Do you know what real power is? It's knowing you're on the same rate for energy all day, every day with a smart all day plan from board Gosh Energy, save up to eight hundred and eighty euro on dual fuel plus get a two hundred and thirty five eure a welcome bonus switch today at Boardgosh Energy dot ie Board Gosh Energy. Know your power estimation anuel bill at
twenty six hundred twenty nine. Your new customers only thurship centis Kentov Smart all Day Electricity UNI rates in twenty nine percent of gas.
See pocash Energy dot E for fulltiesncies. Oh hey, it's your coworker who makes bunt cakes, Ali Ward. And speaking of work, let's get right into it. How are we doing? How are our brains? How are you feeling? Are you feeling like a little bit like wilted lettuce? You feel in like a swollen infection? Get a pop? We get it, I get it. So this episode has been a long time coming, and I cornered one of the world's leading
experts on burnout. They got their MBA at the University of Oregon and a Doctorate of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where they are currently a senior Fellow. They're the director of the Penmaster in Medical Education program too. They wrote the book on burnout. It's called Burnout Immunity so Ergo Pathology. It's the science of ergon, which is work in Greek and pathology, which is something bad. But
what exactly is burnout? Okay, obviously we're going to cover it, but if you're experiencing exhaustion, cynicism, and professional inefficiency, you're going to want to keep listening before we get to it.
Though.
Thank you to all the patrons at patreon dot com for submitting your questions for this episode. You can get sneak peaks at future episodes, and you can submit questions for them by joining Patreon for as low as a dollar a month and for zero dollars. Thank you to everyone leaving reviews which helped the show so much. Like for example, this week Euphonium Shorty left a review that said, I couldn't possibly care less about the making of street murals.
At least that's what I thought until Ali explained it all to me. That's happened to me at least a dozen times with this podcast. That's why I love it amazing really the frequency with which they come out. If I could change one thing they write, it'd be Ali taking better care of herself. Euphonium shorty Timely. I'm doing much better, and I'll tell you how I balance life with work that I legitimately love. Also, speaking of love, lots of love. Back to reviewer, Amari, you know who
you are. Okay, let's get into it. Please take a load off, Lie down on a carpet, you can recline against tree trunk. Take some time to listen and absorb the teachings about what is burnout, who burns out faster than others, who doesn't burn out? What professions are more at risk for fatigue and mental health repercussions, How do
you tell your boss you're burned out? Neurodiversity and burnout grit, The myths of guilt, hockey mascots, childhood trauma and lingering anxiety, and how to tell your brain to tell your body that you got this and when to acknowledge no, I do not got this. Baby needs to rest. Also how you don't need to wait until you're onotropical vacation to recharge, in fact, don't with scholar author and burnout expert, ergo pathologist for candy weeds.
Candy weens, she her mm hmm, burnout expert.
How does it happen this one become a burnout expert just like diving right in. I'm like, tell me everything.
Well, let me tell you. When I was probably nine, ten years old, that's the last thing I ever thought I would be. In fact, I don't even hear the word burnout until just probably, I don't know, eight, well twelve years ago. So becoming a burnout expert for me anyways, started with me having a life threatening wake up call experience with burnout, the kind where I was having a hypertensive emergency and just decided to go on a quest to figure out like what was going on with me,
learn how to deal with my stress. And then as I started nerding out and geeking out on the whole thing, I decided to go get my doctorate. I just it was like one of those I'm Okay, I'm going to go figure this out for real. I'm going to science the shit out of this thing, and I'm going to find out why some people just seem to be somewhat
immune to burnout. They are clearly experiencing a lot of stress, but they work alongside people like me that are experiencing the same sort of stressers, but they're not burned out. What's going on with them?
Can you tell me a little bit about that hypertensive emergency if it's not true traumatic, But what was the moment you realized that it was related to stress?
Yeah? So, at the time, this is back in twenty eleven, I was a management consultant, on the road a lot, had three young kids at home, living the whole type a personality sort of career. Loved what I did, threw myself into it, super engaged in work, loved my colleagues and my clients and all of that. And I felt at the time like I was experiencing a lot of stress, but to me, it felt like the good kind of keeping myself motivated sort of stress, alongside a lot of
the other bad stress too. But my approach back then was just stuff that stress, like, put it in a box, put it in a put that box in a closet, like lock that closet, and don't touch that stress until you're ready for it. What happened was when I had this hypertensive emergency, which I had no idea I was
even having one. I went into my doctor's office just for a routine annual physical you know that kind where you go in and they check your blood pressure and they check all your vital signs and you're in and out in about twenty minutes. They give you your a and
say see you back here next year. I thought it was one of those, But what happened was I was in the exam room, the nurse checked my vital signs, She checked my blood pressure four times before saying anything, and the only thing she said to me was I'm going to go talk to the doctor. And instead of like taking that seriously and thinking, holy caw, like what is this about? What's going on with my blood pressure? Instead I picked up my phone and started working again
because that was the norm for me. And I know, it's like I'm hearing stories from so many people that that's what they would have done too, because the stress I was feeling at the time had just become to feel so normal to me that I wasn't recognizing the fact that when my doctor came in she told me that my blood pressure was two hundred over one ten. Yeah, I didn't know what that meant at the time.
Just a side note, I had to look this up. Normal blood pressure one twenty over eighty it's considered high around one thirty over eighty. Stage two is like one forty. But if you get a blood pressure reading over one eighty over one twenty, you need to call nine one one or go to the er immediately, like you could die on the spot. And again, doctor Weens was two
hundred over one ten. What so, this is what's called a hypertensive crisis, and it's usually caused by people forgetting to take blood pressure meds, or kidney disease underlying or heart disease, some pregnancy complications, taking meth or really high anxiety. And according to the CDC, heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing over three hundred thousand women in twenty twenty one, or
about one in every five female deaths. We do have a cardiology episode coming up, of course, but yeah, her blood pressure was well into the range of all hands on deck, holy shit.
And then of course she gave me a huge delsa xanax, which I'd never had before, and brought my blood pressure down and so like an hour later, she called my husband to have them come pick me up, and about an hour later I was finally stable enough where they could send me home and not to the emergency room. I was basically like ordered to be on bed rest
for several days. And my first thought when she told me that was there's no way I can be on bed rest because I have this big leadership development program to run, and I almost panicked, like it almost sent me back into another stress spiral. But then the second thought was, well, thank god, someone's finally telling me I can go home and rest, like giving me a permission to rest, because because I wasn't giving myself enough rest. And I hear this so often from people that I
work with and people who hear me speak. But then my third thought was, you know, she's absolutely right. My doctor is telling me I'm not fine. I need to take this seriously. I need to stay home and not work.
