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This is FiveMinuteFriday, emotional burnout.
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Welcome back to this SuperDataScience podcast everybody. Super excited to have you back here on the show. And today’s going to be perhaps a longer than usual episode. I’d like to talk about emotional burnout.
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So why this topic, and why now? Well, last month in August, I took a two-week break where my laptop actually needed repairs. So I had to give it away to the Apple repair store. And I chose not to work from my phone and just take some time off completely and switch off from all kinds of work.
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Now, this is something I don’t do frequently. The last time I remember doing it was the previous August of 2019. I did it for a week and before that, I can’t even recall when I did that. So even when I think I’m resting, even when I think I have time off on the weekend or whatever, I still think about work. I still can go and check my emails or write down a to-do task or do something that’s urgent. And this time I didn’t have my laptop and I couldn’t access, or I chose not to access my emails or notifications.
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And for the first three days I was craving to work. I really needed it. It felt like an addiction. And that got me wondering. And then it so happened that a good old friend, YouTube, recommended me a video from a Russian psychologist on emotional burnout. And I learned quite a lot of things from there, and I thought I’d share them here with you because they were very valuable to me and maybe they can help somebody out as well. Especially in this time of coronavirus, when everything’s muddled. Where is work? Where is home? Where is rest, when we’re all working from home or mixing in different activities and also our schedules are different. Things can get really muddled in this world and hopefully this information will be helpful to someone out there.
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And most of it comes from that video I watched. It’s by psychologist just called Евгения Стрелецкая. We’ll link to the YouTube video in the show notes if you want to check it out. It is in Russian, but it’s got English subtitles and it’s got an English description, so you can still get a lot of value from it. And some of the materials today are from other sources where I’ve wanted to dive a bit deeper.
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All right. Emotional burnout. So what is emotional burnout? Burnout, or emotional burnout, is defined as the loss of meaning in one’s work coupled with mental, emotional, or physical exhaustion as a result of a longterm unresolved stress. So let’s dive into this a little bit. And before that, I want to preface that with a quick disclaimer, this is not medical advice. It’s just some research I did. If you’d like medical advice, please see a medical professional. This is just my thoughts and opinions on this topic.
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So according to the framework that I learned from the psychologist, or from the video, there’s four stages of emotional burnout. Stage one is addiction to work. It’s when you experience enthusiasm, thinking about work all the time, you are preoccupied with work and you experience some levels of acute stress. So stress that comes and goes, and that’s totally fine. That’s totally normal to experience stress. For instance, before you’re up on stage for a presentation or you’ve got an interview or something like that, you feel stressed. And then afterwards that dissipates.
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So this part, all of emotional burnout, this first stage, is quite tricky because it feels like everything’s great. It feels like you love your work. It feels like you’re doing what you want to be doing. The problem is though, here, it hides in this part where it says that you’re thinking of work all the time, that you’re preoccupied with work. You start to negate other parts of your life, your health, or your sports, your hobbies, your friends, your relationships, and other things that make a diverse life of lots of different activities. You focus most of your time on work. You wake up thinking about work. You go to bed thinking about work. You’re always brainstorming ideas. Even though you like it a lot, it’s taking up a lot of your life. Well, that’s a first sign that you are heading down the road of emotional burnout. And the thing is, a lot of people will not recognize this or not see as this is a bad thing, but really that is the way towards burning out more. And it’s important to even recognize this stage.
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Then if you don’t and if you keep pushing, you slowly to get to stage two, which is chronic stress. And chronic stress is different to acute stress in that it doesn’t come and go. It’s always there. It’s predominantly present in your life. And so this is the part where I wanted to research a bit more about stress. And this is what I found.
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So when you experience stress, your adrenal glands, which are located right above your kidneys on both sides of your body, they release a hormone called cortisol. And cortisol, apart from other things, it does two main things. First of all, it’s a flight-or-fight hormone, right? So it puts your body into a flight-or-fight state, or it helps your body to be in a flight-or-fight state, meaning that if you needed to run away from a tiger or a lion back in the historical days, then that’s when you need flight-or-fight.
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And so what cortisol does is it increases some functions in your body, and it decreases other functions. For instance, it increases the amount of glucose going to your brain so you can make decisions faster, so you can think on your feet. It also increases the amount of blood going to your muscles. From what I read, it narrows your blood vessels so blood flows faster and you get more blood to your muscles. So you can run faster, as your muscles can operate more efficiently.
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On the other hand, it suppresses certain things or decreases them. For instance, when you’re running away from a tiger, you don’t really need your immune system to be fighting off a virus or a common cold or something like that. You don’t really need your digestive system in that moment because you are fighting for survival. So digesting food is not important. Your reproductive system is not important. Your growth processes are not important.
