comes about. The phenomenon of burnout was first mentioned

1:32 back in the nineteen seventies by doctor Herbert Freudenberger, I think that's his name, and it refers to a specific syndrome of exhaustion related to prolonged situations of emotional imbalance with a burden of perceived stress exceeds your personal resources to cope with it. Now, it's always been referred to as a workplace issue, as a workplace phenomenon. In fact, it was added to the World Health Organization's ICD eleven, so that's the International Classification of Diseases, Big bat manual of all of the diseases that exist in the world. So the eleventh revision of that came out in twenty nineteen and burnout was included and defined as a syndrome, so a syndrome. Before this, it used to often be kind of conceptualized as a symptom, So it is now considered to be a very specific syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed and it is characterized by three dimensions. So these are the three kind of key characteristics of burnout. Feelings of energy, depletion, or exhaustion. So that is rock bottom, that is, got nothing left in the tank, completely utterly emotionally physically exhausted.

2:59 This could be ending up in the hospital. This could be collapsing, being really physically unwell, increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism interesting word or cynicism related to one's job. So this is feeling really detached. If you consider that often the people who experience bernat are start off being very invested in their job, very engaged, working really hard, very conscientious a lot of the time, and really focused on work, getting the work done, doing a good job. They end up at this point of just being completely disconnected, emotionally, completely detached, a lot of very negative cynical emotions, not just towards the job, but often towards people as well around them, and reduced professional efficacy.

3:51 So what that means is that they become very down on themselves, feeling incompetent, feeling like they can't do the job. Taking all of this stress and this inability to cope with these chronic, unrelenting demands and taking that to mean that there's something wrong with them that they can't do the job. So it can look a lot like depression, but it's not depression, as in it is a separate and distinct Even if depression is a part of it, and it's extreme, it's really extreme, and you don't just wake up one morning burnt out. There is a process, clearly, And so what I wanted to talk about today as we're heading into a new year and everybody's heading back to work and perhaps you have had a break. I hope you've had a nice break. I hope you're feeling well rested. And if you have come back with that sense of wanting to have more balance and wanting to set better boundaries and wanting to really look after yourself a little better than you perhaps have in the past, if you can look back and know that you have potentially really been at risk of burnout or you have been burnt out, then what are the signs to look for, How does this start to manifest and what can you do to intervene to best look after yourself so that that doesn't happen again. I also want to say that the World Health Organization has been very clear and specific that they consider this to be a workplace phenomenon. There's a lot of research coming out now, particularly in the last i would say five or so years, looking at

5:22 maternal burnout, looking at parental burnout, caregiver burnout. I don't think it is reasonable to consider that this is just a workplace phenomenon. I think there are many situations in life that place so much pressure and stress, and it's not just we'll talk about this the difference between the stress or and the stress response, but the perceived stress and pressure that exceeds a capacity to cope. And I think maternal burnout is very real, and it's it's actually been shown to be a little different to for example, postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety. Parental burnout often lasts longer, It goes for many more years, and it has kind of different characteristics, and that might be worth a whole extra separate episode of the show. Today. I will just talk about burnout generally, but if I use references to the workplace, just know in your mind that it doesn't have to be a workplace situation. There can be other situations in your life that might be causing you to experience excessive stress and leading to potentially burnout. When I first heard about Freudenberger's twelve kind of stages that people he proposed that people go through, it reminded me immediately of something that I learned when I was studying NBCT mindfulness based cognitive therapy, and that is this concept of the exhaustion funnel.

6:51 And I often share with people the concept of the exhaustion funnel, which is a handy way to imagine how this whole process sort of works. So the idea is that if you imagine a funnel like with a very wide opening at the top and funneling down into a very narrow opening at the bottom. When you're at the top of the funnel, you have a lot going on in your life. You have friends and family and work and hobbies and creativity and food and self care and all sorts of things that you do to have a full and meaningful and fulfilling life. What you also have is when you're at the top of the funnel and you're feeling positive and optimistic and all of those positive emotions.