And so for a few days, laying on the couch on xanax and blood pressure medicine, I had a lot of time to think and started reading some books and started digging around on you know, what are the best stress management techniques and doing to sell so a lot of self reflection, and it started to dawn on me then that I needed help. I needed to make changes because my work environment was not going to change anytime soon, so I needed to think about for myself what were
some immediate things I could do. But then also it really dawned on me too, like longer term, I really need to find a work environment and the right conditions where I can really thrive without burning out. So that's kind of how it started my interest and my geeky curiosity on stress and burnout, and then it eventually turned into me wanted to get my doctorate so I could study it for real.
When you realized that you had to make some changes, where do you start, Like did the doctor say like, oh okay if you need to matter or are they just like your blood pressure's good. You got to figure out the rest.
So it was like, you know, gave me medicine and told me to go home and basically figure it out
for myself. She didn't recommend anything at all. And this was again back in twenty eleven, where very few people, if any, were talking about burnout, Like I wasn't really hearing about it, and I worked in healthcare consulting, so it wasn't really until like twenty twelve, twenty thirteen that I started reading studies about this stuff and reading some other stress management books and like practitioner kinds of books.
But then when I started digging into the research, I started seeing, Okay, there is this thing called burnout, and then I was able to put my finger on what I was experiencing.
What exactly Looking back, now that you have your doctorate and now you've been working in this for so long, can you pick apart a little bit of what was happening during a burnout episode. I imagine that it can show up in your heart or your brain. I imagine that whatever crisis people might finally get to can show up at all kinds of ways.
Right, So they're really a number of ways that we can pay attention to the fact that stress is turning into something that's a little bit more dangerous, potentially getting to a point where we're going to break down or burnout. And I would say, first and foremost pay attention to
the physical science. Most of us can notice things like headaches, not sleeping well, not being interested in exercise, not being interested in intimacy with our partner, you know, all kinds of physical manifestations that if we were to just really
pay attention, they are there. Those signs are there. But then also like some of the psychological ways that burnout manifests, that things like just lack of interest in things that we once love to do, starting to feel more negative and cynical about work or about other people, And then
we also might notice changes in our relationships. Some people tell me that they notice the first signs of burnout when they start to notice their relationships are kind of fraying and starting to become more tense, that they start lashing out, maybe at people that they really love or
they even enjoy working with. So there are a number of ways that you can pay attention to how stress is affecting you, and it's really noticing the fact that burnout is really this thing that can be quite insidious, meaning that it can really sneak up on you if you're just going through the motions of life and keeping with the grind that you've always been doing, which was my case and a lot of people that I talk to who have been burned out, that's how they experience
it because they're so focused on performing or achieving or helping other people or just juggling life and family and everything all at once that it's really easy to lose track of what's going on with yourself.
And what's happening. From a scientific perspective, I know, the amygdala has so many things to say when it comes to stress. I know, we've got cortisol, we've got adrenaline, we've got dopamine, we've got serotonin, We've got all kinds of things going on. What is happening under stress where it finally, just like the roof caves in.
Well, so for some people it caves in on a physical level, and burnout for the most part, is a psychological experience. With stress. Our body goes through all kinds of chemical reactions when our amygdala goes off. It's that part of our brain that triggers the fight flight or freeze response. And very few of us, though, are actually threatened by bears coming out of nowhere.
Yeah, I mean chased by.
A tiger or you know, in my case, I actually am going through something that it's not physically threatening, but it's psychologically threatening to me. So that to me is much more stressful than something like coming on the Ologies podcast. I was nervous to come on and also excited. Like there's stress involved in both of those scenarios, but one triggers a threat response to stress. The other one, coming on your podcast triggers what's known as the challenge response
to stress. So our body is going to react differently in each of those situations. And what's really important what I write about in my book is learning how to pay attention to those science so that you can regulate your nervous system. Whether you're truly being threatened or if the stressor is something that you are excited about and looking forward to, you can learn how to regulate your nervous system in a healthy, productive way so you can show up as your best.
So doctor Weens says that the challenge response to stress kicks in when we want to perform or achieve something, and why it doesn't freak you out is because you've told yourself that it's not life threatening, and so your body uses those fight or flight hormones, like if you are exercising or trying to beat your brother in law in a potato sack race. So the challenge response gives you energy and focus and motivation and just a little
bit of swagger. So how do you respond that way instead of throwing up in a garbage can before your annual performance review. Doctor Weens writes that you have to like gently brainwash yourself, or you have to unbrainwash yourself by telling yourself inside, hey, you can do it. You can go crush this. So don't try to suppress the stress because that makes it worse, and she says to tell yourself, I'm stressed right now, but that's okay. I've
experienced stress before. I always get through it, or say hey, why not go for broke. I'm stressed right now, but this ain't my first rodeo, and I'm going to kick some ass, she writes in her book. She also says other quick mindset shifts include remembering all your strengths, remembering all the prep you did for the challenge, all the times you overcame similar challenges, imagining your loved ones rooting for you, or having a mantra like I've got this,
I can handle this, or again. Her personal favorite is this ain't my first rodeo, and she confesses in her book that she'll actually wear a T shirt that says this ain't my first rodeo under her suits when she gives like a big keynote, I tell myself to show up like you belong and have fun, which I guess I didn't realize that I was shifting my terror into a challenge response to stress. And I have to do it every week before I record HI doing it right now.
Neuroscience researchers who look at this stuff and look at really all the chemical reactions to stress and not just burnout, but every everyday stress for long periods of time. Sometimes that may lead to burnout, other times it may not. It main lead to other psychological conditions. But yeah, when we get stressed, and that turns on our nervous system, and that nervous system switch is turned on for a long period of time or it gets stuck in the
on position. We start to burn through our adrenaline first and then our cortisol kicks in, and that's meant to protect us. But over time, burning through all that cortisol really really quickly can lead to other physical symptoms. It will immediately cause your blood vessels to constrict, so you're then experiencing lack of oxygen and healthy blood flow to your brain, which then puts you in what we call
fast thinking mode. So it's like a chain reaction where we first have an unconscious physical reaction through the release of these kinds of hormones, you know, whether it's adrenaline or cortisol, or in some cases with good stress, it's dopamine and oxytocin and other things that help us manage stress. But it's those physical things that happen without us even knowing it before we start to fill the psychological effects of stress and then eventually burn out.
