Unstress Health with Dr Ron Ehrlich
Overcoming Burnout | Dr. Sharon Grossman’s Expert Advice on Stress Management | Mental Health Tips
[Overcoming Burnout | Dr. Sharon Grossman’s Expert Advice on Stress Management | Mental Health Tips]
Welcome to Unstress Health with Dr. Ron Ehrlich! In today’s video, Dr. Sharon Grossman, a stress management expert, shares practical strategies to overcome burnout and restore mental well-being. Whether you’re overwhelmed by work, personal life, or daily stress, this video offers actionable tips to help you manage stress and rebuild resilience.
Dr. Grossman will guide you through effective stress management techniques to regain focus, boost energy, and prioritize your mental health. You’ll also learn how mindfulness practices can improve emotional resilience and the importance of work-life balance in stress recovery.
If you’re ready to reclaim your well-being, like this video, share it with others, and subscribe to Unstress Health with Dr. Ron Ehrlich for more expert wellness advice. Stay tuned for more tips to help you live a healthier, more balanced life!
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For more details on Dr. Grossman’s journey and the strategies discussed in this episode, check out the full shownotes at Dr. Sharon Grossman: https://drronehrlich.com/dr-sharon-grossman-overcoming-burnout-a-journey/
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Podcast Guest: Dr. Sharon Grossman
Dr. Sharon Grossman shares expert strategies for overcoming burnout and building resilience.
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hello and welcome to unstress my name is Dr Ron Ehrlich I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I am recording this podcast the gadigal people of the Euro nation and pay my respects to their Elders past present and emerging and I do this acknowledgment to our first Nations people because I truly believe we have so much to learn about connection and respect [Music] well today we are going to continue our exploration of burnout and uh burnout difference between burnout and chronic stress and a whole range of different things but we're going to focus on this from the point of view of the individual of you as an individual who may be chronically stressed who may be facing burnout who wants to start thinking constructively my guest today is Dr Sharon Grossman now Sharon is a psychotherapist with over 20 years of experience and has written some wonderful books on this subject which and has a a podcast called decode your burnout tells us all about that there is so much in this podcast that is of Great Value I felt like it was a therapy session not on its own I'm sure you will too I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr Sharon Grossman welcome to the show Sharon thanks for having me Sharon burnout boy is that a word that people can identify with and obviously that's what we're going to be talking about today I know you focus your whole career on that but I wondered if you might share with us how you got to this point of being a burnout coach yeah yeah yeah absolutely um so I actually am a trained psychologist and I started as a therapist I had been doing that for about 20 years and um while I was still in grad school I ended up going to one of the American Psychological associations annual conference and I attended this session with a psychologist who talked about what it's like to be a practitioner in a private practice and one of the things that he said that really stayed with me was how burnout was so prevalent amongst therapists in private practice and so at that point I had kind of made this unconscious decision I think that I wasn't going to be in private practice because I don't want to be one of those people that burned out you know and so when I graduated from school I ended up working for a non-profit and I was like this is great they take care of everything there's didactics which I really appreciated there's a great team like we do all these things so so it worked out really well I learned a lot but over the years I kind of climbed up the ladder to the point where there was nowhere more for me to go other than management and I said I didn't go to school for 10 years to sit in meetings with people and talk about data and all these kinds of bureaucratic things like that I have no interest so I started looking for jobs elsewhere and as I really looked around at all my different options I realized that none of them really fit because I was doing the search through the lens of my number one value which is lifestyle okay and so I realized if it doesn't exist I have to create it which meant that I have to go into business for myself I have to be a practitioner in a private practice and I said well I remember what that guy said and I have to figure out how to do it smarter so I don't end up burning out and so I got an office space that was near my gym and I created my schedule such that I would see a few clients in the morning I would have a large break in the middle of the day where I'd go work out have my lunch and then see my afternoon patients and then do all my notes before I go home so that I could just like completely unplug and so that's how I really avoided burnout as a therapist but I was really intrigued with this concept of burnout and I started doing some more digging and Research into the topic and the more I did that because I was I decided I was going to write a book on it and the more I I did this research the more I understood what it actually was and I would start listening for it and I would hear my patients talk about what they're going through and how they're feeling and all of these things and I was like I just read about this like I know this sounds like burnout and so I would say it sounds like you're burning out and they would be like oh yeah and I was like this is an interesting phenomenon like people are burning out and they don't even realize it right they don't even have the vernacular to experience to express what it is that they're experiencing and I thought okay I have to make it my mission to really go out and educate the public about what burnout is so that people know what to look for and as a therapist I feel like that's actually really important because if you don't have the right diagnosis for what you're struggling with then you don't have the right treatment that's a big statement that's such an important one totally that is a big statement I mean you've said so much there already I mean values so interesting because I spoke to somebody in medicine recently who after 18 years of practice burnt out working 50 or 60 or more hours a week and