Burnout Masterclass - How to Prevent, Handle, and Never Have Burnout Again (OptiCast 22)

🎓 ABOUT THIS VIDEO
Burnout is a silent but pervasive threat for high performers. In this episode, Nathan and Aubrey delve into the physical and mental signs of burnout, how it differs from fatigue or losing discipline, and most importantly, how to build systems that prevent it altogether. Learn practical strategies rooted in biology and systems thinking to safeguard your progress and well-being.

🏋️‍♂️ WORK WITH ME → theoptimizationlab.cc/bio

🧠 TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Introduction to burnout and its significance for high achievers
02:08 - Personal stories of burnout symptoms and consequences
05:15 - Differentiating productive stress from burnout signals
06:42 - The importance of sequencing and system integrity in training and recovery
09:24 - Physical and mental signatures of burnout and how to recognize them early
12:14 - Internal signals: hormone shifts, cognition, motivation, and emotional blunting
15:24 - Why high performers ignore warning signs and how to reframe burnout as constraint
18:42 - The integration of the O5 system and March Method for proactive management
21:05 - Burnout in training, nutrition, and lifestyle—signs and mitigation strategies
25:24 - Distinguishing between need for rest versus loss of discipline
28:22 - Strategies for safely pulling out of burnout and realigning systems
35:44 - Building systems that prevent burnout instead of reacting to it
44:32 - Understanding sustainable intensity through sequencing and predictability
48:43 - Practical questions from listeners: overtraining, deloading, and recovery timelines
52:39 - Final thoughts: the power of governance in long-term performance health

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you need to ask whether you're burning out, you probably are burning out. Like uh like productive stress doesn't actually feel like you're dragging a dead body through your week just to prove that you're fucking disciplined. Productive, like productivity actually pushes you to make your output more sharp over and by output I mean like the results of the stuff you're getting. And burning out just makes you more like you need more caffeine, you need more volume, you need more willpower to maintain the same. So what we're doing is essentially creating debt.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

This podcast right here is just for an game for purposes. I am not medical doctor, not a nutritionist, or a personal trainer. I am barely fun qualified for operated toaster. As Ruth Langore so wisely said, I don't know shit about fuck. So don't trust me, don't listen to me. We're here just for shits and getting. And with that disclaimer out of the way, let's get started.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Welcome everybody to another episode of the Opticast with me, Nathan.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

And me Aubrey.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Guys, this week, very, very important topic to me. Very important topic to me. We are discussing burnout. What is burnout? How do we actually get to burnout? And what is it that we can actually do to avoid burnout? Like what are the systems that we can implement and put in place to avoid this shit? Have you actually dealt with burnout before?

SPEAKER_02 1:00

Yeah. You have? I think so. Okay. Um, so over the past couple years actually, I've dealt with symptoms of burnout and they were unexpected, I guess. It was kind of like I didn't know what was happening. I just felt like tired all the time, stressed all the time, not able to sleep or rest or think about anything but my job.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

And um and it was really taking a toll because I am very disciplined. And I would show up and I would just push through because, well, you gotta do it, because you gotta work, cause you gotta, you know. Yeah. I'm that kind of person. So you don't really notice it. But yeah, so it's close to my heart too. I think that I am still learning how to deal with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Yeah, I think we all are, man. It's it's such a it's such a difficult spot to be. It's also a much more difficult spot to leave because sometimes you need to stay in that place and kind of like burn through the wick, which is which is very difficult. Uh I remember when I was in my last uh semester of college and I told my advisor that I had no more fucking gas on me. I I set up some unrealistic goals and I fucking hit him, every single one of them, but I wanted my C V to have more publications and more teaching experience before finishing college than my all of my friends had before finishing their PhD. So I did that, and it cost a lot. I I gave myself, you know, IBS. I uh had hair loss that I could literally like just I would just take a shower and just take these bunches of hair of my head. Like my stomach just couldn't process any food whatsoever, super stressed, like very inconsistent sex life. It was it was fucking awful. And then life circumstances just basically put me in a spot where I had to continue pushing because now I have my master's. And then, you know, the big C word happened, and uh that was happening during my master's, and I was looking at different careers, so I started working another job, full-time job, on top of my master's, writing my thesis, writing my papers and everything, writing papers, uh, going to conferences and all of this shit. And I got to a point that it was just too much. And once I left academia and I was just working my job, I just got to a point that I couldn't even hold my job anymore. And I just basically had this like massive blank point in my life that was just like six months to more that was just like a pit of recovery. You remember, like, the house was dark, like people that are like, Oh, your background is so dark. You motherfuckers have no idea. Like, I I before getting my dog, like, it was nothing, it was like no sensation apart from just this deep-seated feeling of like I can't do shit, and I have no more pleasure on anything. It's different from Anhedonia and it's different from depression. We're gonna we're gonna touch on that a little bit, but not to go so deep into our experiences. I actually want to give you guys some actual fucking sauce that you can implement into your lives. So let's actually start with one of the questions that was asked by uh by my clients.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

