3. Stress management for business owners: Burnout (Part 3)

Welcome to Bettermental! To kick off their season on stress management, Mike and Leanna have introduced a three-part mini series on stress, exhaustion, and burnout. The last part of this mini-series (Part 3), is all about burnout, which is what happens when you’re exhausted from stress and haven’t managed it effectively. AKA the “crisis mode” of stress.

In this episode, Mike and Leanna get really personal about the part that burnout has played in their lives and businesses, both before and during the pandemic. They share some of their biggest lessons learned, and thoughts on managing burnout with chronic mental health.

Listen in to learn things like the role dissociative episodes can play in burnout and why “getting enough sleep” isn’t going to work.

Show notes at: https://bettermental.fm/episode3

And we’d love to keep in touch. Connect with us on Twitter @leannalost and @mikeveny

Transcript

Episode 003: Prevent And Manage Burnout At Work

Mike V: Hello and welcome. My name is Mike Veny, and I'm here with my lovely co-host from Illinois, Leanna Lee. Hello!

Leanna L: Hello.

Mike V: How are you doing today?

Leanna L: I am…a little tired to be honest with you! It's been a long day.

Mike V: It's been a long day, okay. Well, I encourage you and everyone else who might be tired to listen to the last two episodes that we did. We did an episode on stress and an episode on exhaustion. And this episode, we're going to talk about burnout. Now, let me just quickly recap those three items:

  Stress is your body's response to stimuli in the environment. If you don't deal with it, you get to the point where you're tired all the time, that's exhaustion. If you get to the point with exhaustion where you can't function at all, that's called burnout. And that's why we are here today. 

                            And before we go any further into this episode, when people are feeling burned out, sometimes they can actually be in a suicidal place or feeling like they want to harm someone else or themselves. If you are feeling suicidal, it's really important that you get professional help immediately and call 9-1-1. So I encourage you to do that. If you're listening, if you know someone who's burned out and they're in a suicidal place, call a suicide hotline or a medical professional immediately and get them the help that they need. 

But in your mind, what is burnout?

Leanna L: So I think of burnout as the crisis mode of stress, I guess. So I think of stress is like stuff you deal with day to day that's like a bit overwhelming and can be tiring and difficult to handle. Sometimes if you don't have the proper system  in place and, you know, frustrated. And then exhaustion is when that happens over and over and over again and your body's like, "Ugh, why?" And your brain just doesn’t want to deal with you anymore.

And so that's kind of what happens after prolonged stress, but then burnout to me is what happens after prolonged periods of exhaustion, where you've gotten these warning signs probably at least once or twice where your brain is... is like in those old cartoons, I think of like Bugs Bunny or Roger Rabbit, where they're in this car and it's going like “Kaput, kaput, kaput!” and they're like these little smoke things and then the car dies. So if you can imagine that, exhaustion is like the car is starting to die. And then burnout's just like pshh and then the hood, there's steam coming out of the hood and you're like, you have to get it towed.

Mike V: Well, actually aren't you talking about a real thing because you're talking actually about like a car overheating actually, right?

Leanna L: Yeah! Yeah, and it just stops.

Mike V: And you think about it, the car's overheating, there's stress on that car, the heat.

Leanna L: Yeah. It's true.

Mike V: And it gets to the point where you see the little needle go up, if you're paying attention and then if you don't deal with it, the car just stops and we're no different.

Leanna L: Yeah, true. Yeah. I was thinking of Bugs Bunny, but yeah, no, that's a good point.

Mike V: It happens in real cars, too.

Leanna L: It happens in real life! But yeah, no. So with burnout, you really, at least my experience, you're not really able to function normally. You've gotten to the point where compounded stress and exhaustion is just making it nearly impossible for you to fulfill day-to-day tasks. 

                             And actually some professionals refer to work-related burnout as a type of nervous breakdown. So that's kind of the level at which they categorize it. You can have a nervous breakdown, or if you struggle with pretty severe mental health issues, you could even have a psychotic break. If you are dealing with certain mental health issues on top of stress and exhaustion, that may be one of those times where it happens. 

                             But it's more likely that you were to have a nervous breakdown due to some kind of work-related compounded stress, which leads to exhaustion, which leads to burnout. But yeah, there are a bunch of different symptoms and signs. And I think you're going to tell us about those, Mike.

Mike V: I am, okay! The signs and symptoms of burnout. Every day just sucks, like it just sucks. You're irritable, you're isolating, you don't want to be around anyone. You're just done. You're feeling that “I'm just done!” feeling. Putting attention on anything seems like a waste of time, a complete waste of time. Even something like walking your dog, something as simple as that. 