and yes interesting that early on in your career you you focused on that because similarly myself in my background I recognized very early on how taxing it was physically and mentally and I didn't want to burn out this was when I was 25 and just thought I would find that sweet spot that it meant enjoyment lifestyle quality of delivery of service it's it's a really important values decision early on isn't it in a person's career yeah and I feel like there is something that happens for a lot of people where that's not the value that leads their decision making it's more about the accomplishment and there's a reason for that I think that as a culture as a society we're very much programmed to think about accomplishment as part of your identity and what it means to have good work ethic and um our self-worth is often very much wrapped up in our productivity and so we're not focused on ourselves we're focused on everything external to us right and the perception others have of us and what it means for for us to get accomplished and to reach certain milestones and to be successful in the world if you will um I think there there is a lot of that kind of external mindset that leads our decisions um and so it's really not that surprising that so many people are burning out yeah and isn't writing a book so cathartic and why a great way to organize all your thoughts yes I I do I do have to say that um when I decided that I was gonna do more than just therapy that I was gonna go into coaching everybody said you have to write a book and I'm like well I don't know what to write about I talk about so many different things with my clients and I can go a million different directions with this like how do I take all of the things that I've been teaching all these years to my clients and put it into like a system a framework something that is cohesive that makes sense that allows people to have a transformation and then when I started doing the research on burnout it all came together and so it was actually a very cool project to be able to think about how to take all these different tools that I teach and bring them together into kind of like a step-by-step blueprint for people yes isn't it it's great I mean I've written a book myself and it's just a great way of organizing your thoughts and making yourself a little more accountable which you focused as you've said on burnout so let's dive in a little bit and how do we Define it and this is this is perhaps the best kind of takeaway for people burnout very simply put is chronic stress okay because I was gonna ask you I was gonna ask you what is the difference between burnout and stress but maybe it's a question of degree like pulling on an elastic band for a week and eventually it breaks right so so there's a difference between acute stress which when I think when we say oh I'm so stressed out we usually talk about it from an acute perspective like I got so much going on right now or um you know I feel really stressed out because I'm in my car and I gotta go to my appointment and I'm running late and there's a stupid guy in front of me and he's driving like 20 miles an hour and I'm like you know so like we feel stressed when there's this crunch there's this pressure when there's a lot of Demands on us and we don't feel like we have the resources or the capacity to perform given our circumstances um that is how it starts that's acute stress and it's when those stressors keep showing up day after day that it's almost like an onion effect where they build one on top of the other it could also be that you have stress coming in from all the different directions of your life like your relationship is Rocky and you know you're having a hard time with one of your kids or your kid has special needs and that's really stressful or you just got a puppy you know and you're gonna train the puppy or you just had a newborn and you're waking up in the middle of the night every two hours and you're not sleeping so you're exhausted right there's so many different things that come into the mix about what makes us stressed and sometimes it's like just the grind of day after day and sometimes it's just the accumulation of things from all over the place that come together for the perfect storm and it it becomes this more chronic picture of stress and that's where we experience burnout um which is really like where we're breaking down right so whereas with acute stress like if I'm stuck in traffic I'm going to be stressed in that moment but when I get out of the car and I finally made it to my appointment I cannot forget about it I'm over it I don't like take it on with me for the next week and tell everybody oh my God like you can't believe what's going on in my life like like we just forget about it but like with other things we take it everywhere we go and um it's hard for us sometimes to disconnect from the stress so a lot of the people that I work with will say how they can't turn work off at the end of the day so it's hard for them to fall asleep they're constantly thinking about what else they have to do I had one guy who I talked to who said that he was he's planning a vacation for Christmas with his family and I asked him well how does it feel when you think about the way that you have your vacation structured and everything like imagine you take yourself through the next eight days of your vacation then you're right back to where you are right now sitting in your office chair how does it feel and he's like not great and I was like why and he said because number one I have pre-planned too much like it's just Overkill right so it's not relaxing and number two is I'm gonna be checking emails from 10 p.m until 2 A.M every single day I was like well that doesn't sound like a vacation at all right but there's all these different ways that we think about what we have to do and so we're putting ourselves in these situations where we're perhaps working too hard we're not disconnecting enough we're not recharging enough and um it doesn't give us the opportunity to get back to ourselves and to really live life coming back to our point of lifestyle and all this kind of stuff like um yeah like you you value being responsible and doing a good job at work but there's more to the equation than that and I think a lot of us have lost sight of that the rest of the equation I know you said there are so many directions you could go in when you were writing your book and you've already mentioned quite a few that could contribute to a stressful situation sounds like you've got to take a a more a really more holistic view of of the things that are impacting on that 100 percent actually I