Burnout: A Journey Towards Resilience with Amy Schamberg 2

Can chronic stress really lead to burnout, or are we simply not managing our stress properly? This episode promises to answer that by exploring both the subtle and glaring signs of chronic stress and burnout that often go unnoticed. Through my personal journey as an educator—where frustration and burnout culminated into writing the story "Taught"—we highlight how easy it is to be blindsided by these stressors. Amy Schamberg, a certified functional medicine health coach with a school psychology background, joins us to shed light on the physical and emotional changes that signal chronic stress and why it's crucial to recognize these symptoms early.

If you are interested in following or contacting Aline (the Pilates/yoga/fascia guru that I mentioned in this episode), go to her Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/aline.amaralmelo/
And you can also search for her @aline.amaralmelo

Chapters

• 0:06 Understanding Chronic Stress and Burnout
• 4:32 Holistic Approach to Health and Wellness
• 13:07 Calm Healthy Living Tips

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

You know we don't operate in silos, like all of our parts are interconnected. We aren't just well when work is well, like we have relationships and you know our financial wellness and all of these different puzzle pieces kind of go together. So what a functional medicine health coach does when it comes to dealing with a person who is suffering from chronic stress and burnout is to really take a holistic view of what's going on and look at all of the different pieces of the puzzle. So there's many areas of our life that can be contributing to the way that we're feeling and how to get better.

Speaker 2: 0:47

How much I miss, not knowing that we're all screwed. A few years ago, I started writing a fictitious story based on my time as an educator. It is called Taught, and the story was partially inspired out of anger and frustration fueled by burnout. Okay, actually, it was more than partially inspired by anger and frustration fueled by burnout. Okay, actually, it was more than partially inspired by anger and frustration. But taught has also become a vehicle for me to tell what I thought at the time and in some ways continue to think, was and is the real story of teaching. I now realize that my perspective is not everyone's perspective, but there are some pieces of taught that resonated with many educators perspective, but there are some pieces of taught that resonated with many educators. This podcast is an extension of that story and I, a former teacher, will interview other educators, asking them to share how they really feel about the current state of education. Why are so many teachers burnout? Why are so many like me leaving the field? We likely won't solve any problems or come up with any solutions, but we can create a community of voices that maybe begin the conversation around how educators can take back teaching.

Speaker 2: 2:12

I'm Melissa LaFleur. Welcome to Taught the podcast. Hey, everybody, guess who's back? It's Amy Schamberg. If you missed Amy's episode from last month, I linked it in today's show notes. Last month, amy and I discussed how chronic stress and burnout are defined from a professional standpoint, because Amy is a professional and she's devoted a lot of time, energy and education into the field of burnout. And she's devoted a lot of time, energy and education into the field of burnout, especially in the area of education. Amy earned her graduate degree in school psychology from the University of Colorado and worked as a school psychologist in the Denver metro area for over a decade. Now, as a certified functional medicine health coach, amy continues to work in wellness consultancy roles within educational programs throughout Colorado. She specializes in mental health, burnout recovery and holistic well-being and she's doing a side gig with me right now, trying to put knowledge and resources out to all of us. Amy, thanks for being here.

Speaker 1: 3:20

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here again.

Speaker 2: 3:23

On our last episode together, you broke down the chronic stress and burnout connection and gave us some understanding of what chronic stress and burnout actually are. Can you do just a quick recap of that for our listeners?

Speaker 1: 3:36

Yes, absolutely so. Chronic stress is something that we experience for a prolonged period of time. So it's something that we've been experiencing for a couple of weeks, and some of those symptoms of chronic stress might be aches and pains that weren't there before, that aren't due to an injury, insomnia or feeling really sleepy all the time, having low energy, noticing a change in appetite, sleepy all the time, having low energy, noticing a change in appetite, irritability, cloudy thinking, big reactions to small problems, emotional withdrawal, social isolation and, like I said, these are things that you would be experiencing over a period of time. So it's not abnormal to have you know one or two of these symptoms for a short period of time or intermittently, but when you're noticing that it's ongoing, that's when you can be sure that it's chronic stress. And chronic stress becomes burnout, when it just feels like things are never going to get better.