7:35 And remember we've talked about the positive emotions and the effect that they have on your mood and your mental health and your cognitive processing. Is that you have a wide perception. You have a wide open perspective about options available to you, about what's in your life, what resources you have available to you, and generally, so if things to go wrong, there's lots of things that you can draw on to help yourself to get back to feeling good again. So, if you're having a bad day, you talk to a friend, or you're feeling the mistressed, you go to a yoga class, or you know, you take some time off, you sit in the sunshine, you have a good night's sleep, and you get back to being yourself again. What happens if you're in a situation where stress is constant and kind of unrelenting, or you find yourself in a very busy environment, you find yourself in a job that's very demanding of you. When we feel that pressure, what happens often is that we start to let go of the things that we consider to be non essential. I don't have time to catch up with friends, I don't have time to cook myself for healthy dinner.

8:41 I'll just grab something on the run. I would love to go to my yoga class, and my regular fitness class. But I really I don't know how I'm going to fit that in this week. I just don't have the space. And it's not just I don't have the available time. I start to feel like I don't have the mental space. I don't have the mental capacity to work out how I'm going to do all of these things. And so then what happens is we start experiencing the physical effects. We start feeling run down, we start feeling exhausted, sleep starts getting interrupted, We start withdrawing socially, not relying on those people anymore. We sort of retreat into ourselves a little. And what happens is it's often the most conscientious workers who just work harder and longer, and who tell themselves, I just need to get through this period. I just need to get through this crisis or whatever it is, just until end of tax time, just until they hire some new staff, just until we feel that position, just until we get this project over the line. You know, it's just until, But there's never any just until, like it never ends, and so it continues and continues and continues.

9:47 So we start working later into the night, start having sleep interrupted, thinking about work during the night, going to work earlier, working through lunch, and as I've also mentioned, when we're in that negative kind of mindset, what happens is our mind wraps around a problem. We create this tunnel vision where all we can focus on is the source of the stress or the pressure. So if that pressure and stress is coming from work, projects, work deadlines, then that's we've sort of become consumed by that, and everything else just blurs into the background. Life becomes much smaller, hence the exhaustion funnel getting narrower and narrower and narrower, until eventually we just lose all of our capacity for joy.

10:34 You know, we feel quite isolated and disconnected from the people around us. Our sense of self worth, our sense of self efficacy is affected. We start feeling like there's a problem with ourselves that we're not able to manage this. We're not necessarily talking to other people, so we're not getting other people's perspective, or if we do get other people's perspective, we tend to dismiss it. We don't really hear what other people have to say because we have a kind of distorted perception of what's going on and what the problem is and what needs to be done to fix it. So we get ourselves into potentially a really, really bad, unhealthy situation where we are at risk of burnout. The bottom of that funnel is complete burnout. So I was first introduced to the exhaustion funnel. And obviously, in the context of mindfulness, we're talking about teaching people with mindfulness to be able to be more present to what's happening as it's happening, and to be able to choose a different response rather than getting swept up and before we're not bending ending up at the bottom of this funnel.

11:36 So I was, in fact very intrigued to see that good old Herbert Freudenberger back in the seventies describe this twelve step process, and as I talk you through it, I think you will recognize there's a lot of the exhaustion funnel in this, so I'll run through these really quickly. The first step is the compulsion to prove oneself. Often found at the beginning is excessive ambition. So these are hard working, high a chiep people that desire to prove oneself in the workplace, and this becomes kind of compulsive. We get on this high achieving, high status, prove myself kind of treadmill, which is not an uncommon one to be on. Many many people are on that treadmill. We start working harder. So people establish very high personal expectations in order to prove themselves, particularly if you're trying to fit into an organization that maybe doesn't necessarily suit you, and to meet these expectations, you tend to focus solely on work, taking on more work than you potentially otherwise would.

