#185 Beat Burnout and Recover Faster by Knowing Your Burnout Type

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donnie Wilson, and in this episode, I'm going to be talking about burnout. What is it? How do you know if you have it and how do you recover from it? This is such an important topic because such a high percentage of us as humans around the world are experiencing stress and burnout. I want to make sure you know what it is and what you can do about it to protect yourself and to recover if you're experiencing signs of burnout that I'll be covering in this episode. So the thing is, we've been using the term burnout for many years sort of as a sling for experiencing stress, and now there's actually a more official definition of burnout, and it is basically to say that you're experiencing symptoms as a result of chronic stress. Now, the definition of burnout is applying specifically to stress related to your job or occupation. But I would say as a stress expert, then I would consider burnout to also be related to any activity in your life, whether you're a student, a parent, if you're a business owner, if you have a job or occupation, or even if you're retired. It's possible to experience burnout at any age. It's also possible to recover at any age. So I want to make sure you leave this video with hope and inspiration that it's possible to feel better and to become resilient to experiencing burnout once again. So what do we experience when we have burnout? In the definition, they talk about energy being depleted and feeling exhausted. Also feeling separate or kind of a mental distance from where you feel and where your job is or your activities during the day. So feeling like you're distant from your life and also reduced efficacy or productivity in your in your career or in your activities during your daily life. So these are some of the ways that it shows up. But I want to go into more detail because I want you to know all the ways that I look for signs of burnout in my patients. So here's the thing is that there's still a big stigma related to experiencing signs of burnout and mental health issues. And so this is why a lot of times people don't realize they're experiencing burnout and maybe don't even realize they're experiencing the effects of stress. And then when people do experience symptoms of stress or burnout, they might not feel like they can talk about it because there's a lot of fear about what someone else is going to think of them or that it might have a negative impact on them or their life if others know that they're experiencing burnout. And so part of also my goal with this video is to really help break that stigma and really help us all realize that we're all human, we all have stress, we're all going to be affected by stress. And so there's no reason for anyone to feel ashamed or embarrassed or even for anyone to be critical of someone else who is experiencing symptoms of burnout, because it's possible for all of us at all ages. Now, here's something that I also like to emphasize is that it's not one size fits all. It doesn't look the same for all of us. Stress and burnout can look different for each individual. And this is why in my work, I work really hard to help you identify exactly how burnout looks for you so, so that you can recover more efficiently. It's interesting because some recent research is even showing that there's differences in how we experience burnout related to generations. What one study showed is that Gen Z is more likely to experience stress and burnout than other generations. Gen Z is people born between 1997 and 2012 or 2013. And so the study also looked into why is it that Gen Z is more often reporting burnout than other generations? By the way, they're reporting 91% of them are experiencing burnout versus 84% in other generations. So why is that? People ask me, why is it that that generation of young adults and adult and adults who are entering the workforce, why are they more experiencing burnout than other generations? And that there are several reasons why we think that's happening. One is that we all, of course, just came through the pandemic, but Gen Z's were more likely in school and in college and starting to enter their jobs during the pandemic. So it was a different kind of stress for them and it also was a different age of development that they were at when we went through the pandemic. So now it's past, it's post pandemic, and they're starting to go into their work environment, it's very different for them because they don't have as much experience being in, in work situations with other humans. And so they're needing to learn how to interact with other humans in that work environment. Post pandemic. Also, there's a cost of living issue in most everywhere around the world. And there's also this fear of stability in their workplace. A lot of them describe being in fear of losing their job, and they also describe being less able to turn off their mind when they leave for the day. When they leave their work for the day, they continue to work into the evening. Whereas older generations seem to have more of an ability to say, no, I'm going to focus on other tasks, maybe family or other activities, and be less likely to