Speaker 1: 4:38

Every day feels like a bad day. You feel like, no matter what you do, you can never get ahead. You start to feel this sense of detachment or this connection from your life or your work. You have trouble telling. One day from the next. You have the cynicism that doesn't really go away and it's hard to find the humor in situations you might have difficulty concentrating. You might notice that because you feel like you have this lack of self-efficacy that you can never get ahead. So you stop trying and perhaps your performance is dropping and it's just kind of this sense that you're just kind of stuck and things aren't going to get better. So why should I even try to make them better?

Speaker 2: 5:23

I love that definition. I would like to say I think that cynicism was my humor language for quite a while.

Speaker 2: 5:29

So, and only the other people who were burnout thought I was funny, but okay. So in addition to chronic stress and burnout and the work that you've done there, you are also a certified functional medicine health coach and my goal here today is to have you tell us a little bit about what that is and kind of the connection between the two, because I'm really interested in well, I'm interested for myself and I'm also interested for our listeners, in that I think that if chronic stress and burnout are connected, I also think our physical bodies and our health are very connected to those two things as well. So tell us a little bit about what a functional medicine health coach does.

Speaker 1: 6:21

Yes, and I started to kind of allude to it last time. You know functional medicine is so important, so you know Western medicine or conventional medicine is also important. You know we need emergency care and we need and preventative, whereas you know, typical approaches to healthcare are more reactionary it's like, you know, giving the pills, whereas functional medicine is. Well, let's figure out why this is happening. And so much of our modern day disease can be addressed through modifiable lifestyle factors. So things like exercise and diet and ding ding ding stress. So stress has so many implications on our health and there's so much research that shows if we can manage our stress levels better, we have lower cholesterol, we have lower blood pressure, we have a lower risk of heart disease, of diabetes, of all of these things that you might think are unrelated. It's crazy, but truly they're all connected and that's what I really love about functional medicine.

Speaker 1: 7:41

Honestly, I feel that it's very empowering, because so many times we get sick or we get told that we have this ailment, or, you know, we get a diagnosis slapped on us.

Speaker 1: 7:53

Oh, you have anxiety and we're like, oh well, I am this thing now, whereas with a functional medicine approach, you can really learn to make some shifts in your life and see it the reversal of symptoms or the decline of the severity of symptoms, and really I see that to be so empowering. It was empowering for myself and so you know that's kind of like the medical lens. But when I apply that to what it's like to be burnt out, it's kind of the same thing. It's like we don't operate in silos. All of our parts are interconnected. We aren't just well when work is well, we have relationships and our financial wellness and all of these different puzzle pieces kind of go together. So what a functional medicine health coach does when it comes to dealing with a person who is suffering from chronic stress and burnout is to really take a holistic view of what's going on and look at all of the different pieces of the puzzle. So there's many areas of our life that can be contributing to the way that we're feeling and how to get better.

Speaker 2: 9:11

I'm really glad that you have brought this up. Actually, you've said a couple of things, and I'm going to bring up something that you said in the podcast that we did before, which is you didn't say it exactly this way, but we oftentimes have this feeling that we just need to push through, and I definitely resemble that pushing through philosophy. It's. I feel this ache or pain, I have these chronic headaches, but I'm just going to push through. I haven't slept for five days, but I'm going to push through and I'm going to go to work anyway. And I think that I did some work once.

Speaker 2: 9:54

I got here to Portugal online with a lady in Brazil. Her name is Aline. She's amazing and she basically just does a series of it's yoga and Pilates and fascia work and let me be clear, I don't speak Portuguese. Well, she doesn't speak English, but we make these classes work and the one thing that she says to me every week is observe what's going on with your body. And two things have come. A lot has come for me. I have had many benefits from working with Alini, but two of the things that I noticed that I was surprised about. One was I do not notice my body. I was completely a year ago, out of tune with everything going on with my body. Additionally, I rarely touch my own body because we have to do a series of self-massage, and it was so interesting to me that I'm so disconnected from my physical being.

