Episode 165. The Warning Signs of Burnout You're Probably Ignoring

You know the patient who says, “It just started hurting last week”… while you're staring at a problem that clearly started long ago?

Yeah. Burnout works like that too.

In this episode, we’re talking about the warning signs of burnout most dental team members miss completely—the ones that show up long before you’re crying in your car, fantasizing about quitting, or wondering where the version of you who used to love this job disappeared to.

If you’ve been feeling more irritated, more exhausted, less patient, less like yourself… this episode might explain why.

Because burnout rarely shows up all at once.

It whispers first.

HEY THERE! LET'S CONNECT...I'D LOVE TO GET TO KNOW YOU BETTER!

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Transcript

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Hey, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so glad you're here. Whether you're listening on your commute and your car before you walk into your office, or, and I genuinely hope this is you, I hope you're sitting somewhere quiet with a cup of something warm. Today's episode, I want to tell you up front, this one might hit a little close to home. We're talking about burnout warning signs. Now there are lots of them. Today we're going to talk about five, but not the dramatic fall apart kind that you just can't ignore. The quiet kind, the ones that have been whispering to you for weeks, maybe even months, and that you have been very successfully convincing yourself they don't mean anything. And I know you've been doing that. I used to do it all the time because you're really good at it. Most dental professionals are. And by the end of this episode, I want you to have a name for at least one thing that's been happening in your body or your mind that you've just been brushing past. Because naming it, awareness, that's the first step. We don't have to fix it, just look at it. Welcome to the Dental Life Podcast, where we explore how you can have both a successful career and a meaningful personal life in and outside of your practices without sacrificing one for the other. I'm your host, Beth Highman, former dental office manager, turned certified life and health coach, and I'm here to help you navigate the challenges and opportunities that come from being a dental professional. Let's get started. One of the things that I realized looking back on burnout is it's very similar to patients and their dental problems. You know the patient. We've all had them in our practices. We see them all the time. You ask, when did this start bothering you? And they say, honestly, it only started hurting a week ago. Meanwhile, there is a cavity the size of a studio apartment. Bone loss, that didn't happen over lunch, and an old temporary crown hanging on by thoughts and prayers. You're standing there thinking, respectfully, this did not happen on some single random Wednesday afternoon. And burnout is sneaky like that. Nobody wakes up one morning and says, Good morning. Today feels like an excellent day for a complete emotional breakdown. No, it starts small. You stop listening to podcasts on the drive home and you sit in silence because one more voice feels like it's going to make your head explode. You start ordering takeout because the idea of deciding what's for dinner sounds like a hostage negotiation. And then you stop volunteering ideas and meetings because honestly, someone else can care about that. You don't care anymore. You notice yourself saying things like, I'm just tired. This is a busy season. Everybody feels like this. I just need a vacation, which is basically the mental version of it only hurts when I eat something cold. I only floss before an appointment. I'm waiting to see if this just gets better by itself. Then one day your version of that toothache shows up. You cry because someone asks you what was for dinner. You dread seeing patients you loved before. And you forget little things. You start fantasizing about becoming a barista, maybe opening a baby goat farm. That's my latest obsession. Or disappearing into the woods where nobody can ask you for an insurance breakdown. And suddenly you're shocked, but your nervous system isn't shocked. It has been sending signals for months. Burnout doesn't usually arrive like a dental emergency. It arrives more like gingivitis, quiet, easy to dismiss, a little bleeding here, a little bleeding there, until one day you realize this isn't something a good night's sleep and a long weekend are going to fix. But the frustrating part, just like dentistry, the earlier you catch it, the easier it is to treat. Now, let's take it to the dental practice. So the story is one I've heard over and over and over again from dental team members, from hygienists, office managers, dental assistants across every kind of practice. Say it's a hygienist. She's been in dentistry for 11 years. She loves her patients. She's good at her job, like really good. Her schedule is always full. Patients love her. From the outside, everything looked fine. For the past several months, Sunday nights have started to be filled with dread. She can't quite explain it. She goes to bed at a reasonable hour, but she doesn't sleep well. She wakes up tired. By Tuesday, she's already looking forward to the weekend. By Thursday, she's running on Red Bull and willpower. She's more irritable than usual. Little things at work bother her that used to not. A patient who's running late, the front desk that filled that three o'clock open appointment, and she's pissed about it. She snaps, then feels guilty, then pushes it down and keeps going. Her neck hurts. It always hurts. That's just part of the job, isn't it? But lately it's worse. Her shoulders feel like concrete by noon. She's getting tensioned headaches a few times a week. She doesn't tell anyone about this because none of it feels like a big deal. Because compared to what she hears from other people, she's fine. She has