have a podcast called decode your burnout and what I do there is I'll interview people about their burnout story and then I'm basically there to listen for three contributing factors their programming so this is a lot of your subconscious beliefs that are driving your decisions their environment environmental stressors which are the things that we're usually most aware of so that's where people are complaining about their job their boss their industry their husband their wife their kids you know all of these things and then there's your what I call your personality or your burnout profile which is whether you're as I call it a thinker a feeler or a doer and there's all different things that come along with each of those and then based on what your burnout code is we think about how to create more customized Recovery Solutions for you so it's not a one size fits all we really want to take into account like what is showing up for you so that we can Custom Tailor the approach that we're taking for your recovery because if you're burned out and I'm burned out we might be burned up for very different reasons and we got to work on very different things yeah that's that's terrific I I'd love to to to go through that uh a little bit in more detail because personalizing uh approach to Health in general is where we're all headed hopefully but but at some point and is it just a question of degree it is burnout and and what what what are their features about go yes this person is burnt out I know you know I've been reading about the work of Christina maslak who seems to be the world lead you know in putting present company aside of course uh a world leader on on burnout um and and they're kind of there are some features of it that are quite unique well so I would say this yeah Christina Mazz like talks about burnout in first of all more of an organizational perspective so she's really focused on what can organizations do to support their workers so providing certain kinds of resources and um also using her measure to figure out if your people are burned out and how many of them are burned down and what kind of symptoms are showing up for them so it's kind of like broad Strokes right it's like yes 60 of your Workforce is burned out they are exhausted they are cynical and their productivity has gone down great now it's your job as an organization to do something about it and actually I'm glad you asked that because I started doing research on burnout in 2018 which is pre-covered and at that time there weren't a lot of books on the subject as as there are now um and when I came across her work and some of the other people that were talking about burnout in in that space at the time I thought well what if I'm that person working in an organization that's burned out like what if I'm one of those people taking the math Lac inventory right and I'm like okay I already know I'm burned out now what you're telling me is I gotta sit around and wait for my organization to make some changes we all know how quickly they move yeah and I thought well that's actually pretty disempowering to me hmm and so I thought well I want to write a book that's for the professional so that they can actually think about what they can do to help themselves rather than sit around passively waiting and hoping that maybe their organization is going to do something about it yeah brilliant and that's that's why I wrote the book yeah so your focus is very much on the the individual experience of burnout and you've mentioned those three uh three things first and programming let's talk about programming because um I mean is tell us about programming yeah so we're we're all humans and so we all have programs whether we realize that they're there or not and it's basically when you think about how we started out in the world we all started as these blank slates that you know we were subjected to certain experiences you had your parents you had your teachers you had your siblings if you had any uh your your colleagues your your peers your friends um and being exposed to these different circumstances and these different people left a mark on you and some of it is good and some of it is bad and there's all kinds of ideas and beliefs and Notions that you carry around with you that you don't even question and it's become so automated that it is kind of running the show for you without you even realizing it okay because it is subconscious and that's actually the job of our subconscious mind is to take certain things that it deems something that can help us stay safe and survive in the world and bring it below our conscious awareness so that we don't have to think about it because it would be exhausting think about this if everything that you do on a regular basis you have to think about like imagine driving a car remember when you first learned how to drive a car right and you were just like oh my God I'm so nervous I have to look left I have to look right I have to turn I have to this right like it's exhausting to have to think about it all and it's like don't talk to me because I have to focus but now we can drive and we don't even like remember how we got to from point A to point B and that's because that entire thing has been learned and wrutenized and like pushed under our conscious awareness so that we can do it and it doesn't tax us so that's a good thing when things become subconscious if they're helpful but then we have some things that we have just kind of accepted or haven't questioned because that's how we were raised or those were the experiences that we had and that's the interpretation that our brain came up with at that time and it could be when we were three or five years old where our brain wasn't fully developed and I mean I'm saying this from experience because I've worked for like 20 years with therapy clients and I know like this is what it always comes back to and so when we bring that online and they have more self-awareness of this is what they believe and this is the conclusion they always end up with no matter what it is that they face in the world now as an adult right if if you can trace it back to these core beliefs that's what it always ends up so for instance if you have somebody who believes that they're not good enough which is a very common belief then every time something happens their brain is processing that experience through the lens of I am not good enough so this person um didn't pay attention to me because I'm not good enough and this person didn't give me this promotion at work because I'm not good enough and my wife left me because I'm not good enough and my kids don't respect me because I'm not good