continue working into the evening. At the same time, in that age group, they also have more energy and need for stimulation. And sometimes they are then turning that stimulation into their job and ending up working more, which leads to more work stress and greater likelihood of burnout. They also are less able to speak up at work and say that they feel stressed and get help with it. So these are all factors to consider. Especially if any of you listening are Gen Z, it's definitely important to consider that you're in a generation that's experiencing more stress and burnout and makes it even more important for you to understand how to recognize the signs of burnout and what to do about it. But I want to emphasize that burnout can happen to all of us. And I think that sometimes what's happening is older generations, we were less likely to talk about stress. There was less awareness about stress and burnout. This is a relatively new awareness. It was just officially defined. So for many years, many decades, we weren't, we were kind of taught to dismiss stress, to pretend like it doesn't affect us, to. To judge others who were affected by stress. And so I actually think our relationship to stress is shifting now. And for Gen Z, that means, hey, being willing to say, hey, I am stressed and burned out, whereas other generations may be less likely to identify in that way. And so that's for those of you in other generations, millennials, for example, on Gen X, we want to be thinking about how can we be more okay with recognizing that stress affects us and to then be able to be proactive about helping ourselves to recover from it. So one of the areas that I look at when it comes to burnout and stress, there's five key things. And I encourage you to walk through this with me and think about how stress may be affecting you again. We're all human. Stresses are going to affect us in some way. It's going to be unique to each individual. There's no judgment. It's about self compassion and understanding how stresses affect you so that you can help yourself recover from it. We know that stress and burnout is related to more than 90% of health issues. So it's worth it to understand the effects of stress and become proactive about it in order to protect yourself from health issues now and into the future. So the five areas to consider. First is your energy level. Do you feel like you have lower energy? Have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning? Or maybe feel like you need extra naps in the afternoon? Or just feel like you have to survive on caffeine all day? This is related to your energy level. Number two is your mood. Mood being do you feel like you're in a good mood or do you feel like you're in a low mood? Harder to get motivated? Not feeling passionate about your life or your career? Do you feel anxious, like worried all the time? Some people might not realize they feel anxious, but they might just be feeling nervous or worried or having racing thoughts or what if scenarios going through their mind constantly or having a hard time turning off the worries. And when it's evening and you need to go to sleep, that brings us to sleep As a third area to look at, how are you sleeping? Are you able to fall asleep, stay asleep and get 7 1/2 to 9 hours of sleep? If not, then stress is likely affecting your sleep. How about number four, which is your focus? Do you feel like you can focus on a task and complete it, or do you feel there's a lot of brain fog and distraction? Sometimes it's diagnosed as adhd, sometimes not. Sometimes diagnosed as other kinds of mental health issues. It's possible and sometimes it's not diagnosed. But you might feel like, why can't I remember? Why can't I keep on track? Why can't I finish a project? Those are all signs that your focus is being affected by stress. And the fifth area is your body. We always need to check in and listen to our body. What's it trying to tell you? Is there a rash on your skin? Is there pain? Pain in your joints or your muscles? Are there digestive symptoms? Are you getting heartburn? Bloating? Constipation? Diarrhea? Are you getting any other symptoms? Tightness in your jaw, Hair falling out? These are some of the common symptoms I hear people tell me about. And it can Go on and on the list. The way I look at it is I look at four major systems in the body that tell us how your body's responding to stress. One is your digestion. Any symptoms in the digestion? You name it. Yes. We know classically that ulcers are increased risk with with stress, but it doesn't always have to cause a stomach ulcer. It can be anything from canker sores in your mouth, dental issues, all the way to gastritis, sibo again, bloating, gas, colitis, hemorrhoids, anything through your digestive tract. How about your immune system? That's the second system where you could be noticing anything from frequent infections, recurrent infections, chronic infections, say from Lyme or Epstein Barr virus or HPV virus, which may be causing you to have abnormal Pap smears if you're a woman. For men, HPV is often not tested and so you might not know that you have HPV virus. But most all of us are exposed to HPV virus in our lifetime, just like most all of us are exposed to Epstein Barr