How do you know when you're pushing productively versus slowly burning out?

SPEAKER_01 4:00

I mean, if you need to ask whether you're burning out, you probably are burning out. Like uh like productive stress doesn't actually feel like you're dragging a dead body through your week just to prove that you're fucking disciplined. Productive, like productivity actually pushes you to make your output more sharp over time. And by output, I mean like the results of the stuff you're getting. And burning out just makes you more like you need more caffeine, you need more volume, you need more willpower to maintain the same baseline. So, what we're doing is essentially creating debt, which is a concept that I've introduced in the previous videos. Like, if your sleep length is is is fine, but you wake up and you're like super wired, like that's a sign that you have a resilience problem and that needs to be fixed. And in my methodology, within the March method, resilience actually sits in the R level above age, which is the actual hypertrophy and and and like the performance that you want. So when like when you notice that your energy becomes unpredictable, your your hormones are gonna actually start lying to you. So this is this is what catches doctors all the time. Your cortisol is actually gonna shift some diodonase activity, and then your reverse T3 is gonna creep up, and your free T3 effectiveness drops before the number on paper actually drops. And then you swear that you just need to push harder and stop being a bitch. But that's like actually has nothing to do with you being a bitch, it's just like the signal is distorted and you didn't know where to look. When you think about like productive work, it actually should increase your capacity, it should be fulfilling. Burning out actually just increases your fragility overall. Like if there's a small stressor that just wrecks your mood, fucks up with your digestion, or with your libido, you're not adapting. What you're doing is downshifting all of your energy production to be able to compensate for the demands that you're putting on your body. So you can have your labs looking fine, but your output is declining, and that's just your body reallocating energy to survive instead of growing. And your doctor is not gonna call that out because it's not a pathology yet. Now, a productive strain is going to also improve your recovery markers week to week. This is what's going to induce what is called hormesis. Like burnout is actually gonna flatten all of this shit out. So your HRV is gonna tank, your resting heart rate is gonna go up, your appetite's gonna get really fucking weird, and definitely your body temperatures are gonna drop. But you're still gonna just tell yourself that you're just going through a tough phase, that this is just a phase. If you can't like deload and pull without like anxiety, you're not actually pushing very productively. Like you should be able to notice these signs and pull out of this phase. What you are addicted to is fucking output. You're addicted to that grind, and that grind will eventually get you to the fucking burnout point. And the the O5 system that I have, it actually would flag this as an obstacle, as in one of the O layers, before it ever touches your program. So, like, it prevents this from happening and it understands that this is the context that your body is in, so that you can actually start differentiating these two, the productivity from the burnout. Productive work is also going to respect sequencing, which I'm very huge on. Like, if your mitochondria is very unstable, if you don't, uh, you know, you shouldn't escalate volume, you shouldn't escalate your hormones, you should restore that thoroughput first. Like burning out is exactly what happens when you skip down one layer of sequencing because you think you are the fucking exception. You think, oh, I can just dabble on some things here and there. Another thing to look out for if you if your progress is only happening like when everything in life is perfect, you don't have any resilience. You're just fragile and you depend on good conditions for things to work. But real productive work, like a real productive push, it's going to increase your tolerance to chaos. It's not gonna depend, like increase your dependence on control.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Which is crazy that that's what we hear from clients. Whenever we ask about, okay, how is your life then? How is your life now? They're saying that it's less like it's given them more freedom.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I always talk about the fact that structure is not a part of lack of freedom. Structure is what gives you the guardrail so that you can make sure that you actually achieve the goals that you owe yourself to achieve.

