I'm Rebecca Hunter and this is Take Out Therapy. As a private practice therapist, I've helped a lot of people work through some of the most common everyday issues using new tools and greater insight. If you have any interest in doing some personal growth work, this might be the perfect place for you.
In the next 20 minutes, I'll walk you through a commonly explored topic in therapy and provide you with actual tools to deal with it. It's that simple. Obviously, this is not a substitute for therapy, but I think it could be helpful.
Thanks for being here. Hi guys, thanks for joining me today. Here is what I know.
We are living in an ever-increasing culture of burnout. And I think it's time for some change. So that's what we're going to talk about today.
Let's talk about burnout. I'm going to talk about what burnout is and how it affects us on both an individual level. And then I'm also going to talk about like company burnout, like when companies have a culture of burnout, what that looks like.
And then I'm going to, of course, tell you what you can do if you feel burnt out in any areas of your life. Burnout is basically something that happens to us when we're under prolonged stress. You guys, burnout looks like trauma.
Trauma being adverse stress. Yeah, so it's like basically when we're so repeatedly stressed out emotionally or physically by problems at work or by problems at home, right? That we just start getting all these negative symptoms. And life feels bad.
I'm just telling you, like if you've ever been burnt out, I see you. I talk with people all the time about burnout because as I've said before, there's a couple reasons. There are many reasons that people come see me for therapy.
But two of the most popular ones are that people cannot stand their jobs. They're very, very unhappy and also their relationships, right? And what I see so much of the time, it's just burnout. They're just in a chronic state of stress and it's been going on so long that now on the individual level, they're seeing all these kinds of troubling signs.
So what we're looking for, if you're looking in your life for burnout, are areas of your life where you're just done. You're exhausted. You feel empty.
You don't care anymore. You feel stuck, right? You're totally unable to cope with whatever this area of your life is, whether that's work or your relationship or your parenting, your caregiving. Hello.
Right? And so when you feel all those things, what that looks like is that you're not really motivated to do that, right? You just like, maybe there's a lot of avoidance going on or maybe you just drag yourself every single day. But the focus that maybe you once had, if it's a job, if it's parenting, right? It just isn't there. And frankly, we see people with burnout have poor performance at work, right? Because when we're under adverse stress, you guys, we're not creative.
We can't think of creative solutions to everyday problems, forget about it, right? We're just like trying to slug through. And there's physical symptoms. It's heavy.
Oh, people get headaches, stomach aches, leg pain, sleeplessness, blah, blah, blah. And the list goes on. But generally like on an individual level, when you're burned out, one of the ways you can tell is like your attitude, your mindset.
Are you the total negative Nancy, right? Are you cynical? Well, this is the way it is. I guess I have to do this again today, right? Or like you're the one that's kind of like always feeling all the problems. If you've had a job where you've had burnout, maybe you just feel like F this, right? This is like totally negative attitude.
There's a lot of kind of within that, and I'm not going to go into this, but there's a lot of kind of othering that happens in burnout. Like I've been burned out before and I thought the problem was another person, right? And in some cases, yeah, that's part of it. And also the problem was me, right? And there's a hopelessness and burnout that is so disempowering that makes us just flat out complacent.
You guys, we will force ourselves to get up and go to a job that we hate like for a pretty long time. We will drag ourselves out of bed to parent our kids even through burnout and not be able to really make any changes because again, the brain and the body response to burnout is trauma. You guys, your brain can't do all the things.
So if it thinks that you're under adverse stress, you don't have access to all your organizational skills and your great communication skills and your emotional regulation. No you don't. I'm sorry, but you've lost the pass if you're under adverse stress, which is burnout.
Okay? So I want to talk quickly about what burnout looks like on a company level because let's face it, we've all, you know, a lot of us have worked at jobs in which the actual structure of the company was burnout culture. And Oh man, I'm not going to go off on this, but I could. I hear this so much in private practice.
I've worked at these companies, I see them in the news. Companies are not doing a great job of preventing burnout. And part of that is just, um, just a lack of ability to do so.
You know, it's, it's that whole example of like when you're in your situation, you can't really see all the way around it. So companies have a problem kind of seeing that they're creating a culture of burnout. But some of the things that you experience, if you work in a company or live in a family that's burned out, right? A family structure, meaning I can talk about motherhood here, right? Or I can talk about like when we go to work, but there's generally a lack of communication.
