Stress Mindset- Lessons I've Learned the Hard Way

Today's episode is the first in a series of episodes called "Lessons I've Learned the Hard Way." In this series, Dr. Bybee explores some of the topics that were essential for her recovery from burnout but that were difficult to put into practice. 

On this episode, Dr. Bybee discusses stress and some of the cultural misconceptions around it that may be making your stress worse. She outlines what stress really is and how changing your thinking around it may impact your stress levels.

Join me for more over on social media:

• Blog: Humans Leading | Jillian Bybee
• Instagram: Jillian Bybee, MD (@lifeandpicu)
• LinkedIn: Jillian Bybee, MD | LinkedIn 
• Threads: @LifeandPICU
• Website: Contact — Jillian Bybee, MD (jillianbybeemd.com)

If you’re ready to kickstart your journey (or your team's journey) to a less stressed life, I’m ready to help you! You can get in touch about 1:1 coaching or inviting me to facilitate a workshop for your group, get in touch via my website. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hello, and welcome to Humans Leading, a podcast aimed at restoring the well-being and joy of high achievers who have burned out on their way to success. I'm Dr. Gillian Vivy, a pediatric critical care medicine physician, medical educator, coach, and leader in well-being and professional development. I use my personal experience with burnout recovery to help others do the same. This podcast is for anyone looking to move beyond hustle culture in order to find true fulfillment and well-being. In each episode, I share practical solutions on a variety of topics, including limiting beliefs, stress management, leadership, well-being, and more. If you're looking to feel less stuck and redefine what a successful life looks like for you, this is your podcast. Come join me. Hi, welcome back to the Humans Leading Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jillian Bibe. I'm so excited to be here with you today, kicking off a special series called Lessons I've Learned the Hard Way, where I share some of my own experience with burnout and stress and the resources and skills that have been really helpful for me along the way. The reason I call this Lessons I've Learned the Hard Way is as you may have guessed, this has not been easy for me, and it may not be easy for you either, but I hope it will be helpful. One thing I want to be clear about is that these tools and practices have not completely eliminated the stress in my life. In fact, as we'll talk about later in this episode, I don't think it's possible or desirable to eliminate stress in our lives. But I think these things have made a huge impact on my day-to-day experience and how I live, and I think they're a key part of why I have not experienced a full-blown burnout episode in several years, and I've never had a relapse of my depression. By creating self-awareness and having a toolkit, I think these science-based tools will help you as well. As I've shared before, I've had burnout in my own life. In fact, I've experienced it twice. The second time really came as a surprise for me. The first time I experienced it, I was a pediatric critical care medicine fellow, which means that I was in training and working really long hours. And I co-experienced my episode of burnout along with depression. You can see from data and from other people's stories that this is pretty common. Burnout is something that can lead to depression. And I thought once I addressed that with therapy and medication and some lifestyle changes, I thought that would all get better, especially as I was going to become an attending physician where my hours would be better. Unfortunately, during my second year of being an attending, meaning I was a full-fledged practicing doctor, I experienced another episode of burnout during a very busy time at my hospital. As I mentioned, this came as a bit of a surprise to me. I was not expecting to re-experience it. After all, I'd recovered, so I thought in my own head, shouldn't I be done with burnout? Shouldn't I be able to have managed these things? The problem was I was still doing the things that had contributed to my burnout in the first place, including shoulding all over myself. Earlier in my career, I didn't have a clue about how my mindset of thinking about how things should or shouldn't be was actually making my stress worse. Every time something wasn't what I expected it to be, either with myself or other people, I felt myself getting more and more frustrated. At times I also felt let down. And both of these things directly contributed to my burnout and they impeded my recovery. But before we dig into mindset and practices to manage stress, it's really important to zoom out and talk about what stress even is and how our own mindsets about it could be making it worse. I find a lot of the cultural messages about stress to be extremely unhelpful. And so we're going to take a minute to look at yours. Before we define what stress really is, I want you to take a moment to reflect on what comes up for you when I even say the word stress. From what you've heard and in your own life, do you feel like stress is something good or bad? Do you think stress is preventable or inevitable? Have you ever had or do you currently have too much of it? Have you ever had or do you currently have too little of it? How you answer these questions will depend on a lot of factors about you. But if I had to guess, somewhere along the way, you've heard that all stress is bad and it's something that we have to get rid of at any cost. It's the thing that shortens our lifespan and makes us prematurely age, and it's not good for us. And this could be true if what we're talking about is distress, the negative form of stress. But it's also possible that your mindset around how you should be able to get rid of stress and eliminate it is directly making your stress worse. In this case, you might be feeling, shouldn't you be more relaxed if you're taking steps to decrease your stress? This was how I felt when I first started this work. I kept thinking, I'm learning about this. I should be doing it. Shouldn't I feel better already? Shouldn't this go faster? Why don't I feel any better? While these things are understandable and part of being a human, they definitely weren't helping me feel any less stressed. One of the problems with the word stress is that we don't always understand it when we use it. As I mentioned, most people mean the negative form of stress, but there are actually positive forms of stress that we'll talk about in just a minute. But in really simple terms, your stress response is the cascade of chemicals that gets released when your nervous system detects a threat. It's your body's fight or flight response that's acted out through the sympathetic nervous system. These threats that we experience are called stressors. A stressor is just something that we experience with our senses or anything that we think that activates that stress response. For example, if you're driving and someone cuts you off, the stressor is the being cut off. The stress is the cascade of chemicals that happens in your body, which causes a faster heart rate, increases your blood pressure, changes your breathing, etc. If you are able to proceed on your drive without getting caught in a cycle of rumination about how everyone is such a bad driver, this stress cycle will actually end in a few minutes and you'll return to baseline. But if you get caught up in a thought loop of why aren't