                            You're exhausted all the time, tired, drained with headaches. You spend a lot of time procrastinating or trying to do everything, and both can be actually a symptom of burnout, like becoming hyper-focused on work. Not giving a fuck about work, people, life, like again, screw everybody. And sometimes it can lead to substance misuse, acting out, whatever that might mean for you, and comfort eating.

Leanna L: Alcohol, comfort eating, drugs.

Mike V: Yeah. I just need that glass of wine. I just need a bottle of wine tonight. That's a sign that you're going through some stuff, but-

Leanna L: I have been there, I won't lie. Definitely been there.

Mike V: I have been there many times, especially during the pandemic, but also, poor performance at work. If you're just not getting any results at work, if you're really, really struggling, you're struggling with relationships at work. Chances are, there's something deeper going on and it's probably burnout if you're just done and you don't feel like yourself anymore. So it's really important that you address this, but everyone's burnout is going to look different. What does yours look like, Leanna?

Leanna L: Right, so! The past year or so we had a lot of experience of burnout, didn't we? My first burnout came, my first COVID burnout, because I had several! My first COVID burnout came, it was early summer. I think it was like end of May, early June, late spring or summer. 

                             And so I had lost some anchor clients in, I want to say February right as COVID hit, late February, March. I had picked up some new anchor clients in March and then I just went full out because I didn't know, I didn't know how these long these clients were going to last. I didn't know how long I'd have these products for. So I just went full out for about three months and that was like, I'm talking like wake up at 5:30 every morning, go for a walk because that was the only time when I wasn't going to see people. Like I was in the mode where I didn't want to see anyone, I just wanted to be alone. And like, that was how I was able to function, it was to just be alone. 

                             I'd go to the local park at 5:30 in the morning and just watch the dew in the grass fade as the sun came up. And that was my function mode. And then I'd go back and then I would work and I would work and I would work and I would work. And then I would go to bed super early, like eight or nine o'clock. You'd think, "Oh, that's plenty of sleep!” But if you tuned into the last episode where we talked about chronotypes, if you were the kind of person who has pockets of energy throughout the day, like most people do and you work through those, it doesn't really matter how much sleep you get.

…if you work through all of your low energy times, your body just eventually gets too tired and that's what happened to me. I had a high-stress environment, plus lack of proper rest. And I just ended up exhausting myself and I headed into burnout like after three-ish months. And I think part of it was just like the early days of the pandemic, you're like, “This is a new challenge!”. Everyone's learning to bake bread in their freaking bath tubs.

Mike V: I remember that.

Leanna L: And they were planting Victory gardens and all of these like crafts and everyone was suddenly so energetic. And we were like, "This is like World War 2! We're going to do all of this shit! We're going to band together and be a cool nation!" And just like, I don't know, but we were under lockdown and it was stressful and we didn't get to see people.

And eventually everyone was just like, you know what, screw it I'm not trying anymore. And that was the point where a lot of people hit burnout because, that high level of energy, you really can't sustain it for very long. So that's kind of when I burned out. 

                            Now burnout to me, that was my COVID burnout, burnout to me is not an unusual state because I deal with anxiety, I also deal with depression and PTSD. And I feel like at the center of those three conditions is burnout. That's like, if you have a Venn diagram of those three, it is burnout. Because if you're dealing with all three at once, anxiety is like your brain is on all the time, depression is like your brain is trying to shut down on you without your permission and PTSD is like a weird combination of the two, it's like anxiety plus I just don't want to do this anymore.

So eventually your body's like, you know what, fuck it, I give up! And what would happen to me growing up and kind of over the years, less so as I had learned to manage these different conditions, was I would have these dissociative episodes. Sometimes my brain would just, I would just have brain fog and I couldn't really focus on the present, but when it got really bad, my body would literally shut down. So I'd be sitting down and this numbness would creep over my entire body to where I couldn't move, I couldn't talk, I couldn't think straight. 

                            If I was writing at the time and I did this as an experiment, my handwriting would go from normal to just a squiggly line. It was really terrifying.  But literally that was my body slowly burning out. It was stuttering to a halt and then all systems would turn off and then I could blink and that's all I could do. And it would be like that for a while. Sometimes it would be like five or 10 minutes and sometimes it would be like an hour or longer and I just couldn't move, really. 

                            So then eventually things would start back up again. I could like move my hands, everything  would be tingly…it was very, very weird, but I thought of that, that would only happen when I was burned out, and I thought of that as kind of a reset button? Because I knew that once I got to that point, I couldn't do anything to stop it. I just kind of had to let my body do its thing because it just needed whatever was going on, it just needed that forced reset.

