Breaking the Positive Feedback Loop of Stress: How to Prevent Burnout and Find Balance

Ep 96. Every day, we navigate life within a set of personal boundaries. These limits shape our behavior across various settings—from home to school, work, and even casual encounters at the grocery store or one-on-one interactions. Social boundaries, though often unspoken, are essential for maintaining harmony in our relationships and minimizing stress. But what happens when these limits are pushed to their breaking point?

Imagine stress as a positive feedback loop. Just like a sound system where the volume gradually increases and spirals out of control, when we face mounting stress without relief, it amplifies our emotional and physical reactions. This loop intensifies the pressure and leads us deeper into burnout.

We push ourselves to the limit in our work, caring for loved ones, raising children, or managing demanding service-oriented jobs. Interacting with unhappy clients or dealing with challenging situations can escalate stress. Over time, the emotional and physical toll of these challenges leads to burnout, and the cycle of stress keeps feeding itself.

This positive feedback loop operates without us even realizing it. As we neglect self-care and push through without taking a step back, stress builds. Each new task, each challenging interaction, only feeds the cycle, making us feel more overwhelmed. The more stressed we become, the less energy we have to cope, and the harder it becomes to break free.

Burnout is the result of this vicious loop. It quietly builds as we lose sight of the signals our body is sending—like racing thoughts, tense muscles, or shallow breathing. But by learning to recognize the early warning signs of stress, we can intervene before the loop gets out of control.

Think of it like turning down the volume on that sound system. By practicing mindfulness, situational awareness, and emotional self-regulation, we can interrupt the loop. Monitoring our heart rate, breathing patterns, and emotional reactions at the point we feel stress starting to rise helps us disrupt the cycle.

Instead of spiraling further into burnout, we gain control and move towards a more balanced, peaceful state. With this awareness, we can transform overwhelming stress into manageable moments, break the positive feedback loop, and avoid the destructive path toward burnout. Take care and walk well. 

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 96 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at the local community college. What we're going to be discussing today is going to be a little varied, but we're going to start off with the base of positive feedback loops. Now this is something that in

hard physical science we're aware of, it also relates very well to our levels of consciousness of self during stressful situations. We're also going to speak about negative feedback loops and also what those things are that are resembling our way of dealing with things day to day based on our levels of stress. So to start the discussion, we're going to kind of define what a positive feedback loop is. Now in hard sciences,

And also we know within psychology as well, we've lifted those terms from the hard sciences, is to realize that a positive feedback loop is a system where there is a continuous level of fuel. So if you start a fire, for instance, that's going to be our mental image and we keep adding wood to it or we have a perpetual stock of wood that we keep adding fuel to that fire. It'll never really burn out. But

Positive feedback loop generally speaking within the human body is what we start looking at when we start hearing things of people getting hurt where they go too far Where things are pushed too far to where the body starts to break down? Overheat this sort of thing like when somebody is detoxing from alcohol sometimes the neurotransmitter NMDA Does not regulate GABA so therefore

Whenever this happens, those are the brakes and the accelerator. The body starts to continually heat till we reach stroke levels and then we could possibly die. not in an immediate vicinity of medical care. So within the human body, a positive feedback loop is helpful to a degree, but beyond a certain point, it becomes dangerous and destructive. Now, in the inverse sense, a negative feedback loop

armando (02:48.973)
would be something where it might burn kind of hot, but that fire only has, let's say, eight logs on it. It might last through the night, might burn particularly hot, have a peak at some point, but then it starts to run out of fuel and then finally fizzles out and we just have the leftover ash. But no one is adding more to it, so therefore it has a limited run, a limited burn time, so to speak. And we do have negative feedback loops as well within psychological.

circles that we would call extinguishing behaviors wherever if we see somebody acting a certain way that's not particularly acceptable or or really uncomfortable and we don't pay attention to it and yet they're doing it in the sense of trying to get attention or reward but they don't get it more often than not that becomes something they won't do again they'll pack that away or may just extinguish the behavior in quotes but when we have a positive feedback loop

