EP 33: Brain Changes from Burnout

Our mission is to give you tools and strategies that will help you move from being stressed to feeling your best.

Burnout makes us feel physically and mentally exhausted. Research shows it affects our body on the cellular level. Tune in to learn how long hours and burnout change the way your brain works.

Co-hosts Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher are certified HeartMath® Trainers, and certified stress educators, who are skilled at helping people discover the power of living form the heart.  To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in Canada, click here. To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in the US, click here. 

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Barb Fletcher, Deb Timmerman

Deb Timmerman  00:00

You're listening to the Less Stress in Life podcast. Your hosts, Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher are on a mission to help individuals and organizations manage stress and change. Together, they bring you real conversations, inspirational stories, and strategies to help move you from being stressed to feeling your best. Hey, I'm Deb Timmerman, welcome to our series of 52 Practical Tools for Less Stress in Life. This is episode 34.

Barb Fletcher  00:32

And I'm Barb Fletcher. Our goal is to give you tools and strategies to help you move from being stressed to feeling your best. And today we're going to talk about burnout. So, let's start with a definition. Burnout is defined as a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Though it's most often caused by problems at work, it can also appear in other areas of your life such as parenting, caretaking, or relationships, and I can say that I've won the lottery on a number of those. So, the truth is, some work actually energizes us. But commonly, we think that long hours have the biggest relationship to burnout. Can you talk to that?

Deb Timmerman  01:26

Certainly. So, it's true that some work energizes us and it's also true that you can have burnout in 40 hours a week, or burnout working more than 40 hours a week. This is what the research says. if you work more than 40 hours a week, it puts you at risk for stroke and heart disease due to long hours. The World Health Organization did a study and found that people working 55 hours a week or more that workload was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease. That's compared to working what we call normal hours. But in your work recently there was somebody who was working normal hours who was still experiencing burnout. Can you share that story?

Barb Fletcher  02:19

So, this client of mine was assuming I temporary position. Lots to learn, lots of dynamics, and found herself in a place where even though she wasn't working extra hours, she was starting to see the signs of burnout. She was starting to be triggered. Her mind was racing, a number of those characteristics. And, you know, I had seen her in February, and then we checked in again in May, and there was a significant difference in how she was feeling, and she was just working 40 hours a week,

Deb Timmerman  03:06

I can remember working 40 hours a week and managing lots of people and that in that work, it was challenging. So, working in hospice, you're working with dying families who are going through the grieving process, or maybe there's some stuff in the family that they haven't worked through, and that shows up at your doorstep. But my outside of work at that time was really stressful. Marriage was falling apart, had a child who was struggling. So, all of those things together, really made for the perfect storm and what I recognized about that experience of burnout is that I would go from job to job usually every three or four years and I'd repeat that same pattern over and over again. But I think particularly now, in many organizations, staff is being asked to do more with less. Less resources, maybe less workforce, and that has really contributed over the last couple of years, to the increasing amount of burnout that we're seeing.

Barb Fletcher  04:09

This client was seeing a lot of things that were outside of her control. and so, if we're a little type A, we like to keep things in a particular order. We like to know the outcome of the event. This was really taking her outside of her comfort zone. and she was quickly becoming depleted.

Deb Timmerman  04:35

So, you mentioned that you had worked with her in February and then reconnected. I'm assuming she was doing some HeartMath tools training with you in February.

Barb Fletcher  04:45

No, in fact, she wasn't in February, we just had a preliminary conversation. And she was all good. You know, there was some opportunities to build on her stress management tools, but you know her stress and wellbeing assessment, the tool, the baseline tool that we use was really positive. The risk was not necessarily having tools and I knew the direction that the challenges could present. And so, I probably mentioned that might be good to build some, but the challenges became even bigger than what I imagined. And the great news is that she touched base with me before she became so depleted. Often burnout can be life changing for people.

Deb Timmerman  05:38

It's interesting that it happened in such a short period of time. So, she's pretty good. And then it only took a couple of months. So, it has a lot to do with what you have on board in your internal battery and how many tools you have to be able to cope and navigate through those times in life where it feels like there's big waves coming over you.

Barb Fletcher  05:58

Yeah, It's the interventions. It's being able to take action when something happens to prevent that continuous drain. Those drains that occur that we aren't even really aware of, are the dangerous ones. So those are the stories we take home at night about what might have happened, it could be something somebody said that created a trigger, or it could be an experience that we're reliving something that might have happened to us in the past.

Deb Timmerman  06:33

So, another interesting thing that we need to look at is that when we are feeling burned out, we don't always recognize the changes that are happening on a cellular level in our body, or even that there could be a possibility that burnout is contributing to cellular changes in our body. So, here's another piece of research out of Sweden. They took 40 people, and they looked at brain tissue of those people that worked 60 hours a week for multiple years and had a formal diagnosis of burnout. And what they found was there some consistency in the symptoms they were presenting with and that is that they were having a hard time controlling and suppressing their emotions. They were overreacting. But on that cellular level, there was actually changes in the brain scan. So, do you want to share with folks, Barb, what some of those changes were in the brain scans?

