Overcoming Burnout with Cait Donovan
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In this episode, I talk to Cait Donovan, a Keynote speaker, one of New York City’s leading burnout experts, host of “Fried – The Burnout Podcast,” author of the book "The Bouncebackability Factor," and an acupuncturist with a master’s degree in Chinese medicine. Her creative burnout recovery solutions have been featured on podcasts and online magazines such as “Forbes,” “NPR,” and “The New York Post” and in companies such as Lululemon and PepsiCo. We will dive into What is Burnout? Entrepreneurial Burnout? The Burnout Epidemic and the top-down and bottom-up approach to dealing with burnout!
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What is Burnout?
Cait Donovan, from personal experience, describes burnout to be the feeling of giving without receiving anything in return. She describes it as a sense of constant irritation, resentment, and anger in conjunction to feeling exhausted, unproductive or a reduction in quality of work, detached, mood changes, and cynicism.
Currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon and is not classified as a medical condition. However, Cait argues that this definition of burnout is incomplete and incorrect because burnout is not exclusive to work experiences but day-to-day experiences as well.
WHO lists the symptoms of burnout as follows:
Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job
Reduced professional efficacy
How does burnout affect your body?
Burnout does not only affect your emotional state and health, but it also affects you physiologically.
Burnout changes your brain structure.
It causes your executive function, made up of your prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus, to shrink. This shrinking affects your emotional regulation, motivation, and logical reasoning negatively.
It also causes your Amigdalas, which alert us when something seems dangerous, to grow, causing hypervigilance and overreactions to things that are not normally seen as a threat.
These changes in brain anatomy can cause a person to demonstrate changes in their personality, often becoming more irritated and aggressive.
Burnout can cause muscle atrophy and increased feelings of exhaustion.
What causes burnout in the workplace?
There are six factors that lead to workplace burnout.
Workload is too large or greater than your ability.
Lack of autonomy.
Lack of community in the workplace.
Lack of praise, rewards, or recognition.
Mismatch of values between you and your job/company.
Lack of Fairness.
Ensuring that your workload is not overloading you, ensuring your autonomy, cultivating a sense of workplace community, ensuring paise and recognition are given and received, ensuring your values and your job’s/company’s values align, and ensuring fairness in the workplace are some ways you can prevent burnout in the workplace.
Burnout can also occur to entrepreneurs or CEOs. Cait Donovan explains that it can occur to them because they try to undertake too many roles and tasks than they can handle. Overall it is a lack of prioritization, management, delegation, role overload and role ambiguity.
How to prevent burnout:
Managing stress is not the same as prevention; management is making adjustments around stress until you get to a point you can no longer adapt and now really need help.
Some good prevention strategies are:
Yoga Nidra/ Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR)
A guided meditation, where you engage in progressive relaxation starting from your head to your toes. Doing this for at least 11 minutes for 30 days helps reestablish your executive functions.
Slowing down
For those who keep active, you may feel exhausted after doing your exercise routine. Slowing down or reducing the intensity of the workouts will allow you to continue your routine but reduce the sensation of exhaustion.
Keep moving and sweat
Sweating and exercising for at least 20 minutes causes a secondary rush of stress which speeds up the progression of the stress response by flushing the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline out of the body, leading to a quicker resolution.
Gratitude journaling/Awe journaling
Gratitude journaling is when you write about something you're grateful for.
Awe journaling is writing about things that make you go wow, such as a beautiful sunset.
Both of these are wonderful tactics to prevent burnout.
The truth behind burnout prevention is to focus on stress reduction and management.
How to Recover from burnout:
Resentment Journaling: Write things you're resentful about and what is making you irritated. This will help you identify if that specific factor is causing resentment.
Resentment can be applied to people, tasks, or objects.
At this point, if it is, you must ask yourself if it really is necessary or if it can be removed. If you can remove it from your life then you should.
If it can’t be removed, ask yourself if you have to deal with this factor yourself or if it can be delegated to someone else.
If it can’t be removed, and you have to deal with this factor yourself, ask yourself if there are tools that can aid in decreasing frustration or optimizing the function of the factor, so it is no longer causing resentment.
Focus on making small changes first rather than big changes.
Making smaller changes first helps you buy back your energy and prepares you for bigger changes.
Small changes may seem insignificant, but they are vital to recovery from burnout.
Thanks for listening!
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[00:00:00] Mike Goldman
Let's dive in. So early on in podcast life and I'm learning this, you, you have as guests, your most talented friends. So here we go, here we go. Kate Donovan is a keynote speaker, one of New York City's leading burnout experts, host of Fried: The burnout podcast, author of the book, the bounce back ability factor. That's a tough one to say but good name and an acupuncturist with a master's degree in Chinese medicine. Her creative burnout recovery solutions have been featured on podcasts and online magazines such as Forbes, NPR, and the New York Post. And in companies such as Lululemon Lululemon, I said, bounce back ability factor, but I couldn't say Lululemon and PepsiCo. Okay, welcome.
[00:01:01] Cait Donovan
Thank you so much. It's always nice to be first of all considered a talented friend, but second of all, to be considered a friend. So
[00:01:08] Mike Goldman
You do both? Both of those things. Very cool. So let me start off with a real basic question. How does one become a burnout expert?