a good job, good patients, good coworkers. She tells herself she's just tired. She'll feel better after her vacation. But here's the thing her vacation is four months away. And here's the other thing. This woman isn't burnt out yet, not fully, but her body has been sending her signals clearly and consistently for months. And she has been very skillfully, very professionally ignoring every single one. This is what burnout looks like before it becomes a full-blown crisis. Not a big dramatic breakdown, not quitting, not crying in the parking lot, though sometimes it gets there. It looks like this quiet, cumulative, easy to explain away. And that's exactly what we're talking about today. Burnout rarely announces itself. It doesn't show up one day and say, Hi, I'm here, I'm a problem. Please address me. No, it whispers first through tension, through irritability, through that Sunday night feeling that something you're finding harder and harder to tolerate is coming. And by the time it feels like a real crisis, by the time you can't ignore it anymore, it has been building for months, sometimes years. So today I'm going to walk you through five of these warning signs, five things your body and your mind do when burnout is building. And I want you to listen, not as a clinician checking off symptoms, but as a human being who is allowed to notice what's happening inside of them. Ready? Here we go. The first one. And it's what I call Sunday syndrome. It's that feeling that starts creeping in on Sunday afternoon, sometimes Sunday morning. Sometimes, and I've heard this, it even starts Saturday night. I've experienced that before. It's not depression, it's not anxiety exactly. It's more like a low-grade heaviness, a reluctance, a quiet voice that says, I don't want tomorrow to come. I'm already dreading it. Now, everyone has the occasional, I'd rather not go to work Monday moment. That's just being human. What I'm talking about is when Sunday dread becomes a consistent experience, when it's there week after week, when it starts to affect the whole weekend, because you can't fully relax on Saturday knowing what Sunday evening is going to feel like. In a dental office, this often just gets written off as part of the job. Dentistry is stressful. Of course, I don't love Mondays. But Sunday dread that's consistent isn't normal stress. It is your nervous system trying to protect you from something that's depleting you. It is not a character flaw, it's information. If Sunday dread or that Sunday night syndrome sounds familiar, and I mean familiar like you're nodding your head right now, I just want you to notice it. You don't have to fix it yet. Just let yourself see it. Now, the second warning sign is irritability that doesn't match the situation. This one is sneaky because it often comes with the guilt attached. You snap at a patient who's running five minutes late and you immediately feel terrible. You're short with a teammate over something so small, like it really doesn't matter, but you blow up. You go home and you're irritable with your family and you just can't explain why. And you wonder what's wrong with you. Look, nothing is wrong with you. Here's what's actually happening: your nervous system has been running hot for a long time. When you're in chronic stress, not acute stress, not the oh, this is just a difficult day stress, but the ongoing, accumulated week after week kind, our window of tolerance shrinks. Normally we have a fairly wide range of things we can handle without going into fight or flight. We can deal with a difficult patient. We can roll with a schedule change. We can handle some little miscommunication without it wrecking our mood. But when that window shrinks, which is exactly what chronic stress does, small things start triggering big reactions. Not because you're a difficult patient, because your system is overwhelmed and running on fumes. The irritability isn't the problem. The irritability is the signal that your tank is empty. And the guilt on top of that irritability, that's its own kind of exhausting. So if this one landed for you, if you've been harder on yourself than usual or harder on the people around you, I want you to hear me say, this makes perfect sense. And it's telling you something. Now, warning sign number three is sleep that doesn't restore you. This one trips people up because on paper, they're sleeping. They're going to bed, they're getting their hours, but they still wake up exhausted. This one is so common in burnout that it's almost diagnostic. Because what happens when the nervous system is chronically activated is that when your body is technically at rest, your brain doesn't fully shift into that deep restorative stage of sleep that actually rebuilds you. You're sleeping, but you're not recovering. I remember waking up in the middle of the night so many times, aware that my brain had been quietly looping through some to-do list, replaying conversations of the day, things that I forgot, or things I didn't want to forget, things I should have said, and a problem list that was a mile long, all while my body slept. Like I was sleeping, but my nervous system absolutely was not. My mind was clearly still clocked in at the office. You might notice this as waking up in the night, often around two or three, not able to turn off your brain, or waking up first thing in the morning with this sense of dread before you've even remembered what day it is, or just that pervasive feeling of tiredness that coffee helps with for about an hour and a half and then it's back. A lot of dental professionals at this stage will try to fix this with more sleep. Go to bed early, get a sleep supplement. And those might help a little, but if the root cause is burnout, sleep alone is not going to solve it. Because the problem isn't the quantity of the sleep, it is the quality. And the quality is being disrupted by a nervous system that does not know how to fully switch off. Again, this is not weakness, this is biology, and it is