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A Slice of Humble Pie with P2
🥧 A podcast where we curiously explore nutrition, fitness, mindset, sports, wellness, & beyond. ☕️Host @parastoobadie
A Slice of Humble Pie with P2
Unmasking Burnout: Navigating Challenges and Rediscovering Joy
Burnout is not just a buzzword; it's a reality that many of us face, often without even realizing it. As a nutrition and fitness professional, I've fought through the highs and lows of this silent adversary. Join me in this episode of A Slice of Humble Pie as I explore burnout, its evolution, and how it sneaks into multiple aspects of our lives. We'll dissect its three ominous types—overload, under-challenged, and neglect—and trace its progression from honeymoon phase to chronic stress. Through personal stories and expert insights, you'll learn to recognize and combat burnout before it hijacks your well-being.
Athletes, in particular, face the unique challenge of balancing their passion for sport with their personal identity. This episode sheds light on the emotional and physical toll that burnout can impose on athletes and offers strategies to prevent the stress bucket from overflowing.
Finally, the episode champions the importance of joy and simplicity in life. Whether it's painting or a leisurely walk, rediscovering what makes you smile and engaging in activities purely for pleasure is essential.
Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279286/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/words-matter/202404/4-types-of-burnout
https://www.calm.com/blog/how-to-recover-from-burnout
https://www.nata.org/nata-now/articles/2016/04/burnout-athletes
Website: https://parastoobadie.com/podcast/
Email: asliceofhumblepiewithp2@gmail.com
Instagram: @asliceofhumblepiewithp2
Welcome back to A Slice of Humble Pie. I'm your host. He Too. I'm a nutrition and fitness professional, a lover of pie and a curious human on planet Earth.
Speaker 1:Today's episode is about burnout. Now, I've personally been through burnout several times in various ways throughout my life, and so what I'm sharing in this episode is definitely from experience, as well as lessons learned the hard way. And I feel you know, in retrospect I definitely had a toxic pattern. I had a toxic pattern where I work really hard and hustle and then I burn out, and then I do it again and then I burn out, and I obviously was presented with the same situations or put myself in the same situations over and over, until I learned better and learned to navigate this differently. So that's, you know. The whole point of this is for me to share some things I have learned and where I've been humbled by life, and if this resonates with you, great, and if you take something away from this episode where perhaps you're observing what you're doing a bit differently, then that's awesome and I really hope to hear from you about that, actually, if you had that experience. So what is burnout? It is actually a term that was coined in the 1970s by an American psychologist, herbert Freudenberger. So this term was used to describe severe stress that caregiving professionals would go through, so doctors and nurses and now, though, like in today's age, this term has been used for more than caregiving. But if we just stay there for a moment, you know it is 2024 and a podcast episode I had with a while back with Dr Alami, we were talking about burnout, and we were seeing the stress, you know, amongst the nurses and the doctors, especially during, you know, the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. And this is all still very true, right? There's, you know, a lot of people had their own versions of burnout, but the looking at where caregivers so nurses, doctors, physicians and any person really that was in an area where they were supporting someone, so this, actually, I would say, also falls on coaches A lot of people have been burned out in the middle of a burnout or already. You know I can just think of several people from my own circle that, from my own circle that you know made some big changes because of burnout, and so that evolved from, you know, the original definition.
Speaker 1:And there's more types. For our purposes, we're going to talk about three of them. So there's three types of burnout, and I'm of course going to be talking about athletics in a moment, but just high level. So type number one overload. This is, you know, it's in the name. There's work overload, so workaholics, doing too much, being really out of balance with the other aspects of life. And you know this is a high level of dedication, high achievers, go, go go.
Speaker 1:The second type is under challenged. So sometimes we don't think about this as a burnout, but it is because, you know, the human experience is really interesting. Where we need stress, we need some challenge or else it becomes rather mundane. So in this type you are in an under stimulating environment and the tasks become really repetitive and you know you're not really being pushed to move to your potential. And then the third type is neglect. I mean that's in the name. You're neglecting your basic needs. Possibly. You're, you know, moved into helplessness and hopelessness and you're burned out. You know, you're just, you're done with it.