enough right and so we don't even recognize that this is what's happening but that's part of the programming and also if you believe that about yourself then what happens especially if you're one of these high Achievers who also values accomplishment you're gonna find ways to overcompensate so there's this desire now to go above and beyond which is where we're putting so much into work and we're neglecting other aspects of our life because we want to feel adequate we want to feel valuable we want to feel worthy we don't like feeling like we're not good enough so it's like I believe it but I don't like it and so I have to do something about it and I have this idea that if I do that then I'm going to overcome this uncomfortable feeling within me that I am inadequate right so think about people who have imposter syndrome I just wrote it as an example yeah that's that's an example of a thinker right when I said I have my three kind of types one of the examples of a thinker or somebody who's a who's got imposter syndrome and so I've worked with a number of people like that who as accomplished as they are everybody can see that they are super accomplished I had this woman that I worked with who was in a construction company she was elevated up to VP of the company like that's how much they approved of her and thought she was doing a great job but it didn't matter didn't matter every time she had to send out a company-wide email she would be scanning for errors two three four five times over because she was like if I send this and it has any sort of mistakes in it they're gonna recognize that I don't belong here they're gonna realize that they made a mistake and so imagine if that's you and everything you do now that could take 30 seconds now takes 10 minutes and multiply that times all the tasks that you have every single day that's a lot of extra time at work and that's a lot of anxiety and a lot of energy spent and something that's not even real that only you believe that nobody else thinks about you like you're so worried about people's perception of you nobody else is buying into that at all and you're just like I I refuse to believe that you know so these are the kinds of things that are part of our programming that are really detrimental to our well-being I mean it's often I you know I think it's said in Jesuits or Francisca I forget they say show me the let's be uh let's be appropriate show me the child at seven and I'll show you the adult you know and a lot of these values are ingrained very early on yes is is is reflecting on that um what therapy is all about is that is that the therapy Journey does that what one has to go through to change those patterns so I would say that would be a helpful thing to go through in your life if you decide to do that work in therapy yes um especially if you have trauma very helpful to heal from it to process it because so much of our identity is wrapped up in these ideas right and a lot of times it's just that we've misinterpreted things so imagine if I told you you know the reason that you feel so horribly or that you have such low self-esteem is because you just have there is a misunderstanding right that you just told yourself this story that doesn't actually add up but you believed it and it's causing so much turmoil in your life like wouldn't you want to rewrite that story right like and and I feel like that's that's what happens for so many of us like if we are um if we have trauma in our lives right if somebody is perpetrated something against us as children especially there's so much shame that we carry as if we the victim did something wrong and so we have the story of like well I shouldn't have done this or I shouldn't have showed up or I should have told this or right and we we keep telling ourselves like it's it's my fault that this horrible thing happened to me and that's the that's that's the brain of somebody who is either too young to understand the truth or too emotionally wounded to be able to think rationally hmm and we know that uh somebody like that if you ask them well you know your friend just experienced Eric's thing um and they think that it's absolutely their fault what would you say to them they're like oh no of course not like of course it's not your fault don't you poor thing but we can't have that self-compassion we can't have that compassion for ourselves in the same way that we have it for other people and I think it's because we're so wrapped up in the shame and the guilt um and so yeah I think doing some of that work in therapy would be super helpful what I focus more on in Burnout coaching is just helping people identify that there are some of these erroneous Notions and helping them wrap their mind around the fact that they don't have to buy into it and that they can do things differently and we work we work through it in less of a therapeutic manner but more in terms of like um mindset if you will now the second aspect you mentioned there was Environmental aspects and and I guess by that you know you you've include you've used that word environment in a very broad context could you just expand on that a little bit for us yeah so it's kind it's like what I was saying earlier it could be all these different aspects of your life so your work and even that you can break it down even further could be like a task that you're working on where you don't feel confident it could be the timeline that you have to get your work done where it feels unreasonable it could be the number of tasks that you have in the time that you have allotted you know all those kinds of things it could be that you work with somebody who's a micromanager it could be that you are in a toxic work environment that maybe you're being discriminated against at work it could be that you are working inside of a team and you have to wait until your team members have done part one before you can do part two and they're stalling or they're not taking their time and you're getting stressed out sitting here and waiting because you know there's that crunch that happens the closer you get to the deadline and the longer they take the less time you have there could be a million things just under the umbrella of work and then we have everything else in our lives our all of our relationships right whether you're single or married or dating or I mean dating itself is like so stressful right and we have marriage which we have so many people getting divorced because they're having so many issues and we have parenting which is super stressful and we have health issues that come up for us so what if you get diagnosed with cancer or what if you have an autoimmune