virus as well. But these viruses can become underlying and chronic and in the background causing issues when we are burned out and not recovered from stress. Immune system can also go towards autoimmunity. So if you have, if you know you have autoimmunity of any type, from Hashimoto's to Crohn's to rheumatoid arthritis, or any other form of autoimmunity, that also tells us your immune system is being affected by stress. Even if it's simply that you're catching one cold after the next. Sinus infections, bladder infections, skin infections, you name it. That tells me your immune system needs help recovering from stress. Then there's our nervous system. The nervous system is creating our neurotransmitters. And when we're under a lot of stress, our nervous system is at an increased requirement for helping us keep up with stress. So we end up become depleted in our calming neurotransmitters. Right, because the calming neurotransmitters have a high demand when we're under a lot of stress, so we become depleted in serotonin and gaba, the calming neurotransmitters. We can also have imbalances on our stimulating neurotransmitters, including dopamine and adrenaline. They can either go too high or too low, depending on how stress affects your metabolism and your body. So neurological symptoms can start to develop, anything from anxiety, depression and other mental health issues to migraines and neurological pain. And other neurological type symptoms like tics and stuttering and tremors. Many, many other seizures, for example, can all happen when the nervous system is inflamed and experiencing chronic stress. Then the fourth area to look at is hormones. So if you're noticing any kind of hormone imbalance for women, that might be irregular menstrual cycles, difficulty with fertility and conceiving, frequent miscarriages, anything with the ovarian hormones for men, it can also be testosterone can be depleted. That's an effect of stress. It can also stress can affect both men and women in terms of their thyroid hormone, their insulin, which is another hormone that manages our blood sugar levels. And many other hormones in the body can get disrupted by chronic stress, you see. So I'm hoping now you might be like, wow, I didn't realize stress was affecting me. But now that you mention it, there are ways that stress is showing up in my body. So I'm hoping this is not a way to make you more stressed about stress. This is actually a way for you to start to become proactive about burnout and how you can recover. Are you ready to discover your unique stress type? We're all affected by stress, but why fight it when you can master it? Take my free online stress type quiz today and conquer your burnout. We'll measure your energy, sleep, mood, focus and body to determine how you your body is built to deal with stress. Then we'll work together to take precise action to help you get out of stress mode and become resilient to it. It's time to master your health. Let's go. So what happens when we're under stress? Why is this all occurring and why does burnout happen? Well, it's because our bodies are built to respond to stress and make our stress hormones, which is cortisol and adrenaline, and that's a good thing. We want cortisol and adrenaline to protect us from danger. The issue is when we have stress day in and day out and we don't have enough time for stress recovery, if we're not taking breaks during the day, if we're not taking time off at the end of the day or in the middle of the day, if we're not taking time off on the weekends, we're not getting adequate recovery. And certainly if we're not getting enough sleep, we're not getting enough stress recovery. And so it's simply a matter of imbalance between stress and stress recovery. If we have a lot of stress and not much recovery, we're going to start to have our body's going to start to show us in some way. And again, it's unique to each individual. I've been researching stress for over 20 years, and what I found is that one of the ways that it's unique is in terms of how it leaves our stress hormones. Meaning for some people under chronic stress, they end up with high cortisol levels and high adrenaline levels. Those are our stress hormones. They just stay high. I call that the stress magnet type. Others is completely opposite with burnout. They end up with low cortisol and low adrenaline. And they. These two types can have similar symptoms or completely different symptoms. They both can experience fatigue, they both can experience anxiety, and they both can experience the symptoms we just described. But the difference is they have different cortisol and adrenaline levels due to the effects of stress. So they have a different type of burnout. There's the stress magnet type of burnout with high cortisol, high adrenaline, and there's the law and blue type of burnout with low cortisol, low adrenaline. Those are just two of the stress types. There's actually three more. There's the night owl who has high cortisol, high adrenaline in the evening or at night. And so this type of burnout often affects sleep. Your ability to fall asleep or you're waking up in the night or early in the morning. That's the night owl type of burnout. Then there's the sluggish and