[00:01:20] Cait Donovan
You start by burning out really terribly. Not knowing what
[00:01:25] Mike Goldman
writing this down. So step one, I burn out,
[00:01:27] Cait Donovan
step one, burnout terribly step two, realize this was in when I burned out was 2016. And, or when I realized I was burnout, I should say it was 2016. And I was in Europe at the time, and there was almost no information on what to do. There's some information, some research on some of the causes, which weren't applicable to me at the time, because the the subjects that they were researching, were corporate workers, and I was an entrepreneur. And so I didn't really have a lot of like, what can I do here? There weren't books, there wasn't a lot of research, I looked for everything that I could, and I'm a healthcare practitioner. So I have probably, you know, a little bit of extra information that the average human doesn't have. And I still didn't know what to do. So I went through a process with coaching. I had a therapist, I use functional medicine, I used acupuncture, I went through this like very long, drawn out process, it probably took me a year and a half, two years, to get to the point where I wasn't afraid, anymore of saying yes to things for fear that I would be crashed after and wouldn't be able to function took me about two years. And then people started asking for my help. This the same story every time I didn't plan on becoming a burnout specialist. But I was writing about what I was going through on not even on a blog. I was like writing on Facebook, like just friends. And people were like, Oh, I think that's happening to me. What do I do? And I realized that a lot of the things that I learned over the years in acupuncture and treating patients for 15 years, we're really applicable to people without needles, right? Just talking to people and saying, Hey, do this, do this, do that. And so it kind of grew out of that.
[00:03:14] Mike Goldman
And how did you know? You said, Oh, I didn't realize this was happening to me. Yeah. When someone described this Oh, my God, that's happening to me as well. Yeah. What was happening to you what and and I guess that in combination with I don't know if it's the same answer a different answers. What was happening to you? And how do you define what burnout is?
[00:03:35] Cait Donovan
So for me in my life, at that time, I was really annoyed at all my patients all the time. Anytime somebody asked me for anything. I was like, what else do people want from me? I had so much resentment, I was such a martyr, like I give so much to everybody. And I don't you know, get it back. There's just sort of this constant anger and irritation that I was giving too much to the world is a relationship
[00:03:57] Mike Goldman
being a parent. Yeah,
[00:03:59] Cait Donovan
I'm not even familiar. I didn't even do that. And I still felt that way. And I was my relationship was breaking down with my partner. I was. Also my health was breaking down, I was gaining weight, my thyroid was going haywire. And all of my doctors were saying, everything's fine. And I was like, It's not fine. This is I'm not normal. And the thing that really hit me was that I used to I was living in Prague while this was happening, and I used to walk from the tram to my apartment. It's a four minute walk up a hill, and four minutes, and I did it every day. And it got to the point where I had to stop halfway up the hill, because I couldn't make it the whole way home. After getting off. I was so physically tired that I couldn't make it and I would sit there and cry. Thinking that I had to finish the walk up the hill, and then go inside and get my dog and take my dog out for a walk and I didn't know how I I was going to manage it. I was that tired. And this is coming from someone was I was a competitive gymnast growing up, I was the captain of the field hockey team, I ran track, I've been an exerciser, my whole entire life. And I couldn't walk up a damn Hill. So I was just breaking down in every of, my emotional life was breaking down, my physical life was breaking down, everything was falling apart. I read an article one day on burnout hadn't heard of it before, didn't know what it was, even as a health care practitioner and had never come across it. And I'm reading it and my whole body is going Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, this is it. This is why you haven't been able to figure it out. Because the things you've been looking at have not been the problem. This is what's happening. And that's when it all started turning around for me. But getting back to the definition of burnout. Right now the World Health Organization, as of May 2019, the World Health Organization adopted a definition of burnout, that they call an occupational phenomenon, not a disease, not a syndrome, not a but an occupational phenomenon. And that's really important because the World Health Organization considers burnout only within a work context, which I believe to be incorrect and incomplete. However, this is the working definition that we have right now. And in addition to the fact that it's related to work, there must be three components. One is physical and emotional exhaustion, I was like, check, check, check. The next is cynicism and detachment, check, check, check. So I call this being a negative Nancy and not wanting to be with anyone. And the third is a lack of efficacy, a lack of impact, a lack of productivity. So this can show in different ways. But it means sort of that no matter how important your job is, or how impactful your job is, you don't see it as being impactful. And you don't you can't produce to the same level you used to and you just don't have it in you. So I was helping people have babies as an acupuncturist at that point. And I didn't care when people were getting pregnant. I was like, Oh, good, another person, I can take off my list. Rather than Yeah, you're pregnant? Yeah. You know, hey, let's celebrate. I was like, ugh, another one. Great.
[00:07:11] Mike Goldman
And what? So this may be different in every human being? Or maybe there are one or two standard ways. But what causes it? I mean, what, what caused it for you? What causes it? And most people, is it simply being overwhelmed with too many things to do? Or does it have nothing to do with how much you actually have going on?
[00:07:32] Cait Donovan
This is a bigger question that I have an entire one hour keynote on. But I will I will shorten it for you. So the research that has been done over the past 40 ish years, which is all the research we have on burnout. And women were included in research on stress until about the year 2000. So we're really not talking about a very long time. As far as research is concerned. The research that we have currently is mostly by Christina Maslach, Michael leader and their teams. And it shows us that in the workplace, there are six factors that lead to burnout in the workplace itself. And this has been shown time and time again, workload, which is kind of related to job strain and autonomy. So not only how much work you have, but how many hours it takes you and how much autonomy you have to decide, when you do it, how you do it, etc. You there's also a lack of community at the workplace is a factor, a lack of fairness is a factor, a lack of recognition and praise for your work is a factor of values mismatch, which can be two different things that isn't really clear in the research, but when you dig in, you can find it. The values mismatch can be a mismatch between a company's spoken values and values and action. We all know how that breaks people down when a company is out of its own integrity, the employees are lost. And when there can also be a values mismatch between the company and the employee, like I've been focused on keeping people healthy for 20 years, probably not going to work for a cigarette company. Right? Like that would be a values mismatch for me. So a values mismatch can also be an issue. So there's all these factors, right.