Barb Fletcher  07:33

Yeah, this is the scary part for me, because we typically think that if I change my job, everything will be alright. But these changes are actually occurring inside of us and we're not even really aware. So, you know, the brain structure, critical and emotional reactions, including fear and aggression, gets changed. We have weaker connections between the amygdala and the brain areas linked to emotional distress, specifically, the anterior cingulate cortex or ACC, technical terms, the more stressed an individual reported feeling the weaker, the relative connectivity between the brain regions actually appeared on the RFMRI. So, burnout sufferers also had weaker connections between the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex part of the brain that is involved in executive function. So, our thinking, our ability to problem-solve those kinds of things. So, if you think about finding yourself in a time, when you might be burned out, everything becomes that much more difficult things that you think that you were able to do yesterday become that much more tough.

Deb Timmerman  08:56

Yeah, so the amygdala works like our brains alarm system. So, in layman's terms, what that means is that our alarm system is stuck in the on position and always processing. And we've mentioned that before, though, not necessarily this particular piece of research that relates to burnout in those brain changes. So, I don't know maybe I need to have one of those fMRI to see what's happened to my brain over the years because I've experienced burnout more than once. I didn't have those tools or know about what was happening in my brain or even be able to recognize that it was happening in my own body. So, I was never treated for that. It wasn't until the last 10 years and all this brain science came out that I finally understood that stress was at the heart and root of those issues.

Barb Fletcher  09:48

So, I have experience experienced caregiver burnout, work burnout, relationship burnout, and for the most part people will say take a break Do you need a rest? And the truth is it's a little more complicated than just that.

Deb Timmerman  10:06

So, one of the questions that we get often is can you recover from burnout?

Barb Fletcher  10:11

And I would say the answer to that is yes, I recently worked with another client who had identified herself as burnout. And she had done some work with me previously and understood the tools, but her practice had kind of lapsed, she, you know, we, we get complacent, we just like a number of parts of our life. And she freely admitted that she hadn't been paying a lot of attention to that. And so, things became very intense for her and luckily, she recognized the signs. And she took herself out of that situation. And boldly she did it before there was damage done. Because often when we feel that burnout coming on, we can sometimes see things and behave in ways that we’ll later regret. And that wasn't the case here, she took herself out and reached out, and we got her practice back going. And interesting enough, she saw her physician and no discounting the medical system whatsoever, but his response to her was, she needed a new job. And so, our first conversation was, "I'm updating my resume", I need to do this, this, and this. And I said, how absolutely. I hear you're going to do all of that. So, let's get your practice going. Let's understand what your stress management tools are and get that practice back up and running. And so, she was off for four weeks, rested and practiced, and I checked in regularly. And we did a further Stress and Wellbeing Assessment. And the shift was actually profound. She went back to work, after a month rejuvenated, enjoying her job, enjoying her colleagues, and even her boss who she felt had been unfair to her, she saw it from a different perspective.

Deb Timmerman  12:32

In the US, we don't have stress leave like you do in Canada. So, for those who are in the US, it really behooves us to have some tools in our toolbox, because our sick leave isn't as great. We'd have to go off on disability short term disability. And getting that diagnosis, I think is more difficult here than it is with you. But the good news is that it's generally four to six weeks of tools in my practice, and I heard you say that as well with yours, that we start to see these significant improvements, whether or not you can be off on stress leave, or you still got to work through this recovery time.

Barb Fletcher  13:14

I think one of the most valuable tools for me is actually having a baseline and being able to see the starting point, which will offer clues, because often happens is people regain their previous state of wellbeing, maybe it's even better. Without that baseline. They don't even really know it. And so, this gradual improvement becomes not noticeable. It's different than the decline because the decline is very obvious when we're not doing well, you know, we're ruffling feathers were getting in arguments, we're not able to think correctly. But when we start to feel better, we don't see it the same way. So, a benchmark is really helpful for us. To help us understand maybe there are other areas we need to pay attention to. The physical signs are really the ones that jump out at people though.

Deb Timmerman  14:15

Yeah, so less physical response to stress is what I hear you say, less emotional distress when they have stressful events, and they're not as triggered. That's fantastic. So, our call to action for you this week is to think about whether or not you are on the verge of experiencing burnout and to take action before you have to be off on stress leave or you're totally depleted. When you don't deal with these things on a regular basis, it leads to physical and mental illnesses. So being proactive can help. And on our BuzzSprout site podcast site, there are the links for taking this drug Some wellbeing assessment and it's a great way for you to know where you stack up. And it's your data, you simply put it in both times and there's a comparison. And that is absolutely free to anyone who wants to figure out where they are in this course of feeling burned out.

Barb Fletcher  15:22

So, until next time, have a great week.

Deb Timmerman  15:27

Less stress in life is possible. If you're new to this kind of thinking and would like to explore what's possible for you. We'd love to connect. You can reach us through our website at less stress and life.com. That's less stress in life.