information. The fourth warning sign is one people in caring professions like ours find particularly confronting. And that's when cynicism creeps in about your work. This might look like you realize you have zero patience, zero tolerance. Patients you used to meet with kindness now feel exhausting before they even walk through the door. You feel your shoulders tighten, just seeing their name on the schedule. You get yourself thinking, I cannot deal with that person today. Your compassion has turned into compliance. You still smile, you still do the job, but inside you're counting down until that patient's butt is out the door. Conversations that used to energize you now just feel like background noise. You stop being curious, stop caring about those conversations. And somewhere along the way, you've stopped feeling proud of the work. Work stopped feeling meaningful and started feeling like transactions, tasks, and getting through the day. For dental team members, this one is especially hard to admit because you chose this career. You care about people. The idea that you're becoming cynical about it feels like a betrayal of why you got into it in the first place. But here's what I want you to hear: Cynicism in the context of burnout is not a change in your character, it is a protective mechanism. When you've been giving and giving in an environment that is challenging, where it's harder to get back, when your empathy tank is running on empty, your brain starts to create emotional distance as a way of protecting you from complete depletion. It's actually a form of self-preservation. The cynicism isn't who you are, it's what happens when someone like you cares so deeply but has been running without sufficient fuel for way too long. That distinction matters. Because if you think the cynicism means you've become a bad clinician or a cold person, you'll feel shame about it and then just push it down. But if you understand it as a signal, a warning light, you can start to address what's actually causing it. And the fifth warning sign, and this one is particularly relevant to anyone in a clinical role in a dental practice, and it's the physical symptoms that you keep finding reasonable explanations for. It's the neck pain, the shoulder tension, the headaches that seem to live behind your eyes by Thursday afternoon, the jaw clenching. And yes, I see the irony of dental professionals clenching their jaw. It's also your gut that's been off, like your gut health is waggy. The chest tightness that you've told yourself is just anxiety about that difficult patient you have coming in. Now, and I want to be clear here, some of these things absolutely have purely physical explanations. Dental work is physically demanding. Ergonomic strain is real. If you're having physical symptoms, please take care of yourself clinically. But what I want to offer is this when multiple physical symptoms are happening together, and they're happening consistently, and they're worse on work days than on days off, that pattern is worth paying attention to because chronic stress and burnout don't just live in your mind, they live in your body. Your body keeps gore. That's not just a phrase, it's physiology. When your nervous system is chronically activated, it produces a stress response, cortisol, adrenaline, the whole cascade. And sustained exposure to that response has very real physical effects inflammation, muscle tension, disrupted digestion, impaired immune function. Your body is not betraying you. It is communicating with you loudly at this point, and it's in the language of symptoms. The question is whether you're willing to listen. So these are the five warning signs we've talked about today. Sunday night syndrome, irritability that doesn't match your circumstances, sleep that does not restore, cynicism creeping in, and the physical symptoms you keep explaining away. And I want to be honest with you, you don't need all five. You don't need to be scoring a perfect five out of five for this to matter. One of these, one that you recognize in yourself that you've been brushing past is enough. One is enough to take seriously. Because here's the thing about those whispers. If you don't listen to them, they eventually will start to shout. And by the time burnout is shouting at you, it is so much harder to come back from than if you had listened to it when it was quieter. But remember what we talked about earlier. Patients don't wake up one day with a massive dental issue out of nowhere. There were signs, little whispers before they were alarms, the sensitivity, the bleeding, the food getting caught between 12 and 13, the tiny little thing they kept telling themselves was probably fine until one day it wasn't. Burnout is sneaky like that too. Your body and mind usually don't go straight to crisis mode. They start with those little messages. The Sunday dread, the short fuse, the waking up exhausted, the headaches, the scrolling instead of resting, the feeling that everybody needs something from you and you have absolutely nothing left to give. And just like your patients, sometimes we convince ourselves if we ignore it long enough, maybe it will just magically get better, or we'll just chew on the other side. So before you brush this off, too, I want to ask you something. What physical or emotional signal have you been ignoring that might just be your version of bleeding gums? I'm gonna say it again because I really want that to land. What physical or emotional signal have you been brushing off that might be your body quietly asking for a reset? Not asking for you to quit, not asking you to blow up your light, not asking you to move to a cabin in the woods and start selling sourdough. Just a reset, a pause, a little curiosity, a moment to stop treating the symptom and ask what's underneath it. Because the goal isn't to wait until your nervous system needs an emergency appointment. The goal is to notice the sensitivity before it becomes the root canal. I want you to think