[00:09:12] Mike Goldman
Got it. And so the lens that I take on this show, yeah, better leadership teams. Yeah. Is that leadership lens? Yes. And that could be the CEO, entrepreneur owner. That could be, you know, the executive team, really? When I say leadership team, I kind of broadly say any, anybody, any team of leaders that lead other people? Yeah. So when you think of those leaders, and you think of the six things you just brought up? Yeah. Let's let's talk about and let's start off talking about the entrepreneur because when I, when I tend to talk to prospective clients, they are and I don't know, clinically whether I think about it in the right way. But they seem to me to be right on the borderline of burnout. They may not be if they were totally burned out, they probably wouldn't be calling me because they wouldn't be dismissive of the whole idea. But but they're there, they still have enough fire burning to call me and say, Hey, I need your help, man. They're close to the egg. So and I see that in a lot of entrepreneurs, you felt it as an entrepreneur? Why do you? And I don't know if statistically it hits entrepreneurs more than other people. But But why do you think so when you talk about values and alignment man, the entrepreneur, according to what you see from the outside looking in, they're doing what they want to do. Except? We know that's not really true. Exactly. Why do you think it hits entrepreneurs so hard?
[00:10:49] Cait Donovan
I think it hits entrepreneurs so hard, because most entrepreneurs do not know ahead of time that you have to wear all the damn hats, especially in the beginning. If you're gonna build a business, you are your social media person, you are this your salesperson, you are the work product you are, and we could just keep your HR, you our customer service, care all the things, and then you're building a website in the background because you can't afford to pay somebody to do it. And then you are, you know, creating a podcast and learning how to edit it because you don't know, you can't afford to pay anybody to do it. And then and then and then and then. So I think one of the big factors is that one of the factors when you break down the work overload in the six factors, that can be job strain, it can also be role conflict and role ambiguity. So role conflict is that that you're being asked to do two things that are opposite from one another. Right, which can happen and role ambiguity that you don't have a really clear view of what it is you're supposed to be doing. How many entrepreneurs have you talked to, that are like God, I'm spinning my wheels. Today, I decided to do this thing. And then I forgot that I was focused on that. So I did thing x. And now I'm not doing any of the things that move the needle financially. But I'm real busy.
[00:12:04] Mike Goldman
And I'll add something to that. Because when people hear that, at least for me, the picture I get in my head is the early on entrepreneur with a smaller business. They don't really have a leadership team. It's them. They've got five people running around helping, they're doing everything. But I think when you talk about role ambiguity, the thing people don't think about is the 30, 40, 50 million dollar company. You are now the CEO, but you don't know how to be exactly right. You're the CEO, but you think your job is to do everybody else's job. Yes, because no one ever teaches you how to be a CEO. And even there that role ambiguity, existent made huge, worse,
[00:12:46] Cait Donovan
huge, and especially because as you pick things up in the beginning, this is exactly where I was going with that you picked up on it perfectly. As you go through that in the beginning, what happens is, even when you start delegating, there's some things that you've never learned to hand off. And there's some things that you never learned to trust people with. So you hold on to them. And there's some things that you never learn that you could just stop doing altogether. And it wouldn't matter at all. Because you've built them into the way you're structuring your days. So you're getting up and you're doing them out of habit, at this point, never stopping to do an analysis and seeing do I still need to be doing first? Does this need to be delegated? And if not, like, does it need to be done at all? We just pick things up and then continue them. Somebody said to me, Well, I started this podcast. And you know, I said I was going to do it every week. So I like to keep up with it. But I'm having a really I said, do it differently. Do whatever two weeks if you want No, listen, hey, nobody cares. But you created this rule in your head. And this as you grow in your business. If you're not taking the time to do those assessments, what needs to get dropped? What needs to get delegated what needs a better tool, what needs an upgrade, if you're not making those decisions on a regular basis, you're going to end up with the most ambiguity.
[00:14:09] Mike Goldman
I love that. I love that. And there's an exercise that a lot of people do call the start, stop, keep or start, stop, continue. I don't do that with my clients. So what I tell them is, every time we get together, you're adding crap to your to do list. So we don't need to start. We don't need to keep we're going to do a stop exercise. And it's exactly what you're saying. every once awhile, you got to sit down for yourself for the team and say what are we doing? This is not worth doing? And yes, don't delegate your crap to somebody else. Get it doesn't need to be done. Rice. Yeah, I love that.
[00:14:41] Cait Donovan
This is what I use resentment for.
[00:14:43] Mike Goldman
Say more about I've heard you mentioned resentment before, which always sounds like Oh, resentment is a bad thing. And I know you don't look at it that way. Now. Tell me more about resentment.
[00:14:53] Cait Donovan
This is the first question when you're doing a resentment journal. The first step is to write down things you're resentful of if you're doing it for company then you're writing your right things that you're resentful about within your company. And the first question once you see a pattern, you see, I see this thing popping up a lot. You know, I've been doing this for a week I keep seeing this same same issue popping up. The first question you ask of a resentment is, does this thing even need to be done?
