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 because we are net depleting ourselves—we are not net gaining. If you constantly give more than you're getting, you will eventually burn out.

How do we get clear on where the burnout is coming from? What is actually stressing us out?

Dr. Camilla Moore helps ambitious women leaders burnout-proof their businesses by focusing on the most crucial element: themselves. 

"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 not an inside job. If you're trying to fix yourself, you cannot fix the burnout piece. 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, the other driver drives off, and you recover. That is stress.

Chronic stress is when you have a bombardment of 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, you get cut off, but before you can fully recover, you go into the office. Suddenly, you need to manage a crisis and 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.

Dr. Camilla says we want to start evaluating based on our energy. The most straightforward exercise you can 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 less. What you're doing is recognizing your limitations.

"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.

Mentioned: The $3.6 Million care gap: https://sarahwalton.com/care-gap/ 

Quiz: 

Connect with Dr. Camilla Moore : https://www.thewellnesscabinet.co

Other GoG episodes you might want to check out:

Build Your Business Without Burnout: https://sarahwalton.com/business-without-burnout/ 

Feeling Stressed? Catch Your Breath: https://sarahwalton.com/breathing-and-stress/ 

You can check out our podcast interviews on YouTube, too! http://bit.ly/YouTubeSWalton 

Thank you so much for listening. I’m so honored that you’re here and would be so grateful if you could leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts by clicking here, scrolling to the bottom and clicking “Write a review.” Then, we’ll get to inspire even more people!

(If you’re not sure how to leave a review, you can watch this quick tutorial.)

#Burnout #Stress #BurnoutAwareness #StressManagement #BurnoutPrevention

#SelfCare #BurnoutRecovery #MentalHealthAwareness #AskExpert #WomenInBusiness