SPEAKER_02 8:02

And it also frees up your mental space, like you're talking about waking up, you know, and feeling like flat and wired and shit.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Like when you when you need a lot of stimulants just to feel normal instead of like sharp, I think you need to like pay attention to compensating patterns here. Compensation is always a downstream problem of something that you didn't fix upstream. You don't have a system, that's your fucking problem. Like five cups of coffee, like five cups of coffee, or like a fuck ton of stimulants, you know. I I depend on a lot of stimulants, but um, you don't need stimulants right now. You're taking clean.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

He's gotten me down to one cup of coffee a day. I actually had no coffee today.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Bitch, fuck yes. That's what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

So sad.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Um, you you're a productive push should feel something like controlled aggression. It like burning out is gonna feel like bargaining with yourself. If you're if you're negotiating with yourself like every morning just to show up, that's a sign that you are your system is out of sequence. Things need to fall into place. But the difference in between these two isn't actually the mindset, even though I touch on mindset a whole fucking lot. It's whether the organism can afford the load that you're about to put on it. And you can't assess that shit on your own because you are inside of the system that you are trying to evaluate. So if you think you can objectively tell the difference while you're the one that's actually applying the pressure on your system, you're kind of proving my point.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

You can't even sometimes diagnose the symptoms.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Exactly, exactly. Like that's that's why there are these questions. Like the the next question, actually.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Okay, what does burnout actually feel like? Not just physically, but mentally.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

So good, good question here. Burnout doesn't feel very dramatic, especially in the beginning. It just feels kind of flat. It's like you're just doing the same thing you're supposed to do, but like nothing hits. It's kind of like when you use nicotine a lot and then you don't get a buzz anymore. Like, I cannot get a buzz from nicotine at all. It's just your reward system goes really, really quiet. Like physically, you're tired, but you're also wired. That's a big one. You can't fucking relax, but you're not feeling like powerful and strong either. Like your sleep is very long, maybe, maybe not. For me, it wasn't, but maybe it's it's long, but it's not restorative. You kind of wake up and you feel like you already lived an entire fucking day before your day even started. Like I'm I'm fasting right now, so I slept and I just the hunger was just very, very pronounced at night. And I I felt like I was awake the entire night, just like feeling my stomach like rumbling and shit. It was very, very interesting. Like mentally, your thoughts feel like they get heavier, they don't get slower, they get heavier. Like everything feels like it costs way more ATP than it used to. Um, like, and that's just the basic component of the of the upstream, like Jesus Christ, the fucking nicotine just hit my throat.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

It's just a think of something interesting to say.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