stress type that has high cortisol with low adrenaline. That's possible. And also the opposite is possible. Having high adrenaline with low cortisol is a tired and wired type of burnout. So the reason why it's so important to know how your type of burnout is because the treatment is different. And this is what I want to start to get into. And I encourage you to subscribe and continue listening in because I'm going to be continuing to teach you how to recover from burnout in subsequent episodes of how Humans heal. In fact, what you'll find is a lot of my content on how humans heal is all different types of recovery for humans from stress, including specifically how to recover based on your unique stress type. And what I mean by that is once you know your stress type, you're going to be able to know how to even implement diet changes and sleep suggestions as well as other types of recovery activities and exercise based on your stress type. And it's important even for your. For these recovery activities to be specific to your cortisol, your type of burnout, your cortisol and adrenaline Levels. So one thing, if you don't already know your stress type, I'll put the link. You can go to my website and do the stress type quiz. It takes less than two minutes so you can know your type of burnout. And from there then I can guide you how to recover more efficiently to get also to resilience so you know what to do to prevent yourself from experiencing burnout again. Believe me, I've been to burnout and back numerous times in my life and I don't want to go there again. So if you're experiencing symptoms of burnout, I'm with you. I get it. I have been there. I've, I've experienced it times when I was in medical school and training to be a midwife and wasn't getting near enough sleep and had way too much stress. Then again, when I was practicing early in my practice and had my daughter who was young, I burned myself out again while running a non profit organization at the same time. So I had to figure out how to help myself recover from burnout. And in the process I learned how to help all humans recover from burnout. And that's why I'm so passionate about helping all of you. So make sure you do the stress type quiz@doctor donnie.com and then continue listening here so you can start to learn how to recover from burnout based on your specific type of burnout. And here's the thing is, yes, you can also measure these. We can measure cortisol levels in saliva or urine. You can do a test at home which you mail in. And I've been able to do this test in most areas of the world and you can mail it into the lab in the United States and we can still get your cortisol and adrenaline levels. So we can confirm your, your burnout pattern. And so that is a test, that's testing, that's available. We measure cortisol at four different times a day. Morning, midday, evening and bedtime. Because cortisol should be higher in the morning and gradually decreasing through the day. We don't need to know cortisol just single time a day. We need to know at least four different times of the day. Adrenaline, we measure in the urine at a single time a day. And this way we can confirm your type of burnout. And again, it's important because it's important to your recovery process. While yes, there are a lot of things that all of us can benefit from, including ones referred to as work life balance. And you'll hear about work life balance a lot out there. And I think it's an important thing to consider in terms of recognizing, hey, there's some time that I need to be focused in whatever your work is, even if it's as a student or as a business owner or as a caretaker, you're going to be focused. And then there's other times when you're not working on that, you're doing something else. But what we're finding even in the right in the research related to work life balance is what actually helps us most is to be able to move easily in and out of work and life. How to have a flow, be able to have a flow state in your life. That's when people have the best ability to withstand burnout and what I call resilience to stress. So really I look at it in a different way. I look at it in terms of managing stress. I look at it as how can we master our stress? How can we become the masters of our life experience? How can we understand that as humans we're going to have various stress exposures, but how can we do what we need to take care of ourselves based on our individual human patterns so that we can be healthy and prevent health issues and still do what what we love? We're not trying to have zero stress. We're trying to help counteract the stress in an effective way so that we can be healthy while stressed. So how are we going to do that? And I invite you all to join me for a masterclass. I'm going to be teaching this masterclass called Calm in the Storm. And this is to this point that it's not about, not like if we think about being in the ocean with waves. It's not that we're expecting that there's never going to be waves. There's going to be waves, there's even going to be big waves and storms that come along in life and stress. We need to be able to help ourselves master those storms and be able to stay healthy even amidst the storms of stress. It