And as far as behavior, the things that we do may or may not be healthy, or they may be healthy within a limited range, but if they're dumped to excess, this is where it becomes dangerous or destructive. Now, whenever I did my dissertation, burnout was one of the variables that I was looking at. So we're very familiar as a society about burnout and what happens whenever we are working and we don't have that sense of respite and able to not only

pull back but also recover from the daily stressors of what would be our jobs so to speak. But burnout isn't something we just experience with job but largely is a phenomena that has occurred since we've become more industrialized and spend most of our lives working at the 40 plus hour of work week. So the repetitiveness and that sense of pointlessness and almost that sense of there's no payback even though you may be getting paid.

the payoff, the good feelings, endorphins and the dopamine aren't always quite there. So we tend to have a sense of worth being dropped as far as our job, our sense of worth as far as an individual. We feel possibly worthless and hopeless. That sounds like the beginnings of depression. And also this is something that I studied as well with burnout, with not only depression, but PTSD as a result of

armando (05:14.476)
in working with acute care mental health patients where there was a high danger of injury, this sort of thing to those that were the caretakers. within the realm of just medical mental health care, there is a level of stress that if we think about patient care, it's a continuous load. Hospitals are 24 hours a day, seven days a week, generally speaking globally, wherever they have them. So.

This is something that if you are in the caretaker profession and there are very few of y'all and they may pay y'all well, it is still not something that will mitigate the actual stress that one experiences that eventually one starts to burn out. And this is a type of positive feedback. Where at some point we put more fuel on the fire. In other words, we are the fuel and the fire is that in which we burn.

and this is our profession, the people that we deal with, and the stress is within our job, and then we start to break down, we start to get ill, but we start doing things and thinking about things because of the state of stress we're in, distress versus eustress because we're not enjoying it, and we start thinking in ways that may be out of the norm. Sometimes whenever burnout occurs, there is this one quality called depersonalization.

where the people that you deal with become a little less important and people that we interact with, not in the medical field, become not only a little less important, but we tend to be less apt to have compassion for them and we are only basically grinding our weight through our lives and often this is when we start seeing people that we're talking about work, going to work just for the paycheck and if they're in a human services field, this is tragic because people get mistreated, the people that need help.

people get judged and maybe for instance, and this is a very specific for instance that I ran into talking to some of my students in class this week about substance use and getting people into treatment or allowing people to arrive to treatment. However, the barrier of entry should be very low, especially if somebody is struggling with an addiction and if they get to the point where they can break the portal and come on into the facility to get help.

armando (07:35.076)
even though they don't want to but they know they need it because otherwise they would die and we have let's say an unkind or maybe a dispassionate assistant or someone that may actually be a little rude or ugly and treating these people that are having the worst day of their life coming in trying to seek help like they're a second-class citizen or worse yet just strictly rude to them and then these people are like I don't need this so they leave

they could very well be getting assistance once they made that step. Why do we have to, as a helper profession, for instance, make the barrier of entry not only harsh but difficult and therefore somebody decides I'm not needing this and thinking that all treatment is this way. Notice the absolute term in quotes, all, whenever we're at level of stress that is elevated our thoughts and our processes of thinking and reasoning.

tend to resemble that level of stress or they tend to go along with it and those are traits of stress which means we have limited reasonability if we're emotional, we're in chronic pain so we may have turned somebody away and turned them off to the possibility of them getting help hopefully not forever but they might actually get to the point where they'll just continue doing what they're doing to the point of the positive feedback loop consuming them where they die so we don't want to do that so

To think about this idea of assistance being a helper, or let's say we're just a regular person going about doing things, not in the helper field, but let's say you work in the service field, we see a lot of this as well. Positive feedback loops, how we live in our life like we're in a positive feedback loop, where it's, we're gonna be burn, burn, burn until I can't burn any longer, burn bright and burn short, but it's gonna be a glorious death or memory of my life, so to speak. But what about quality?