Speaker 1: 11:07

Yeah, yeah, I mean that's really interesting and so true. I think about when I was in schools and I would go into elementary school classrooms and I would teach kiddos about emotion recognition. And the first part of that is where do you feel it in your body? So if it's anger right, Like oh, are your palms or your fists clenched right, Is your heart beating fast? Or if it's worry, do you feel that in your belly or is it in your head? And we do that with small children, but we don't often pay attention to those signals for ourselves.

Speaker 2: 11:46

Well, and when you talked about chronic stress in our former podcast, the first things that you brought, the number one thing that you said was aches and pains in your body, and you know there's a body of research out there that talks about how just and you just alluded to this how chronic stress and burnout can manifest in illness and injury. Can you break down for us some examples of that? And then, what approaches does functional medicine tell us that we can use to be preventative?

Speaker 1: 12:26

Sure, so you know, I always say that there are these invisible effects or impacts of chronic stress, and that's the psychological stuff, the cognitive and the emotional. And then there are the physical effects that are more observable, typically, but they can also be hidden. So I'll start with the physical effects that are observable. So that's that fatigue, the headaches, the migraines, the insomnia, muscle pain, joint pain, gi issues, right, and then the hidden ones, the hidden effects that aren't noticeable unless you actually were tested in your doctor's office, unless you actually were tested in your doctor's office. So, like I said, high cholesterol or type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, you know, cardiovascular disease, stroke, heart attack all of these things, you know, are often linked to stress. And then the psychological effects, the cognitive impact could show up as difficulty making decisions, having a short attention span, feeling a lack of motivation. And then the emotional impacts include depressive symptoms, chronic anxiety, feeling hopeless or helpless or that cynical outlook that we talked about. So there's all of these different, you know, covert, overt, invisible, visible effects of chronic stress. And when you work with a functional medicine practitioner, they're typically quite skilled at gathering a comprehensive history and putting these puzzle pieces together. So it's like, okay, well, when did this start happening and what was going on in your life and you know you can kind of start to paint the picture of what's going on and then to be more proactive, to be more preventative about, you know, putting some things into place when you are experiencing chronic stress so that it doesn't become burnout or so that it doesn't lead to something awful like a heart attack or a stroke.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Really, it's these modifiable lifestyle factors, such as taking good care of yourself. Are you drinking enough water? How many of us go through the day without drinking enough water because we don't have to, we don't have time to go to the bathroom right, like simple things like that? Right, drinking enough water, having healthy meals and I know everybody's busy and stressed and who has time, so we're just going to go through the drive-through, but you know when we do that, day in and day out, it adds up. So making these simple shifts to eat better. Social time is so important. There have been so many studies. I read a study recently that said the positive effects of having a best friend at work and or having a very strong social group. So your social life is supportive and nourishing. Those positive effects were just as strong and significant as the negative effects of tobacco smoke from smoking cigarettes.

Speaker 2: 15:30

Wow, isn't that crazy. That is unbelievable.

Speaker 1: 15:36

I know it, I should send it. I'll send it to you. It was like mind blowing. But so like, when we're super stressed, we to isolate, right, our friends say, hey, do you want to hang out this weekend? And we say, no, I've got so much to do, or, oh, I'm so exhausted, um, and that could be problematic. So it's a protective factor to continuously like, do the things that bring us joy, um, including, uh, be with our tribe, the people who, who build us up, and then actively engaging in stress reduction activities, and whether that is acupuncture or yoga, or a long walk on the beach or reading a book or taking a nap, or allowing yourself to not clean the house this weekend. You know like it looks different for everybody, but we have to be intentional, we have to make time for it, we have to put it on our calendar, just like we put everything else.