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All these things get suppressed. Your immune system, your digestive system, your reproductive system, your growth processes, among other things. And as a result of that… So if it’s acute, if it comes and goes occasionally, the stress, totally fine. But if you have this constantly, if you have this chronic stress, then you’re going to get sick, because your immune system is suppressed. You’re going to have stomach pains because your digestive system is suppressed. You won’t recover as well at night because your growth processes are suppressed. And lots of side effects will start happening.
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In particular, let’s have a look at some of these, and these you can use as symptoms. Again, this is not medical advice, but as I understand, these could be symptoms of burnout stage two called chronic stress. So here they are. For instance, irritability, constant tiredness, hypersensitivity to loud sounds. Acne, especially on your back. Loss of hair, sensitive teeth, stomach pains, insomnia, anxiety. Cravings, like for food, for sweet, for sour, for smoking and other things.
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That’s a very simple explanation, of course. There’s a lot of hormones in the body and a lot of things happen, but that’s how I understand it, that this increase in constant cortisol levels, high cortisol levels, can lead to a lot of side effects. So those symptoms are a sign that maybe you might be in stage two of burnout called chronic stress and something might need to be done to go back to stage one and leave this whole burnout situation.
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If you keep pushing from there, you get to stage three, called reversible exhaustion. For some people who are prone to depression, it may result in depression. For some people are prone to psychosomatics, it may result in physical illness. For some people, your body subconsciously will just start sabotaging your work, right? So if you need your hands for work, maybe you won’t be able to lift your hands. If you need your sight, maybe you’ll have visual impairment. You might have memory lapses. So those are not just random things. Those are your body [inaudible 00:09:22] things.
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But in some cases, that’s your body just saying, “Okay, well, you didn’t understand at stage one. You didn’t understand at stage two. I’m going to take control. I’m just going to stop and refuse to do this work because I need rest.” And as a result, you become ineffective. Your productivity plummets. So that’s some symptoms of stage three. And if you still keep pushing through that stage and through those symptoms, and through that state of your body, you get to stage four, which is called irreversible exhaustion.
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At this stage, you hate your work. You hate your clients, and your reality starts morphing. For instance, if you are a programmer, before, you observed random things in the world, for instance, how trees grow or how birds fly or how something happens, or how humans cross the traffic lights, and you saw algorithm similarities in that. And that was nice and cute and fun and spiked your curiosity and reminded you of your job. But now you hate your job so much that when you see things like that, you see, for instance, humans as just robots, as emotionless, as just following algorithms. Everything becomes a computer code for you. And then you start seeing your work and everything in a very, very negative cynical, detrimental way. And so that’s the stage four, the final stage of emotional burnout.
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So now that we have discussed these four stages, let’s have a look at the ways to get out of them. So stage one, addiction to work. Most people, as we as mentioned before, will choose not to get out of this stage. They will not see it as important getting out of the stage because it’s fun. But the thing to do here, if you do want to get out of it, and these will be useful in case you are beyond stage one, if you’re stage two or three or four even. If you start going backwards, back to the three, back to two, back to one, eventually you’ll want to get out of one as well. So that’s when this can be useful. Or if you want to get out of one right away, that’s also going to be potentially useful things that you might want to consider.
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So, first one is to change your beliefs about work, right? The world’s not going to fall apart if you do less work. If you believe that you only get good results because you work insanely hard and all the time, if you believe that you have to do everything, you have to supervise everything otherwise it’ll fall apart, if you believe that the world will end if you stop doing your work, well, those are detrimental beliefs that need to be looked into.
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And number two is to make a conscious effort to focus and remember about the eight spheres of life. So there’s another framework that talks about the eight spheres of life, and work’s only one of them. So you want to diversify your time across these eight spheres, for instance, there’s work, family, friends, growth, spirituality, hobbies, rest, health. And spirituality here doesn’t mean religion. It means discovering oneself. So eight areas of life, and you want to diversify your time across them.
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If this wheel of life looks like just 90% work and then 1 or 2% for the remaining ones, that’s not a very diversified life and you know you’re in trouble. So try to diversify your life and consciously focus and make time for these other areas of your life. Once again, they’re work, family, friends, growth, spirituality, hobbies, rest, and health. And by the way, rest doesn’t mean changing the activity, like going from work to sports. Rest means going to a couch, lying down and staring at the ceiling. You want those adrenal glands to calm down and you want the cortisol levels to drop off. There’s physical explanations why rests should be rest and not running into the next fight-or-flight situation. So that’s stage one, how to get out of it.
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If you’re in stage two, in chronic stress, remember all those symptoms that come with constantly functioning adrenal glands, constant releases of cortisol and high levels of cortisol and suppressed immune system, suppressed digestive reproductive and growth systems and processes. Well, if you’re in that stage and you’re experiencing those symptoms, things that you can do, or the main thing you can do, is rest. And once again, rest just means doing nothing. Doing nothing or meditating. Meditating also can be considered actually as a bonus. It’s actually very useful.