That's just a the component of like the fact that your mitochondria will downshift, and if your mitochondria downshifts production of ATP, your cognition will follow that. What's ATP again? Adenosync triphosphate. Which is basically your currency for energy for every single process in your body. Yeah, it's like the money exchange. You stop feeling very like sharp and you start feeling very effortful. That's a big one. Like the decisions that used to be very automatic for you now require a fuck ton of negotiation. And like usually you're gonna recognize that is weakness, so you keep pushing through when in reality is just your system is showing you, it's diagnosing you as you're like, you have a fucking leakage in your system of your energy, of your capacity. Your motivation doesn't disappear, and this is a big uh uh thing that people talk about. Like it actually gets very fragmented, so you care, but there's like very little emotional voltage with that, so to speak. It's kind of like your dopamine signal gets really blunted when your stress stays high for a really long time, and you'll be just end up becoming more reactive. Like your your smaller problems just trigger a fucking disproportionate irritation, and like that is the erosion of your resilience that has nothing to do with your personality. So don't try to tackle burnout through morality or through your personality, it's not gonna work. It's not your character, it's HPA dysregulation, it's cortisol rhythm distortion. That's what it is. Like when you're when you're in burnout, deep in burnout, you start questioning yourself more. Like, why is this harder than it used to be? And that's the internal mismatch. These are like high, very, very high standards that we have with very low internal output. That's the psychological signature of burnout. And and your libido is also gonna drop, but quietly. It's not gonna drop to zero, just it's gonna be very muted. It's kind of like if I have it, I have it. If I don't, who gives a shit? That's energy allocation. Like your body does not want to fund reproduction when it's unsure about your own fucking survival. It just fucking makes sense. And because of that, you crave stimulation much more. You crave more caffeine, you crave more novelty, you crave more scrolling because your baseline reward tone is actually lower. Like that is a compensating pattern. You are not indulging yourself. It looks like indulging from the outside, but you're actually just trying to compensate for these internal rhythms. Your focus, like at work, you notice it becomes very, very brittle. Like you can lock in for very short bursts of time, but you crash so much faster. And that's because of the energy production. Like your nervous system can still fucking sprint every now and then it just can't sustain it. So, like me with fasting right now, I don't have a lot of substrates for ATP production in my body. Like, fuck, like I get to like 2 p.m. and I'm like, oh my god, it's 2 p.m. already. Like I did my whole day worth of work, but still, like now I feel like someone just pressed the fucking emergency brakes and I'm still trying to press the gas pedal. That's what burnout feels like. And you start like romanticizing time off, but like when you actually get rest, you feel restless. So you can't recover. You literally are trapped inside of a system that doesn't know how to fucking downshift. So you feel behind. You feel like you're like like you're you're you're never on track, even though objectively looking at the fucking data, you are. And like this happens because internally you know that you're not operating at your ceiling, and that part fucking hurts, and that makes you want to do more, which keeps you stuck inside of this burnout loop. The most dangerous part of burnout is that you can still function, you can still train, you can still work, you can still hit your numbers, which means that no one around you calls that shit out. They can notice that. You have to understand burnout as like something that is not collapsed. Like, people see burnout, just made a post yesterday about burnout and like just saying people like you're not burnout. Collapse happens at a very late stage of burnout. Burnout is actually just constrained capacity masquerading itself as discipline. And here's the part that like I hate to admit, and like most people hate to admit as well is that you're the worst person to judge whether you're in burnout. Because the same drive that got you here will reinterpret every red flag as a sign to push harder. So it's impossible to solve this shit alone. That's that's what burnout feels like.

SPEAKER_02 14:52

So why do high-performing people ignore warning signs longer than they should?