disease or what right like there's endless amounts of things that stresses out in life and now imagine that you have one from this category one from that category and like that's that's kind of normal right there's all different things happening all at once in our lives all the time then we can say it's pretty stressful to be human and it's pretty normal to have stress yeah but it's really up to us to learn how to manage that stress to prevent burnout um and that's what I'm here to teach yeah and I I you know stress is obviously a major focus of this podcast and uh and actually my professional life and uh I always say in order to solve a problem it always helps to know what that problem is um the full extent of it which comes back to your original thing about diagnosing something if you're going to fix something get the diagnosis right first so you know what it is you're fixing and I think people I don't think people have a full understanding of what stress actually means they just think oh it's emotional stress you know that's it but as you point out there are so many other contributing factors to that stress experience right and it can be stress that's in your mind as we often see with burnout we talk about you know you mentioned Christina maslak one of the flagships of burnout is exhaustion and when she talks about exhaustion it's actually not what we typically think of like I just ran a marathon and I'm just like falling on the ground because I don't have an ounce of energy left in my body but it's really mental and emotional exhaustion and it's that brain fog that I just I just can't even focus anymore right like I'm here in person like my body's in the chair and I'm just fried like I can't even think straight you know I had a day like this I just also dancing I had yeah I'm a very clean Ballroom Dancer too uh nice go go go I love the Latin Parts but don't exactly we could do a little Segway into some different dance moves but let's just stay on topic yeah go on so about a month ago I had a day where I didn't get much sleep or something happened and I showed up to class and you know we do it in the evening so it's kind of the end of the day as it is and I felt like my brain was so fried that I couldn't really focus and then like these guys were turning me and I felt like I was gonna fall on my face because I couldn't even like turn like my head was spinning and I I was just like this is what it must feel like when you're burned out and you've got that brain fog and it's like you know normally what you could do like you could usually follow instructions and do all these things and do a turn I could probably do three turns on a good day and like on a bad day I can't even do one like I'm falling over myself and I I was like I was telling everyone I feel like a drunken sailor right like where I just like I don't even have control over my feet and I can't focus my mind and I'm just like in la la land I'm like what is happening and and I I very much feel like that's kind of the experience that a lot of people have with that emotional mental exhaustion of burnout where it's like yeah I'm here in person and I intend to show up to do the work but I just can't anymore mm-hmm yes well um yeah the dancing part of it of course one of the things I love about it is for the for an hour a week I get to lead my wife so that's really you know quite an you know I I relish that I relish that experience but we digress coming back to the third thing which you talked about which was the burnout yeah I know the burnout profile um yeah I think Fila Dua I mean you mentioned the thinker was you know suffering from imposter but there's obviously more to it than that can we talk about those three profiles yeah yeah so the thinkers can be a variety of different uh you know there's different versions of that I've already mentioned the Imposter syndrome but another version might be somebody who is a perfectionist they live very much in their mind they're constantly valuing and devaluing their work which means that they're focused on and and mind you they have good intentions right they're they're really focused on doing quality work but it's just that underlying thing of nothing I do is ever good enough and so I have to keep working harder I have to keep perfecting and I have to keep iterating and reiterating and it's that dissatisfaction and it also is even if I do an amazing job on this one thing I am so over focused on this that I have neglected all these other areas of my life or all these other tasks that I'm supposed to get to and so there's a lot of procrastination on the other side of that it's like I can't I can't focus on these things I have to focus just on this and so I'm procrastinating all these other things which I know I still have to get to like it's not like I don't I only have one thing to do right we don't have that luxury um and so there's that there's also this fear of failure that happens where if I want things to be perfect and I don't quite believe that I can do a good enough job there's that good enough thing again then I might as well not even try because if I do it and it's not up to standard then people will judge me then I'll get rejected then something bad might happen so there's a lot of underlying anxiety whether it's imposter syndrome whether it's perfectionism was procrastination like all of these things and and what we often see with a thinker is somebody who is filled with a lot of negative self-talk a lot of ruminations a lot of catastrophizing and so one of the things that I do is I help them work on their mindset so yeah there is a lot of that self-compassion that we need to cultivate but also like how to think about things differently so that they aren't so scary or they're not so um worried about the future and things of that nature and and the Fila so the feeler those are the people who tend to put other people's needs ahead of their own they're your people people Pleasers they have a really hard time setting boundaries because they carry a lot of guilt they believe on some level that they're not as important as other people so they neglect their own needs in favor of everybody else's and then they experience a lot of resentment because they're like here I am taking care of everybody else what about me who's taking care of me right and there's a lot of this anger that bubbles up um and then what happens sometimes is that spills out so they'll Maybe I mean in some cases so you know they might actually be become really irritable and say something or do something to let the person know how resentful they really are and then they feel guilty about that so then they have to