about the last two or three weeks, not in some clinical analytical way. Just is there something, a tightness that keeps coming back, a thought you've been having that you keep pushing aside, a feeling on Sunday night, a moment in the day that you dread. If something came up for you just now, something specific, I want you to honor that. Write it down if you can. Say it out loud if you're somewhere where you can do that. You don't have to fix it right now. Just let yourself know that you know, because awareness is always the first step. You cannot address what you refuse to see. And the fact that you're listening to this podcast, that you showed up for this conversation today, tells me that some part of you is ready to see it. Okay, I'm gonna close with a reframe because I know what happens after an episode like this. You start to identify with one of these warning signs, maybe more than one, and then there's a voice that goes off in your head, and it immediately goes to, what's wrong with me? Why can't I handle this? Everyone else seems fine. And I need to interrupt that voice because it is wrong. So here's your reframe for today. Those warning signs are not weakness, they are your nervous system doing its job. Think about a warning sign in any other context: a warning light on your car, a smoke alarm, a pain signal when you touch something hot. Those are not the system failing. That's the system working. These are intelligent, protective signals designed to prevent something worse from happening. Your burnout warning signs are the same thing. Your body and your mind are not. Falling apart. They are doing exactly what they're designed to do, sending you information about a situation that is depleting you in the hope that you will do something about it. The problem, and this is where I want to be very specific about what's actually happening here. It's not that you're having the signals. The problem is that you've been trained to override them. And when I say trained, I mean that deliberately because dental professionals, all of us, hygienists, assistants, office managers, we've been trained in a culture that celebrates pushing through, going that extra mile. It encourages it, actually expects it. It equates endurance with professionalism. It makes self-care feel self-indulgent and vulnerability feel like weakness. You have absorbed years, probably decades, of messages that say this is hard, but you can handle it, can do hard things. You're a professional. Don't complain. You show up. And I'm not saying that that culture is entirely wrong. There is real value in resilience. There is real beauty in the commitment we as dental professionals bring to our work every single day. But resilience is not the same as ignoring those signals. Resilience is not pretending you don't have a nervous system. Real sustainable resilience is built on a foundation of actually listening to your body and what it's telling you and responding to it, not as a luxury, but as a professional necessity. You're not a machine. You are a human being who has chosen one of the most demanding, most relational, most physically and emotionally taxing roles that exist. And that deserves acknowledgement, not just from people around you, but from you about you. So the next time you feel that Sunday dread, or you notice irritability that doesn't fit, or you wake up exhausted again, or you catch yourself being cynical about a patient or a colleague, I want you to try something different from what you've been doing. Instead of explaining in a way, instead of telling yourself you're fine, instead of adding guilt on top of an already heavy load, I want you to pause for just a moment and say, my nervous system is doing its job. It's telling me something and I'm going to listen. That's it. You don't have to fix it in that moment. You don't have to have the answer. You just have to be willing to hear it. Because that pause, that tiny act of listening, that is the beginning of the way out. You can't just pretend it's not there. This is exactly what we cover in my membership, Dental Life Mastery. There's a link in the comments where you can join. We cover the 10 mental hygiene skills that get rid of burnout for good. I coach you through all of it. I hope you'll join me over there. Okay, now before I let you go, if this episode resonated with you, I have another invitation for you. I want to invite you over into our private Facebook community Beyond Dental Burnout. It's a group specifically for dental team members, hygienists, office managers, dental assistants who are doing exactly this work, showing up honestly from themselves. This group is a safe, supported, no judgment space to do this work alongside other people who get it. I want you to click and join us in the show notes. Go over to Facebook, come find us, beyond dental burnout. So here's your assignment for the week. It's a small one, I promise. Just answer the question, the one from this episode. Write it down somewhere. What physical or emotional signal have you been brushing off that might be your body asking for a reset? You don't have to share it with anyone. You don't have to do anything about it. Just write it down. Let yourself know you know. Now that's enough for today. That's more than enough. I'll be back next week. We're going to talk about something I think every single person on the dental team has felt but rarely has the work for. And that is what it means to feel invisible at work and what to do about it. Until then, take care of yourself. Not as an afterthought, but as a priority. Have a fabulous week. I'll see you on next week's episode and in the Facebook group. Bye. Hey, have you had a chance to download your free copy of my mental hygiene checklist yet? Visit Beth Heilmancoaching.com to get your copy. It teaches you the practical skills you need to achieve the same level of excellent mental hygiene as your dental hygiene. Don't miss out on this valuable resource for both your personal and professional growth.