So, not to be depressing or anything, but that's just kind of how I dealt with that. And so I’ve learned to recognize the symptoms more and to get to the point where I'm not just there and not able to deal with it, but yeah, that's been my experience. If you deal with anxiety already, if you deal with depression already, if you deal with PTSD already, your threshold for burnout is probably lower because your body and brain are already using up a lot of energy dealing with whatever shit you have going on each day.

So you also have to watch out for different systems because my anxiety heads into depression, anxiety doesn't work that way for everyone. Exhaustion is almost synonymous with depression for me and I think for you as well. Again, not the case for everyone. The brain and body shut down, that's definitely not a symptom that everyone sees. It's kind of like having the flu when your immune system is already compromised, you just have a lower threshold of tolerance. So that's my experience. How about you? Can you relate to any of that or how is yours - Maybe not the forced reset, but what do you deal with?

Mike V: This is a good time to talk about this. Sometimes my burnout has come from successful things.

Leanna L: Oh…yes! Tell me more!

Mike V: On any given week, I could have so many leads coming in to hire me for speaking. My publicist could be sending me a bunch of different requests for quotes or podcast interviews that I have to be on. And plus I might have client calls all week. Any of these are all good things, it means business is going well. And you only can put so much energy out and then get to the point where, I'm on a podcast talking about self-care and thinking, "Whoa, I'm the one that really needs it. I'm saying this for myself, not anyone else." And for me, my body shuts down completely. I can't move.

Leanna L: Okay. Wow. So we have -it's a very similar thing, then!

Mike V: That's why as you were talking...To get to the bathroom for instance, is like an effort to do that. It's almost like you maybe have the flu or something.

Leanna L: Yeah. And it's like the third…fight, flight or freeze. It's almost like the freeze response, you know?

Mike V: Yeah. And I just feel numb and I can't think, my brain goes dead. And so this happens, I'm going to maybe say three or four times a year. Happened a few times in the pandemic. And what was interesting is even though we were home more they say working from home and it was like, no, we are bringing home to work. And it's like, a problem. 

                             We started to work so much more in the pandemic and many people were stuck at their computers, and didn't have the boundary of an office. So they couldn't put that boundary in. And I know for me that that happens a lot, especially when a good project is happening. Recently, my company got accredited for continuing education, which I told you about.

Leanna L: Yeah! Congrats.

Mike V: Thank you. And that process was a year and a half, Leanna, of nonstop work. Some nights I had to pull an all-nighter and you know what, it was for a certain period of time. But there were times where I just burned out and had to take a break from it. So it's really important what burnout looks like for you. And that's actually what I've gotten from the other two episodes we recorded as well. Knowing what stress looks like, what exhaustion looks like.

Leanna L: Yeah, that awareness.

Mike V: And burnout looks like for you, but we have some solutions for you here. We're not just going to-

Leanna L: That, that actually leads us really well into your solution.

Mike V: My solution. Well, number one, and this is really important: treat it as an emergency. This might mean you need medical assistance, that happens. But it's important to treat it as an emergency. I believe we talked about this in the last episode. Pausing, you'd need a timeout. And we have someone in common, actually, we both actually have the same business coach-

Leanna L: Shout out to Lacey!

Mike V: Shout out to Lacey. But Lacey would always tell me that one of her family members, she would just always see, when this family member was younger “Locate, locate, locate!” Which means basically ground yourself, locate yourself. And that's what we need to do when we're burned out. There's no way you can get stuff done at that point, it's important to ground yourself and get your rest and get better, whatever that looks like for you.

Leanna L: Yeah. And that, I think that's particularly difficult for people like us. If you have depression, that's difficult. If you have anxiety, that's difficult. If you have PTSD, that's difficult. If you have another condition like bipolar depression, or manic-depressive disorder, then those are difficult. Like grounding is so, so important because you're not on an even keel. You're like trying to manage one extreme after another. 

                            Especially if you struggle with mental health on a day to day basis, grounding is so, so, so crucial. I recognize that not everyone who owns a business is in a position to just take a break and just drop shit on a whim. I get that, I do. But when you've reached the point where you are burned out, I promise you, your business is not going to get any better if you don't take care of yourself. It’s really -you continuing to work will probably only harm client relationships, the quality of your work on projects, admin and strategy work, that's just going to go out the window.

Mike V: And it will eventually close the doors on your business.