overcompensate and then they they're stuck in that cycle of constantly having to do to compensate for the fact that they've you know been more like aggressive and then they get back into that passive state of doing doing doing and then you have the people who actually don't externalize it like they don't externalize the anger but then you got like the quiet quitter you know the quite quitting that we're hearing about where it's like well fine you know I'm not gonna say anything but I'm just gonna like sit here and I'm not gonna do anything like screw everybody yeah I'm just gonna like sit here you know um and it's like great but like why like this is your life like don't waste it you know um maybe there's something more for you like maybe something different for you like maybe this isn't a fit like let's have a conversation about that you know um I think that's kind of shortchanging you um and finally the Dua the doer is the person who has that compulsion to constantly do do do and it's because they have their self-worth wrapped up in their productivity so there is that need to constantly prove that they are worthy and it's almost like they have this fictional story that if I do all this stuff then I'll finally arrive it's we called it the arrival fallacy right it's like if I do all these things then I'll be happy and then you finish doing that task or you finish that project or you accomplished that title or you get the next pay raise or what have you and then you're like oh well now I gotta like make sure I do all the things that can justify the fact that I've gotten to this point right and so we're constantly in that race and it doesn't end ever and so um it's and the thing is it's not even just at work it's a it's kind of as I say it's a personality right your personality is to just constantly be doing so as an example we do this also on our vacations so I just had a conversation with a CEO of a company and he was telling me about his planned vacation for Christmas and how he is not so much looking forward to that vacation because he feels like it's going to be actually pretty exhausting so like wants to go on vacation because he wants to do all these fun things that he usually doesn't have time for but he's also like yeah I know I'm gonna get back and it's gonna be so exhausting and I'm like why he's like because I've over planned I'm over scheduled I've got a call from one day I got scuba diving and the next day and we're gonna go fishing then we're gonna do this I'm gonna do this and I'm like and what would make it more relaxing and he said if I didn't schedule anything I said and what are your thoughts about having a day on your vacation where you don't schedule anything and he said that it would be a waste of time okay and so and so there's this inner conflict of I have to do because otherwise I'm going to be wasting time and I and I and I appreciate that let's as a doer appreciate that like we want to like squeeze every minute out of life right like there's passion in that and I also think that there's got to be balance because as you even heard in this example there is that inner conflict there's like I want to do all these things and I also want to relax but my mindset won't allow me to have that white space in my calendar my my my mindset my beliefs my programming doesn't allow me to take time for myself oftentimes when I talk to people who are burned out I ask them on a scale of zero to ten like how how would you rate like the time that you create for your self-care like how much are you actually engaging compared to what you feel like you need and it's usually like a three like I I don't spend a lot of time in self-care I don't have time for self-care you know people will always say like oh who has time for meditation who has time to go to the gym like I don't have time for that and I would say like if you if you say and I wrote this in my book if you say that you don't have time for that you're doing it all wrong that is yeah boy if that people didn't get anything else from this conversation then there's so much that you've already said that that statement alone is is is worth listening to the whole thing um but we're all a combination of those things aren't we I mean it's a bit like saying are you an introvert or an extrovert it's a it's a Continuum along a line and maybe you're a 60 this and a 40 that is that how it is I mean are we all combinations of that think of feel a doer and and we're predominant in one way or another I think so I think that you you can really fit like one profile or you can fit all three and the way that I like to explain it is depending on how many things you've checked the box to in terms of these profiles it just means that there's more things for you to to unplug from okay well oh Sharon this is a relaxer therapy session for me I know I've often you know but anyway I'm ticking a lot of boxes here I don't feel burnt out though and that's an important thing too isn't it it's about your attitude to what you're doing like if oh my God I'm doing this oh my God I'm doing that but wow I'm really excited to be doing that and I can't wait to do that there's a big difference there isn't it yes and and I'm glad you you brought that up because stress if we were going to go back to the definition of burnout and what it's all about stress is about perception and so if I perceive what I have to contend with as something that is not something that I want to be doing where I feel stuck or trapped these are words that a lot of people use right if I feel like it's against my will if it's not something I enjoy if I'm bored with it if I'm overwhelmed by it whatever it is the way that we describe it that's why language is actually really important because it describes how we think about it and how we think about it very much influences how we feel and so that's why a big chunk of the work that I do in my coaching is I help people really reverse engineer the results that they want to have and really look at the thoughts that are creating these negative emotions and really asking them well how do you want to feel instead assuming this is a situation that you have no control over and then you can't change the external right your boss isn't going to change or your you know covid isn't going to magically disappear and this is something that I had a conversation with a lot of my clients at the beginning of covid when they were all freaked out that oh my God I have to be in quarantine I can't do this I can't do that and like this sucks and I have to work from home and like I have to homeschool my kids right like everybody was freaked out and I'm like well we don't