Burnout

In this episode of the Oh Health Yeah podcast, hosts Gus and Zach explore the pervasive issue of burnout, defining it as intense fatigue that prevents individuals from being fully present. They discuss practical strategies for managing mental health, setting boundaries between work and home, making gradual life changes, and above all, learning to hold grace for yourself as you navigate life's demands.  
Key Topics Covered
Understanding Burnout: Defining burnout as a state of deep fatigue brought on by work, family, or lifestyle stressors.  
Strategies for Relief:
Dedicating 15 minutes a day to "me time" (e.g., reading, fishing, cold plunges).  
Spending time outdoors to reduce anxiety and depression.  
Creating clear transitions between work and personal life (e.g., sitting in the car for 5–10 minutes, changing clothes).  
The "Pulling Levers" Framework: Applying nutritional concepts (when, what, and how much to eat) to stress management by avoiding trying to change everything at once.  
Holding Grace for Yourself: Overcoming "hustle culture" expectations, dropping the pressure to perform perfectly, and giving yourself space to rebuild slowly after major life shifts or tragedy.  
"Don't be afraid to hold yourself to high standards, but also don't be afraid to give yourself grace."

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome into the Oh Health Yeah podcast brought to you by Healthy is Wellness. As you all know, our mission is to empower you to take control of your health and elicit a little bit of curiosity in your life when it comes to the world of wellness. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And if you have loved ones or friends that you think would benefit from this, share it with them. Let's get this thing going. What is up, Healthiest Family? We're back with another edition of the Oh Health Yeah podcast. Today we're going to be talking about something more mental health focused. Zach's kind of the expert in this field. We're going to be talking about something that the majority of Americans probably struggle with, especially middle-aged Americans, middle-aged humans. This something is burnout. And we're going to specifically talk about what burnout does, how it impacts people, and then different things that we believe people can utilize in their life to actually help with burnout. So in my mind, what burnout is, is it's it's really intense fatigue that pulls people away from their ability to be fully present in any moment that they're in. Burnout can come from family stress, it can come from work stress, it can come from really anything, honestly. But what burnout does is it fatigues us in a way that doesn't allow us to be fully present and doesn't allow us to be the best human that we can be. Do you agree with that burnout definition?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Okay. So when we're thinking burnout and how best we can help our clients with that, oftentimes when we sit down with people on site, we'll talk about, hey, what does stress look like in your life? Or what things are you doing for you? Because oftentimes we give so much and we don't take. And so when we're thinking how do we help people optimize burnout or decrease burnout levels, we oftentimes talk about our calm category and ways that we can reduce stress. One of the biggest things that we like to recommend to people when they're struggling with burnout is taking time for themselves. How can you take five minutes a day for yourself or 15 minutes? We have a card that's titled Healthy is Me Time. But literally what that card talks about is how can you take 15 minutes for yourself every single day? And that could be, that could be fishing for somebody that loves fishing. That could be a cold plunge for somebody that loves a cold plunge. That could be literally reading a book, whatever that is. How do we take time for ourselves to decrease our burnout levels? So if you're struggling with burnout, how can you build in 15 minutes of me time for you? That's one strategy we'd like to talk to people about. Another one that we like to talk to people about is spending time in nature and getting outside. It was one of our focuses of the month recently. When you're outside, not only does the sun help obviously increase vitamin D levels, but it helps to reduce anxiety, depression. It helps you to be fully present. So when we're thinking reduce burnouts, one, can you take some time for you? And two, can you spend some time outside? Because both of those things are gonna help when it pla when it comes to reducing burnout. Do you have anything to add right now? As I'm just buzzing through things.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Uh, I have a strategy when are you ready? Yes, hit it. Uh one of my favorite strategies is kind of a uh I kind of stumbled on this. I kind of created this terminology with my coaching and just leave it at the door. And this specifically applies to like that work stress, especially. I'm I'm gonna use you for an example. I think that you do the absolute best you can with something like this. With everything that's been happening in our business lately, I think it's been a little a lot more difficult for you. But in the past, I've seen you do much better with it. And that's leaving it at the door and knock and like kind of just staying off of work stuff when you get home. But let's say you work a nine to five in your stress to the nines at work. Can you take five to ten minutes in your car when you get home before you go into dad mode, before you go into husband mode, wife mode, mother mode, whatever it may be? Can you take five to ten minutes and do something that is stress relieving in your car? Whether it's, you know, we God, I love to talk about task stacking. And if that's calling your best friend on your way home from work, calling your mom and just having a debrief session, or putting on your favorite music and screaming it at the top of your lungs, it screaming or singing your favorite music on your drive home is a is a double-edged sword in a great way because when you sing or hum, it forces you to breathe more rhythmically and focus on your breath, which is going to in turn lower your cortisol level because of the nitric oxide that you're absorbing with those breaths through your nose. Um, but when you get home, try to leave it in the car, create, create an actual transition. So, like instead of immediately walking in the house as soon as you get home and going into that mode, it's hard to differentiate work life from home life if you don't create a transition. So if you can take five minutes to be like, okay, this is my time, have these thoughts, try to try to work through it, debrief whatever you need to do. And then when you cross that threshold into your house, go into that mode and don't worry about the other stuff as best you can.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

So that's a great strategy. I think the way that I do that in my own life is my clothes. So I'll change an aggregate clothes. I'll go from my work clothes to my comfy clothes or my workout clothes, where that sweats and a cutoff or shorts and a T. But the clothes change for me is where I go from like boss gus to like dad gus and just fun gus. Even though I think I'm fun both ways. But for me, the clothing, the clothing change is a big one. And when you're thinking just different strategies you can implement in your life, like that's an easy one. Like, okay, can I sit in the driveway for five minutes, like you just said? And that's you taking me time as well. So it's taking kind of what I said the 15 minutes of me time, implementing that right before you walk in the door to almost turn the key a little bit to okay, now I am a different version of myself. So I think that's a great one. Yeah, the clothes too is a huge one for me.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

I love that. That's a really good, actionable item. My all-time favorite strategy for burnout, and I'm gonna have you grab the card, levers. Levers. When I first started as a client at Healthy as wellness, my coach Grace, who we love and miss very much. She's still alive, she just works somewhere else, but is healthy as pulling levers. So this is the healthiest pulling the right lovers card. And I'll let Gus break it down as if I want you to talk to me like I'm coming to you, and you think this is the best challenge for me. From a nutritional perspective?