Speaker 2: 16:34

I 100% agree with that and I love that you said it looks different for everyone because I shared in the last episode I am in recovery still from burnout and I am still noticing my patterns. That kind of got me to burnout to begin with, thing that, to be honest with you, is quite stressful for me. But somebody else feels like it helps you de-stress but it doesn't have the same effect on me. So I'm learning, relearning I suppose, because I do think this is a journey For anybody out there, listening, there, listening. I'm at year two of my journey.

Speaker 2: 17:31

So if you are an educator or it doesn't matter if you're an educator if you're burnout, it truly is a journey and Amy mentioned on the last episode that it takes time and it takes reflection and I kind of am feeling like it's not a process that you can speed up or slow down. It's just a process that you have to endure and stick with and it's so worth it in the end. But part of my process has definitely been realizing that I'm not 100% sure all the time what de-stresses me. So when I find something I definitely put it in the vault and I go back to it time and time again. So at least I have that one resource to reflect back on.

Speaker 1: 18:21

Yeah, and it might change right From season to season or week, you know, week to week. And that's fine and along those lines of stress reduction is that topic of self-care? And you know self-care exists on a spectrum. Self-care doesn't have to be going to the spa, doesn't have to be going to get your nails done. You know self-care can be listening to your favorite song or taking six slow, deep breaths or just pausing to look out the window and appreciating the sunny day. You know like these little micro moments that just spark a little bit of positivity within us or a little bit of relaxation have a cumulative effect if we can continuously do those sorts of things as frequently as possible.

Speaker 2: 19:11

Yeah, I think that positivity was very hard for me to come by for a long time. I'm back there. I can be positive again but, it's almost like all the other things that we've talked about. It becomes a practice and I had to go back, find ways to be positive again and then practice those things.

Speaker 1: 19:35

And it's almost just telling yourself. It's like when we go to the gym, right, I personally don't enjoy going to the gym for the first month, but I force myself to do it because I know that I will have done it enough. Right, I know that after, like the first month, I'll actually start to like it and I'll want to go and it'll be like my escape. But, man, those first couple of weeks they're not fun, you know. So you just kind of push yourself through it because you know it's good for you. And I think it's the same thing with, like, allowing yourself to rest or allowing yourself to experience gratitude or appreciation or positivity or anything else. That's kind of counter to the cynical burnout that we're in. It's just kind of like even if part of your brain doesn't believe that practicing gratitude is going to be beneficial just allowing yourself to go with it and try it out for a while and see what happens.

Speaker 2: 20:32

Yep, you know, and the cynic in me is like Amy, she's already gone to crazy town. Now she's talking about going to the gym. But you are correct. You are correct. You know, I like my Pilates class that I go to mainly because I make fun of the trainers, but still, whatever does it for you, right, whatever gives you that positivity, exactly whether I want to do it or not, so that's another great one to mention. Okay, so, as we begin to close this conversation for today, what are some tips you can leave us with to create healthier, calmer bodies? If you had three tips that you could give us this week that we can start, yeah, three tips or more if you want.

Speaker 1: 21:24

Um, three tips for a healthier yeah Well, I'm trying to like narrow it down because I've got like 800 in my mind right now. Okay, the first one has got to be sleep. Um, I think that nothing good comes from having a poor night of sleep. Right, our relationships, um, are our decisions, all the things. So if you can find a way to prioritize getting a good night of sleep, find a way to prioritize getting a good night of sleep, that would be huge.

Speaker 1: 21:53

And I understand that some people have things going on in life. Maybe you have a new baby and you can't get a solid eight hours. How can you invite in some time, some moments of rest throughout the day In order to have a calm body? We have to have a nourished body, that is, you know, not sleep deprived. I would also, yeah, right, and so, along those same lines, creating time and space to do something where you're just kind of like you're a human being, not a human doing you so. Are you sitting down and reading a book that you enjoy for 20 minutes? I would, you know, encourage you to do something that doesn't involve a screen.