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Because like warning signs don't look like failures to these people. They look at they look at these warning signs as weakness, and and people who are high performance who are like pushing the limits, like they build their identity on not being weak. So they've survived every fucking prior dip by just pushing harder. So when their capacity dropped, their bane, their brain like immediately reaches for the only fucking strategy that's ever worked, more output. That's literally not stupid. That's pattern recognition that's being misupplied by your brain and aiming to uh restore survival rates and and uh just maintaining your baseline. And that that like your the baseline of these people usually gets like they have a tolerance for discomfort that is very much higher than average. Like, I have a tolerance for like the unknown and uncertainty that is way higher than the majority of people. Yeah, and people people think that I'm like, oh, you know so much, and I'm like, you have no idea how many open loops I have in my brain. So when like your your recovery starts like slipping for you, like if you're a high performer, you're you're gonna normalize that. You're gonna say something like, Oh, I fell worse. That's like decline's normal logic, so to speak. So, like, these guys are still gonna perform, they're still gonna hit their meanings, they're still gonna train, they're gonna produce very well. There's no catastrophic event that forces some re-evaluation at some point. Burnout at their stage is just constraint, it's not collapse, it's way down the road. Cortisol can actually keep your performance afloat for way longer than it should. That's one of the problems with adrenal insufficiency is that at one point your adrenals literally can't keep up with the demand, but for a good amount of time, it can't. So it's gonna mobilize glucose and it's gonna sharpen you a lot short term, but it's gonna suppress the signals that you should be listening to. So your body looks fine until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's very fast. These people also trust data over like sensations and feelings. So if their labs are in range, they assume that they're fine. But when they're the issue with their labs is what I talked about. It's labs are downstream of physiology. Physiology will always beat fucking labs, physiology will always beat medicine, biology will always beat medicine, no matter what. By the time that your numbers are flagging some pathology, you already have been paying that interest for months. And the discipline for these people is sort of their protection mechanism, like their coping mechanism. The more disciplined they are, the longer they can override the feedback. So they're literally refusing adaptation. These people are used to being the exception. High performers are used to being the exception. So when someone tells them to reduce volume or deload or like stabilize your energy first, they assume those are for average people, not for them. Who the fuck does that remind you of? You yeah, like we yesterday we were having a conversation about this, about how my my own system basically called me out like so strongly that I was like, oh my god, I'm not following my system. That's my problem. I need to follow my own system. Like these people are gonna mistake volatility for intensity. So, like, they're gonna have these wild energy swings and they give you a lot of dopamine because they they they just feel like a very strong passion and they don't realize that their predicted energy is actually the marker for their capacity. So they're like self-sufficient, they don't need anything, and as self-sufficient becomes their blind spot. The 05 system for these people is life-changing. Why? Because it would check measurement, execution, and friction, all of these three layers, which are not part of the 05. They're they're with the layers of observation within the 05. This shit is intricate because you deserve best. Before escalating any of their output alone, like if they are alone, they just end up skipping and pushing the program even fucking harder. And they've been the the like high performers have been rewarded for ignoring pain, like in sports, in business, I myself in academia, like, but endurance is always gonna fucking win. So they internalize every signal to slow down because they see that as an obstacle for them to be able to dominate in their field. The real reason is that nothing explodes immediately, so you can't catch it early on. The system degrades very, very quietly. Your reverse D3 is gonna rise, your T3 effective is gonna drop, your sleep architecture is gonna fragment a lot, and your libido is gonna soften a lot, but there's still no fucking siren. You're just like, I'm just going through this period. And then when your body finally fucking forces you to go to fucking stop through illness, through injury, through an emotional crash, it feels fucking random. It feels out of place, but it wasn't random. You just ignore the data. High performance, they don't ignore the warning signs because they're careless, they ignore the warning signs because they've trained themselves to override their biology, and biology always fucking wins. The only question is whether you want to negotiate it with it early or get corrected by force later.

SPEAKER_02 19:28

So, how do you balance this though with you're saying, I mean, I feel like high performers are self-analytical, and that when you're saying, okay, you're still providing output, but for me personally, if I consider myself a high performer, I am analyzing my output and I'm saying, what the heck is happening? Like this is not like it used to be. What's the difference? So, do you find that high performers that you work with notice these things, or are you still thinking thinking that they don't they don't pick up on them until it's way too late?

SPEAKER_01 20:03

In general, by themselves, they're not gonna pick up early because it's part of their identity. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

I mean, I can totally understand being in like the echo chamber or whatever you call it, of your own identity and not being able to see those things. I'm just curious how the self-analysis piece. I think the self-analysis piece eventually leads the high performers to seek out a solution once they have the crash or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

If they're humble enough, which a lot of times they aren't.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

True.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

But the ones that are, it pays off.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_02 20:35

How does burnout show up differently in training, nutrition, and lifestyle?

