The Burnout Cycle

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I am Brett Kistler, and this is Joe Hudson.

Hi everybody.

We've been getting a lot of questions about burnout, and given that I just got back from a long festival weekend with no sleep and 120-degree daytime temperatures, and you're in your final week before your month-long time off to, uh, to rest and recover. I figured this might be a perfect time for both of us to, to go into this.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. This is definitely the time of year where I am most likely to be, uh, a little burnt out, a little tired. Yeah, it's great, great timing.

Yeah. Okay, so Exactly.

Exactly.

So, so from this, from this grounded, centered place that you must be in 100% of the time, tell me what is, what is it that you refer to when you talk about the burnout cycle? Just so I can get people on the same page.

Yeah. So I would think about it in 3 different ways. So let's talk about the nervous system way first. So I remember when I was running my first company and I went to an acupuncturist. I lived in a place and this one was like, "Go see this acupuncturist." And this was a while back and I was like, "Acupuncture, what the hell is that?" And so went and this doctor was amazing. And he basically gave me something called adaptogens to help my adrenals recover. And he didn't say, he just said, "Take these." And I said, "If you were a Western doctor, what would you do?" And he said, "Oh, what would happen is you would drink a lot of coffee and then eventually you'd get depressed and then I'd put you on antidepressants." And this was before people in the— Western people would put— would give anti-anxiety medication to depressed people. And so in his world, the way it worked was that You get anxious, your adrenals expend, expend, expend, and when they start drying up, you go to coffee. And if you dry up even more, you're depressed. And so that's what I would say on a physiological, uh, system. That's how it works, is that the lack of adrenaline leads to this, like, burnout. And so that, that's how I'd describe it there. If I was describing it from, like, the psychological or the, the human brain or the prefrontal cortex brain, I think about it as for whatever reason, you're constantly in a fight or flight situation. You've created things where you have to do things instead of you get to do things. You should do things instead of you want to do things. It has to be at a certain time, has to be perfect, whatever it is, which constantly feels like you're under attack, like you're under pressure. And so, if you go through life that way, that's going to be— all those psychological things are going to create the burnout. And then, on the last piece of it, in the emotional system, it's typically not wanting to feel something, meaning that there's some emotion that you're not wanting to feel and therefore, you're running from it. And it is that running from the emotion that creates a certain amount of adrenaline in your system. So, so I would say the burnout cycle is if you've been running on adrenaline, fear, anxiety for an extended period of time, then typically eventually you're gonna burn out. Hmm. And so you see this all the time. Yeah. You see this all the time, especially in corporate America.

Yeah. I notice a distinction here worth exploring between running on and burnout. Burning out from fear and anxiety, or just there being fear and anxiety present in your life. And I think often, often people have the perception that the— that what's happening external around them is the cause. And if you actually look across a population, there's some people who can be living a lifestyle where others will be burned out in, and they are not. And there's some people who are living a lifestyle where you're like, how is this person burned out? From looking from the outside, but not without the view of what their internal state is and how they're psychologically relating to their life and to themselves.

Yeah. The other way to think about this is having been a venture capitalist and a coach, I've worked with a lot of CEOs, a lot of pressure, run off of a lot of adrenaline typically. And when their business— they sell their business or they leave their business, I often see them stay in their pajamas for 2 years. They just get— they're so burnt out from that running so hard for so long that they just basically are in a burnout. The other thing that's interesting is that we do this assessment for folks. And one of the things it shows is— and I'm a little bit that work this way, which is the way that I recover is long, extended breaks of doing nothing. So I work really hard, and then I recover with these long extended breaks of doing nothing, which is what I'm about to do. For a month where I focus fully on just physical wellbeing and mental wellbeing. And so some people run like that and some people are far more like on a daily basis, do the things that they need. I do daily practices obviously, but I definitely need these long things to be able to get back into a place where I feel completely resourced and ready and fresh.

Yeah.

And so I do that. And some people, they just work their butt off for 10 years and then take 2 years and sit on a couch and typically beat themselves up. But yeah.

Or, or an opposite direction from the taking time off. My coping mechanism for a long time was going into a very scary situation so that the adrenaline made sense. You know, people would call me an adrenaline junkie, but really I found that if I didn't get out into the mountains, if I wasn't jumping, if I wasn't doing something that was scaring me on a regular basis, then the accumulated background fear underneath my psyche would become debilitating unless I had an opportunity to burn some of that off.

Ah, right.