[00:15:21] Mike Goldman
To find first, when you say resentment, yeah, my picture is like other people that I resent, define define how you using the word resentment, it
[00:15:31] Cait Donovan
can be people, you can be resentful of people, you'll know that when their name pops up into your email bucket box, when you start rolling your eyes before you even open it. You're like, Oh, my God, this guy again. Right? You know, so that's, that's a clear sign. But you can also be resentful of tasks. And it's when it comes up on your calendar, it's that same result, you're looking at it, you're like, Oh, my God, this again, like, I can't believe I have to keep doing this. I, I passed off my podcast editing, when I got to the point where I was like, I if I do this anymore, I'm going to go out into the street and lose my mind. I can't do this anymore. Right? So you'll start to see that there are certain tasks and certain people in certain situations that every single time they come up, you're mad, you're irritated. I use the word resentment because it's my favorite. But we really are talking about what are the anger group? anger, irritation, resentment, frustration, annoyance, right? Any any of those really will work. And the more you see those things, jot them down, start jotting them down. Once you have them jotted down, I promise you, you'll notice some sort of pattern, a person a task a thing. And then you ask question number one of the questions if Question number one is, does this thing need to be done? If it doesn't need to be done? Drop it. It's off your plate. It's done. It's over. It's gone. Yeah, celebrate. Just get rid of it. If it does need to be done. The next question in the decision tree is, do I need to do it. Now we're getting to okay, this thing does need to be done. But I don't need to do it. Now I can delegate. If this thing does need to be done, and I need to do it, or somebody else needs to do it. And it could be done better. Is there a tool that I can use to upgrade the process. And this this tool can be a person it can be a software it can be like I did this in my home. One of the things that I upgraded was my knife sharpener, because I noticed every morning I was slicing a tomato for my egg sandwich and I was annoyed that you know, you put the knife down and if the knife isn't sharp enough, it just squishes the tomato down. And so you have to flip it up to the top, put the you know, poke the tomato with the sharpest point of the knife, and then put your knife back and slice down the tomato. I was so annoyed with it. That I got a new knife sharpener. I upgraded my tool. So you presented the knife now I resented the knife. Stupid knife, right. And that seems like a silly thing. But there are if when there are 700 of those things during your day, try and be in a good mood. Try and be ready to lead other people try and be ready to manage people's emotions and tasks when you're annoyed from the beginning of your day. Because you hate the shape of your coffee mug because your fingers don't fit in it right? Your knife isn't slicing properly. And everything you know like nothing works.
[00:18:15] Mike Goldman
You know, I'm realizing I do hate my coffee mug.
[00:18:18] Cait Donovan
Right? Get a new one.
[00:18:19] Mike Goldman
Oh my god, I have a bunch. My kids just got me a great new coffee mug for my birthday. So I'm very excited about.
[00:18:25] Cait Donovan
The coffee mug seems silly, but they're important.
[00:18:27] Mike Goldman
Here's the Question. So I let's say you've got the resentment journal. You call it right? Yeah. And you're either you know, I'm going to paraphrase you're you're you're throwing it away. You're delegating it, you're automating it or finding a better way to do it. I love it. But here's the question that jumps into my head, is part of burnout, is you you feel like I forget exactly how you put it. But you kind of feel like what's the use, right? It's not going to work. So if you're feeling burned out, maybe the key is do this before you're feeling burned down. But if you're feeling burned down, don't you get clients you work with you say that's never gonna work like that's yeah, that being burned out is you're not going to want to do that stuff.
[00:19:07] Cait Donovan
Yes. And yes, and this is one of the only things that I've actually found to start moving the needle for people in a way that's impactful before making bigger changes, because when you're burnt out, we need to make bigger changes than your kitchen knife. But if you can't make those small changes, we are not buying you Enough of your energy back to be able to handle the other stuff. And I just explained that to people flat out I'm going to give you some things to do. They're not going to seem very big. But I need you to do them anyway because we need to buy back your energy from you. Where is it being spent in ways that are just not useful? We need it back. Then we can go do some other stuff, small steps. We have to there's no other way to do it. You don't have the wherewithal during burnout to do anything else. So we do as small as possible, until we have earned enough of your energy back until we have lit your pilot light and turned it up enough that it can catch flame when we add in something bigger.
[00:01:01] Mike Goldman
Got it? So you've got the resentment journal and I imagine on the resentment journal could be things like I need a new knife, or it could be things like, I need a new team, or business, right? So they'll be big or small. Sure, what are some of the other strategies that you find are helpful? And just so you know, where my head is going, I want to talk about strategies. When you're when you are feeling burnout, what are strategies to get that fire lit again, as you said, what are strategies to get out of burnout. And then where I want to go, and it may be some of the same strategies is, how do we make sure we're we are doing the things we need to do so we don't get burned out, right. And those, again, they may be similar strategies. And they may be different, but but first talk to talk to me about some more strategies that help people get out of that field.
[00:21:08] Cait Donovan
So I will have to rewind a tiny bit because we, we talked about what the definition of burnout is, but we haven't talked about what's actually happening in the body. And one of the things one of the one, two, or three of the things maybe I should say that's happening is that your brain structure has changed. And I mean, this actually, that you physically your brain has changed. So the front part of your brain that sits right behind your forehead is where our all of our adulting happens. It's called the it's called a you know, executive function. This is decision making, this is motivation, this is empathy, this is emotional regulation, this is focus, it all happens in that part of your brain. When you're burnt out, that part of your brain has shrunk, you've literally lost brain cells. So it's so you're not you don't have as much access to these tools as you did before. In another part of your brain in the amygdala, there's one on either side, or right in the left, the amygdala is responsible for letting us know whether or not we're safe. So it's constantly scanning your environment to tell you whether or not you should be activating your stress response, or you don't have to, right, this is evolutionary, it's absolutely necessary, we have to have it, it's a good thing. But chronic stress over a long period of time, which is what gets us to burnout makes this part of your brain instead of shrink, it makes it grow. So this part of your brain is now hyper alert. So now you're scanning your environment twice every second instead of once. Now, things that looked safe two weeks ago, look dangerous. Now, and that's why.