people better drivers? Now I'm going to be late, I'm the only one who's doing XYZ thing, and you continue to think about it, you continue to prolong the stress cycle in your brain and your body, and you do not recover as quickly. We have the potential to impact our stress in two ways. One of them is to signal to the body that it's safe. This allows the stress cycle to end and for us to move on. And this is something we'll really dig into in depth in the next episode. The other thing that we can do right now is to change our mindset about stress in the first place and to broaden our understanding of it. In the simple example that I just used, your brain recognized that a person was cutting you off before you were consciously aware of it. This activated a cycle of chemicals in your brain and your body that allowed you to break and avoid a collision. All of this happened in the blink of an eye. If you didn't have a threat detector system, you would not be able to respond to threats in the environment, and in this example, you would have gotten in an accident. If you stop and think about it, I bet there are a lot of examples in your own life of where your stress response allows you to rise to a challenge. And having this challenge mindset or seeing stress as a positive can really help you. This is certainly true for me in my job. I work in the pediatric intensive care unit, and that means a lot of times there are real emergencies happening. A few weeks ago, there was an emergency that I had to run to on the floor. I felt my stress response kick in as I ran, realizing that the emergency would need me to attend to it. The emergency in this case was not an easy one. A lot of people wanted to me to have the answer right away, and I felt like I could have the answer and I could have the skills, but I was definitely challenged. As I went through the process of trying to get a procedure done, because I was the only one there to do it, I felt the adrenaline raging through me. As it was surging, I could have fallen victim to the I'm not going to be able to do this. I'm so scared of this mindset. That's really when we're overwhelmed by the threats. But as I felt the adrenaline surging through me and considered what I needed to do, I took a brief moment to thank my body for activating itself in a way that I could rise to the challenge, and I eventually got the procedure done. That didn't mean that the process felt good, and I definitely didn't feel good afterwards as I continued to have adrenaline surging through me. But it did mean that I was able to not freeze in the face of a challenge and to do what I needed to do. Sometimes I think we shy away from thanking our bodies for the great things that they allow us to do because we get overwhelmed with the cultural messages that stress is bad and that it ends our lives. In the simple example I gave, and in the example from my workplace, stress, the cycle of stress, is the thing that allows us to do what we need to do. That doesn't mean that it should run unopposed all of the time, but it does mean that it's not something to be scared of. It can be something we can work with. Reframing our mindset about stress in this way allows us to feel like we are not passively experiencing the events of our lives. Rather, we become people who are in control of our lives, people who can rise to the challenges of our day-to-day existence. The more that we're able to do this, the more we are able to feel like we have some degree of control in our lives. This creates a cycle of positive emotion where we feel like we have what we need. This helps us complete the stress cycle and move on. Your body is adapted to experience stress as a natural cycle that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In my work example, my stress cycle started when I heard the emergency notification go off. The middle of my stress cycle was the part where I was taking care of the patient during their emergency and getting the necessary procedure done. The end of my stress cycle for this event came when it was all over and I took some deep breaths and sighs of relief, frankly. I also shared a few moments of positive interaction with some of the other people who had responded to the emergency. And these were the keys in this scenario. These were the things that told my body it was okay. It told me that the emergency was over for that moment. And over time I felt like my body was relaxing, my heart rate slowed, my breathing returned to normal, and some of the muscle tightness that had built up during the event let itself go. This is the goal of the stress response. It allows us to rise to challenges or threats to our safety, and eventually it allows us to return to baseline through a process of completing the cycle. But it's possible to get stuck in the cycle if we ruminate or if we suppress the emotions that come up during the stressful periods. Or we might get stuck because we are living and working in places that chronically activate our stress cycles, and we haven't learned the practices that the body needs to help us calm ourselves. We'll begin to talk about those practices in more depth in the next episode. For now, I'd really like you to start thinking about your relationship with stress and to begin to see how you might relate to the word differently. I don't want you to invoke toxic posity or to tell you that all stress is good or threats to your personal safety or good. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is instead of viewing stress as something good as good or bad, I'm asking is there a way you can relate to it, like the dial on the radio, that you turn up when you need it and that you turn down when you don't. Can you see how stress helps you with the challenges in your own life? Can you be less judgmental of yourself when you experience stress or emotions? If you're not there yet, don't worry. This is a practice that takes time. And like I said at the beginning of this episode, this is not something that I'm perfect at. When I'm working a lot, this gets harder and harder for me, and it's something I have to consciously remind myself of. This is where having a coach, a therapist, a trusted friend, or an accountability buddy can be really helpful. Discussing your stress with people can be a way of helping you move through it when you feel stuck. It can be the thing that gets you out of the cycle. In summary, stress is not inherently good or bad. It's a biological response to something that happens. Seeing it as a positive or a negative thing is related to our mindset about it and to how much chronic stress we are experiencing. When we are chronically experiencing stress that we haven't processed, it builds up and makes us more likely to perceive threats in our environment, further exacerbating the stress that we are feeling. This is what eventually leads to burnout. If you're listening and you feel like that's you, don't worry. The first step of recovering from burnout is recognizing that you don't feel like you are able to recover from your stress. The next step is getting help, either from a therapist, a mentor, a loved one, a coach. I'm here to tell you there's life on the other side of burnout, but that it continues to take work each day not to fall back into old patterns. On the next episode, we'll talk about how to complete the stress cycle so that you feel like you have some tools in your toolkit. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review and share it with someone you think would enjoy it. See you next time.