And I noticed that after, after jumping, I'd be like, wow, I feel so grounded. Nothing scares me right now because nothing's quite as intense as what I just experienced. So I can get back to my email and get some work done and things are great. Until it started to build back up again and the blowoff needed to occur.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that totally makes sense. I remember something similar where I went to Alaska and threw fish in Alaska or butchered fish in Alaska for a summer. And we would work 100-something hours a week, physical. It was draining. You were definitely running off of adrenaline just because it took so much energy to do it. And I remember when we got out, first thing I did was sleep for 20-something hours. But then I remember we went to Oregon and One of my favorite things to do was jump off of things into water at the time. And I remember like jumping off of a bridge and like no adrenaline. I was like, what? What just happened? Like there was no adrenaline from it. And so we just kept on going bigger. And finally I did something so big that I was like, and I could feel the whole adrenaline, like, you know, suck the last little adrenaline out of me. So yeah, yeah, totally understand that. And because that felt refreshed in some way. So yeah, that's what it is, I would say. That's what I'd say the burnout cycle is. And the reason it's really important to me to talk about is because so many executives that I know are in that place of burnout or about to be burnt out. And then when it happens, the brain caves in on itself. You don't see opportunities clearly. Take enjoyment in your work. It's just very hard to see things with the optimism that's necessary often. And so how to think about it, I think is really important for any kind of sustained productivity.

Yeah. I think that makes a self-reinforcing cycle, like to the extent that you have some unprocessed, unfelt fear in your system, as you start to get more and more burned out, then you are going to start seeing things even more in that in that kind of scary or pessimistic catastrophizing light, which will increase the level of fear. And yes, going back to that distinction of not just that there's anxiety, fear, adrenaline present in your life, it's that you're driven by it and it becomes the driving force that eventually brings you to the, to the brink.

Yeah, that's one of the many traps that are available in Meaning like there's a sense of feeling alive that comes with it and it can be exhilarating. And so you can do this thing that brings that thrill. And then at first it feels really great, like a cup of coffee, like the first time you drink a cup of coffee, it's like, ooh, this feels really good. And then if you're drinking like 3 cups every day, then you notice the jittery things happening. And then, and then pretty soon you just need it. And so I think it's the same way that That's one of the traps of it. The other trap is that a lot of people use it for motivation. I had a really famous investor that I worked with for a while, and he just wouldn't do anything until it became urgent. And then he would use the urgency to motivate him. And then the whole team realized urgency is what motivates this person. And so they would create these urgencies and then they'd be motivated, but all it did was make him more and more and more burnt out. And so, so that's another thing is people will use it as a form of motivation rather than, say, enjoyment or inspiration or, um, or, or vision or any of those things to find their motivation.

Yeah, Tim Urban of Wait But Why has this really beautiful TED Talk on basically the, the metaphor is that there's like a monkey on your shoulder and that monkey is the thing that like motivates Like, so you find yourself just very distracted up until the moment of the deadline, and then you use that deadline to motivate yourself. And it just seems like a very common, very common cycle. I relate to it so much through much of my life and the, the languaging around ADD, ADHD very much fits that pattern as well as many other like depression, anxiety.

Yeah. I would say that, that those are some of the things that keep you in that side of the cycle. The other thing that happens is what keeps you in the other side of the cycle. So then you're burnt out, then you're in your pajamas. Then you're not doing anything. And what happens is that your mind keeps on attacking you. You should really get up. You should really do this. You should really do that. And it starts beating you up, which continues to create the adrenaline because you're under attack. And so what you need is just to rest. And instead, what you're doing is sitting on the couch beating yourself up. And so I have noticed when a CEO that I'm working with is done with a big project and They're not beating themselves up. Their recovery time is like 3, 4 months. Um, similarly, if somebody is beating themselves up, it can be 2, 3, 4, 5 years. So that's a, that's a pretty tremendous difference just in how it keeps you stuck on the other side through self-abuse.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you have, if you have a conflation between relaxing and resting and laziness or some kind of judgmental description of it. Then anytime your body wants to recover, you're going to go into self-attack and self-threat, which is just going to stymie any attempts that your body wants to recover, leading you straight into burnout.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I was, I was talking to this Olympic trained, Olympically trained athlete. And, um, he was saying that the best athletes that he knows know how to recover really well, that they work really, really hard and then they do absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing to recover. And, and, and that it's this unknown secret that the Olympic athletes will train really, really hard, but the recovery is really important. So I thought that was fascinating.

What are, what are some other traps around this that people fall into that get them stuck in the cycle?