It's not always about excess or extreme or getting as much of it in as possible because life is short and I'm going to get mine. And these are reflective conscious symptoms of stress and living life in a burnout mode or potential burnout mode or what we would call positive feedback loop. Wherever there is no, okay, no more fuel so stop burning and just be. Or go back to our baseline which a negative feedback loop indicates.

armando (10:01.608)
by default that we get back to our baseline. It's okay to burn a little hot but can't do it all the time because at some point either the fuel runs out or you run out. But let's say you're the fuel and you truly do get destroyed by that because it's excessive and you can no longer stand the heat. You might be part of the fuel but you also become the ash at some point. Whereas with a negative feedback loop there's only so much burn you can do and when you run out you're done. You're not burning anymore. You just are. And

Here's the thing, whenever we're looking at positive feedback loops as an analogy for how we live our life and the level of stress, we're looking at that we are living in our most modern sense, a very stressful world where we have respite from stress, but not as much as we used to. When we used to live in areas that were a little more rural where we'd have to walk and we didn't have this continuous interplay of...

Electronic interaction with other people we had distance in time. We used to have to physically write letters in quotes snail mail I love that name and I don't know how many letters I wrote in this lifetime, but from my teen years till I was probably in my early 30s was writing to my teacher writing to friends across the state and I would write ten page letters sometimes and I would get ten page letters back and it was always fun to get something in the mail, but there was a quality of

I would say patience that was being instilled. I remember no Amazon at the time. had to order stuff by catalog or by some little cutout out of the back of a magazine, sending in money, a little money order and waiting for weeks at a time, four to six weeks delivery on the average for things sometimes longer in the mail. And those are things that aren't lost, but we don't see nearly as much of.

In our everyday life, we had a sense of patience. When we used to be pre-microwave, what do we used to do? We would cook. That took time. And we had to kind of watch things and look at the symptoms of what cooked, in quotes, looks like. Whatever you're cooking, bacon or eggs, this sort of stuff. Or if you're cooking something like steak or a piece of toast and waiting for things, and waiting for the little dinger to go off when your bread, bread is ready. Those are qualities of interaction with technology. But there's a component of time there.

armando (12:26.454)
that we were very aware of and being more aware of the symptomology of what cooking looks like whenever I'm cooking food, when it's done, when it's overdone, and oh my god, I got busy and I forgot it and it burned, which we burn a lot of things now because we're so distracted that we don't pay attention to the process or we're not actively engaged in cooking, for instance. And those of you that work in culinary arts know that you have to be very mindful of not only

What you're cooking, could be cooking several things, but what you're cooking and the states that they need to be in so they are consumable versus getting consumed by the positive feedback loop, so to speak, by cooking it too far or leaving in the heat too long or not being able to put it on the appropriate level of heat. things of this nature do relate to what it is that we do in our lives. And often we live our lives in a sense that we're not very mindful. We're not very attached to what it is that we do. We look at where we want to go.

and we miss the middle. It's almost like whenever we're in road hypnosis, wherever we drive, get in the car to drive, and we remember pulling out of the driveway, and then we remember pulling into the parking lot at the Walmart or Target or wherever it is that we go, and we are missing the largest amount of details of the drive in between. Point A to Point B, yes, but what happened to the space in between those points? There is something there, or there was, but why didn't I pay attention to it?

And it's there, it's in our recorded mind for the most part, but whenever we're aware and awake and paying attention to details, if you're driving in the lovely picturesque area, you take in a lot of the cool things. You see things that other people would not simply because they're too busy focusing on where they got to go and how they're getting there and don't enjoy the ride nearly as much. So what does this positive feedback loop have to do with that?

and self-regulation. Well, one, it is probably one of the most important ideas about regulating self by not allowing oneself to fall into extreme levels of stress and being, two, aware of the symptoms of stress and what do I think like when I'm under stress? Now, whenever I'm at a higher level of stress, my thinking tends to resemble what looks like racing thoughts. We tend to have thoughts that are very quick.

armando (14:50.273)
They're very visual oriented and we have these ideas that seem not only intrusive, but sometimes excessive. The higher levels of anxiety, fear and stress, the more we start going into problem solving mode and trying to fix that in our environment that is stressing us, even if it seems nonsensical. And some of it may seem extreme, things you wouldn't do because well, that part of our brain that brings these ideas up, it was formulated at a time before we had laws and guidelines and...