[00:22:41] Mike Goldman
And that's why simple things when I exactly when I have felt this way before. It's as silly as oh my god, I have to do the laundry now. Yes. And that feels like a big thing that I got to do the laundry. So that makes sense.
[00:22:53] Cait Donovan
Yes, everything seems to be a danger when you're in burnout. So it's hard to make a move. Because you're constantly in fight or flight, you're constantly ready to like Battle away a lion. Right? So we have this front part of your brain that's supposed to manage that emotional response. So in it when your brain is healthy and normal, and your amygdala fires up and says, ah, danger, the front of your brain gets real rational and says, Hey, let's think about that for a minute. This is just a kitchen knife, and it's just on the counter, I can put it in the sink so that it's in a less dangerous space. But my life is not actually in danger. I'm actually okay right now. And then your amygdala goes, Oh, cool. I'm glad you got this. But when you're burnt out, and the front part of your brain is not online, and your amygdala is overactive, and their communication is not as clear the road that they communicate on, it's not as clear as it should be. There's a lot of heavy traffic going on in there. You can't regulate your emotional response to things. So your amygdala is on fire. The thing that most people tell me, especially in leadership roles, when they're burnt out is I don't like the person that I've become, I don't feel like I can control myself. I'm bursting in anger. I'm yelling at everyone. Nobody seems to want to work with me. My team told me to take time off because they can't stand me right now. Right, because you can't control this response. These are not the only things that happen in the brain. But this is something that I these two pieces are two pieces that I think are really representative for the majority of people and something that people can understand with ease. So knowing that that is happening and just
[00:24:34] Mike Goldman
to be clear, by the way to go back. Yeah, doesn't just happen and then oh my god, I'm burned out. Now. You said it's that chronic stress. Yeah, so not the stress of something happens in a day and oh my god the next day that you know, my executive function and it's that chronic it's yes, of months and years of whatever. It slowly happens then obviously I think gets to the point that you feel it.
[00:25:01] Cait Donovan
Yes. And you say like, well, I could always manage this much stress before the thing is you weren't managing it. But you didn't know that because you can't see your brain functioning, you know, like it was, it was getting worse and worse over time, but you didn't see it, right? Because we make small adjustments as we go. When your hips starts to hurt, you start to walk a little different, but you don't really think it's a problem. And then your foot hurts. So you walk a little different again, six months down the road, you're limping on both sides. And you really need help. Because you just you make small adjustments. You do that with stress, too. You make a small stress response, you create a coping mechanism, you're handling it, okay, until it breaks down until it gets worse. So we have our brain in this state. The question we need to be asking when we're our brain is in the state is what can we do to reverse some of these changes. And in this regard, we go to you I know you love Andrew Huberman.
[00:25:53] Mike Goldman
I was just listening to him interviewing Jocko willing
[00:25:57] Cait Donovan
Love it. Love it. So right, so we're on the Huberman lab podcast for the moment, big shout out to that. He talks about something called non sleep deep rest, which in traditional cultures is yoga nidra, or some sort of body scan. This is a guided meditation, where you are as relaxed as possible. And you are being told to Relax your forehead, relax your eyes, relax your mouth, relax your jaw relax, you know, kind of through your whole body. And there's really clear research that shows that if you do this for 11 minutes a day for 30 days, your brain will start to get back online, your prefrontal cortex will grow, your amygdala will shrink, things will start to go back to normal. So I have people do this most frequently just before bed. Because this is if you fall asleep, I don't care. That's fine, you know, like good, because at least what's happening is you're entering a state of rest where your body can restore itself. And then you're entering your natural state of rest where your body's job is to restore itself. When you are under chronic stress, that restoration doesn't happen the way that it's supposed to. But if you're doing yoga, Nidra just before bed, then you are amping up your chances and your ability to repair your body as you sleep as you're supposed to. So this is something that everybody can do, it's free. Go get it on YouTube, go to Insight Timer down. You can do this one more time what it's called, you can type in yoga nidra. The second word is NID Ra. Or if you want to look it up on the Huberman podcast and listen to how he describes it, he calls it non sleep deep rest, NSDR. And he also has a short 10 minute YouTube video on NSDR that he shares with people for free. So these are free resources that anybody can use that if you find yourself edging toward that space, you can pull yourself out of it. So yoga nidra, to me is both a burnout prevention and burnout recovery mechanism.
[00:27:52] Mike Goldman
Yeah, that's what it's like why, right. So you're burnt out to do.
[00:27:54] Cait Donovan
Right? Just do it. Right. So so this, this can be in either side. And I think that that's really important. Most other things fall into one side or the other. Burnout prevention is just stress management. There's no difference between burnout prevention and stress management. The reason I don't focus on burnout prevention in my work, is because by the time you're worried about burnout, you don't need prevention anymore. You need recovery. We're beyond that.
[00:28:20] Mike Goldman
So you saying if someone's listening because they're worried they might be burned out, you're already probably burnt down.
