Episode 168. The Real Reason You're Still Exhausted Even After You Take Time Off

Have you ever come back from vacation, unpacked your suitcase, answered a few emails, and thought, "How am I already exhausted again?"

In this episode, I'm sharing a realization that took me years to understand. For a long time, I thought I was one weekend getaway away from feeling better. Every six to eight weeks I'd hit a wall, escape for a few days, feel refreshed... and then find myself right back where I started.

What if the problem isn't that you need more rest?

What if something in your daily life is draining you faster than rest can refill you?

We'll talk about the difference between rest and restoration, the hidden "leaks" that quietly steal your energy, and the simple question that can help you uncover what's really going on beneath your exhaustion.

If you've ever wondered why a vacation helps for a few days but never seems to last, this conversation is for you. It might just change the way you think about burnout, time off, and what it truly means to feel like yourself again.

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

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Transcript

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Hey friends, and welcome back to the podcast. Okay. I'm going to start with a question. And I want you to be honest, even if it's just with yourself, have you ever come back from a vacation and felt like you needed a vacation from that vacation? Like you took the time off. You went somewhere. Maybe you really did unplug. Maybe you had a lovely, relaxing time. And then you get back. And within a day or two, sometimes within hours, that same heavy, depleted, I just can't do this feeling is right back where you left it. And if you felt that, I want to tell you something, something very important right up front. That doesn't mean anything has gone wrong. And it doesn't mean you're bad at relaxing. It definitely doesn't mean you need to try harder to rest. It means something else entirely. That's what we're talking about today. So let's get started. 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 Heilman, former dental office manager, Turn 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. Summer is in full swing. A lot of you are either about to take time off, maybe you're currently taking some time off, or you just got back. And I think this is exactly the moment to have this conversation because I think a lot of people are quietly walking around thinking, I just took a full week out of this office and I still feel like this. So I guess this is just how my life is now. I'm going to confess something. For years I thought I was just one long weekend away from a different life. I could laugh about it now because it was so predictable. Every six to eight weeks, I'd start negotiating with myself. It would sound like, you know, I just need a long weekend out of here. Maybe if we just got away for a few days. I'm tired. You know, I've hit the wall. And because I was a high-functioning burnout person, I always had evidence for why that trip was necessary. The schedule had been crazy. We'd had staff issues. Insurance was out there doing insurance things. There was always a reason. What I didn't realize was I wasn't taking the trip because I wanted adventure. I was taking trips because I was trying to escape my own life for 72 hours. You know what I'm talking about. You know, you're sitting there in February looking at pictures of the beach in June, and you're thinking, if I can just make it there, everything will be okay. I used to do that all the time. And then I'd finally take the trip. I'd sleep in, I'd eat food, somebody else cooked. A Sunday morning under that crisp white comforter in a hotel watching pay-for-view. That was my favorite. Nobody was asking me where the lab case was, nobody needed to reschedule an appointment. Nobody was texting me about a patient emergency. And for a few days, I felt amazing. Then I would come home, not even get my suitcase unpacked, and I would be right back at it, answering a few emails, checking the voicemails at the office. And somehow by Tuesday afternoon, I felt exactly like I did before I left. Have you ever had that happen to you? That never worked. And I want to tell you why. When I was working in the practice, that was my pattern. It took me years to even notice it was a pattern because when you're in it, it just feels like life. It would roll around. I would hit that wall roughly every six to eight weeks. Now it wasn't a dramatic dropping to my knees wall. It was more like, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine. And then one day I'd wake up and just feel like I genuinely could not do one more day without getting away. And so I would take those three or four days to get out of there. But here's what I had to be honest with myself about eventually. That didn't last. I'd be okay for those few days, maybe feel really good. And then when I got home, I mean, it was like clockwork. Those same feelings were already there and they would creep back in. The overwhelm, the heaviness, that bone deep, tired. It's not about sleep. Like it had been sitting in the driveway the