SPEAKER_01 20:40

So in training, burnout is not gonna look like you're just fucking lazy. Uh, it's gonna look more like grinding through all of your sessions that used to feel very explosive and and fun and entertaining, but now they just feel heavy. I had that in my previous push phase where like by week like 16, I was like, fuck, I hate this. I hate it, and it just fucking killed all of my love for training. I I've been training like three to four times a week now, and it feels fucking great. Like 45 minutes instead of two and a half hours. Like you're you can notice that your bar speed drops a little bit, your pumps kind of really suck, and your recovery like stretches out in between sessions, but you tell yourself that that's just a hard block, that's just what it is. But if your mitochondria can't like fund the output, like force just becomes damage. So you you start needing more warmups, you start needing more caffeine, you start needing more music, more psyching up, like just to be able to hit the numbers that you literally hit last week. Like, that's literally not progression, that's compensation. And the O5 system would check the execution and the physiology layers before touching your volume. And alone, you would likely just add another fucking set. One thing that's very easy to notice when you're starting to see patterns of like adrenaline insufficiency or burnout is that, like, in in like injuries, like you just get these stupid injuries. They're not big tears, they're kind of like your tendons just bark a little bit, like your joints just get inflamed, you have these nagging shit that just won't resolve. Like, you should see that as poor resilience under load. It's not like just your genetics. Your genetics sets the footprint, but your habits is what shapes what happens inside of that. Like the stress biology is going to bleed into your tissue. We talked about that in the in the episode about injuries. In your uh eating patterns, like your burnout is going to show up as volatility. So your appetite is going to swing from being suppressed to being ravenously hungry. You either forget to eat or you physically cannot stop eating. Like your glucose is going to shift, your um, like your your cortisol is actually gonna shift your glucose handling, and your fasting glucose is gonna drift towards like high normal, but your insulin stays weirdly low. And that's one sentence, something that's hard to catch. On the topic of nutrition, like you also like your cravings change a lot. You just start wanting faster hits, like sugar, hyperpalatable foods, caffeine, right? Like, why? Because your baseline reward tone is down. So that's that's not a lack of willpower, and it can't be seen as such, and it's also not a binge eating disorder. That's just a nervous system that's trying to self-medicate during your downshift. And your digestion is also going to be very inconsistent with the food that you've been eating. Like you're gonna have bloating that you didn't have before, you're gonna have stools that are changing like week to week, you're gonna have like supplements that just don't seem to work anymore. Why? Because when the absorption of your gut and the clearance, like the detox system, are impaired, adding more inputs just creates a bunch more congestion and you can't get rid of these toxins. And you become like very chaotic or rigid with food. Like you're either hyper-controlled because you feel like things are slipping, or you are very impulsive because you're tired of holding the fucking line. And both of these are stress responses. Absolutely. Now, shifting that to a little bit of like lifestyle, it kind of looks like you have like compressed bandwidth. Like you still you can still show up, but you're gonna be less present. Like the conversations are gonna feel drainy. If you're like small inconveniences, they feel very offensive to you, like personally. And then, like, because like that happens because like you're because of your sleep. Like your sleep is paradoxical as fuck. You're exhausted, but you're also wired, and then you lie there and you're thinking about tomorrow, and then you wake up like already behind. It's because your cortisol rhythm has literally flattened your entire day, has already decided for you the day before that you're not going to be able to recover. And like you stop enjoying the things that used to bring you joy. This is the biggest sign. Like, your training becomes an obligation, social time becomes just effort that you have to push through, and even rest, it just feels like something you need to like execute correctly. You need to like nail that shit, dude.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

Dude, that's this is crazy how how relatable it is. Like the whole social aspect. I love social events and like hanging with my family and friends and all this stuff. And there have been points where it's like, oh my gosh, do I really have to go to this thing?

SPEAKER_01 24:36

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 24:36

And that's the opposite of who I am, you know.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Absolutely, absolutely. And the the thing is like well, for for like people like us who are very like high, like very driven people, our standards don't drop. It's just our capacity does. So this mismatch is the the psychological signature that I talked about before. Like, you know what you're capable of, but you can't access that shit. And the deceptive part is that you can still perform, like you still can hit your macros, you can still finish your sessions, you can still produce very well at work and thrive, which means that there's no fucking alarm sign that goes off. And then burnout in in your training is just like declining output under effort. It's just gonna be like burnout in nutrition, which is just unstable regulation under like rising control. And your lifestyle is just gonna be shrinking emotional margin under like rising responsibilities. And and none of that shit is gonna look dramatic. It's just gonna look like a tough season until the system finally refuses to fund all this debt that you have created. And if you're inside of it, you'll call all of this intensity. Like you're just like, oh, I'm just living it, you know, it's just an intense moment in my life, instead of calling a constraint. That's why these high performers stay in these phases longer than anyone else, you know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

What's the difference between needing rest and losing discipline?