So the chemical background here is that adrenaline helps you survive in physical stress. It gives you this fuel boost in the form of glucose, which helps you get out a dodge or fight or hide in a bush or whatever it takes to evade an attack. Now, the hormone cortisol, this is our lined in the Frontiers and Psychology paper Burnout and Hypocortisolism a matter of severity. Cortisol responses to
acute psychosocial stress. Cortisol gives us the energy mobilization to fight off that attack, but as anyone who's ever had nervous diarrhea knows, it's not always helpful. And it continues this paper that long term exposure to stressful circumstances without enough recovery is hypothesized to be the cause of fatigue and exhaustion symptoms in people experiencing burnout. So things might be happening physically to you under stress, but like your
own bo sometimes you can't even detect it. You're just accustomed to it, and you might not even notice your burnout and your anxiety symptoms until your body's very mad at you or your sanity starts to fray. And I'm speaking from experience. Do you think some people are more
predisposed to burnout? It's like, if you have an anxiety disorder pre existing, or you have depression, or if you're neurodivergent, do those people tend to push beyond their limits or have a lower threshold for this kind of stuff.
Yeah, so there's interesting research that shows the relationship between You can look at it by temperament, So each of us is born with a certain type of temperament that doesn't necessarily change as we age and get older, and then we also all have personality traits that may change through life experiences. Anxiety is an interesting ones. So people who have just like underlying anxiety disorders or tend to
be one of the personality traits as neuroticism. So people who are high on the neuroticism scale it's great, tend to be more prone to burnout in certain contexts because they are more easily triggered. But it's also not just
with people who tend to run anxious. I would say what's important to look at for everybody is not necessarily whether you have an anxiety disorder or depression or anything like that, but really think about the interaction between what you want and need out of a work and life
environment and what you're actually getting. What is the environment that you're actually in, because it's really the interaction between you and that environment that makes you more vulnerable to burnout in certain contexts are in certain environments.
Yeah, I'm laughing about the neuroticism because we did a Personality Psychology episode. I took a test and it was like, You're neuroticism is so high we can barely measure it. It was just like they know, so I know definitely some of us are predisposed. And we'll link to that Personality Psychology episode. It is a banger. We'll put that
in the show notes. But the cheat sheet is that there is a scholarly five factor model of these five core personality traits, which are agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. And there was a twenty twenty three study titled the Big Five Model Personality Traits and Job Burnout a Systematic Literature Review, and it showed that higher levels of neuroticism and lower levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness are
associated with higher levels of burnout. No surprise. So the neuroticism and hiding from the world and being stubborn that I think protects me from failure, Nope, it does not. Why are we like this? Do you think that there's anything in our past that makes us more prone to pushing through? I understand things like, you know, childhood trauma or codependency issues, things like that might make us take
on more than we necessarily should be handling. Does childhood experience or does codependency or just like I can give more than the average person because I should, Does that figure into being predisposed for burnout?
It absolutely does. Yeah, absolutely, So if you think about, like what really contributes to my vulnerability to burnout? In yours alle your vulnerability might be different, it's two things,
like what are we born with? We're born with a certain kind of temperament and personality, but then also what's the environment, what are the conditions that we're exposed to in our early childhood all the way up until where we are today, And so, you know, aside from personality and temperament, which are hard for us to change in general, when we are able to reflect on the early experiences we had in childhood, and not just the experience itself, but who helped us or who did not help us
through stressful experiences.
And chronic trauma like surviving long term intimate partner abuse or war or sex trafficking, or childhood trauma that can result on what's called CPTSD or complex post traumatic stress disorder. And as for CPTSD being distinct from PTSD, some experts fight about that, which is not schill.
And it's interesting because there's really good research that shows a correlation between people who have had a number of what we call aces, adverse childhood events or experiences, and the studies are mixed. It's really showing that people who have a number of aces, like in my case, the whole first chapter of the book describes my experience from early childhood and how I went through a lot of adversity, and.
Her book details more of that, but she writes, I grew up on an Indian reservation in eastern Montana. Picture big blue skies, golden wheat fields, and their rich beauty of Native American culture, alongside abject poverty, little opportunity for education, and on my mom's side of the family, a long history of mental illness and alcoholism. She writes. My parents divorced after the tragic death of my two year old middle sister, leaving my mom to care for a newborn
in me. Needless to say, she shares, we struggled a lot. My mom was traumatized and grieving in ways I couldn't begin to understand. Lived in government subsidized housing, and relied on food stamps and Indian health Care for basics. I was constantly bullied at school for being too skinny. Not my fault, I would think to myself, I've barely eaten in the last five days. So began my struggle with
adversity induced stress, she writes. So childhood adversity is even more crushing, with systemic oppression and lack of financial resources and support.
And at the same time, I had a really loving, supportive family environment, even though it was very unstable and I felt at times very very insecure, and that led me to all kinds of bad patterns and habits around overachieving and immersing myself to an unhealthy level. That was offset by the fact that I had parents who loved me, and I had other caregivers and people in my life who were supportive and tried their best to give me
as secure of an environment as possible. So that all factors into both my patterns and how I've responded to stress up until today, as well as how how I perceive stressers now and into the future, and how that
might make me more vulnerable to burnout. One that's really interesting that I'd want to hit on a little bit because I think a lot of people can relate to this one is we hear a lot about grit, that grit is a good thing, the ability to persevere and work through things, you know, big hard challenges, And we find that a lot of people who go through really advanced education, like physicians go through you know, med school and then residency fellowship, that they learn how to persevere,
like they have grit, like nobody's business sort of thing. So I started digging into that, and sure enough, there are studies that show that that grit protects people from burnout.