[00:28:27] Cait Donovan
Okay, chances are very high. By the time you're looking at, like, oh, I should probably prevent burnout. It's too late. You've already crossed a barrier boundary. So yoga nidra is a really good place to start. Right? That's a really important thing. The next thing when you are physically mentally exhausted. A lot of high performers, a lot of high leaders, a lot of CEOs are big into exercise. They're doing triathlete triathlons. And they're, you know, and they're like, that's how I keep my balance. When you're burnt out. One of the things that happens is you have muscle atrophy. So you stop having the ability to do the same level of exercise as before that 5k run that used to give you power is now making you exhausted. So you do the same run that you've been doing for the past five years, but you're coming back and you need a nap instead of coming back feeling pumped and ready for your day. This is a very clear sign of burnout. And the response to this is keep moving, but move slow instead of fast. I don't want you to stop moving. Your body needs movement. It's critical. But I might want you to do Tai Chi or chi gong or yoga, or walking instead of running and CrossFit and Orangetheory.
[00:29:44] Mike Goldman
And to be clear, and you said this, but I want to go kind of hammer it in is we're not saying to prevent burnout, no, move slower. Do you're saying if you're in burnout, yes when you might need to do this
[00:29:59] Cait Donovan
To prevent burnout sweat, when you need to prevent or if that's what you're thinking about. If you're like, you know what I'm going to do everything I can to maintain my stress response system, you better sweat, doing a pretty intense workout, even if it's just 20 minutes, that raises your adrenaline helps to shut down your stress response system. So if you have a meeting that really throws you through the roof, hop on your peloton for 20 minutes, get the cycle to finish. This is something that's talked about in the book, that's called burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle by the Nagurski sisters, you got to finish the stress cycle. So if you're, if you're having a lot of stress, but you're not burnt out yet, make sure you're getting in enough fast, sweaty movement to help your body hormonally go through the whole cycle and ended instead of being stuck in the cycle and dragging it out. So those are two very different facets.
[00:30:57] Mike Goldman
For someone that is disciplined in most areas of his life. I'm looking in the mirror when I say this, but not discipline when it comes to working out. Yeah, that's such an empowering way to think is that the sweat is going to, you know takes care of those. The stressors.
[00:31:16] Cait Donovan
I love. It doesn't change the stressor, necessarily, but it does move your your hormones go through a pathway. When you get stressed. The first thing that happens is your adrenaline spikes. After that your cortisol spikes. Adrenaline goes back down. Typically within an hour, cortisol takes sometimes a couple of weeks to go back down to normal. If you can sweat it out and push it, you'll push an another stress response, which will force your body to close that cycle faster. Right. So this is just a basic biological, like do this for biology. It just worked.
[00:31:51] Mike Goldman
Love it. Love it. So we talked about both resentment journal and the yoga nidra. That that is whether you're already in burnout, or both of those could be great burnout, preventers, the idea of kind of keep moving but slow it down. Whether that's on the recovery side, what else do you find helpful on the recovery side?
[00:32:15] Cait Donovan
I think that the resentment journal is can be helpful during prevention, but I think it's more helpful on the recovery side, I would put gratitude journal on the prevention side. Do not try and gratitude your journal, your gratitude journal your way out of burnout, that will not work because you will be writing stuff down I'm so grateful for and you will not feel a thing.
[00:32:36] Mike Goldman
You're you're writing, you're writing stuff down and your brain is going bullshit.
[00:32:40] Cait Donovan
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what's happening. But when you're not there yet, if you can practice gratitude, or more specifically, if you can practice awe you will be doing yourself grand favors. This is this is a big one, there's a new book out called The Power of awe by Michael Amster. And Jake, I forget his last name. It might not have been before Jake, I it might not even be Jake, it might be something else. It might be Luke I don't know. But Michael Amster. And in this book, they explain what awe does to your brain. And it has a very similar function to yoga nidra.
[00:33:18] Mike Goldman
How do you define gratitude of awe versus gratitude?
[00:33:22] Cait Donovan
Gratitude is is feelings of gratefulness, right? Just an understanding that there are blessings in your life in some way, shape, or form. Awe is that moment where you look at a sunset or a VISTA and it just something hits you and your whole body just your energy expands and just goes wow. Wow. Gratitude is thank you awe as wow.
[00:33:52] Mike Goldman
Interesting. Love it. It's like it's almost it's it's almost like it's like I can't believe the universe's Yeah, this year.
[00:34:02] Cait Donovan
You know, that moment that you see that you're, you see a sunset that you weren't expecting to catch. And it's really wonderful. Every once in a while when I'm leaving a National Speakers Association meeting on a Friday, when it's the right timing, the sunset in the city. It just It changes the way everything looks. It's just that moment of like, wow.
[00:34:28] Mike Goldman
But that's again, burnout prevention,
[00:34:31] Cait Donovan
that their research shows that it can be used for both they actually did research on it and they say it can be used for both, but I think gratitude journaling belongs on the prevention side. And resentment journaling belongs on the recovery side.
[00:34:45] Mike Goldman
So I want this is excellent stuff really helpful. I want to go back to the leadership aspect of it and take it from from two standpoints. One is is and this is the second one I'm going to want to cover but so you know where I'm going. One is, as a leader, I want to talk a little bit about how your burnout can impact others. Which may, if nothing else, add some urgency to fix that damn thing or you know or not. But the other one is if, if you're a leader, how do you see if you've got someone on your team? Or appear on your leadership team? How can you identify if someone is going through that if someone's feeling burned out? And what can you when most leaders are not? practitioners in Chinese medicine and all the background you have? And Michael Amster? And all that? What should people how do they recognize it? And what should they do about it if they see it?