whole time, just waiting for me to pull back in. So six to eight weeks later, I needed to do it again. For a long time, I genuinely thought this is just how it worked. Like this is the rhythm. You push until you can't. You get away for a few days. You come back recharge. You push again. I thought I had figured out the system. I actually kind of was proud of it. I knew myself well enough to know when I needed a break. And that felt like self-awareness. But here's what I didn't see for a long time. I wasn't actually getting recharged. I was getting a temporary reprieve from something that never went away. The cabin in the mountains, that beachside cottage, didn't fix anything. It just turned the volume down for a few days. And the moment I walked back into the same environment, doing the same things, carrying that same emotional weight, thinking those same thoughts, the volume went right back up because nothing had changed. I had just stepped away for it for 72 hours and then stepped back in. And that, that realization eventually is the whole reason I wanted to do this episode. Because I think so many of you are running the same version of that pattern. Maybe it's not every six to eight weeks. Maybe it's a long weekend every month. Maybe it's counting down to your one big vacation every year, like it's the thing that's going to save you. And maybe, like me, you've come back from that vacation more than once and thought, wait, why do I already feel like this again? I want to tell you why. And I want to tell you it's not because you're doing rest wrong. Here's the thing I couldn't put into words back then, but I've figured it out now. And once you hear it, I think it's going to click for a lot of you the same way it clicked for me. Rest and restoration are not the same thing. Rest is the absence of activity. It's sleep, it's downtime, it's stopping. Sitting in a lounge chair poolside and doing nothing is rest. It's real and it matters. And your body genuinely needs it. Restoration is something different. Restoration is the replenishment of something that's been depleted. Not just your energy, that's part of it, but things like your sense of meaning, your sense of connection, your sense of who you are outside of your role in dentistry or in your role in your family. And neither has to do with your circumstances or the situation you're in. Nothing to do with that. Here's an analogy that I think makes this click. Imagine your energy and your capacity are like a tank of water. Every day you're pouring into your patients, your coworkers, your family, your responsibility, and all the little problems that land on your desk. But somewhere there's a leak. So no matter how much you pour in, the tank never stays full for very long. Something, maybe it's work stress, feeling unseen, disconnection from the things that matter to you, those are slowly draining that tank. Rest is like turning off the faucet for a few days. You stop adding more water that's just going to leak out anyway, which is good. That's not nothing. But turning off the faucet, that doesn't fix the leak. So you go away for three days. The faucet's off. The tank doesn't drain quite as fast because you're not actively pouring more into a leaking container. You feel a little better, maybe a lot better. And then you turn the faucet back on. You get home, you go back to work, back to the same routine, that same mindset. And the leak is still there. It was there the whole time. It never went anywhere. And the tank starts draining again, sometimes faster than before, because now you have felt what it's like to not be drained. And the contrast makes the drain feel even more obvious. That's why I took the whole week off and I'm still exhausting. It makes complete sense. It's not a contradiction, it's not you doing something wrong. You rested, the faucet was off, but the leak was never addressed. And the moment you step back into the same life, the same environment, the same patterns, the leak picked up right back where it left off. For me, six to eight weeks was apparently how long it took for the tank to drain to the point where I genuinely couldn't function anymore. And three days away was enough to slow the drain temporarily, but nowhere near enough to actually find, let alone fix, the leak. I had built an entire system around managing a symptom. And I never once stopped to ask what was actually causing it. This is how it might show up in a dental practice. Have you ever gotten into your car after work and realized you barely remember the day? You know you've answered the phones, you checked patients in, you know you solved 17 problems before lunch. But if someone asks you what happened today, all you can really say is, I don't know, but it was really busy. That's a leak, an energy leak. Here's another way it shows up in a dental practice. It feels as if you exist as the function of your job. What you do, and it's not who you are. People know what you do. They know you're the one who can fix the schedule, the insurance issue, that upset patient, the payroll problem, the broken autoclave, the team drama. You are everybody's solution. But when was the last time somebody asked how you were doing and actually waited for