Uh, I think the other thing, the other trap that isn't particularly like what keeps you in it, but there is this idea that people have, which is, "But if I don't beat myself up, if I don't have a sense of urgency, how will I ever get anything done?" That is an amazing thought process because you look at little kids and all they do is do stuff. You look at mice and all they do is do stuff. It's not like they're under this idea of urgency. They're just doing stuff. It's our nature to do stuff, but somehow or another in our brain, we get this idea that without this motivation of urgency or without this beating self up that we won't get anything done, which is interestingly true and not true. So what I mean to say there is that it's not true at all. However, if you're burnt out, then there is some truth to it because you're just kind of creating more of that adrenaline high to get to into something. And so they see this with kids who do this thing called unschooling. So if a kid burns out in school, they go to school and they're just burnt out, maybe because they feel attacked by their teachers or maybe because they feel attacked by the kids or maybe because they're just under this crazy stress. They'll drop out. And if they go into this idea of unschooling, one of the things that they say to a kid is, "Okay, you don't get to use any screen time, but you can do whatever else you want." and tell us when you want to start learning again. And they will maybe read cartoons or comics, or they'll, you know, maybe just hang out or go off into the woods. They'll do all this stuff. What they won't do is screen time. What they won't do is video games, because those aren't allowed, because those increase your adrenal fatigue. And it turns out that eventually, usually like 4 months, 6 months later, the kids just totally want to learn again. And so there is this short-term thing of not being motivated if you've been under this sense of urgency. Now, that doesn't mean as an adult we might not be able to take 6 months off and we might be burnt out. And so then our other option is how do we do things without the adrenaline? And so you have to start thinking about, okay, here are the things I'm going to do, but I have to figure out ways to do them without the adrenaline rush, which is one of the ways I help CEOs out all the time is we look at the things that, that drain them and we figure out ways that they could do them that are, feeds them directly, makes them feel better about their day.

Yeah. And so we've been talking about this in terms of burnout on an individual level, but you can also see a lot of the same dynamics play out in society or in a company or in a movement. For example, there's so much around marketing or, you know, grassroots movements where, yeah, the prevailing wisdom is to hook into people's sense of urgency. Uh, like, we need— this is a problem, we need to fix this problem. If you don't fix it, the world is going to hell. And like that, there's that, that kind of message is prevailing everywhere.

Yes.

And so you— we, we all find ourselves walking through life kind of being hit by a bunch of these messages, these arrows, like the environment this, you know, social whatever that, politics this, religion that. Yeah, right. And that would tend to reinforce those cycles that we have individually when our media is that way. But also, if you are a CEO of a company, how do you bring that energy into your product or not? How do you How do you create meaningful change in the world from a place of, you know, whoever's with me on this needs to buy into this fear and urgency place and use that as a tool to hook other people into our mission with us. And what is the alternative?

Yeah.

So I'm curious if you have any reflection on that before I lead into the, the next section on what we can do about it.

Yeah, that's a great, great question. There's a couple things too. I, I've also seen it somewhat on a societal level where I notice that like if a society is like all run up on an idea, you know, like make as much money as you can in cocaine-fueled kind of caffeine-fueled expansion of on a societal level, then like you can just wait for that downturn to happen in the economy Yeah, I think it happens and I see it happen in companies too. What's a fascinating thing is I've literally watched somebody go from burnout to being free of several ideas and then be inspired again, like a CEO who's like, "I'm done. This sucks." Then it's like, "Well, do you have to deal with it this way and this way? Are these constraints real? What if we take them away?" Then, "Oh, wow. I'm excited to do this again." which is really a fascinating thing to watch. It's rare, but I've seen it several times where what was actually the thing that was taking all their adrenaline was some false idea, some limiting belief that they have.

Right. Same in a relationship as well.

Yeah. And I, I just worked with a group of CEOs and we did this exercise where I said, tell me the thing that takes the most adrenaline, that takes the most out of you, and we'll all ask them how, what questions about "Alternatives, alternative ways of doing it that actually feed you." And every single one of them saw this breakthrough of like, "Oh, I'm doing it in a way that takes my energy. I could be doing it in a way that gives me energy." And I think that is the way you handle it inside of a company. And if a CEO knows that, if the CEO thinks, "I have to push myself through to get through," then their company is going to feel the same way. If a CEO says, "Oh, it's more efficient for me to figure out how to enjoy it," It's more efficient for me to get energy from everything that I do. Then they'll start looking around seeing how powerful that is and they'll organize their company that same way so that the people in their company have that same experience. It'll be part of the questions that are asked. How do you do your job? How do you get these same results but enjoy it twice as much? And it's funny because I will ask that question when I go into to work with teams. One of the questions I ask is, how do you What could we do that would double the results? And what could we do that would double the enjoyment?