[00:35:56] Cait Donovan
So if we know the signs are physical and emotional exhaustion, lack of productivity and being negative, that's what you look for. So but what we're what we're actually noticing, and people are personality changes, so somebody who used to be pretty upbeat is coming in, and now really not being upbeat, they're really negative all of a sudden doesn't feel normal to them. Somebody that was always producing at a 10 on a 10 scale, is suddenly at a seven out of 10 scale for the last two and a half months, consistently. Something's not right here, there typically tends to be some sort of complaint about their behavior during that time, because the way they're treating other people has shifted too. So people will mention like, gosh, Jon's been in a mood lately, like, has anybody else noticed that? So you're looking for mood changes, community changes, and work changes?
[00:36:47] Mike Goldman
Got it? And then if you see that, yeah, I mean, it's, I guess I'm thinking two things. One is, is gotta be, it's a sensitive subject to approach with someone. Yeah. But then even if you do, again, as someone who's not a practitioner, and helping folks with burnout, what what can we do as leaders to help when we see that,
[00:37:09] Cait Donovan
and I think this is the big trick thing, because most of the things that they're telling leaders to do for burnout are really great for prevention. Making sure that recognition and praise are, are intact in your team is critical for prevention, making sure that workload is okay is great for prevention, making sure that compensation is fair, making sure that the community is tight, all of those things are great preventative factors. But when somebody's already there, your preventative factors didn't work. So you have to do that you have to implement some of those factors. Because clearly, something's not working on your team. But the conversation needs to start with that person. No matter how sensitive it is, as a leader, one of the things that you are responsible for is having difficult and brief conversations. This is a huge, huge belief of mine in leadership, if you don't know how to have difficult conversations, you should not be a leader. Period, amen. And they suck. And they're hard, and I get it. But if you can't have them, nobody else is going to have them. And if you can't have difficult conversations in your business, it's never gonna go anywhere. Because these conversations have to happen. Right? So you need to sit down with this person and say, All right, listen, I've noticed these couple of things. And I want to know, is there something going on at home that you haven't talked to us about? You don't need to tell me what it is. But, you know, do you do need some time? Is there some support? Is there something that I'm not seeing happening on the team? Is there some lack of fairness, you can take out the six factors that create burnout in the workplace and say, is there one of these that you think is most important? Is there something that you see going on? Once you get someone engaged, you don't necessarily have to talk to them only about themselves. You can talk to them about how the team is functioning, how the company is functioning, how things are going overall, because that gives them a little bit more space to express some things because I promise you, it's not just about them. There's something in your company that's not working, right. And you need to know what that is for other people. Because you need to defend they
[00:39:12] Mike Goldman
may and they may be more comfortable talking about if they disassociated.
[00:39:16] Cait Donovan
Exactly, exactly, exactly. And once you've opened that door, then chances are you can have better and different conversations after that. But your first stop should be Hey, I sort of noticed this happening. These are some things that I've learned that cause it. What would you mark off on this list? Like, how can we what do we need to do here? And that gives people the opportunity to say you know what, I am going through that and it might be because their mother got diagnosed with Alzheimer's last week and they've been a mess, or last week, not last week. That wouldn't happen that fast. But it's been six months that they've been in the sandwich generation and they've got small kids at home and a mother to take care of that live Two hours away. So they've been driving back and forth. And there, it might be because of external circumstances. If you find that out, then you can figure something out with people. There's a, I've seen some amazing leaders step up in massive, big ways. In the past couple of years. I've seen people say, You know what, we'll pay you for your job fully. But we'll reduce your responsibilities to the 70% you've been able to keep up with. And then when you're ready, you let me know. And we'll, we'll bump you back up. And it works. It works. People stay because they feel supported, it builds loyalty. Right? It's, they can there are solutions here.
[00:40:42] Mike Goldman
Love it. Now I want to go where I said I was gonna go, which is you are, you are a leader and you are experiencing burnout. Or as you said, you think you might be experiencing burnout, which probably means you're experiencing burnout. So it's all the same thing. Yeah. How? How have you seen that impact? The folks around them, whether it's peers on that leadership team, whether it's their team that reports up to them, it may be an obvious point, but I want to get kind of specific like, because part of me and doing it since I want to kick people up in the kick people up the asset are going through it to say, you got to go get this resolved, not just for you, but for your people and for your business. So what impact does it have on others around them?
[00:41:29] Cait Donovan
In the world of epidemics, when you have a disease process that passes from person to person with ease, it's called a propagated epidemic. Burnout is a propagated epidemic is this shit is contagious. When somebody burns out, it's most commonly 50% of the environment and 50%, some personal factors, the research says 80/20. But my personal work with people over the past six years does not say 80/20. It says about 50/50.
[00:41:59] Mike Goldman
Research is 80 is work factors. 20 is personal? Yes.
[00:42:03] Cait Donovan
Yes, I don't find that to be true in the real world. But that is what the research states. And so even if we're looking at it as 50/50 that means not only do you have things addressed to address in yourself, there are things that this company that has to change, because you're not the only person that's going to be susceptible to this. This is gonna affect everybody. Burnout is absolutely contagious. And I say that exactly how I mean it. I'm not mincing words. I'm not trying to be cute. It's contagious. I don't know how many people have been caught in a burnout cycle because they said, Well, three people already left this year, I can't leave there's nobody left? Well, yeah, because burnout is contagious. And yes, you can leave, and yes, the company is going to lose it. And that's not your fault. Because the company did not keep you safe, the company did not keep you healthy. You gotta go. So this is something that you need to take care of for yourself. You need to take care of for your team, you will be a bear to your team, you will not like the way you're treating them. When they are treated poorly, they will have their own reaction stress reactions to that. And it just continues, it just rolls down the hill,
[00:43:28] Mike Goldman
if they last in your company, they love you to actually see those stressors.