So certainly a lack of assertive communication, but sometimes just a lack of overall communication. Like things are not talked about. There's a lot of stuff going on that nobody's saying anything about.
I think we're learning something about that right now. We have to start speaking up and I will get into that. But in general, there's a lack of communication.
And also one thing that I hear a lot is there's a lack of clarity of roles, right? And even in the household, you guys, I hear about this all the time. I hear people say, maybe we should sit down and make a list of all of our duties. And I'm like, Oh yeah, that's a great idea.
You should totally do that. What could possibly go wrong, right? If you want to create a family that where one caretaker is not burned out. Yeah, everybody needs to know what everybody else is doing, friend.
Right. And the other thing that we see on a company or organizational level about burnout is that the workload is unmanageable. It's just unmanageable, right? I have friends that are working at companies and they have like three jobs as their jobs.
I see people all the time in my office that are like, I could work for the next week straight and not get everything done that has been assigned to me. Dude, that is so stressful, right? And if that list is ever growing and never shrinking, that's adverse stress. That's trauma.
It's burnout. Okay. And so the other thing you really want to be looking for is unfair treatment.
Meaning, is it okay in your environment to speak up? What happens if you do that? Right. And so we just want to kind of look, especially in companies. I've known a lot of people in the healthcare field.
There's another one where I have seen a lot of people. And when they say like, no, I can't go and see that person. Right.
I have somewhere else I have to be. I should have gotten off an hour ago. We see this a lot in the medical field.
That's not an appropriate answer. And as a matter of fact, it's not only not appropriate in the workplace to set boundaries like that, but it's punished. Okay.
So that's unfair treatment. And you want to be looking for things like that when we're talking about burnout. Okay.
So let's talk about a little bit. What can we do about burnout? I want to help you kind of identify areas in your life where you might be burnt out and then figure out how to take action. So I wrote all these things down and then I'm kind of looking at them.
And as usual, all of these things are things that you have control over. Okay. And so just making an identification that there's burnout and getting to the root of like, what's going on here, right? What's not working for me? And if you listen to last week's episode, I hope you found that really helpful.
But if you haven't go back and listen to it, because this will set you up. Basically, it'll help you identify like what's causing the burnout. Okay.
And so one of the things if, and I'm going to talk about this in a job, in the professional workplace, because I think a lot of people are pivoting right now. Frankly, a lot of people are out of work that had worked before, and it's a pivot point. And so you definitely like want to go back in there with if you were burnt out before with a burnout prevention attitude.
Right. Same thing with like, if you're burnt out in your parenting, we need to start talking about that. Okay.
Because that's not sustainable. So listen to last week's episode. It'll set you up for this week's episode.
The first thing you want to do, you guys, is start speaking up. Okay. Listen, if you're working somewhere and you're burnt to the crisp, if you're living in a house where you are exhausted and stuck and unable to cope, it's time for you to say what's happening for you.
Because here's the deal. You're in a relationship with yourself. Okay.
And so if you're feeling burnt out and you're ignoring that, you're not even supporting yourself. Do you understand? And I don't know about you, but I don't like to be in relationships with people who don't support me. I will leave it right there.
Okay. So it might be time to speak up. If you don't have the skills to do that, if you don't feel like you're well-equipped to do that, well, that's a good place for personal growth because it's time.
Okay. The other thing is if you're burnt out, you need to start considering restructuring stuff. Right.
So if you're burnt out at your job because you work too much, it might be time to shift things up a little bit. Right. If you're burnt out at home because you're spending all your time caretaking, it might be time for a restructure.
And so when you're thinking about restructuring a situation in which you're burned out, you gotta be putting yourself first, which means, hey, friend, take a look at your self-care habits. Do you have hobbies that you do when you're not doing the thing that you're burnt out from? Right. Are you able to get time away? Is that something you can do? Right.
So what kinds of things could you insert into your life? Or frankly, they need to just be there all the time. What permanent changes can you make to how you take care of yourself? Because we can't be working all the time. We can't be caretaking all the time.
We'll get burnt out. It's too much stress. So we have to take care of ourselves, which means, you know what it means.
It means we have to start setting boundaries. I'm sorry. I know.