know how long this is gonna be around but given the fact that it's here how do you want to feel and they would say I just want to feel calm I'm like what do you need to think about covid in order to feel calm and it would really force them to think in a more focused way it's it's and that's one of the things that I think is really great about coaching is we ask really powerful questions to help Focus your mind on what you want rather than focusing on all the things you don't want and this um and and I often do say that while you don't have control over the events and people in your life you do have control over how you think about it in fact actually that's your best tool you've got but of course that's easier said than done which brings us back to your second point about the external stressors of health and sleep and kids and relationships and all of that which don't allow you to change your attitude so it's important again to take this kind of bigger bigger picture view of of what stress actually means absolutely um I do a lot of work with people around and it's funny because a lot of times people aren't even aware of what they're feeling or they're like in denial or you know there's there's like the people who are really stuck in their mind where they know what they're thinking but they have no access to their emotions and then you have the people that are like so emotional but they have no access to their thoughts they're like I feel this but I don't really know why you know and my job is to kind of tease it out and then say okay this is what's actually happening and listen I'm going to read you back everything you just said you said this this this this this this this is do you hear all the thoughts that are going on in your mind each one of those thoughts actually creates another emotion inside of you that's why you're feeling this and this and this and this and this right and then they're like oh okay that's how it works you know and then there's also this Epiphany that happens when they're like so actually this thing that's going on in my life is different from my thinking about it right and they always like think that it's those those events that are creating their feelings that's why we'll say you made me feel this way and it's like wait a minute there's a there's a step in between there those two things and that's your thoughts right and that's the stuff that you actually get to control and that's the stuff that Christina maslak doesn't really touch on yeah yeah yeah yeah well as you say I think her focus is very much on organizations and group group Trends uh but to your point about you know you know it's still a one-on-one problem you know you you have to deal with the problem and this is this is what you're talking about tell me I mean I think uh burnout stress chronic stress has been a problem for quite a while and the last two years have uh or three years have been an interesting time in human history what what impact do you think this period has had on on the amount of burnout stress that you're seeing foreign we certainly have seen a rise in Burnout I think that's part of why you're seeing so many more people writing about it talking about it it's very much at the Forefront right now because it's just like people's burnout has gone through the roof um actually funny story so I started researching my book in 2018 I was ready to publish it in March of 2020. and right about that time okay you know it's like oh wait a minute wait a minute I should include another another chapter so so all of a sudden they're like oh everybody go home and I was like wait um my book is for the person that's sitting in the office and they're burned out and now everybody's sitting at home I can't publish this book so I just like put it on hold and I waited six months and then it was September of 2020 and everybody was burned out working from home and I was like you know what this still applies this still applies and now more than ever so I actually ended up publishing it in in September so yeah it is kind of a funny thing how um funny but not funny right we're we're seeing we're seeing a lot of this and um I am glad to see so many people rising up and saying like we're working on this problem you know there's so many more people that are authoring books on burnout that are uh that have started podcasts on burnouts that are uh coaching on burnout there's a lot of physician coaches a lot of Physicians who turned into coaches that are now coaching Physicians because of the Whole Health Care crisis I mean there's been a real transformation in this field so I'm really happy to see that because there's a need for all of those workers for sure and I'm just kind of uh I should say proud to be part of that movement wow yeah you really picked it uh but you know the the thing about I I would describe the pandemic as a an up an opportunity or a period of global reflection um on values and and that's a really important part of the process of dealing with burnouts so if people needed a kind of a wake up and go hey maybe you need to be thinking about what you're doing the pandemic certainly forced that issue tell me if people were just if people are listening to this and thinking yeah I think I could be what would be a couple of hints to avoid burnout or if you were dealing with it to deal with it you know a couple of things for our listener to go away with and think about I mean you've given us a lot to think about already but just yeah I mean um I I would say in addition to everything that we talked about if you're still kind of wondering and you're not sure um I've actually made it really simple for people so I've created a burnout checklist which people can just go and download and it explains in very simple terms uh what to look for and you can literally like check check check and say like oh this applies this doesn't apply and then based on what you've checked it kind of gives you some um broad recommendations on what to focus on first second third that sort of thing um and then of course I've got lots of other resources on my website as well so if anybody's interested in that checklist it's on my website so it's Dr Sharon grossman.com forward slash burnout checklist you could also find it on the home page as well along with a couple of other free resources that I have there and I also encourage people to check out the decode your burnout podcast because really the the reason I created this is because I wanted people to hear the different ways that burnout shows up with the intention that if you're listening to a particular guest and their burnout code resonates for you you're like yeah that sounds