Speaker 1:Now, within these types in general, there's also stages. You know everything has a stage. You know relationships have stages. Just, you know, in education, everything has a stage and everything's a dose. So one thing to keep in mind is that stress is not a bad thing. You know, stress is actually necessary. Everything is a stressor in some way, shape or form, but it's the dose and it's the, it's the management of it, it's the you know, the big picture of the stresses that is important here. So that's, that's to highlight what the stages are that I'm going to talk about right now.
Speaker 1:So stage number one is the honeymoon phase. You know we hear that usually with like a new relationship, but that is true as well in a job, in a project, if you're part of a new team, if you've started, you know, speaking of relationships like a coaching relationship or a new relationship with a new team or whatever. So you might, you know, might have a lot of ambitious, excited energy at the beginning, but then there are certain things that you're presented with that you have to, at this moment in time, figure out how you're going to manage so, for example, the workload or the schedule, the demands, et cetera, and if, at this point is the time to sort of assess, to figure out the proper coping strategies in order to mitigate the future stresses and to have that proper stress management. Now, in an ideal situation, we can figure out, you know, when people are like red flags. You can figure those out pretty early on and you can be aware of them and manage them. But we don't always figure that part out right away.
Speaker 1:So then the next stage would be the onset of stress. Fair enough, like we talked about, we're resilient beings. The whole point is to get stressed a bit. You know it helps motivate us, push us. You actually need, quite literally, we say, the stress hormone. We need cortisol as part of our circadian rhythm to wake us up. We need stress in terms of exercise in itself as a stressor. At this point we're hoping that we're implementing our coping strategies. Stressor. At this point, we're hoping that we're implementing our coping strategies. If we have not, we move on to the next stage, which is chronic stress. So now we have, you know, those little bursts of stress that we need to function as humans have now compounded and where everything has a sense of urgency and it's hard to differentiate about what's really like, actually necessary for us to stress about, because everything is stressful. This is not where it ends. So now we're moving into the next stage, which is burnout, burnout I'll talk to the last stage, which is the most serious and severe, and this is where habitual burnout, in the name.
Speaker 1:It's become a habit, it's basically integrated into literally your life and it can lead to chronic mental, physical. And it can lead to chronic mental, physical, emotional issues. This part, at this point you really do need professional support to pull you out of it because obviously it's not doing more of what you were doing, it's not doubling down and working harder. If you're already in habitual burnout, you've gone too far. You need help. You need help to get pulled back out.
Speaker 1:And so what are the symptoms in general? Some of them, you know. The first one is like a sense of constant fatigue, and I realized that sounds. That sounds kind of silly because fatigue is such an overarching symptom that can be applicable to so many different things. But when all of the symptoms are put together, you know that's where, speaking to a professional, you can differentiate between, like, what's going on, the symptoms in burnout for our purposes, right, you have that sense of fatigue.
Speaker 1:You might be feeling really disconnected or demotivated, especially from you know, depending on what we're talking about from your work, from people you care about, from your activities, from your sport, if you're an athlete. The other symptoms are you're a little bit more snappy, you know, impatient or irritable. This could be just a random people you know. Anyone that's worked in customer service has witnessed just complete horrendous behavior by people that just like take out their rage on them. Or it could just be picking at, picking fights with loved ones and people you care about, just snapping, not really being able to emotionally regulate or have that emotional awareness of yourself. It could be also having difficulty focusing and concentrating. It's just a really terrible loop that you're in because if you are trying to focus and you might have to do work to get out of it, to finish it off and take it off your plate, you're in this really perpetual cycle. The other symptoms are feeling ineffective, feeling like there's a lack in accomplishment, feeling stuck.