So, according to a twenty eighteen paper, the relationship between grit, burnout and well being in emergency medicine residence, grit is this personality trait marked by perseverance and passion for long term goals, especially over a sustained period of time, and this study found that residence with higher grit appear to be less likely to experience burnout. So how do you
know if you're gritty? If you're the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team mascot Gritty, a huge furry orange thing whose lore involves being disturbed from his secret hideout while the Wells Fargo Stadium was being built, you definitely have grit because Gritty gets his name from the grit of the Flyers team. Because when you're from Philly, you go through things like
corrupt public officials and winter. Now, Gritty looks kind of like a Jim Henson character who owns more than one bong, and he was designed to represent someone that you'd high five but not hug, and they really got that dialed in. So gritty has grit. Maybe you're not gritty, but you have grit. There's a test for that. It's called the Grit Scale, and grit I just learned this. It's not
just about like someone who'd rubbed dirt, no wound. It actually stands for something that stands for growth, resilience, instinct, and tenacity and this scholar author and psychologist doctor Angela Duckworth pioneered a test for it, which includes statements like
setbacks don't discourage me. I finish whatever I begin. And this quiz tragically honestly reads like a reverse assessment for ADHD, which we cover in depth on our three part ADHD episode linked in the show notes with doctor Russell Barkley, and we'll also cover NERD divergence later in this episode. So the Grid Scale, though has its critics, scores are kind of said to be in line with higher GPAs for students and spelling beach championships and military academy success.
But as doctor Ween's explains, it's not an immunity amulet to future despair.
But in my case, I thought, you know what, I'm a really gritty person. I'm kind of off the scales when it comes to grit. But why did I get burned out? Well, my theory and what I found through my research is that grit without self awareness can get
you in trouble. Oh, it may serve us really well to get through things like medical school or whatever, these hard things are that you're working for, but then at some point that pattern and those ways of working become so ingrained in us that we lose track of loose sight of the fact that it's actually pretty unhealthy for us to keep going at that pace.
When you do research on this, how do you approach that? Do you have to go and find subjects? Where do you even start? I imagine people who are going through a burnout are like, I don't have time to talk to you.
Oh, totally. I was worried about that. Actually, when I started my first study, which was my dissertation, I thought, Okay, here's what I want to do. I want to find people who are in probably one of the most stressful jobs I've ever been exposed to. And a lot of my clients were really busy on physicians and clinicians. And then there are a number of physicians who have both
clinical responsibility and then they also have leadership responsibility. So I thought, Okay, let me study chief medical officers because I know I've worked with a number of them and they just the pressure and the demands on them is just like so extreme. So I thought, but wait, they're probably not going to talk to me or it will
be extremely hard to get on their calendar. Well, I was actually surprised because many of them wanted to sign up when they heard that I was studying stress and burnout. They were like, oh, let's talk about that. I have some thoughts. I want to tell you my experience. So I started studying that group of people, and the findings were really the basis of what turned into more research. The next big study I did was with over two
hundred police chiefs and other senior law enforcement officers. So again I went after what profession do I think has you know, very regular, very high stress for very long periods of time. And sure enough, you know, when I studied police chiefs along with the chief medical officers, what I would have them do was first tell me, like, on a scale of one to ten, how would you characterize your stress with ten being worst possible, zero no stress, and the ones who showed up as a seven or above,
which think about that for a second. They were telling me that their stress for a long period of time is severe, very severe, or worse possible, And then I have them, I actually measure them. I have a psychometric tool that a lot of researchers use.
So this quiz is the burnout Risk Assessment, and it's included in her book, and it asks participants to rate their degree of agreement or disagreement with statements like I feel comfortable asking others for help when I'm stressed out. I'm experiencing a lot of conflict with other people at work, I'm working longer and harder than I want to. My stress level does not feel sustainable, and I feel emotionally exhausted at the end.
Of the workday.
So this burnout risk assessment, it's kind of like a quiz in a magazine about like should I have a threesome? But instead it's used to determine feelings like does my life stress make me wish I was a box turtle so I can hibernate five months out of the year. That's what it boils down to.
So I found that there's this unique population of people who have this high level seven or above stress for a long period of time, but they're not burned out. So then I conduct very in depth interviews with them, sometimes speak to them multiple times or follow them over a couple of months period to really dig in and understand what are they doing to protect themselves. And that's
really the basis of the research. But aside from these really high stress jobs, I also interview people who are frontline workers and bartenders and barristas and babysitters, people who just experience everyday stress that a lot of people can relate to.
And we're going to talk about money issues in a bit. Especially in the medical field. I've heard from so many friends who are going through med school. It's just beyond I mean, you're learning everything for the first time, you're studying, you're on the floor, you're expected to work twenty hour shifts. How does the medical field come into this when a lot of the culture and the work around it is already pretty fucked up.
It is really and this is one of the things that some of my colleagues and I have really been looking at is I did a study with a number of physicians who wanted to look at you know, why are our residents and fellows getting so burned out. Why is the rate so high and why are they not
coming forward to ask for help? First of all, in the medical professions, there's a lot of stigma around coming forward about mental health issues, and there's a lot of concern that if I raise my hand and ask for help, that's like shameful. I should not be asking for help. I should be an expert. I've been getting straight e's throughout college and medical school, and now I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. And then there's a lot
of pressure on me. And so if I'm the one out of these other twelve residents who raises my hand and asks for help, what is that going to say about me? And so there's that kind of culture, and I'm seeing it change in some institutions, which is a good sign. But we need more research on this. We need more just awareness of what's going on. What are the cultural conditions that are really both causing the burnout but also preventing people from coming forward and asking for help.
You know, there's a lot of folks too who just are feeling so burned out from you know, four and a half years of a pandemic from lockdown, from increased screen time, from decreased social interactions. For more on some current stressors too, you can see our episode on Genocideology with genocide expert doctor Dirkmosis, or just look at the news in any capacity. So we've been trained to be on high alert looking for information at all hours of
the day and night. Is there something about the way that we are so tethered to devices that doesn't allow us to rest the part of our brains or our souls that need it.
Totally? Yeah, totally. It's become so common like if you walk through any airport, I mean just about any where you go a bus or train stations or whatever, you see people on their phones. Like how often do you actually go through a public place where more people are engaging and talking to each other. It's much more common
that people are looking at their devices. So there's that there's not enough time for people to really take their brains offline, because when our brains are always online, even if we're consuming good productive content, it's not allowing your brain or your psyche enough time to rest and burnout for the most part, is a psychological syndrome. And so when we're not giving our psyche a break, it's more likely that we're going to be susceptible to burnout.
And you can see our recent episode about fun with Catherine Price, who also wrote the book How To Break Up with Your Phone, The Thirty Day Plan to take Back Your Life. What about working hours? Because our open signs are just kind of always on. We're like, I go my phone on me, Like we're always at a computer because it's in our pocket. Has it been helpful for some people to be like I start work at nine and I'm off at five point thirty and no
one can tell me otherwise. Although even if you did that, what have you got kids and they're like need food and bathing. It's like, this is obviously from someone who's dog is asleep very gently in the corner because I could not handle kids. But like, where do you start to put limits on it so that your psyche can sort of repair itself.