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Burnout. Burnout, okay, interesting. So the the levers card is based off of three different levers that you can pull. So the emphasis on this, it's based off of nutrition, but uh, you need to talk about how you play with it with stress. Because the the three levers that you can pull when it comes to the nutritional side of things, the first one is when you eat. So, what this ties into is like a fasting concept. Can you do a smaller eating window? Can you do a larger eating window? Do you want me to do all three and then you'll talk about how you okay? So, can you do a larger eating window? Can you do a smaller eating window? The second one is can you focus on what you eat? So either taking away certain foods or adding certain foods, taking away maybe the Hershey's bar and adding in a handful of raspberries, taking away add focusing on what? And then the third lever is how much? So can you eat less? Can you eat more? When we're talking to people about this, it's not that you have to pull all three levers at the same time. It's can you pull one of these at one time? Can you pull another at another time? It's more so based around different strategies that you can use to really begin taking control of that area of your life. How do you how do you talk about it when it comes to stress, Anthony?

SPEAKER_01 8:05

So when I talk to people about the levers, if just like with nutrition, I think I, if in my opinion, the way that I interpret the level the levers challenge is if you pull all three at once, you're setting yourself up to fail. And I think it's the same way with burnout. If you are going 150% at work, in the gym, at home, as a dad, in your hobbies, you're pulling so many levers so hard. You're so much more likely to fail. Especially when you come home from an injury or or a tragedy from grief, right? So, like I think that's one of the biggest things in this can be applied to almost every podcast we've ever talked about. Excuse me. So let's say you went through a tragedy. Someone died, right? Happens to all of us, we all go through it, it sucks. But before that tragedy, you were rocking it, right? You're going to the gym three or four times a week, you're getting perfect grades in school, you're doing all of the things perfectly. You feel like you're really in your stride, and then that tragedy hits, which again happens to all of us. And you take a week to grieve and move on. And oftentimes, as humans, we expect ourselves to go right back into that stride. Right. So after that week, you're like, okay, I need to go right back to the gym four times a week, perfect grades, perfect attendance, perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. But when you take a week off, two weeks off, three months off from an ACL surgery, whatever it is, you're pulling too many levers at once, and you're so much more likely to fail. So that's where I like to really talk about like slowly ramping up rather than going zero to 100 right now. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

I think it really, really contributes to burnout is this hustle culture that's all over social media. And I think it when we see people on social media doing starting businesses and being a mom and being a dad and going to school and having a career on the side of their business, we don't see the parts of that that are hard. We don't see the tragedy, the death, the, the, the depression, anxiety, all of those things, because that's not what social media is most of the time. I think it's getting there, but it creates this very unhealthy expectation of ourselves when that's all we see all over social media. So I think the reality of the situation is you have to give yourself grace and understand that just because you were doing XX during YY time doesn't mean that you're going to be able to do that right away again. And when we aren't able to do that amount after something like that happens, we spiral and we feel like we're a failure. And like, what's the point? I think this has really, really affected me. And you talked to me a lot about this about just doing one thing instead of trying to do everything like I was at one time. You know, there was a time during my weight loss journey where I was genuinely going to the gym twice a day to play basketball and to weightlift or whatever. Perfect, and I mean genuinely perfect macro and micro tracking, like to the point of like a disorder. I was, I was hitting everything so hard. And then I went through a really, really, really bad depressive, obsessive, compulsive disorder episode right before my wedding. And then after the wedding, my life calmed down and I expected myself to get right back on that horse. It's never worked. It's never worked. And if you really think back to it, I didn't implement all of those great things that I was doing overnight. But I expected myself for some reason to be able to do it again, to do that overnight. And it just doesn't make sense, right? So if you like look at it, hindsight's 2020, if you look at it from that perspective, I think it's just really important in regards to burnout to try to do, to try to slowly introduce those things one at a time. So that's what I've got on that.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Sweet. I like it. And I mean, small changes, big impacts, little things. Like you got to compound those things over time. You can't do it all at once. I agree 100%. So when we're thinking burnout, kind of like Zampy just said, take it small. Small changes, big impacts. Don't feel like you have to do all the things in the world at one time. When it comes to actual things that you can pull in your life, actual levers to use the word again, can you leave work at work? Can you leave home at home? Try to create a relationship there that's beneficial for you, whether it's parking in the driveway and taking five minutes for you or changing your clothes. Can you take some time for yourself to kind of reconnect and be fully present again? And then I mentioned it a little bit and we have a previous episode on it. Can you spend some time in nature? That helps with burnout as well. But the biggest thing here, don't feel like you have to do all the things all the time. Do what's best for you. Listen to your body, listen to your mental health, and listen to you because you're the most important person in the world after all. Can't pour from an empty cup. Thank you all so much for tuning in today. We love doing these episodes for you all. If there's ever anything else you want to hear from us, let us know.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

What I want to leave you guys with is two things can be true at once. And that's really hard for some people. Don't be afraid to hold yourself to high standards, but also don't be afraid to give yourself grace. Thanks for listening, guys.