Episode 273: What Burnout REALLY Is (And How It Differs From Stress) with Dr. Camilla Moore
Things in motion tend to stay in motion. It takes more energy to change than to keep going down that path. That's where we can get into trouble: We are net depleting ourselves, not net gaining. If you are constantly giving more than you're getting, eventually, you will burn out.
We are all asking the question, "Do you see me? Do you hear me? Do I matter?" When the answer to those questions is no, things get really ugly. This is when humans don't behave well. This is when we start to self-attack, self-medicate, or even self-harm. All of these things can be fixed through the environment, but only if we understand what's actually going on.
How do we get clear on where the burnout is coming from? What is actually stressing us out? And what's the difference between a little bit of stress and this chronic stress we hear? And what does all of this have to do with boundaries and that ever-present imposter syndrome?
Dr. Camilla Moore helps ambitious women leaders burnout-proof their businesses by focusing on the most crucial element: themselves. After building a multi-six-figure business, she was hit hard with burnout. Using her personal experience and 16 years of clinical experience, she now guides entrepreneurs and professionals to finally balance work and life without giving up on their career goals or what matters most.
Studying burnout and stress
Dr. Camilla studies stress and burnout because she's experienced it—she was working with Brown University's medical school to help start a program when COVID-19 hit. At the same time, she was undergoing fertility treatments and had a baby during the pandemic.
She crashed. She wondered if she needed more exercise, better food, or more sleep, so she did. Nothing changed. At the time, she was teaching a stress management program, so she started evaluating her life.
“Oftentimes when we are stressed and trying to prevent our own burnout, we default to the things that we know we 'should be doing,'" says Dr. Camilla. "These are complex issues. Burnout is a complex issue, and it needs a little bit more refinement to get down into the root cause.”
Burnout is an environment issue
Burnout is not an inside job. So, if you're trying to fix yourself, you will not be able to fix the burnout part.
Dr. Camilla says we have three terms that are often misused or misunderstood.
Stress is supposed to be a short-term event. It is a survival mechanism, a physiological response. You're driving down the highway, you get cut off, you white-knuckle it, they drive off, and you recover. That is stress.
Chronic stress is when you're bombarded with stressful events, and you don't have the ability or the capacity to recover from each one individually before the next one comes. So if you're driving to work and get cut off, but before you can fully recover, you go into the office, and suddenly, you need to manage a crisis, and there's another fire drill. You get compounded stress, and you're not able to recover. In the long term, we know that leads to chronic disease, that leads to depression, that can lead to anxiety.
That's where our physiological changes really occur. We are at a greater risk for things like obesity, Type 2 diabetes, sleep disorders, and all of those things that function physiologically because our biology hasn't been able to recover from each stressful event.
Burnout is really about the depletion of who we are as people. It is a product of not being seen or heard in a relationship or a workplace. Dr. Camilla says that when burnout was studied in the 1970s, it was a workplace issue.
"But what I have seen in my work over time is that women in particular get burnt out in relationships, in their marriages, in their partners, as well as in other caregiving roles," she says. "When we are giving of ourselves, not just the tasks that we're doing, not just the work that we are doing, we begin to feel like we don't matter and our needs are not met, and that's where you start to get extinguished."
She says you can have chronic stress, and you can have burnout that overlaps. But when we break it down there are very different root causes.
Setting boundaries
Dr. Camilla says we should start evaluating based on our energy. The easiest exercise to start with is to journal and make two columns: charges and drains on your energy. Write down everything that comes to mind.
"The key to this, and this is where it all connects with mindfulness, is being able to look from the 30,000-foot view to zoom out on our life and to be able to listen to our guts and listen to ourselves about what is actually filling us up and what is actually draining us," says Dr. Camilla.
When you start setting boundaries, you have another lens through which to look at your life because it's not necessarily saying no; it's saying not as much. What you're doing is recognizing limitations to what you can do.
"When you start to live based on your values of what is most important to you in that gut feeling, then it becomes much easier to set those boundaries," she says.
Another exercise Dr. Camilla recommends is looking back at your life. Women, in particular, have many identities and wear many hats. One of the things often heard is, "I've lost myself." You can look for the things you've sacrificed that you enjoyed and made you feel alive.
The root of imposter syndrome
Dr. Camilla says many people miss identifying the root cause of imposter syndrome, which has two sides: One says, "You can't do this because of XYZ, you're not good enough, etc." The second side is the logical part of you that says you can do it. All of a sudden, you have an argument in your own head.
What we try to do is overpower the negative with positive. But you have to understand where that comes from. Those negative thoughts are inherent to our survival mechanism and tied to our stress.
"Where this little negative voice is coming from it is protecting something," says Dr. Camilla.
You can find the root cause through the shift method, which starts with saying the negative thought out loud – try using the third person to detach yourself from it. Then, start looking for the root cause.
For example, Camilla is not good enough. So if the thought is that you aren't good enough, then you would say, "Okay, if that were true, what would that mean?"
That would mean that I might get fired. What would that mean? I wouldn't have a job, I wouldn't have money to buy anything and support my family, and I would eventually end up alone.
We can get to that root fear of being alone and abandoned.
"I say this because we often trivialize some of these thoughts about wanting to be liked and about being good enough," says Dr. Camilla. "They are deeply seated in some of our most primitive stress and survival responses. So they deserve that level of honor and appreciation for how significant they are."
Remember that stress comes from the resistance. Getting comfortable with what that fear means and sitting with it.
"If you are able to practice and be able to just be okay with being afraid of being alone and being rejected and just, that's not to say it's going to happen, but just be okay with that feeling," says Dr. Camilla. "You don't try to change it, and you don't try to justify it, and you don't try to overwhelm it with the positive stuff, and you just let it be; it will dissipate."
Once it dissipates, then we reframe it and bring in the positive.
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