12:36 So again it's just working longer and harder. Then they start stage three, neglecting one's needs. Since they're devoting everything to work, they now have no time or energy for anything else friends, family, eating, sleeping. These all start seeming unnecessary and unimportant because they reduce the time and energy that can be spent on work. The next one is this placement of conflict, so becoming aware that what they're doing isn't right, but not really able to see the source of the problem. So this is that sort of disordered perception that I told you about, and this is when the first physical symptoms may potentially start to appear. So the next stage is that while falling into a state of denying basic physical needs, so neglecting sleep, neglecting food.

13:19 Value systems start to change, where work becomes the number one focus. Work starts to consume all your energy, there's nothing left. The job becomes the new value system, and people start to become emotionally blunt. We going to denial, so starting to become intolerant, starting to not want to be social, irritable, losing humor, little, aggressive, little sarcastic, little don't have time for anything, in no mood to chit chat. You get that you've either been there yourself or you know somebody who is in that place. Problems are blamed on time pressure and all the work. It's not about themselves and how they're managing that. Social contact starts to turn into isolation. We start becoming very very withdrawn. Maybe by this stage we're turning to alcohol, recreational drugs, other unhealthy coping strategies to manage the stress that is accumulating.

14:12 This is about when people start to feel like start feeling hopeless, and hopeless is a really bad sign. There are obvious behavioral changes. Coworkers, family and friends will know this. They will see this. They might even point this out. These are undeniable behavior changes. This is when the next step is it is possible that at this point you no longer see yourself or others as valuable. There's this depersonalization that comes along, the view of life narrows to only seeing the moment, and life turns into a series of mechanical functions, just going through the motions. There is no joy, it's completely emotionally detached, emotionally disconnected. Stage ten in an emptiness, beginning to feel empty inside, maybe exaggerating other activities that give you sense of pleasure, the dopamine rush, potentially food, sex, drugs, alcohol, depression may happen. This is when you are exhausted, completely burnt out, indifferent, starting to believe that life has no meaning. And twelve is the bottom of the barrel. Basically, twelve is when you hit complete physical collapse. So that with Freudenberger's twelve steps, I've just described Mary Asberg's from the University of Stockholm's exhaustion funnel.

15:28 As you can tell, they're very much describing the same thing in a different way. So that is what burnout looks like, and that is how people end up in a really, really bad place. And there's obviously lots of points along the way where something might be able to be done differently if there was enough awareness and enough recognition of what was happening and enough sense of perspective to be able to change that. The thing is, it often feels like it can't be changed. Often feels often a feeling of being trapped. And I would say this this is particularly true with parent burnout. There is clear feelings of being trapped and unable to escape. And the point that has been made about parental burnout is that even with workplace burnout, if you feel like you can't quit your job, there is the option of calling in sick.

16:17 There is the option of stress leave. There are times even if you can't psychologically escape from the pressure and from the work, you can physically not show up, and so there are options available. Whereas parental burnout, when you've got kids in your care that you need to look after every day, there is often absolutely no physical reprieve at all. So burnout is partly a problem of the environment, the excessive pressures and demands of an underresourced, understaffed work environment, micromanaging, boss bullying, behaving in the workplace like there's a whole lot of workplace issues or environmental issues that can contribute to that emotional psychological pressure. But there's obviously also internal pressures.

17:11 There is obviously internal individual characteristics that will potentially lead somebody to be more prone to burn out. The perfectionists, the high achiever, the one who holds themselves to unrelenting standards, the people who take excessive responsibility for looking after everybody else rather than being able and willing to set boundaries and prioritize their own needs, the people who particularly in caring roles and compassionate roles. And in fact, it was first conceptualized as a syndrome that affects caregivers, people who are in contact with other people in their jobs. So if you're in a helping profession, it can feel very difficult to take care of your own needs when there's people immediately relying on you. It is really important to understand what the risks are if you don't do that.