That's that's the question of the day that each of us needs to really do some soul searching on. Here's how I look at it and how I think about it. This has been one of the most helpful things for me because during this research, which I consider to be action research, meaning that when I was researching people, I
was applying this stuff on myself. So one of the things I've learned and I still use to this day is to do just a daily or for me sometimes it's even a couple of times a day, just to quick check in, like where am I on my stress curve? So if you think about like we all need a little bit of stress or even some good amount of stress to feel motivated and engaged in all of that. It gets us motivated and makes us want to perform and do good things for the world and other people
and all that. But then at some point we get way too much stress, like way more things to do with all the kids and all the home things and all that that we get out of what we call the sweet spot of stress. So the exercise where I really find a lot about value is just checking in to see have I tipped over past my sweet spot of stress? Not just today, but like if I were to think about this past week and how it's gone for me, what am I doing and what is it
really doing to me? So what am I doing to take care of myself and how is that really helping me create conditions to keep me in a zone in a sweet spot of stress where I'm really challenged and engaged, but I'm not flipping out and breaking down and burning out, or what am I doing that's not good for me? Maybe huh okay, turns out that I'm saying yes to everything, I'm not setting boundaries, or I set boundaries, but I
don't uphold them. How can I focus on the things I can control to keep myself in that zone of sweet spot of stress?
So what if you're in a sour spot? Not sweet at all? So Doctor Weans writes in her book that optimism can prolong longevity if you do want to live longer. But also optimism going into stress can help you make choices that kind of better equip you to handle the stress. And some of those choices are like engaging in more
movement or less alcohol or tobacco consumption. And if doctor Weans knows she's going to have a tough week, like the day we recorded this, she had a few important meetings, and then right after we stopped recording this, she was headed straight to a big book signing event. Or if she feels overloaded, she dials down some things and adds others, you know, not.
Drinking, eating really well, exercise, and getting enough sleep. I know those things for sure will set me up for a day or two of just good clarity and good a good ability to focus, and a good ability to tolerate stress that I knew was going to come along. And sure enough, today is one of those days where I've got both the bad kind of stress, the threat response kind of stress, as well as some good challenge
response kind of stress coming on. So I feel good about what I did the last several days just to help set myself up to be able to handle today really well. And then I also know that at the end of today, because it's going to be a long day and there's a lot going on, I know that I have a really fun dinner to look forward to. Right it will be a long day, but I get to go do a book signing that I'm looking forward to, and I get toep dinner with three people that I
absolutely love in a door. So those are just like for example, for me, it's all about not just how do you manage stress in the moment or how do you take care of yourself afterwards, but it's also what do you do to set yourself up when you know you're going to go into a period of high stress. M hm.
That makes total sense. Can I ask you some questions from lastener?
Sure, it's okay.
We have a lot because I think a lot a lot of people are feeling very burned out. But before we get to your questions about capitalism and neurodivergence and prevention of burnout, we're going to donate to a charity of doctor Bean's choice, and she selected the Lorna Breen Heroes Foundation, whose mission is to reduce burnout of healthcare professionals and to safeguard their well being and their job satisfaction.
And they also worked to pass in twenty twenty two the Doctor Laurna Breen Healthcare Provider Protection Act, which supported healthcare workers' mental health and wellbeing. And we're actually going to hear a little bit more about that backstory in a few minutes, but they're linked in the show notes at doctor Laurnabreen dot org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show, who you may hear about now. Okay, on to your questions. This one's right
on the money. A lot of people Jess Sidney Knig, Anna, Lauren Jacob Shepherd, Olivia Rermple, Earli Gramlkin, Jennifer Farrow, Brianna l Vanessa Adams, Dana Coohello. All wanted to know, in Jesse's words, how do you deal with it when you got to have a job to, you know, live this capitalist world? And I asked about is burnout primarily a phenomenon of living working in such an intensely capitalist system? Does burnout exist outside of capitalism?
Well? I need the names of everybody who submitted that question because I want to send them all a handwritten thank you note for asking that question, because those are the kind of questions that we need to be asking. And I would say one is to focus on what
I call meaningful connections. And so for people who actually in these kinds of experiences like their jobs, they might even love their jobs, but there's just too much of it and there's not enough breaks, and they feel the capitalism sort of pressure is to be very clear about the things and the people in your life that bring.
Meaning to you.
And that means getting super clear on what your values are. And values might be really small things like I value a good night's sleep. I need to get at least six seven hours of sleep a night or more, or a big value like I value quality time with my partner or with my pets, even just sitting down with my dog for half an hour every day, and just like connecting with my dog.
Or your human children, doctor Weens has three of them. Or maybe it's volunteering at a raccoon rehab center, or whittling, or bird watching or coding or reading about sci fi apocalypses, whatever makes you go, ah, that's so good. I like this.
And maybe the big thing for all of us to be thinking about is that for many of us, the type of companies that we work in are not going to change the fact that they are capitalist oriented organizations. They just it's not going to happen overnight. So how do we continue to operate and survive in these conditions?
Will also creating workplaces where there are microcultures that support people to raise their hands when they need help, to not make them feel bad when they need to take a mental health day off.
So if you run a company or if you manage people, you can be part of the solution rather than the problem. Now, if you're undergoing this, Also if you're on the receiving side and you feel like you have no power, consider asking other employees if they're having similar experiences, and maybe approach management as a unified force and you can remind your bosses that more burnout leads to higher turnover and staff and also reduced efficiency at your job. Now, what
if you were raised Catholic like me? So many patrons asked about guilt, such as Jennifer Frow who said, why do I feel so much guilt when not working full time? Mom? And author Sam Wise asked about this, Rebecca Fitchett, Sarah Man's and Mims, who asked, how do you stop yourself from feeling guilty about needing a break? Asking for me Mims not alone. A bunch of people wanted to know, in when Constantini's words, how can people deal with the shame and guilt that comes with literally not being able
to be productive? Mouse Pakston wan show any tips on feeling guilty when you're too burned out to do things with people?
Yeah, that was my experience for a long period of time, and I felt like I should not be raising my hand because everybody else around me is going through the grind and performing in there. They don't see him burned out. So I was carrying that shame, and then the shame
creates more stress. So it's a total vicious cycle which you've got to get up yourself off that hamster wheel as quick as you can, the sooner you can find someone to connect with, you know, whether it's someone that's currently in our circle of relationships or a professional that we can reach out to. It's sometimes really just starts with one conversation with the right person to get a head start on the support and the help that you need.