Speaker 1:I personally really relate to the symptom of feeling apathetic apathy. I'm a very intense person, I'm very, very passionate and I usually take things seriously. You know I'm an all in person, I'm an all in. So what starts as a simple habit like I started fitness because I loved it, switch to. I switch careers because of the things I'm really ambitious about, I throw myself into stuff, and so for me to feel apathetic, especially when I am so mission driven and passionate about what I'm doing, actually scares me and that's when I know I'm in a dangerous zone. And that's actually happened several times, especially this past year. I was very apathetic and I, as a self employed person, I'm in. I'm in, you know, I put myself into this on purpose, but also I'm the only one on my way out, and it's really, really scary when you're feeling apathetic. I'm the only one on my way out and it's really, really scary when you're feeling apathetic because then it just it kind of pushes you to the other thoughts of like, what is wrong with me? And then you end up with a different bruminating cycle of thoughts.
Speaker 1:For me, fortunately, I have a lot of resources. So I was mentioning, you know, dr Lamy, but we had talked about burnout. So please, I will link that episode that we were talking about in the show notes and I had that conversation with him as well. Right, and it was brought to my attention by people that care about me. You know I've been in a burnout and for me it wasn't something that just happened, it wasn't a one day.
Speaker 1:Here's a couple of things you can't handle. It really has been a compound of the fact of years, years of going through the three types that I've mentioned earlier, and most of it was the neglect and overload combined, because I, the opposite of under challenged, I really like it, you know, make it harder for myself. But it was like various different aspects of my life. I hadn't really managed it well and it just kind of caught up with me and then my physical body was responding. You know, I would get really frustrated because I wanted to fix it faster.
Speaker 1:But, as all my wellness practitioners have told me, I'm aware of myself, obviously, and one of my many of my therapists many plural over the past decade is that I intellectualize a lot, you know, and but you can't, you can't think your way out of burnout, you can't. That's what got you into it in the first place. You got to feel the suck, you got to embrace it and just to be clear here, I'm not telling you to do that without, if you're not, if it's not the capacity you have right now, like, lean on your professional support, because it may not be appropriate for you to feel all your feels If you, you know, don't, don't have a safe space to feel them. So I was talking about the physical symptoms a second ago. So what that happened for me this year was, you know, on the surface and doing everything I ever wanted.
Speaker 1:I'm an online coach, traveling, and these are wonderful things that I have such joy about but also because of the compound effect of a long, long time of me dealing with things over months and years, my body was in a burnout and I would just sort of what would have been self-care. I pushed the dose too high. That's where you know when we say fitness, movement, their stress management tools, yes, but they can also be stressors that compound, and that's really important for us to recognize, because everything is all about dose, even the best of things. So I want to take a few moments to talk about burnout and athletes before we come back together and just talk about some actions we can take. You know the positive side of things, burnout and athletes there's some different considerations we have. You know everything I just said, whether it's work, obligations, life management, relationships, etc.
Speaker 1:And then you have added on that athletics and sport, where there is more physical and mental demands of managing training, the load of training, competition, perhaps the stressors that come with competition, and so you can actually get burned out in many different ways. So the first one, obviously physical, and this could be just too much, too much without proper recovery. And you have a lot of training, you have too much volume, you're not resting and recovering properly, you're fatigued, you're always sore, there's decrease in performance, there is higher risk of injury and this is, you know, understandable, especially if you're a really competitive person and you because if you are constantly pushing, something's going to give, and sometimes that's not up to you to decide, unfortunately and this is a great area to have that accountability and that conversation with coaches, teammates, to sort of have someone also hold you accountable in that aspect. We always talk about it, of having people push us to go do fitness, but especially when it comes to athletes, I think it's the opposite, where sometimes people have to be reminded to also pull back and to rest. It's not, you know, it depends on the individual and it's not always just screaming at someone to do more. It's just maybe holding space and having them realize they're not a machine but a human being. You would be feeling as well as the pressures.
Speaker 1:So if you are trying to compete, there's perform, maybe you have a lot of pressures to win. You're trying to keep up with the expectations you have of yourself, of your teammates, your coaches or professional athletes that maybe also have the keyboard warrior as fans and a bunch of other people. This can also definitely compound, because then it's just mental load, it's things you're carrying and again, are you talking about it with someone? Is there a space for you to discuss these things so it's not just on your head or filling your stress bucket more and more? This part is interesting because to be an athlete or to do anything like anything at all in life, there's very interesting conversations I have with clients, with friends just the concept of balance, and I know I mentioned earlier that a part of burnout is that there's no balance. You went too far on one side and I personally believe that balance in itself isn't a destination, it's just, it's just information, it's a constant, because if you're trying to do anything in life, sometimes you do have to go.