the answer? It also shows up because you end up carrying the emotional weight. Every day somebody hands you something. A patient wants you to fix their money problems, a team member is frustrated, the doctor is stressed, a family member needs something. And because you're capable, you pick it up. And then you pick up the next thing and the next thing. And after a while, you're carrying so much emotional luggage you don't even realize how much you're dragging it around. So, what is the leak? Because chronic disconnection from meaning sounds nice in a podcast, but I want to make this real. I want to make it. Can I get through Wednesday afternoon real? How do I make it through Friday real? Here are some of the most common leaks I see. And honestly, many of these were mine. Leak number one is just going through the motions. This is when your day has become a sequence of tasks rather than an experience. You're doing the work and you're doing it great, but there's no aliveness in it anymore. You can describe your whole week and it just sounds like a checklist. Patients, charts, payments, schedule, insurance, repeat. Nothing's wrong exactly, but nothing feels like it matters either. Leak number two, feeling like that function instead of a person. We talked about this a few weeks ago, the invisibility piece. If you spend most of your time being useful rather than being seen, that's a leak. You can be surrounded by people all day and still feel completely alone. Because what's being acknowledged is what you do, not who you are. Leak number three, the repetition without growth. It's the same procedures, same conversations, same kind of day on rinse and repeat, with no sense that you're actually moving anywhere. You're not making any forward progress. Even people who love their work can feel this leak because humans need a sense of progress, of becoming, of growing into something bigger than them. When that disappears, even good work starts to feel like you're treading water. Leak number four relationships that have gone flat. This one sneaks up on people. You're not fighting with anyone, nothing's wrong, but the depth is gone at work, maybe at home too. Conversations are functional. Connection has become coordination. Did you grab that lab case instead of actual exchange between two people? Leak number five, you carry around other people's emotional weight with nowhere to put it down. If your day involves absorbing other people's fear, their frustration, their pain, their anxiety, patients, coworkers, sometimes the provider you work with, and you never have a place to set that down, it accumulates. Vacation doesn't empty that out, it just pauses the accumulation for a few days, turns the faucet off. Leak number six, there's no outlet for the things that used to bring you joy. When did you last do something? Just because you wanted to, not because it was useful, not because it was for someone else, just because it was yours. If the honest answer is I can't remember, that's an energy leak. And it's one that a week at the beach isn't going to patch up because the beach isn't the thing. The thing is having a life that doesn't include things that you love on a regular basis. Here's what I really want you to connect with. Rest replenishes energy, it does not replenish meaning, connection, or alignment. They need their own kind of repair. And that repair doesn't happen on a beach in four days, it happens in the actual structure of your daily life. And this is exactly why so many people come back from vacation. You feel good for about 48 hours, and then you slide right back to where you started. The leak was sitting there the whole time, patiently waiting. For me, it was sitting in that practice in patterns I had not named, had no real awareness of, in a version of myself that had quietly gone missing somewhere along the way. The escape to the city for a couple of days, it didn't know any of that. That cabin in the mountains, it was never going to be able to fix it. They weren't able to do that. So here's the question I want you to ask this week. And I want you to actually sit with it, not just hear it and then move on to the next thing. What were you doing the last time you genuinely felt restored? Not just rested. I'll say that again a little slower. Not the last time you slept in, not the last time you binged a show and didn't move for six hours. That's rest. And it's fine, but that's not what I'm asking you about. The last time you came away from something feeling more whole, more like yourself, more connected to something that actually mattered to you. It might have been recently, it might have been years ago, it might not have been something big. It could just be a conversation with someone who really gets you, a creative project you got lost in, a moment where you help someone in a way that felt meaningful, not productive, but meaningful. Sometimes restoration looks like spending time with someone who helps you remember who you are outside of your job, outside of your responsibility and your to-do list. I had one of those moments just this week. My dear friend Amy and I spent the afternoon together. We walked around the lake, we found a beautiful patio restaurant nearby, and