Yeah, that also feels very relevant for, uh, business negotiations as well. Ultimately, if you're— if you want to work with somebody and you guys are just drilling into how, how we're going to get our senses of urgency met rather than how we're going to get our, like, deeper spiritual and psychological needs and that of our companies and our organizations served by what we're doing, then you're missing some of the puzzle.

Yeah. As a matter of fact, this is like a little golden thing for anybody negotiating. When I talk to people about negotiating for a position or for a job, I say there's 3 stages of the negotiation. The first is, how do you want to work together? That's the first stage. Because that actually motivates everybody if there's a match, or it pushes people away if it's not a match, which is perfect. The second is, what are the resources you need to actually do your job really, really well? And then the third is, what's the salary? And I notice that when it goes in that position, it's just clarity the whole way, or you get to a no quicker, rather than if what most people do is work on a salary, which is really not what motivates us. There's great studies on this, but— But we— most people would take a little less money if they were 3 times as happy in their job, you know? Right.

Yeah. So let's, let's kind of zone this back into the, the individual level of burnout and talk a little bit about what we can do to avoid it, or how can we work with it, or fall deeper in love with it.

This one, I don't know. I mean, if you're in it, then love it. But the, the— I think there are ways to just not get there, and I know there are ways to just not get there. Um, my— one of my ways is to take significant time off. I'm, I'm able to do that now. I wasn't at some point, so I had other methods. Um, making sure that you have physical health, like running, any kind of thing that de-stresses the system that works for you, whether that's meditation or yoga or massage or whatever. I think that's a huge, huge benefit. On a psychological level, I would say, you know, we have that— the whole— all the podcasts from the MasterClass. And so each one of those is a reduction in adrenaline. So if you're operating from your wants instead of your shoulds, there's less adrenaline that's happening. If you're operating from, um, how do I be authentic instead of how do I improve myself, you are absolutely using less adrenaline. So every one of those are tools, um, to use less adrenaline. And, and then even on a more deep level, like if you always have to be on time, which is something that I have struggled with, um, then usually that means there's a parent who you got in trouble with if you weren't on time, and therefore you're like running from meeting to meeting. That's a lot of adrenaline. Adrenaline use, how do you undo those psychological components that constantly look at your adrenaline use? So instead of— I think there's a huge amount of time and energy put towards time management, but I think energy management is critical. And you can spend a lot more time if you're really managing your energy well. And so that's another thing is to just pay attention to when you're running on adrenaline and what's creating that and what's a way to do it where you're not running on adrenaline to get that same job done. And if you problem solve there, then you have so much more energy, which is why I've done a lot of that work and it's why I can work the way I work at the speed in which I work and not burn out. That and taking a month off every year is really, really important to get back to my physical wealth and Well-being. Yeah.

Yeah. It, it also feels like a good dose of self-inquiry would be helpful here, where if, if I'm running to the meeting and it's like, okay, what am I afraid of? I'm afraid of being late to the meeting. What does that mean? Does that mean that if I'm late to the meeting, I feel like I'm unworthy, I'm gonna be yelled at, I'm not good enough. But if I were to just message and say, I'm gonna be 5 minutes late and then show up much more prepared for the meeting and less burned out. You know, is that like, what, what is it that I'm actually concerned about when, when we have our, all these fear stories and stress, uh, stress triggers? What is the actual trigger that's going on? Uh, not just the surface level one, but what's the deeper one? And what is it that we actually need underneath that?

That's right. Yeah. So that's, that's where the head stuff comes in. It's in the shooting ourselves. It's in the, what are the psychological things that make us rush? And the best way to go about that is just really look at where you're spending that and how do you do it differently? Is the way to do it differently just to let people know I'm running late? Is the way to do it differently space, give yourself 10 minutes between meetings? What is it? What is the way to do it differently? And that's one of the things we sat with today where there's folks who are like, okay, I have to have conflict with somebody. What's the ways? Or I have to run this sales meeting., and I hate it, and I do it through adrenaline. It's like, okay, well, how do we do this? And there was infinite in each one of these CEOs who had the issue. There was literally infinite solutions, at least 20 inside of 5 minutes from the other CEOs who had all figured out some way to do that thing in a way that they enjoyed it. So it's really cool when you really see it, when you're like, oh, wow, I can take anything that that takes energy from me and figure out a way to do it and that gives me energy, or delegated, or whatever it is. It's pretty amazing to watch that.

Yeah. And how about also on the side of— you, you described earlier, we, we talked about allowing the rest to actually occur. How about like welcoming the experience of being tired? Maybe not like burned out, but just noticing like When you feel burned out, what does that feel like? I feel tired. I feel like not doing anything. I feel XYZ. And then doing the emotional inquiry on those feelings, including even just the physical sensation of tiredness. Okay.