[00:43:31] Cait Donovan
Exactly. Yeah, they might just leave.
[00:01:01] Mike Goldman
And this is so and you know, there's so much go, you know, whether it's COVID locked down, or it's war in the Ukraine, or it's yeah, you know, what's the economy going to look like? And are we in a recession, there's a whole lot to get stressed out about a lot that, you know, it's so easy when people I know when I work with leadership teams, I do an assessment and assess in the six pillars of having a great leadership team and either them or very team focused. And the first one is about mastering self leadership. Yeah, and that and clients are always wanting this brush, oh, we're good at self leadership. Let's work on our vision. Let's work on our strategy. Let's work on our culture. Let's work on our discipline around execution. It's like, if you're all screwed up and burned out and overwhelmed and frustrated and angry, none of the rest of that stuff matters.
[00:44:27] Cait Donovan
No. And if you don't know who you are, and if you haven't worked through some of the trauma that you're bringing to the workplace every day. If you're not working through your coping mechanisms on a regular basis. You're not doing anybody any favors. I just released an episode that was called the workplace is a trauma recycling center. Because we get to
[00:44:51] Mike Goldman
this place, wait a minute recycling is good, right? It's
[00:44:55] Cait Donovan
yeah, we're just going we're just bouncing our traumas around one another. It's really normal. More for people in leadership positions to have gotten there because they were good at what they did. And then they were bumped up. They weren't necessarily taught how to manage people along the way. This is a common problem in teams, right? leadership that doesn't probably the Peter Principle, right? Yes, exactly. Right. So we have these people that have been pushed up. And they are demanding excellence from their teams the same way that their parents demanded excellence from them. You're bringing your parents patterns into your workplace, you need to, you need to know yourself well enough to know which of those things are applicable and that are totally okay to apply in which things are like, not doing too hot. But you have to be able to know that if your Self Mastery has to be number one in my book, I'm with you.
[00:45:50] Mike Goldman
It's so important, as we kind of start to wrap this up. Ha, tell us a little bit about your business. And how do you go out there specifically and help clients? Is it one on one with clients? Is it group programs? What do you do?
[00:46:09] Cait Donovan
So my company runs group programs, but I'm not the person in charge of them. I have a fellow I call them. My podcast is called "Fried: The burn out podcast" and the people that work with me are called fried guides. Because that's funny, because it makes me giggle every time I say
[00:46:26] Mike Goldman
doesn't make burned out people giggle or did they get pissed off?
[00:46:29] Cait Donovan
Like, so I have fried guides that run the group programs, I don't run them myself, I work one on one with people on a very selective basis, I do sort of VIP one on ones only. And then I also work within companies in two different ways. One way is a speaker series where I'm going in like a tornado a little bit. And I'm saying this is burnout. This is from the top, this is from the bottom, this is how you fix it by meeting together. And then we're talking about how to use resentment as a positive business tool. And then we're talking about how to use boundaries in the workplace in a way that's actually beneficial to everybody boundaries is one of the only things that research has shown to be really beneficial to reversing some of the signs of burnout. So boundaries belongs in the recovery side. Of course, if you have great boundaries in the prevention side, you're probably not going to burn out. So we can, you know, we can sort of throw that one in both. So then we teach people how to have boundaries, but my job going in from a speaker perspective and that sort of environment is to kick start the conversations, to give people the right vocabulary, the right things to talk about the right things to focus on. So that we're not focused on singling people out, dubbing people certain things, calling people names, sort of we're not getting into that we're talking about it from a scientific sourced background that says this is the foundation of how this works. What might that mean for our company, but my job is to kickstart the conversation. There are some companies that use my podcast for this, they use the podcast as a like a book club, they listened to an episode and then they talk about it, which I think is I found out that this was happening way after the fact and I was like, that's the coolest thing ever. I'm so into that. I think that that's great. And then the last thing that I do is with leadership teams, I will go in and when there is already sort of a widespread burnout, I help the team recover, both with group coaching and individual coaching, depending on what's going on and who I'm talking to. But this is I'm never talking to more than like five people at a time at this rate. Because I can't I would burn out otherwise.
[00:48:34] Mike Goldman
Well, I that's what I was gonna say I was gonna say burnout is an epidemic. Beautiful, how many? How many people you're working with? Exactly. So I have to rely on your end to keep of course
[00:48:44] Cait Donovan
yeah, I don't do any of this by myself. I definitely have if we need to do a full on assessment. I bring in an outside team to do the assessment because it's that's not my forte.
[00:48:55] Mike Goldman
Well, listen to "Fried:The burnout podcast" and what what are some other ways how, how else can people find you in addition to the podcast,
[00:49:05] Cait Donovan
I honestly think the podcast is the best place to go. Because you'll find anything that you need to know about me you will get linked to from that place. And it's a really good way to sort through the things that might be useful to you. We've done almost 200 episodes of the podcast, we've probably covered the topic that you're looking for. So starting there is a really, really good place I think the best place and the easiest place and I like to make it easy for people just go one place. If you really want to find me. You can click on all the links in the show notes.
[00:49:32] Mike Goldman
I mean, don't give us too much. We'll get burnt out.
[00:49:34] Cait Donovan
Exactly. Keep it simple.
[00:49:37] Mike Goldman
Excellent. Well, hey, um, I'm glad I have such talented friends. Me too. And this was great. Thank you, Kate, so much for doing this.
[00:49:45] Cait Donovan
Thanks for having me.
[00:49:50] Mike Goldman
I lost my record button, there.