Speaker 1:You know, short term, really concentrate on it. Especially if you're in sport and you're in the middle of a competition like that, that is your primary focus. Of course it's going to take all of the emotional, mental, physical, financial capacity you have, but if you make that, your be all and end all and forget again about the human piece, that's also a big burnout. If your sport is everything to you and if it is all consuming, if it basically like hijacks your existence, that can be definitely a risk for burnout, because you are more than your sport. It's important to you, important to you and sure it may be also like your profession, your job, how you're, whatever, how you're surviving. It could also be that, hey, you're an amateur athlete or you're a rec sport athlete and this is you know, ultimately, as what's the word? What am I trying to say? Just be aware of it, so it doesn't become all of you. It's just a part of you, right? Just be aware of it, so it doesn't become all of you. It's just a part of you, right? And we're all part of something.
Speaker 1:So if you're doing individual sports I keep saying talking to people, but it depends on the sport, right? So if you're doing individual sports, you have to kind of cultivate your own team and come with other people that are also like individual athletes, and there's coaches and you know friends and people that may understand and like they're. On the opposite end, there is team sport athletes. So I come from from rugby originally, before I switched to bodybuilding and Muay Thai, so I, I, my brain is always operated in this team dynamic that I want to look out for my teammates. That in itself presents its own stressors because it's like your team dynamics change. So it could be positive. That could no longer be working for you. It could be toxic.
Speaker 1:So, also like the dynamics of the relationships around you could be contributing to a burnout. So, like your teammates, your coach. Is there a clash in values or communication with your coach? Is it? Other things are? Do you have to travel all of the time? Are you constantly on the road Again, especially if we're talking about contact sports, or you know someone's throwing a ball at your face or you're running, or you know someone's punching you. Like there has to be presence and if you're detached, it's just, it becomes you're hurting yourself and possibly your teammates.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, it's like something that you may have been in love with, like you are a passionate athlete or a dancer or artists, and something that you know brought you joy. It just starts to become so tedious that you're, like, resentful of it. So those are some of the some of the ways that burnout presents in athletes, but obviously this is some general statements and I'm hoping that some of the stuff I said, lance, it's hard to talk about all of it without having the context right but to if you're taking away one thing from what I've said the past 20 minutes is that you know, burnout can affect everybody, everybody of every profession, of every starting point, of every background, and it is just nothing to be ashamed of and it's just important for us to observe and to be able to do stuff about it. Sometimes, too, when you're doing the stuff you might be aware of, like yeah, I'm just gonna take a weekend off, maybe that's enough and maybe it's not. Maybe having two days off isn't sufficient if you're just reverting back to the same habits, behaviors that got you there in the first place, because sometimes it can take days, weeks, months, even years, years to heal from burnout. And that was my experience, right. So, like you might see something, but it's not.
Speaker 1:It's not always what you see, the visual, that iceberg visual that I'm sure we're all familiar with. If you Google, you know the iceberg visual and you always see just what's at the top and then everything else that's underneath the surface and everything that's added to it. And I always like to use the stress bucket example with my clients. You know you have a bucket and then every stressor has. You know, if you visualize a big bucket in front of you, every single one of your stressors is a big rock and you start to pile each rock in the bucket, or they're a drop of water, and then the faucet's running and dropping a drop of water for every stressor at some point is that bucket's going to overflow and we don't want it to overflow. So we're, you know, we're quite literally navigating the rocks or the drops of water, whichever visual works best for you. So that's how we get to the recovery. What do we do?
Speaker 1:The first step to admitting you have a problem is that you have a problem. I don't know, I don't remember the whole saying, but it's acknowledgement of it. It's really, really important and if you're in denial of it, that's not helpful. So acknowledge it. And I 100% took so long to get here and I made it harder for myself. And I remember one of my. It was a few years ago. It was one of the catalysts for me leaving corporate and entering the fitness industry because you know, I kept saying I have it, I have it, I have it Wearing the how much I can take like a badge of honor. It's like who are you trying to impress Like who gives a fuck? So just acknowledge, be like hey, yeah, this is, this is a lot.