And in her book, doctor Weans explains that excess pressure on yourself like should statements impose a set of expectations that aren't likely to be met because they aren't grouded in reality, like it's not possible to make zero mistakes, and believing that you should be flawless just sets you up for a lot of self blame and shame and guilt. And she calls this a form of thinking trap or
a cognitive distortion that you pull on yourself. And it's about as effective, from my experience as punching yourself and the kidneys.
So what do you.
Do if misplaced guilt is ruining your life? Doctor Wiens tells a story of a physician's assistant she met who went through therapy and learned that her work guilt was itself a stress response and it stemmed from a traumatic event from childhood, which helped her tap into self compassion instead, so she was able to brush it off and not take the guilt seriously giving herself a damn break, because again, giving yourself a break and some self compassion and lowering
the stakes could actually save your own life. And on that note, Daniel opdah Mean, Kelly Dueling, Si Rue and sugar Puff Dadykins asked, in sugar Puff Daddykins's words, can we please talk about mental illness and burnout? Yes, let's a bunch of people did kind of of ask about that mental health aspect too, and about reaching out, And like Cleb and Fearn, wanted to know if there are
links between burnout and suicide. We just did a suicideology episode, So could burnout ever lead to suicidal ideation for people?
It does? Yeah, there is a correlation there, you know, studies are showing that. But we've also heard stories of individuals who are suicidal with previous history of expressing stress and burnout issues, and we do see higher rates within the medical profession for examples. That's where some of these
studies have been done. And I hear actual stories like this is really sad, but I hear I would say, at least one story a year from someone that's close to me, someone that I work with, that I know well, telling me that someone who's a resident or a fellow that they know of or mentored or something like that, you know, died by suicide. Fortunately, we've got some organizations out there that are working of as hard as they possibly can, and they have some really dedicated, talented people,
like the Lorna Breen Foundation. It's one that I'm starting to get involved in.
And doctor Lorna Breen, who we talked about and whose foundation we donated to, was an emergency medicine physician who died by suicide in late April of twenty twenty. After being on the front lines of COVID and despite having no known mental health difficulties prior, experienced a burnout and a fear of poor performance that was so intense that it led to her taking her own life, and the foundation started in her honor. States that in the US,
four hundred physicians die each year by suicide. And female physicians are more at risk, especially in emergency medicine. And for more on these statistics you can see the twenty ten study Burnout, Hopelessness and Suicide Risk in Medical Doctors, which concluded that even fifteen years ago, people in charge of workers' health should pay particular attention to the burnout and doctors and interview with changes in the work environment.
Another twenty twelve study titled high Risk Occupations for Suicide found that there were increases in rates of suicide in the occupations of coal mining and construction laborers too. And I've gotten questions in the past about veterinary medicine and mental health, and there was a twenty fifteen paper suicide in Veterinary Medicine, Let's talk about it and its cites.
The rate of suicide in the veterinary profession has been pegged at more than twice that of the medical profession and four times the rate of the general population, and the American Veterinary Medical Association said that burnout among animal healthcare workers is even higher lately due to higher expectations for pet owners, overwhelming workloads, the impact of the global pandemic, educational debts, and this was surprising instances of cyberbullying are
taking a toll, which then leads to compassion fatigue, which is this physical and emotional exhaustion that can result from caring too much about your job. High stakes matters and from vets to vet's. Military personnel are also experiencing post traumatic stressors and burnout, and we go more into depth on that in the Traumatology episode too, which we'll link in the show notes. So jobs are hard in a lot of sectors. The world is tough, and of course
people are trying to help. The helpers like the doctor Laura Bring Heroes Foundation Doctor Wing continues and.
That foundation is doing some incredible research and some incredible just like philanthropy, work to change the way hospitals evaluate their physicians and the types of conditions that physicians work under.
You mentioned working with police chiefs and medical residents and chief medical officers. What do we see about burnout On the other side of the finance scale, where, like Tyler Bates asked, how does one balance not working extra because of burnout but when you low key need the money. Tao also known as Nasty garden Rat says, what's the effect of money or financial stability on burnout. My job had me so exhausted at eighteen dollars an hour, but much less so a twenty even though I'm doing the
same work. Still burned out though woof, they say, Dave Cannon want to know, would winning the lotto help burnout? Or is it something deeper? When you've got to grind or you need that grit because you're working three jobs, how can you even begin to start to balance that?
Yeah? Well, I would say, first of all, I think one of the things we haven't really talked about is that oftentimes people characterize what they're feeling and experiencing is burnout. When these examples you just shared, I wonder a little bit it may not be burnout. It may actually be overwhelmed, overwork, overfunctioning, meaning that you have just way too much work, not enough resources, not enough time, not enough support. A lot
of those people are just overworked and overextended. The remedy for people who are overworked is oftentimes more recovery time in the form of not just I don't mean just like vacations or spot days and all that, I mean micro recoveries where you're truly take a mental, physical, psychological break and you are forcing yourself, like really intentionally creating space in your life where you are connecting to the
things and the people in your life. You're giving yourself positive energy to offset the feelings of overwork so that you can create have that psychological capacity so you can go to your boss and say, I've been working seventy hour weeks for the last however long, I can't do it anymore, like this is what it's doing to me. So the goal is to help people get the psychological strength to go to their leaders or whoever and say, here's what I need in order to be my most effective at work.
So, yeah, if you're thinking every day, one day, I'll just go to an island for a week and I will fix all of this, it's actually easier than that. I mean, yes, it's wonderful to have something to look forward to, and this positive anticipation has been shown in studies to fight depression. But it doesn't have to be an exp bensive escape to a piece of land in
an ocean. You can create a tiny, little safe space every day, even for ten minutes, sitting and meditating, listening to chill music and closing your eyes, breathing deeply reading a chapter in a book or doing a craft. And I know it might feel more stressful at the beginning to carve that time out. Trust me, you're like, I have no time, How can I possibly do this? Or maybe you have to wake up a little earlier than your kids or work, or you have to ask for
support to carve out that time. It might not feel like it's helping immediately, but the routine of doing something, even for ten minutes a day that feels chill and feels like a treat that's not scrolling, helps you know that you have that little respite daily reliably and that you have your own back. And I wanted to get back to this because you were mentioning the people who don't experience burn out even though they're in the seven to ten scale. What did you find in your research
that was common to that. I'm like, are they just associopaths? Do they not feel me emotions?