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So the things you can do daily: learn to recognize the feeling of tiredness on a physical, emotional, or a mental level. I’m really bad at that. When I feel tired, I just push through it, and that’s not good. So when you feel tired, when your body’s telling you you’re tired… And you’ll know that feeling. For me, it’s like a wave, a shiver. A cold shiver goes up my chest and it may happen for two or three minutes until it subsides. Well, that’s a sign for me to go rest. Then, when you recognize that, go and rest.
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Also have an information blockade. For instance, after a certain time of the day, just switch off your communications. Don’t go on emails, switch off Slack, switch off whatever other communications you use for work and make sure you’re not going to be checking them, maybe until a certain time in the morning. And bonus, meditation, that’s also very helpful. That’s daily, weekly. Have two days per week, or at least one day, where you completely don’t do any work. Don’t check any messages, any emails, try to not even think about work. Two days is preferable. That’s why we have the weekend, because it takes some time to wind down from work, even get it out of your head.
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And focus on the other seven spheres of your life in the meantime. Book some time to call a friend or to do a hobby or to grow and educate yourself or discover yourself. Something that is completely unrelated to work. Fill up those other seven buckets of your life.
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Monthly, what you can do is for a few days in a row, take some rest. For instance, go camping, hiking, if you can. Of course, with this coronavirus it’s much harder, but take those two or maybe even three, if there’s a bank holiday, or if you want to take a day off, take some additional time off, just a bit more than you do weekly. Then on a yearly level, take at least four weeks off. Of course it all depends on your company and their vacation policy, but if you can, take at least four weeks off, so that’s either one week per quarter or two weeks two times a year or a whole month off to really rest, recharge, and don’t take your laptop with you, whatever you do. Just stay away from it. So that can get you out of stage two.
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Stage three is reversible exhaustion, and that’s the one where your body starts to sabotage what you’re doing, where you might start feeling the onset of depression, or you might start getting physical illnesses. In any case your productivity is going to be dropping. So the solution proposed by the psychologist here is to take a sabbatical, to take time off for an undefined period of time. Usually it’s about three to six months, but it can be more. But the key is that when you take it off, you don’t say three months or six months, you just take it off until you’re ready to come back. So you take a sabbatical and you go do something completely different. And you forget about this profession, this work, for a period of time, to let yourself recover and rest, to get yourself out of that constant fight-or-flight and stress.
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And it’s hard to do, of course, if your livelihood depends on your profession, but the bad thing is if you keep pushing through stage three, you get to stage four, irreversible exhaustion. And the only solution, the only way to get out of that one, according to this, again, psychologist, is by changing your whole profession. You’re never going to see your profession in the same way as you did when you were starting out. It’s always going to haunt you. It’s always going to morph into your reality. And the only way, unfortunately, is to completely change your profession. Once again, this is just my interpretation of that video. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Of course, do your own research, but that’s true. That’s a very sad outcome.
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And one great example that she gave in the video was the show True Detective, season one, with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. So if you haven’t seen the show, you might want to pause here, but I will try not to give anything away. It’s a great show and it’s got parallel storylines. So I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying this, but basically the transformation of the main character played by Matthew McConaughey and from the start of the show to the end, whether it was episode 10 or 12, how at the start, you can see that he’s stressed, but he loves his job. He investigates crime. He’s a detective. And he’s probably in stage one or two of his burnout.
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Towards the end of this show, and again, these storylines are parallel so you actually see this quite early on, he is so far into burnout. He is definitely at stage four of burnout. He sees criminals and crime everywhere he looks. His reality completely morphs. He is always paranoid about everything. He’s definitely at stage-four burnout. So if you’ve seen the show, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, when you watch it, just observe that. You will witness, and he plays it absolutely brilliantly. So you’ll see for yourself what stage four of burnout looks like. And we definitely don’t want to get there. Nobody wants to get there.
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So to sum up, just make sure you get enough rest. I guess that’s the biggest advice or takeaway for me from here. After watching the video for the past few weeks, I’ve been starting to do this, that every day I try to allocate 30 minutes, and I’ve been quite successful in doing this most days of the week, where I just go and do nothing. Or maybe half the days of the week, I’ve been successful doing this. When I go and just do nothing. I just lie down and I stare at the ceiling or I switch on Andy Puddicombe’s Headspace app.
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Any one of his sequences is pretty cool. I switch it on. I meditate, but lying down. And that helps me either meditate or fall asleep and basically just think about nothing. And actually meditation gives you techniques how to observe your thoughts rather than get caught up in them. And it’s been extremely surprisingly effective, in the sense that after 30 minutes like that or an hour or whatever it ends up being, once I stand up, I actually feel recharged. I feel rested. And that’s a very cool feeling that I’m enjoying a lot. And I wish for you to experience frequently as well.
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So there we go. Thank you very much. You can find the show notes at www.superdatascience.com/the number of this episode if you’d like to learn more, and I wish you to stay out of emotional burnout and have a very enjoyable, diversified life. On that note, thanks for being here today and I’ll look forward to seeing you next time. Untill then, happy analyzing.