Speaker 1:Sometimes when I say that, I feel like it goes, or two things come up or maybe I'm assuming this, but I know I assume it as two different things. The people think I'm saying for you to be soft. When I'm saying to have self-compassion, I don't mean to let yourself off the hook, I don't mean not to have discipline, I don't mean not to have self-accountability. I think that's a great conversation piece for a different podcast episode. It's just treating yourself like you're a human being and we can't keep going at the same intensity and the same speed. So if we're talking about sports, if we think about a power lifter, for example, you can't lift your one rep max competition weight every single day. If we're talking about a fighter, you can't fight every single day. If you are whatever profession, like there's, there's ebbs and flows. You're working towards something, you have to recover from it and you have to life. You have to let life life.
Speaker 1:First step is acknowledgement, then it's to pause. Just take a moment, and this can look very different, obviously depending on the symptoms, obviously depending on the variables that you're navigating. Like what does that pause look like? It could be as short or as long as you need it to be, but it's essential to take and I understand that it's a challenge, especially if we're talking about, let's say, like financial constraints and you can't just leave work because you need it. But it's important to basically interrupt what's happening so that you could figure out the next steps to take.
Speaker 1:So it might be taking a break from work. It might be taking a break from the gym, from the sport, sitting out a couple games. It might be taking a break from people. Maybe there are some relationships that aren't serving you. It could even be people that you love, or just people in general, and you need to isolate, just to have some time to yourself. It could be just the activities that brought you joy, that are becoming that you're building resentment towards, like perhaps you just take a break, pause from those, then shift your attention to the basics Resting, truly resting, not just disassociating. Possibly that that's a part of it getting to sleep, napping, if you need to, hydrating, showering those self-care indulgences. Maybe that's something that's accessible at this point and it might make it a little easier to go to the next step with some of the harder self-care stuff.
Speaker 1:And then, obviously, nutrition eating nutrient-nense foods. It's really easy here right now to just say, oh, eat healthy. But I do want to address, as a nutritionist, that this could be a huge stressor and so I just want to extend that permission. I guess, or reality, that you can make this as tangible as it needs to be for you. So if you need to outsource and have meal delivery companies, or if that's not within your budget or something you can access maybe it's getting frozen meals and just making it really easy to pop in the microwave it's understandable if you're reaching for nutrient void, hyperpalatable snacks and whatnot that are going to be contributing to some emotional eating, if you're like, burned out. But the reality is that long term, that just keeps that cycle going. Because we need nutrients, we need protein, we need fats, we need complex carbohydrates to pull us out of this, too complex carbohydrates to pull us out of this too Like if you're not fueling yourself and taking care of yourself in multiple ways, there's just the domino effect keeps going, especially mentally, emotionally, physically.
Speaker 1:When you have the clarity right after you've paused and then you can start to shift your focus on the basics, just start, because there's always a way to improve these. But just don't overthink it Like what's the easiest thing I can do right now, and then of course, we can improve it, because if we're talking about high performers, doing some of the basics isn't sufficient to improve our performance. But if you are at a burnout, sometimes simplifying is the answer. Just, less is more. Focus on the most simple stuff and then reassess, adjustess, adjust.
Speaker 1:Look around what are you saying yes to? What are you saying no to? You can't, you can't say yes to everything, and you know I say that as, like I say yes, figure it out later, yes, but at one point no, because if you say yes to everything, then you're just spread thin. You have to say no so you can redirect your focus, and that might be saying no to some stuff that you like. It might be saying no to people, to situations, to projects, to keep you going in a way that you can actually handle and obviously get professional support.