Speaker 1: 22:38

So many times we kind of get lost on those social media rabbit holes and maybe it's relaxing, but maybe it's not so oftentimes not. Yes, Maybe, turning on a Netflix show that you enjoy, can you watch, like you know, a program that you haven't seen in a while, or something that you that you've been meaning to get to, or just go sit outside. So much research shows that you know, just being out in nature can be so therapeutic. Take a nap outside even better, you know. Get some sunshine, get some rest. But in order to have a calm body, we really need to create an opportunity for our bodies to calm down, for our nervous system to regulate, to allow that high cortisol and high adrenaline that we've been, you know, coasting on, to kind of come back down to, to baseline, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 23:32

I, I 100% agree with all three of those for myself. I can't speak for the rest of you out there listening, but for me, if I don't get a good night's sleep she mentioned relationships my relationship suffers immensely because my husband is pretty much like ooh, okay, maybe you need to go take a nap, and he's right I do so.

Speaker 1: 23:57

I am very crabby when he tells you it's like no, I don't, I'm fine, right, that's right.

Speaker 2: 24:01

I'm not going to hopefully he won't listen to this episode.

Speaker 2: 24:04

I don't want to tell him he's right. And you know, the other one that you mentioned that really hit home with me was the nature one. I am constantly amazed, consistently amazed, at how I can get messing around with the podcast. A whole day can go by, I can be inside all day and I just feel whatever this is like this weight on me and as soon as I step out the door and I hear the birds and I feel the breeze and I hear, you know, somebody's dog comes over and needs me to pet it and there's grass around me and trees and the leaves rustling. It really puts me in a different headspace. So thank you, thank you for that Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 24:53

And also, just to be clear nature doesn't necessarily mean like going to a park right, like what you just said step outside and just get outside yeah, just getting that sunshine.

Speaker 2: 25:04

Amy, thank you so much once again for being here and for everybody listening. If you like this conversation but you're wanting more, amy will be providing an online professional group therapy session on Sunday, august 11th, at 10 am Pacific Time, 11 am Mountain Time, 12 pm Central Standard Time, 1 pm Eastern Standard Time and 6 pm Portugal Time. For 20 US dollars, you can get an hour with an experienced professional and avoid the forms, insurance and all that other minutiae that can keep many of us and when I say us, I am definitely putting me in here from seeking out professional guidance. There's no commitment to do more than that. You can find the link to the first session and the subsequent sessions at Amy's website, amyschamburgcom, my website, taughtbuzzsproutcom, in today's show notes on Instagram at amyschamburg or at taught the podcast, and finally on my Facebook page taught by a teacher. So if you're feeling the burn of burnout and would like some professional guidance on coping strategies, a safe space to speak your truth, or just to see if guidance from a professional might be a good step for you, visit the link at any of the locations and sign up. Space for each workshop is limited, so sign up soon.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Today's episode was produced and edited by me. The theme music is by Otis McDonald featuring Joni Ines. If you know someone who might enjoy these conversations, please share the podcast episodes as much and as often as you can. It's as simple as copying the link you use to access today's episode and sending it in a message or sharing it on social media. I'm a small, independent operation and your shares broaden our audience. Perhaps you or someone you know will be inspired to talk about teacher burnout audience. Perhaps you or someone you know will be inspired to talk about teacher burnout. If you would like to get your voice on my podcast, contact me via the link on my webpage. Taughtbuzzsproutcom.

Speaker 2: 27:17

Coach speaker and author Rashid Ogunlaro said it may take many voices for people to hear the same message. Join me in being one of the many voices rising up to get the message out around educator burnout. This is Melissa LaFleur. Thank you for listening to taught the podcast. I wish I knew I have an important reminder slash disclaimer to share. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company. Content provided on this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional advice. We encourage you to do your own research and consult with qualified professionals before making any decisions based on the information discussed in this or any other episode. Additionally, any opinions or statements made during the podcast are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company or individual Listener. Discretion is advised.

Speaker 1: 28:34

Thank, you for tuning in.