Or do they have like really good recovery systems?
Exactly? That's what I wonder too, Like who are these people they have? Like I don't know, were they raised by unusually cool headed parents or they have like Jedi mind tricks that they play on themselves so that they can survive in some crazy stressful environment. I mean, that's exactly what I went after in my research. That was my primary research question. So a lot of it has to do with our emotional intelligence. That's the whole basis of my research in the book, is that stress creates
emotional responses. So it's learning as much as we possibly can about how we respond emotionally to different types of stressors. That includes things like understanding what triggers my stress, and not just what triggers me and ticks me off, but what's underneath that, where did that come from, what happened in my past that led me to have this trigger.
So it's not just about avoiding stress and highly but understanding and clocking your own reactions to it and your own unique sensitivities to it.
So emotional self awareness is a big attribute that these people with burnout immunity have. They're very in tune with their emotional response to stress, very clear on what their triggers are, what ticks them off. They're also clear on what makes them tick, you know, what motivates them, what gives them good positive energy, and then they're able to regulate.
This is the emotional regulation part of emotional intelligence. They're able to regulate their emotions, their thoughts, and their behaviors working in very stressful conditions. But just emotional self awareness and emotional regulation are some of the big cornerstones of creating burnout immunity. But it's also things like staying really connected to your values, to people that you love, meaningful relationships. It also has a lot to do with your outlook
on life. Some people thrive in certain conditions better because they're look on that type of end environment is more positive, and so that passion, that calling that they felt is protective our general mindset and the way we think about the world, the way we think about work.
So emotional awareness and regulation being the cornerstone of burnout immunity means a bit more challenge to folks who are neurodivergent. My hand is raised right now now. The National Institutes of Health ADHD Support Toolkit recommends people wanting to support someone with ADHD up their empathy and refrain from blaming and shaming someone who's struggling to handle a heavy load
with executive function issues. So be patient, be empathetic, and it encourages for those with ADHD to take short breaks during tasks that require continued focus. And there's this brand new study in twenty twenty four titled Executive Function Deficits mediate the relationship between employees, ADHD and job burnout and have found that hell yeah, lower executive function contributes to
faster burnout and fatigue. Not to mention masking, which is a term that means you spend a ton of your energy pretending to be neurotypical in a world built for this productive grind of working like ten hours a day, usually sitting at a desk, and this masking is common in autistic adults and kids as well, and Stanford Medical School has a neurodiversity project and one presenter, Katie Oswald, laid out that autistic burnout arises from chronic life stress
and this mismatch of expectations and abilities without adequate support. And symptoms include long term, typically over three months, exhaustion and loss of function and a reduced response to stimuli.
And some causes of this autistic burnout are life stressors and masking and cumulative overwhelm, lack of empathy and dismissal of struggles, and lack of support from others but it recommends some interventions like pure led support groups and meditation and exercise, Trauma informed care, art therapy, animal assisted therapy,
and interventions that are pure led help a lot. So without this kind of support and empathy shown from others and ourselves, it's much harder to maintain this optimism and self confidence and self care like rest and time away from screens and healthy hobbies that we need to avoid burnout. But for all of us, Doctor Ween's has a chapter that details how to recover from burnout using what she's coined the three R prescription or a three RX, and
that means recover, reconnect, and reimagine. And she acknowledges with the recovery that a certain painful irony exists that comes along with recommending tips and strategies for making a full burnout recovery, because the ultimate responsibility for burnout recovery and certainly prevention lies with the employer, she writes, not the employee. But we can try to do what's in our control.
And sometimes you can't get better in the environ that's making you sick, in which case you got a balance, but you can try to change your mindset and set boundaries and the reconnect R involves getting in touch with things outside of work like people and hobbies and downtime and group activities, or even your values or your vision of your ideal self. And then the third R helps
you reimagine your life going forward. So she details all these strategies in her book, but they can help you regulate your approach to stress and the emotions that come up from it to lessen the impact on your life and your brain and your body. An emotional regulation, I understand, is not the same thing as stuffing your feelings down and not feeling that.
That was me and a lot of us saying oh well, that will just make it all go away if I if I stuff it. I have one guy tell me, one of my research participants, he was a chief medical officer, told me that he was a professional stuffer, like stuff to stress like crazy until hand it up with diverticulitis, which is like really bad things happening to your intestines.
Not to mention, of course, cardiac and metabolic disease and autoimmune diseases. And there was one study, a twenty eighteen paper association of stress related disorders with subsequent autoimmune disease and it found that yes, it's stress related disorders were
significantly associated with increased risk of autoimmune disease. So being exposed to high stress and not having the outlets to cope or to explore it, or to get support, or essentially developing what psychologists call emotional intelligence or regulation can be deadly. Yeah. OI, no better to deal with the emotions than whatever's going on in them guts, you know. But yeah, I was like, I have an idea. What if I just don't feel the bad feelings and I scroll instead? Poof, I made them disappear.
You didn't until they come back again and they hat you exactly.
Well, this is okay, this is my last listener question, Matthew Walker, I mean so many people. Lady is a geek. KATIEB already wanted to know, in the lady's words, does burnout leave a scar? If you've had one burnout, are you more likely to have another or experience it more easily? Same thing? Katie had that question too. If you get at once, are you more predisposed to it?
Oh?
It depends what you do with that information. Totally depends on how you were able to recover from that burnout experience. And what did you learn from it? What do you not want to do again? Because all of us, when we're burned out, all of a sudden it becomes clear like, oh that's what was causing the burnout. Oh that's you know what triggered me. Oh that's what I wasn't doing, or that's what I was doing that made me more vulnerable. So it depends what you choose to do with that information.
In my case, I was like hell bent on not ever getting burned out again. And I you know, like I said, when I was nine or ten, I never wanted to be a burnout expert. I never crossed my mind. But now I'm glad that I am because it forces me to really pay attention and I made a commitment to myself. I'm not going to let that happen again. I want to live a full, happy life while I'm here. I want to have stress in my life. I actually want to have good stress and stress that will challenge
me and help me learn and grow. But I also know, like I have a limit. I need to be really really aware of what that limit is, and it's my responsibility to get myself out of it. And that doesn't mean and I get it. People might be wondering, well, I don't have the luxury of getting myself out of it. I didn't feel like I had the luxury either when
I was burned out, so I took my time. It took me a couple of years for me to create an exit ramp and a path, a new plan for myself where I was going in a direction that I knew was going to be right for me and wasn't going to cause burnout for me.