we decided, because why not, to order a bottle of champagne to go with our salads. At one point, Amy looked around and she smiled and she was like, I feel like we're on vacation. And she was right. The funny thing is, we were only 15 minutes away from our homes on a Thursday afternoon. We weren't in some exotic destination. We weren't escaping our lives. We were simply present in them. We talked about real things. We laughed. We connected. There was no rushing to the next thing, no guilt about what wasn't getting done, no checking the clock every five minutes. Just two friends enjoying the moment and soaking up every minute of it. When I drove home, I realized something. My heart felt lighter. My mind felt quieter, and my soul felt full again. That's what restoration feels like. I didn't need to take a week off of work or buy a plane ticket somewhere. It just took a couple of hours with someone who helped me feel like myself. All right, here's your reframe. And I want this one to actually land, especially with where we are in the calendar right now. If rest isn't working, it's not a sign you need more rest. It's a sign something in your daily life is actively depleting you that rest cannot replenish. And here's why this matters so much right now as we get into the summer. A lot of you are about to take time off, or you just got back from it. And I want to give you two different messages depending where you are. If you're about to go somewhere, good, go enjoy it. Don't put pressure on it to fix everything. Let the vacation be what it actually is. Rest. Turn the faucet off for a few days. That matters and you deserve it. Full stop, no questions asked. But don't load it up with the expectation that's going to send you back a completely different person who suddenly loves Mondays. That's not what rest does. And when it doesn't do that, which it's not gonna, I don't want you walking away thinking that vacation failed or you failed at vacationing, because neither one of those is true. And if you just got back and it's already wearing off, I want you to hear this. You're not broken, and now you know why. The vacation worked exactly as well as vacations work. It did its job. The job it cannot do, the job no vacation can do, is patch a leak in your daily life. That's not what it's for. Expecting it to do that, that's like being upset that turning off a faucet didn't fix a cracked pipe. So here's the actual shift I want you to make. Instead of asking, how do I rest more? Which is the question that kept me booking those trips every six to eight weeks, ask a different question. Where is the leak? Go back through that list from a few minutes ago, going through the motions, feeling like a function instead of a person, repetition without growth, relationships that have gone flat, carrying weight around with nowhere to put it, no outlet for joy is one of those landing for you. Maybe more than one is. You don't have to fix it today. You don't have to overhaul your whole life this week. That's not the point. And honestly, that's the kind of pressure that has its own kind of leak. But naming it, actually identifying okay, I think this is where it's coming from, is the first time you've pointed at the real thing instead of just managing around it. And here's something worth knowing. This connects back to the episode we did on your brain versus your mind. Rest is largely brain care. It's sleep, downtime, recovery for your nervous system is very important. But the leak, meaning, connection, identity, alignment, that's your mind territory. That requires a different kind of attention, reflection, honest conversations, sometimes a real look at whether something in your work or your life needs to change, not to just be escaped for the weekend. You can't out vacation a mind problem. I tried four years. It's a really expensive, ineffective way to find out. So here's what I want to leave you with. If you're heading out somewhere this summer, have a beautiful time. Really, let it be rest. Let it be simple. You don't owe it the job of fixing your whole life. It was never going to be able to do that anyway. And if you're on your way back or you've been back for a while, and that same heaviness found its way home before you did, I hope today gave you something. Not a verdict on what's wrong with you, just a different question to ask. Where is the leak? Not how do I rest more? This connects fabulously to what we're doing right now in the Beyond Dental Burnout Facebook community. If today's conversation resonated, come find us over there. We're doing exactly this kind of work together. We're figuring out what's actually depleting us, not just managing around it for 72 hours at a time. Until then, wherever you are this summer, if you're on a trip or back home or counting down to one, I hope you find some deep restoration, not just rest. Have a fabulous week. I'll see you in the Facebook group and on next week's episode.

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Bye.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Hey, have you had a chance to download your free copy of my mental hygiene checklist yet? Visit Beth HeilmanCoing.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.