Speaker 1:So for I was talking about you know earlier, when you get to the burnout or habitual burnout, if it's possible, like seek talking to different people before you go there, like, learn how to manage your stress, have conversations with sports psychologists, mindset coaches, therapists, have conversations with coaches, teammates, like you know. Look, look at some proactive ways of implementing some stuff. And obviously I was talking about nutrition and that's what I'm doing, you know, with my clients is trying to sort of make choices for future us, especially as athletes. And the one I want to add that I have a story on now is have fun, especially if you, like you know, I mentioned earlier that what started as a hobby, you know if you get go all into it and sometimes those lines are blurred between what's a hobby, what's work, whatever. Just find other ways to just do things for the activity itself and not necessarily for what you can get out of it or what the outcome is. So what I mean is I love to learn.
Speaker 1:I am a big, I listen. Obviously I have a podcast, so I listen to podcasts and reading, but it's constantly about personal development or nutrition or business or. But at some some point it's like when did I read a story? Or can you just go for a walk outside for the sake of going for a walk and just looking up and observing the trees and the leaves falling around you? It's, and for me, one of that was the biggest thing is. I was in Japan and I was just, like you know, biking down the bamboo forest, just going through, just being really present and enjoying, just enjoying just to be.
Speaker 1:And then we hear this but a lot of us from the west and if you are, you know maybe I'm generalizing here, but if you're like me, where you're, I guess what type a high functioning anxiety you just want to do it's like sometimes do nothing, do absolutely nothing, let yourself decompress and also go have fun doing outrageous things that don't necessarily teach you anything, because you're allowed to just do stuff for the activity itself, like go painting because it's fun and go for a walk not because you must get in your step count. Go for a jog not because it is specific sprint training for your conditioning, for your sport, but just because you're connecting with your breath and you're looking around and you're suddenly a tourist in your own town. Go do something completely ridiculous and random, like go-karting. Just remember the random crap we used to do as kids. It's grab your friends, grab a glow stick and go play, capture the flag, have fun and also do something different.
Speaker 1:So if you're burned out I think I mentioned physicality earlier for athletes like go do something that moves your body differently. So that's the one thing I've really been focusing on the past while is I've been following programs in the gym for 20 years and everything was always so focused for me of, like, what can I get out of this? How am I growing? How am I becoming a better? Xyz and the past, while, instead of following any structure, even though I have access to it, I'm like, hey, let me just remember the space. Like, let me remember how it's like to connect my mind and my body and move and just do things. So I'm just going to the gym and moving around, however, I feel like in flow, without thinking of hey, is this progressing? My deadlift? Like not really Put on some music and dance. I've been doing that a lot.
Speaker 1:It's one of my, you know, favorite joys is to just have a random dance party and imagine that I am in one of these. You got served movies Like bro. You got served yeah, whatever Daydream. Go create something, pick up a camera and just go take pictures of stuff. If you are a content creator, maybe just go do something random instead of having it to be. Or I must create content to do this. It's like no, what do you find fun? What's bringing that joy and that laughter and that curiosity back for you?
Speaker 1:That was the biggest one and I'm so pleased to be at the other side and I'm so grateful for the privileges I've had and the resources, with an entire team of wellness professionals. Having been in team sports and in individual sports, having been in corporate and being self-employed as a person, to have had my ups and down hardships, I really understand. And that's why I wanted to do this episode today is to just encourage everybody, no matter what level you're at, is like hey, you're human, what can you outsource? Where can you lean on support and where can you celebrate yourself Because you are enough just as you are. And, of course, there's always room to floor it and to gas and to push fitness and to push mindset and to push everything. But maybe, instead of just always pushing and this was I encourage you to listen to the episode with jazz where we're talking about calming your shit so you could get more shit done. And funny enough, because you know the algorithms of the social.
Speaker 1:I was in preparation for this episode. I clicked on something that started showing me, like you know, toxic productivity versus positive productivity. It's like are you just busy for the sake of being busy, or could you actually accomplish more, more efficiently, if you were to take a step back and to rest and have fun and reconnect with the things that bring your heart joy? The last thing I want to leave us with is a very short quote by Hamza Khan Burn bright, not out. I hope that you have a wonderful day and you go do one thing that makes you smile. Thank you so much for tuning in. Catch you next time. Have a good one. Bye.