and police, so something to think about. But our stress level tends to have a type of thinking and feeling that goes along with its level of stress that would be more akin to survival mode. I've got to run, got to hide because I'm feeling like the bologna sandwich and I'm either going to fight or run. And that sort of mindset is not what we would call the best mindset for making good decisions that

are going to be changing what our future looks like. It's not good for making decisions involving relationships wherever people get emotional. And we're more worried about alleviating the immediate stress, the discomfort of not getting along, arguing, or seeing people in a state that may seem counter our best interest. They could be stressed, could be angry, could be crying. We could be very uncomfortable because we don't have an answer.

and quickly our mind goes to trying to find an answer and we might feel very uncomfortable with those things that come up as a result. So what does a positive feedback loop tell us? Chances are we're living at a level of stress that may be a little high. We also may be thinking in a way that may be more apt to the survival mechanism in a simpler time versus one that

is a survival mechanism along the lines of problem solving for the long term, the long game, versus just the immediate alleviation of stress and discomfort. And this is something that we see with people that tend to abuse drugs in that they're trying to get rid of the feeling, change the feeling or numb the feeling, especially if there's been abuse or if there's been anything particularly traumatic that's happened. tend to see a

armando (17:15.991)
gravitation towards those modes of problem solving and those really are problem solving tools that I would say aren't healthy. They are bad for you. But there are attempts at alleviating stress and creating relief from stress and we have to see those things as they are used and it's not always for recreation even though even recreation can be an escapist tool.

In the self-regulation sense, what can I do to keep myself from going into a positive feedback loop mode? Well, two things that are really helpful or what I teach with a running man model is to be aware of yourself. And what awareness in particular am I talking about? Heart rate, breathing, that sense of pressuredness. If you start feeling like you're under stress, all of a sudden you feel pressured. Chances are your heart rate's gone up. Chances are you're getting tension in your muscles, meaning fight flight.

If you're feeling that level, mind you, this is a body self-awareness to help regulate what it is that we're thinking and how we think by being aware of our state, then that's going to give you a whole lot of useful, opportunity to either get better by moving out of the way, not being there or start taking evasive action by maybe strategically, moving physically to alleviate some of that physical sense of stress, but also

Start thinking in a way that maybe you start planning. Well, if this is getting stressful for me, what can I do to prevent that? If someone is saying or doing something that makes me uncomfortable, sometimes just listening without judgment. Sometimes people will get stressed around us and will trigger our stress within us, the mirror neurons within us, our social conditioning that makes us want to friend and be friend and be like those around us, even though maybe it's not comfortable.

We tend to do that very quickly, so being aware of that level of stress so that we can be mindful and self-regulatory and not allow ourselves to go down that rabbit hole. And the next thing you can do that is immediately useful in the moment is not to inhale, but rather whenever you start feeling that stress is to exhale.

armando (19:32.433)
decompression breath that also keeps one from feeling that sense of you must suck wind because you do that and your sympathetic nervous system arouses and you're more apt to become not only aroused but irritated and possibly start feeling that fight-flight response so if you can ground yourself by doing an exhale first before you start breathing in and don't breathe deeply on purpose but rather allow yourself to regulate breath by exhaling

that allows you to feel that sense of I am ready for impact, so to speak, if I must, but also it centers oneself in the body and takes one's sense of thinking to awareness in the body versus thinking and being in the mind for a moment. And it breaks that state where we tend to follow along versus lead if we must. So those are some useful tools that help manage what happens whenever we get stressed.

And we start living our lives by a positive feedback loop model that tends to resemble the track towards burnout. So that's really about it for today. And I just want to tell you, thank you for listening to this podcast and please share this with people that you know. I am on YouTube and Spotify, iTunes, Amazon Music and iHeartRadio and all other places that you get your podcast. So please.

share this with folks you think may benefit. will tell you that even though this podcast is a useful psychological tool, it is separate and apart from my professional duties at my several jobs that I keep. also much of what I speak here is not merely opinion. It is largely research-based, practice-based, but also my opinions are woven in, but once again separate from my places of work. This is just strictly Armando. But on top of that,

If you have any feedback for me, please send it to the email at runningmangetskillsproject at gmail. I'd love to hear from you. Take care and walk well.