18:02 So what I wanted to share with you today is something that was introduced to me a couple of years ago. I came across a book called Burnout. I was very interested in Burnout. I was very much going through down this exhaustion funnel myself at the time. So I was very familiar and what these two twin sisters, Emily and Amelia Nagoski. If you have not heard of them or heard of the book, you can google them. But they wrote this book about how to complete the stress cycle, and this was fascinating to me. It was so interesting and that is what I want to share with you today. So besides the obvious, making sure that you are being present and attentive and mindful of your own physical and mental health, setting boundaries, making sure that you're getting enough sleep, healthy, appropriate work life balance, all of that stuff goes without saying.

18:51 We can talk about that a bit more later. But what they talked about in their book was this idea that there is clear distinction between a stress or and that is the thing in your environment causing you stress. And a stress or can be outside in your environment, or it can be your own way of thinking. You know, your own internal talk and as I said, your perfectionism, the demands that you place on yourself, high expectations you place in yourself, they can all be stress ores as well. But typically we talk about the stress or being something in your environment causing you stress, and stress is the process that is happening inside your physical body. Is the physiological reaction that is happening, this chemical kind of cascade that is happening all of your hormonal systems. I talked about chronic childhood stress earlier on this show, and I talked about the effect that chronic stress has on every system in your body. So it happens in you're a child, it also happens when you're an adult. Chronic stress impacts your reproductive system, respiratory system, endocrine system, you know, your adrenal system, musculo scalidle, every system in your body impacted by excessive stress. And we know that stress response as the fight or flight response, fight flight freeze. We're all very familiar. Here's the interesting thing. When you are confronted with something stressful and your body goes into its fight flight response, it starts producing the cortisol and the adrenaline to prepare to get you out of that situation. That

20:22 flood of cortisol and everything that happens in your body is designed to serve a purpose. It's designed to get you safe. It's designed to get you out of the situation, to fight off the predator, to flee. In the animal kingdom, you might notice that when a dog or any anbal feels stressed, so they come around the corner and they bump into another dog and there's a bit of stress and bit of barking or whatever. Then what happens when they move on and they continue on their walk, is their whole body shakes. They shake off that stress. Their body completes a stress cycle. A body has to go through a whole cycle to discharge and emotion. What Emily and a million of Gooski describe is that emotions have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And so if we're not getting to the end, if we're not discharging that emotion from our body, that emotion is staying trapped in our body, and that is what is causing all of the pressure and the stress on our nervous system, on our body and brain, on the way we think, on the way we perceive the options we consider that are available to us, but particularly our physical health. So they describe burnout as being stuck in the stress cycle, stuck in the middle of that stress emotion and not giving ourselves the opportunity to discharge that stress. And what they propose is that even when the stress or is still present in your environment. Even when the thing that is placing the demands on you is still there, there

21:54 is nothing to stop you from on a regular basis, daily basis, discharging the stress through your body. And there's plenty of very simple ways that you can do that to move that stress through your body so that that stress is not staying trapped in your body placing all of that pressure on all of your internal organs and systems. The other thing is, even when the stress or is removed, even when you are not in that stressful situation, you still need to move that stress through your body. So a really great example is, like, let's say you have just had a big blow up at work. There's been something really difficult or stressfully, it's stuck in traffic and it's been really frustrating and something that has just caused you to feel really frustrated. You know that when you walk in the door at home, just because you've walked in the door and you're suddenly not in the work meeting, you're not in the traffic, you're not in the stressful conversation anymore. You're home, you're safe, you're able to relax.

22:53 Doesn't mean you're relaxed, all of that stress is often still coursing through your body, all of those feelings of frustration and irritation, like it is all still in your body. So just being out of the situation, and even if you were to quit your job, you still have that stress in your body that needs to be discharged. So they propose that on a daily basis, on a very regular basis, you do something to complete the stress cycle. The ways that you can do that, the ways that you can discharge that emotion from your body, to keep everything moving, to keep all of the systems operating as they should, to give you the best chance of staying healthy and keeping at the top of that funnel where you have a wider perspective keeping your health on track.