Leanna L: Exactly, exactly. So I really, really truly believe…you know, exhaustion, you may have a little bit of time. Maybe you don't have the time to take a break right then. Maybe you have a little bit more time to like figure something out. But when you have hit burnout that you have to see this as an emergency, as being in crisis mode and just drop shit as quickly as you can. 

                             So if you can wrap up your workday immediately, as soon as possible, I strongly, strongly suggest that you do that. When I have hit burnout, it is like, "Okay, I am emailing this client now I'm saying I have a medical emergency. I need to move this deadline a day or two or even a week if I possibly can, not usually possible, but even a couple days works."

Mike V: Whoa, whoa, hold on for a second. I think that's important for people to hear what you just said. You let clients know what?

Leanna L: That I have a medical emergency.

Mike V: That is really important.

Leanna L: Because it is!

Mike V: It is, yeah.

Leanna L: It is a medical emergency. It's literally, the owner of your business, i.e. you, is in the medical crisis. That is where you're at! You're not just stressed, you're not just exhausted, you are burned out. The business cannot function without you and if you cannot function, guess what? There is no business.

Mike V: There is no business.

Leanna L: There is no -you can't do business with your client because there's no business to do because you're burnt out. Sorry, I'm getting overly-emotional about this, but I feel strongly about this.

Mike V: It's important.

Leanna L: It is. It is important so please, please, please tell your clients. You don't have to say you're burned out, you don't have to say you're dealing with mental health stuff, call it a personal emergency, family emergency, medical emergency, whatever you need, but move those deadlines for at least a few days. At least! 

                            Try and move what you're doing that day and give yourself a slower work day. If only to let your body reset for a short time and evaluate where you're at because if you are burned out, that means that something went wrong somewhere. Too many stressors for too long leads to burn out. So that means you have work to do basically, you're burned out so you need rest, but you also have work to do figuring out what those stressors are and how you can prevent this from happening again. And that means you need to take time to do what is essentially, let's be honest here, business development.

Mike V: Yes. Business development is important.

Leanna L: It is.

Mike V: And it's also important, once you get your burnout under control to come up with some kind of self-care plan for yourself. And it has to be law of the land. And the other thing is-

Leanna L: Wait, law of the land, what do you mean?

Mike V: Oh, that's like an official, when something goes to the Supreme Court.

Leanna L: Oh, oh, yep, yep.

Mike V: And then it becomes official and the thing is, it becomes a permanent thing in your life, that's self-care. The other thing is a brain dump, which we talked about in the stress episode and that's basically writing everything down that's on your mind. Once you get it off your brain, it doesn't take it away, but it makes it more manageable. That's the important thing. And what about work and systems in your business, what are your thoughts on that?

Leanna L: Yeah, okay. So this is assuming that you've had a little bit of time off. You're starting to sleep a bit better. Maybe you're back down to exhaustion mode. You have time to think about how to manage yourself properly. So now we're talking about redesigning work and the systems you can put in place to prevent this cycle from repeating. 

                            So I'm thinking of stuff like, are you so overwhelmed by work tasks that you, A) are not good at, or B) struggle to complete because they're just not your area of expertise. A solution to that would be hiring a VA. If you cannot afford that, a solution to that would be looking into software solutions that can help you automate that. Another thing I think of is chronotypes.

So I mentioned this in the last episode, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier when you're working through low-energy time, taking another look at how your work day is scheduled and how it's structured. Taking a look at how many hours you're spending on really deep, focused work and kind of what I call brain-heavy work, rather than low-brain work, or easier tasks that take up less energy.

So you'll want to take a hard look at your work schedule to see if, oh, maybe working nine hours flat, with zero meal breaks, three months in a row is what caused burnout. Yes, it could absolutely do that. So you're taking a hard look at stuff like meal breaks, stuff like how many hours a day you're working, when you're working, what you're working on, and putting systems in place to control that a little better. So maybe cutting down on some of the work hours. 

                            When I'm in what I call emergency mode, that's when I'm…you talked in the last episode about something called, something “imbalance.”

Mike V: “Focused imbalance.” And what that is, is when you are focusing on a project in your life that just requires for a period of time that you put in extra work.

Leanna L: Like really focused concentration?

Mike V: Really focused concentration. Yep.

Leanna L: Yeah. Yeah. So for me, I call that “emergency mode”. So I had to do that during COVID, I set that up during COVID actually. But when I'm having a really bad mental health time or something like COVID comes up. I go into emergency mode where I work fewer hours, more days per week. So it sounds like I get less time off, but it's actually more helpful for me because I'm not switching my brain on and off, on and off into different modes. I'm like, I have work in the mornings and then I'm free in the afternoons, or I work in the mornings and afternoons, but I'm free in all the evenings. And that helps my body get into a kind of rhythm again, which is one of those things about burnout is you've just lost a sense of rhythm, right?