starts with what I call care, the acronym care, Z for clean eating, A for adequate sleep, R for recovery activities, and E for exercise. Now yes, these are all fundamental things for all humans, but we can actually go into much more detail and make sure that you are feeding yourself in a way, making sure you're sleeping in a way, getting your recovery and exercise in a way that really is honed in and fine tuned based on your type of burnout. And so if you do the stress type quiz, I'll be able to guide you through that you can also get so much more information about that in my book, Master your Stress Reset yout Health, which is available on Amazon and anywhere else that you get books, including as Audible and ebook. So it's available for you if those of you like to dig into a book and be guided from, from the beginning to the end on how to understand your type of burnout and how to recover from it, including how to fine tune your care based on your stress time. So I want to clarify, because I haven't mentioned this word yet, and a lot of people who talk about burnout, you will hear them mention the adrenal glands or the adrenals. And this is really important because the adrenal glands are our main stress responders. The adrenal glands, which are above our kidneys, make our stress hormones. The adrenal glands make cortisol and adrenaline. So of course, when we're exposed to stress, we're going to have variations in our cortisol and adrenaline levels. And that's going to mean that we have an effect on our adrenal glands. And I really want to mention this because a lot of people will talk about adrenal fatigue or adrenal exhaustion. These are also terms that have been used over time and to some degree I'm glad that they are bringing awareness to the adrenal glands. But the issue is that they're not exactly accurate in terms of identifying exactly how stress is affecting your adrenal glands, because not everybody experiences fatigue. Not everybody has low cortisol. As I mentioned, there's the five different stress type patterns or burnout patterns that I've identified in research. And that's what's happening. It's, it's more of a. It's not just everybody goes to one form of burnout, and it's not that everybody goes to adrenal exhaustion or fatigue. It's that we need to know how it looks for you and how your adrenal glands are being affected by stress so that we can help them recover because it's actually possible for the adrenal glands to heal. I know there are some rare cases of some of you who may have had complete adrenal failure or reasons that maybe your adrenal glands are not functioning at all. And that is possible, but that's a much less lower percentage. The majority of people have adrenal glands that are burned out from stress and just need help recovering. But the thing is, in the conventional medical system, this is not part of it. This is not something that the conventional Standard medicine knows how to address. And there is not. It's. It's not best addressed with a medication. It's best addressed with your dietary changes, your sleep patterns. You're introducing recovery activities. Recovery activities is everything from just simply taking breaks during the day to spend some time outdoors in nature, taking a breath, a few deep breaths, calling a friend, to even listening to music, playing music, dancing, meditation, mindfulness of various forms, spending time with animals. There's so many possible recovery activities available to us. It's just a matter of us choosing them, choosing them even in small amounts at regular intervals every day, every week, every month of our life. And as we introduce those little even sprinkles of stress recovery throughout our life, that helps us to recover from stress. And there's a lot of research on that, which I discuss in the Master Stress book, including E for exercise. Based on your stress time. Okay, so you understand it's possible to recover from burnout. And, and it's important first to know what type of burnout you have, how stress is affecting you, so that you can hone in and really become strategic about your burnout recovery. If you're a stress magnet with high cortisol, high adrenaline, and you are doing a treatment for blah and blue, you're less likely to experience an improvement. You're going to continue to feel all the symptoms of burnout. But if you are blond, blue and you start addressing your burnout as blonde and blue, you are highly likely to feel better in a shorter period of time. And not only that, but to learn what your body needs in order to prevent burnout from happening again. And that's what I really hope for all of you. I don't want you to have to go through burnout. And if you're already there, I want you to recover as fast as possible and, and learn how to prevent it from happening again. So there are definitely ways to help. I'm so glad that you're listening in and joining me here at How Humans Heal. Please do subscribe and make sure you don't miss the next videos that are coming up. I have so much more to share with you. I look forward to connecting with you soon. You could always reach out to me if you need more help. All right, talk to you soon and take care.

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