23:45 Number one is movement, so physically moving your body. And it doesn't mean you have to go out to a hit class. We've already discussed that. Often the first thing to go is your yoga class or your physical workout. Just getting up and just jumping around the room, putting on some music, dancing, even just tensing and relaxing all of the muscles in your body systematically helps to move that stress through your body. Another one is crying. Whoever said crying doesn't solve anything didn't understand the stress cycle, because crying definitely releases stress from your body. Even if it doesn't change your outside world, it changes what's happening in your physiology, and that is the really important thing. Laughing similarly, but a really good belly laugh, you know, if you've got that friend that just makes you laugh, cracks you up at big belly laugh, or a movie, whatever you can do to laugh, that's a really great way to release stress as well. A twenty second hug that is a very long hug, so that means holding your ground. They're very specific about this too when they talk about it, that you maintain your own center of gravity so you're not leaning on somebody and you hug and press your body against another person for a good solid twenty seconds. Creativity is a really good anything that you can do to create something using your stress. Discharging your stress in a creative way during playing, writing, but even just you know, using your imagination is apparently good enough.

25:15 Speaking to people. Emotional connection, social connection. We already know the power of social support. So if you think about all of these things that I'm talking about, and you think about that exhaustion funnel that I described to you. We start dropping off all of these things, the social connection, the movement, you know, all of those things that are either anything creative like it all just gets dropped. And so we're not giving ourselves the opportunity to do the things that we need to do that are actually going to help us to complete the stress cycle. We're so focused and tunnel visioned on the outside problem, the stress or dealing with the stress or that we are not giving ourselves the opportunity to actually process the stress. Breathing slow deep breaths with an extended exhale. Nothing more powerful to activate your parasympathetic nervous system to get you out of that fight or flight state is slow deep breathing extended exhale. It's the extended exhale which activates the parasympathetic nervous system. So those are the really simple and really important things that I would recommend that you do that you start to incorporate into life on a daily basis, weekly basis, very regularly, no matter what stress you are dealing with, just understanding and recognizing that it is incredibly important that you are doing something to complete that stress cycle and move that emotion through your body so that it has it is complete. You're not getting stuck in the middle of the emotion and having that stuck in your body and impacting all of the cells in your body.

26:47 Then obviously there are things to do to manage the stress in the outside world. And this is, like I said, this is self care. This is learning to ask for help, learning to set boundaries, understanding the importance of this, understand and what the real consequences potentially can be if you allow yourself to go down this funnel. And you may already be very well aware of that, if you've already experienced burnout or you know somebody who has, as best as you can trying to set boundaries at work, the kinds of jobs that are likely to contribute to you feeling stressed or potentially being at risk of burnout are jobs that have unclear expectations, not a lot of autonomy, excessive demands, obviously under resourced, underpaid, unsupportive coworkers, and unsupportive boss.

27:34 Jobs that are either over demanding of your talents or over excessively demanding of you and what you have to offer. But equally, jobs that are under demanding jobs that are boring and are not engaging at all can also potentially lead to burnout. So if you find yourself in any of those situations, obviously doing what you can to manage the environment, to get a different job, to change the nature of your work. I wrote a whole book about feeling more happy and fulfilled at work. It's the Blue One. You can order it online. Crappy to Happy, Love what you do. The takeaway I really wanted to give you from today's episode was just the understanding of that exhaustion funnel, what that looks like, the process of heading into burnout, and the importance of that stress cycle and completing that stress cycle so that you feel like you are having the opportunity to discharge your emotions on a regular basis.

28:32 Self care, sleep, eat well, hydrate, move your body. You know what to do. I'll catch you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy. Listener