I think it's also interesting that everyone else can see you on an absolute crash course a mile away and you're like, nah, I got this. And a lot of times there's at least you know one or two people in your life that are like, you're going to burn out, and you're like, other people might burn out, not me, watch this, and then you're just in a day crying.
Oh yeah, denial. It's a thing.
Yeah.
I always ask people the worst thing about their job, and I am wondering, what is the hardest thing about your work in burnout?
Oh, and not getting burned out?
That's a Oh, it's a hard one, but maybe it's maybe it's actually an easy one. The hardest part for me is, well, I feel, really, I guess blessed that I get to hear that people feel comfortable opening up to me about their burnout experiences, and I feel honored that they do. So that's a good thing. But at the same time, the hard part about it is I want to help everybody.
Yeah, I would love.
To take everybody under my wing and just say, you know, follow me, let's do these things and you're going to be just fine, and I promise you we're going to get you out of this. And I just I can't do that. I mean, I help as many people as I can, and then I also have my limits where it's just that that's what can cause me to burn out because I'm expressing so much empathy and compassion for other people that then it turns into me not having good boundaries for myself.
What about the best thing about what you do?
The best thing, I think is really just bringing awareness to something that so many people are struggling with. And after a speaking event or a podcaster and people will reach out and say, you know, your story really resonated with me. I felt like you were in my head. And I just feel super honored that people are opening
up more about it. And my hope is that the more we talk about it, the more we bring awareness to it and try to really decrease the stigma associated with it, that we will start to see cultures change. But it's going to take people like me and you and others who have been burned out and recovered to get back in there and say, look, there are ways to create cultures where we can expect, you know, really high performance out of people, but also not to the point where we're going to lose them.
Yeah, it is.
I think speaking out about it is so helpful for me to hear other people talk about it and to that it's not just like a moral failing. I'm so glad I got a chance to talk to you. I imagine there's so many avenues you can go down. Do you see yourself doing this? Just wanting to ask and answer questions for you know, as long as you can.
It's so fun and like that is one of the best parts in my job too. Like I've always been someone who's just naturally curious. I mean, I love researching itself, to go in there and dig into people's lives and really truly understand at an empirical level what is going on burnout is a phenomenon. So it's one of those things that we can get in there and study by time. But we need to talk to people and hear about their life experiences, and that's pretty fun.
I mean, there's no shortage of need or examples.
That's great, that's true.
You are guaranteed a job in this culture and economy.
I don't know if that's a good thing.
Yeah, exactly, So ask experts amateur questions, because honestly, it might save your life. Now, this was recorded a month to a go when optimism and hope may have been easier to come by, so it might seem like easier said than done, which, let's be honest, that's like most things in life. But unfortunately, keeping tabs on your mental health is more important than ever because you're an ape wearing a shirt and you're really not built for this.
I'm sorry to say so. Part of combating global stress is learning when it's getting to be too much and taking care of yourself in constructive and not just numbing and dissociating ways. Trust me, scrolling is not helping you, so heed my warnings please, And for more info, you can pick up Candy Ween's book Burnout Immunity, which will link in the show notes and will also link where you can follow and find out more about her work.
So thank you so much for me and on Dr Ween's so you can learn more about Ologies and you can follow us at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. You can find me at Ali Ward on both platforms. We also have a shorter kid friendly episode available in their own podcast feed. It's called Smologies. Wherever we get podcasts, you can look for the new green logo, which was designed by Portland artist's Body Dutch. We also have Ologies Merch available at ologiesmerch dot com, where they'll link in
the show notes. Aaron Telbert adminsiologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Kelly Ardwyer makes the website. Susan Hale managing directs the whole Shippang Jake Chafe co edits a show and lead editor and Canadian who is trying not to burn out with American and global genocide stressors is Mercedes Maitland of
Maitland Audio. Nick thorburn Nick Thorp Burnout made the theme music and if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you secret. In this week it's I'm the ghost of Burnout, past and future, and I'm here to tell you, no matter how strong you are, or how good at suffering, or how much you want to fix the world, you have to take care of yourself or you will possibly be sick and sadder and less a able to do the things you want to to change the world. So I have been through that.
I thought I was tougher than anyone else, and I thought I could just get through things. As you might know, last summer, I had an excruciating burnout that landed me in the hospital a few times, and then I had to take a bunch of time off and relearn how to talk to my own brain. So everyone warned me for years ahead of time I was going to burn out. I love this job. I love a lot of the jobs that I have and have had all at once, and I just didn't know how to live like a
normal person. I was like, I'm a robot. I'm a machine. I keep work. No, so you're a person if you're listening to this, unless you're an AI, which is weird. But you're a person, and you got to take care of yourself. So when I do, which has been helping me a ton. I mentioned this in another episode, but I have a list of things that I do to keep myself alive, and I print it out. I check it off every day. It's helped so much in the last few months. Again, I print out a new shee
every week. Each day I get a point for things like drinking at least sixty four ounces of water, or meditating, or going on a walk, or reading a book even one page, journaling, avoiding too much caffeine, avoiding alcohol, avoiding scrolling, doing a hobby. I love cross stitch because I can't use my phone and it's zero stakes, and for some reason it calms my nervous system. I literally get a point for showering and then I add up the points of the day to see how I'm doing. And it's
kind of like a game to play. But doing something if you need to gamify it, if you need to have a checklist of stuff you do, don't do it because you have to do it, because you deserve to do it, and it'll start becoming a routine that helps. So checking in with yourself and giving your little ape brain. The comfort that you need takes less time than what
you would spend staring into space and worrying. Whatever you want to do to contribute to a more just world, you'll be able to do it if you're nice to yourself first. So there is my secret. There's my advice to not grind yourself into a nub. The world needs you to take your survival and your health seriously, and I, honestly, as your dad, board as your internet dad, let me be a cautionary tale that it just doesn't work long term. You will nose dive at one point, and you deserve it.
Every single person deserves to take care of themselves. So if you're still sitting under that tree or lying on the carpet, just think of things that make you happy and make you feel better, and please do them for yourself. Doesn't have to be a vacation. Okay, go drink some water, all right?
Byebye?
Pacodermatology, homeology, r doo zoology, lithology and technology, meteorology, paratology, napology, seriology, selenology.
We all agree that you deserve a break.