It all comes back to boundaries, doesn't it? Damn it. Boundaries are really hard, you guys. And there's a whole skill set involved with setting boundaries, which, you know, I go into here and there.
I think I have an episode on boundaries. But in terms of burnout, sometimes we burn out because we don't have good boundaries. Right.
Like when I was a parent in the early years, my kids are 16 months apart. My house was like romper room. Like the wiggles were on all the time.
Too much drove me crazy. And I got totally burnt out. I was changing 1 million diapers a day.
Oh, my gosh. I'm like, I can hardly talk about it without being like, oh, my God, how did I do that? Right. I was totally burnt out and I had no boundaries.
Right. John would be like, do you want me to, you know, hang like take responsibility for the kids tonight? Or do you want me to make dinner tonight? Or do you want me to change his diaper? And I'd be like, no, no, no. I got it.
I got it. I got it. Right.
So hello. I wasn't being in a very good relationship with myself because I wasn't even supporting myself when somebody is reaching out and saying, hey, dude, do you need some help? Right. And I needed to restructure things so that I wasn't the primary caretaker every single moment of every single day.
And that required me to, A, adopt some hobbies, frankly, get a life outside of being a parent and set some boundaries. OK. And the other thing is that if you're experiencing burnout, one of the things you can kind of use as a touch point for setting boundaries, if you don't know, like, where should I even begin? Right.
It's like you have to control your stress level. Some good boundaries are like start times and stop times to work hours. I think a lot of us are working from home right now.
Yeah. So you can't just work all the time, friend. You're not going to be good at your job.
I'll just tell you that right now, just off the top. OK. Whether it's parenting or a job, you're just not going to be good at it if you don't have boundaries around it and if you don't take breaks.
OK. And the other thing is that maybe you need to control your stress by, you know, getting up and stretching or breathing. Get some like skills around your emotional and physical way of relieving stress, please.
And if all that stuff that you have some control over doesn't work out, then it might be time to quit. And so quit the job, right? Get out of the relationship or you can't you really can't get out of the parenting relationship. So I really recommend digging in and doing some work around.
Well, what can you do? Right. But I just want to leave you that little door open at the bottom of the stairs. It's like you could always leave, especially that job, right, where you've done all the things you spoke up, you restructured things, you try to create some boundaries and take care of yourself.
But frankly, right, the company is massaging the culture of burnout. So sometimes there's not a lot we can do, you guys. And I'll tell you this.
If we keep supporting burnout culture, it's going to continue. And I one thing that is very clear in my private practice work and is also super disturbing is that not all companies care about their employees. Not all companies have visibility to the things that they're doing to create burned out employees.
And so if you work for a company like that, listen, there's not there's only so much you can do about that. And then you have a choice to make. Right.
So do your part and then make the choice to not be burned out, because actually you like me have a gift, right? We're out here and we're doing our thing in the world and we can make a difference. We have something that we can give here. And if and if the people that we're sharing that gift with don't see it or value it or understand it or take care of it, frankly.
See you later, right? Companies love burned out employees who do. They're the hardest workers. They're the hardest and the cheapest.
OK, so we have to push back against burnout because it's not healthy. It's not helping us to find life satisfaction. It's not empowering.
And frankly, we're all just living in trauma when we're in burnout. And that is a setup for an unhealthy culture. So let me know how this landed.
Are you going to work on those areas of your life in which you're feeling a little burnt out? Let me know how it works out. OK, thanks for being here. This episode is sponsored by the Anxiety Course, an online recovery program for people with anxiety.
As an anxiety survivor and a therapist, I've treated a lot of anxious folks, including myself. Let's just say I've done my homework. And here's what I know.
Not everyone needs therapy to deal with stress, anxiety and overwhelm. I developed this online learning program for people that want a different option to healing. Sign up to get on the wait list at RebeccaHunterMSW.com. The link's also in the show notes.
I hope you found today's show helpful. It would mean a lot to me if you'd rate, review or subscribe so that we can reach more people with this type of information. Here's the deal.
I'd like to get rid of some of the stigma around mental health. And this is how I'm doing it. We just need to have these conversations.
If you really want to dig in, join me on social media or join my private Facebook group for more tools, support and possibilities for change. Head to the link in the show notes at RebeccaHunterMSW.com. Way to show up today.