So part of redesigning your work, and when you're a business owner who works for yourself, your work life and your personal life are almost inseparable, you're also redesigning your personal life. You're redesigning those intersections, which is work schedule, personal schedule, things like when you eat, when you work, how many hours you work, how many days you work and the projects that you work on. And then some of those tools and some of those systems you can put in place can help you automate that. If you delegate to someone else that can help you manage it and stuff like dealing with sleep, which I think you'll talk about and exercise too can help you manage that.

Mike V: Yeah, no, no sleep is so necessary. People think they don't need sleep or they can go-

Leanna L: Especially when you're young.

Mike V: Yeah. Especially when you're young you can go and work on four hours of sleep. Here's the thing, it's going to catch up with you. It really, really is thinking about the whole car analogy that we were talking about before. It's really important that you get your sleep on a schedule and you can listen to the exhaustion episode to listen to some more tips around that and finding an accountability partner here. Now it's interesting because Leanna, you and I, we do this podcast together, we've done workshops together. We are constantly talking about this stuff.

Leanna L: It's kind of like having an accountability partner.

Mike V: It kind of is.

Leanna L: Sort of.

Mike V: And the reality is, if I'm struggling with something, it's going to come out as we talk through the episodes. And so I think it's really important to have that. And because of that, you'll have someone to help you along the way. And that's where I want to bring one final thing in here on help. It's okay to ask for help. Yeah. Especially therapists or a counselor.

Leanna L: Or as you said, a medical professional, if the occasion warrants it.

Mike V: Yeah, a medical professional and there's something about working with a therapist or counselor that is going to help you and your business. So, so much. So it's really important in our previous podcast, MxV, we did some therapy episodes. And so you can check those out, they're online somewhere. I think on our website.

Leanna L: Working on that. Yes.

Mike V: Working on that at the time of this recording.

Leanna L: It'll be, by the time you hear this, it'll be on our website, bettermental.fm so check out the therapy episodes, because yeah. If you're struggling with finding that healthcare professional support system, that's a great series. We did a three-part series about therapy for business owners.

Mike V: So yeah, it's a really important thing and check out those episodes. But the important thing is you have to do something about this. And again, I just want to end with saying this, this is a medical emergency. If you are burned out and I really encourage you to do something about it.

Leanna L: Yeah. Treat it, treat it like an emergency. So basically the reason we did this three episode series is to give you a sense of the spectrum, right? They all play into each other. You have stress, which is a natural part of life, but unchecked and managed badly. It leads to exhaustion which leads to burnout. So you see, we've got this like cyclical problem. In the freelancing world and the small business world. We have feast-famine cycles, right? Where you market yourself really heavily, you get a lot of work, work dies down. You have a famine mode, you market heavily and you go back. Well, this is kind of like the mental health version of the feast-famine cycle, is this stress, exhaustion, burnout. And it's just going to happen because business is stressful.

You are going to be hit with these stimuli, with these stressors every day. And if you don't manage that, then you're going to end up caught in this vicious cycle. And as someone who deals with mental health stuff on a day-to-day basis, it is a dangerous cycle to get caught up in. It's not great for my personal health. It's not great for my relationship with my husband or my family or my friends. It's not great for business. 

                             But by proactively managing it and preventing that stress and the key is starting with preventing stress which prevents the other two, you catch yourself in time. So I can catch myself before my anxiety hits depression or my stress hits exhaustion, more exhaustion hits, burnout and burnout is when I'm like, okay, all bets are off. Now I don't have a business because now I'm just focused on not getting myself checked into a hospital. This is why it's so important, especially now we are still, for all intents and purposes, in the middle of a pandemic. We are not done with this yet. So we have awhile to go. And in the past year or so, plus year and a half, by the time you listen to this, we're learning that mental health must play a bigger role in your work life and your workday than it used to.

Mike V: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to encourage you to listen to the stress episode and the exhaustion episode. And I challenge you to share these episodes with people that need to listen to them. You know someone in your life, if you're not stressed or exhausted or burned out yourself, you know someone who is, so it's really important to do that. I just want to say, thank you all for listening. I really enjoy doing this with you, Leanna. And I'm grateful to all of you who work on your businesses and work in your businesses and we're here to help you get better mental wellness into your life and your business. And we're excited to do more. So we are out for now and we'll see you in the next episode.

Leanna L: Take care.