Yeah.

The sensation of tiredness is my body signaling that it needs to recover. In fact, it may actually be a direct signal for recovery.

Yeah.

Is that like sleeping is a feeling of tiredness essentially that is an actual Recovery. So yeah, if we, if we kind of flip the script on how we see those signals and recognize that they're actually reparative and not necessarily a sign that we're doing it wrong, then that, that can allow the deeper restfulness to arise when it's needed.

Yeah, there's definitely some people just resist feeling tired. Oftentimes also, if we've been running really hard, we've been compartmentalizing feelings. We've been like not paying attention to the sadness and the fear. And so there's a lot of that backlog that just needs to move. And if you resist moving it, you're going to take a longer time to recover. The other thing that I, a little trick I'll play on folks is, um, CEOs, I'll be like, okay, how do we measure how well you're resting? Hmm. Like, I, I, are you going to be the best at resting or are you going to be kind of a half-ass it? Like what's going on here? And I will literally like flip the script on them in such a way that like to rest well is an accomplishment because it is. It is not an easy thing to do is to rest well. We think it is, but most folks don't. And it's some combination of taking care of a physical body, taking care of the nutrition, taking care of the self-talk. It's like a very aesthetic thing to really rest well and to support yourself in it. And so if we start like looking at those metrics and then we say, okay, well, let's see how well you meet your goal of resting well. It can totally change the whole dynamic in the head. I mean, it's a shortcut, but it works, you know, it gives them some way of being able to feel like they've done something meaningful.

Yeah. And to kind of flip that to the other side of the spectrum, if you can rest well, what would it mean to fear well? For example, if you find yourself in that elevated state, How much resistance is there in it? And, you know, fear can become excitement. Like, fear is excitement without the breath. And so if, yeah, when you are finding yourself in the elevated state and everyone's at the board meeting and they're doing whatever and politicking or like trying to get their thing met and you're running out of time and you're elevated, how do you, how do you allow that to move through to a really clean energetic flow of excitement? And determination and fully showing up.

Yeah.

And how much, how much more energy efficient is that?

Yeah. And the other way, which is one of the things that people have a problem with resting is they start feeling good and then they're like, ooh, that scares me. That level of exuberance or excitement or peace scares me. So I have to, so same thing on the rest cycle. How do you really allow yourself to feel great in it? And not just immediately rush back to the work at hand, which is why I have this— Because in this month, in about a week and a half into the month, I'll have 100 ideas and a whole bunch of stuff that I want to do and I'll have the energy to do it. And I know that if I actually prolong that rest period, if I actually sit with all that excitement and exuberance and I move through that into deeper states of peace and joy and slowness, I am so much more effective. So I actually extend my rest time once a year so that I can go beyond the state of, "Oh, I'm ready to do work again," and go into states of much deeper peace and joy. Because from that place, I do so much— my work is so much better. What I do in the world, how I do it, how quickly I do it, all improve remarkably.

Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed myself too. If I take, if I take like a week backpacking, halfway through, I've got a million ideas and I'm ready to go with them. And then the second half of the week is where a lot of the magic really happens. And I think a lot of that comes from the celebration and the gratitude. Like, yeah, there's, there's time to just sit with how good it feels to A, feel this way, B, continue to reflect on my mission, my purpose, my my enjoyment. And then third, just to, to be with it without— in a wilderness, it's not possible to do anything with my email or whatever. Um, and just have the gratitude for all that is actually present right now without it needing to be contingent upon my actual execution. And so I think gratitude, I'm curious how, how you would bring gratitude into this. As well.

I can totally see how the gratitude would be helpful. And what I notice is that when I'm rested and I'm resourced, gratitude is wellspring. It's just what happens continually. Like, that's the most common thought when I'm rested, or one of the most common thoughts when I'm rested, is just, oh wow, I'm so grateful, I'm so lucky, I feel so privileged. Yeah, well, cool.

I'm really grateful for this conversation.

And too, what a great one.

Yeah, and grateful to all of our listeners.

Yeah, thank you all for just showing up.

Yeah, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it. Just pick one person, uh, that's my invitation. Pick one person you think would love it and send it to them, only if you Only if you would enjoy that. And you can find us on Twitter @artofacomp or hit us up at artofaccomplishment.com. Find a contact form, shoot us a question, come take a course. Awesome.

Thanks, Brett.

See you next time. Yeah, thanks.

See you next time. Thanks, everybody. All right, bye.