just like my story then the tips that they share of things that have helped them can potentially also help you and so if people are interested in that it's decode your burnout the podcast right right and you're talking to clients or patients or rather practitioners professionals or you're just you're you're covering all these different areas yeah I mean it's it's not usually uh people that I've worked with it's more people who are either Professionals in in their own right and have experience burnout and they want to come on and share their brilliant story the other type of guests that I have on the show uh I also include people who are experts in their field and they come on to debunk the the main myths about what it means to be successful in that area and then my job is to kind of take those myths and the tips that kind of that they are sharing and think about how we can apply it to all of our lives in an effort to prevent burnout um terrific listen now just finally one taking a step back from your role as a therapist focused on burnout because we are all on a health journey in this modern world as individuals what do you think the biggest challenge is for us as individuals on that Journey as we're trying to lead a healthy life yeah I think it's prioritizing you know we all have 24 hours in a day and we all have to make decisions about how we spend that time and again I think it comes down to your values and your programming those are the things that are going to be often leading your decision making whether you've realized it or not and that's why I think we often see that people are stuck in a in a pattern or in a loop often sometimes of self-sabotage and we often see people that they have the same results over and over again right because they're always making the same kinds of decisions because they're always driven from the same values or the same beliefs and then we also see how people will prioritize things like work over their self-care over their families like I actually work with a lot of male Executives right now that are in that like 50 to 60 year old range where they're kind of thinking about retirement and they're going through that second wave where they're like you know I'm kind of burned out and I'm rethinking this whole thing and I realize like I just missed out on my kids and I don't want to be that guy and you know like so now it's like wake-up call as you said oh yeah like there's a better way for me to do this so I think that we all come in with this motivation and drive and we want to accomplish and we want to achieve and we want to have something to show for ourselves and then we get to a point where if we've burned out it gives us that step back big picture what's going on and then we're like you know what I'm reassessing this and this doesn't work this isn't sustainable I want more I want different and then we redesign the way that we approach work and that's why we're seeing especially during covet so many people going through transformation and changing their careers and relocating their families and doing so many different things right taking the great resignation and sabbaticals and like so much change has happened because all of a sudden people are like you know what I do want to live next to my family or I don't want to commute to work or whatever the case may be right so many different changes um and so I think yeah I think it boils down to prioritization with your 24 hours and making the best decisions for your Global Health and Wellness well what a great message to finish on and Sharon thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your wisdom and knowledge with us and we will of course have links to your web page with all those great resources in your podcast as well thank you so much amazing thank you Dr Ron I appreciate you having me on well I've often said that covert was an opportunity in fact a time for Global reflection not just on health but on the values in life and it was so interesting to hear Sharon talk about those three things of programming external stressors and the burnout profile whether you're a thinker a feeler or a doer but it's the programming and the reflection on values that I thought was so interesting and it reminded me of the conversation I had with one of my heroes and guests on this podcast who was on the summer series Alan Savory who's written the book on holistic management now uh Alan's Focus has been on holistic management in general but holistic Land Management in particular and one of the most important things that he said to me that I think keeps coming up in almost every podcast we do is um how important the holistic context is before any decision is made by governments by organizations by individuals By You By Me by any time we make a decision or a decision is made there needs to be a holistic context which sits over the top of every other decision for example governments might make a whole have a holistic context which says every decision we make needs to be of value to the individual to improve the individual's quality of life and we need to also protect the environment so whatever else whatever we're talking about those are the holistic contexts by which we will make all subsequent decisions and here we're talking about values and and the programming which goes into us as we make as we as we have values which drive us in life and hopefully this podcast and and this period in in human history has been an opportunity for you and I certainly have reflected on my values and what I think is important in life and and this is the first step in taking control of uh of chronic stress and avoiding burnout and I think the other thing that was so interesting for Sharon is her her acknowledgment that there are so many other stressors externally and internally I think we can include chronic degenerative diseases as an internal stressor in in that model of uh walking our way through and dealing with burnout look we will of course have links to Sharon Grossman Dr Sharon Grossman's site it is a wonderful resource and she has a checklist and she's written a great book on the subject and of course her podcast I hope this finds you well until next time this is Dr Ron early this podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine health and related subjects the content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for Care by a qualified medical practitioner if you or any other person has a medical concern he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner guests who speak in this podcast Express their own opinions experiences and conclusions
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