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Okay, so needing rest feels like your output is slipping despite your discipline. Losing discipline means like you're slipping because you stop executing. Like those are not the same thing. When you need rest, you're still fucking trying, man. You still care, you still show up, but the bar speed drops, like your recovery lags a lot, your sleep feels very like fake, deep, it's never deep enough, and your nervous system just won't downshift. That's your resilience like eroding. Losing discipline is just inconsistent behavior. It's needing to rest like in like needing to rest is just consistent behavior with like declining adaptation. It's just consistently inconsistent. That that distinction is everything. And like most people, they they blurdy distinction because it's easier to just blame their character than to actually address the capacity because it forces you to downshift so that your system can recover capacity. And if you're executing the plan and your results stall, well, when you're working with me, your O5 system doesn't immediately like accuse you or attacks you. It actually checks the measurement, the execution quality, your friction, your physiology in that order specifically, that's important. And self-diagnoses are just gonna skip straight to dealing with this as a morality and a character flaw. Now, needing rest is also gonna show up as very predictable ways. It's it's gonna be a higher resting heart rate, lower HRV, irritability, lower libido, digestion, it just shifts a lot. That's just your energy reallocating upstream. It's it's your body protecting your throatput. Like and and losing discipline, it's gonna show up as like a broken structure. You miss sessions, you have untracked meals, you have your sleep drift, you have that, oh, I'll start tomorrow. Like that's a problem in your operations layer. And the trap is that high performance, they interpret all of this physiological fatigue as a moral weakness because their identity is built on being the one person that can actually push through in front of everybody else. But if your mitochondria is unstable, then pushing harder is just going to increase the damage load that you have. And rest in that context is part of actual sequencing. Real rest is gonna restore the predictability in your system. It's it's like after some appropriate like deload or load reduction, your energy is gonna stabilize a lot, your mood sharpens, your hunger normalizes. Like losing discipline doesn't rebound like that. When you lose discipline and you come back, you decay further. Like I just came back from vacation. I am fucking dominating this shit. I'm a hundred percent locked the fuck in. It was the rest that I needed. I'm even looking forward to go to the gym. You know, like that hasn't happened in months. You know, it was it was a sign, I interpreted a sign, I pulled the face. Now, if like two or three days of your like you reduce some structure and that improves your performance, like I like I said, you needed the rest, like I did. If two or three days turns into like two or three weeks of you fucking drifting, you lost all the structure, you lost discipline. So your your body is gonna give you signals way before it's gonna collapse. Like your cortisol is gonna prop up for a while, which is gonna mask this deficit that you've created, which is why this gets confusing. Like you can still perform while being undercover. And the the chaos here, the the the real difference between this, like two chaotic approaches, is that like rest is gonna reduce long-term cost. So it's playing the long game, and indiscipline is gonna increase long-term chaos. That's the difference. And like you are biased towards mislabeling both. When you're tired, you think you're weak. When you're drifting, you think you just need recovery. Like, that's why this isn't a mindset question, it's a systems question. Without you having an external control loop evaluating your organisms and your operations, you will default to self-criticism or self-justification. Needing rest is just a biological constraint. That's all that it is. Losing discipline is a behavioral breakdown. If you can't objectively separate those, you're literally inside of that problem. And the other thing that I wanted to add, well, let's let's leave that for later.

unknown 29:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

Let's leave that for later. Let's go to the next question.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Okay. How do you pull yourself out once burnout has already happened?

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Okay, first, you need to stop pretending that you just had a tough week or a tough couple of months. Like if you're if your system has been declining for months, you can't address that as motivation. That's system failure, and you just keep overriding that. You do not push through burnout. You actually need to remove the lew, remove the lew before the organism forces you to via sickness and illness. So if energy production is very unstable, aggression is off the table for you. It's not the time. That's literally the March method of 101, whether you like it or not. You're you're you need to to stop the burnout, you need to cap output before you optimize it. So drop volume, audit every single stimulant that you have on your list and get the sleeping time fucking locked. If you can't regulate your circadian rhythm, you can't earn intensity. Every single hormone in your body operates on the circadian rhythm. Guys, as well, look it up. Your testosterone peaks 6 to 9 a.m. It happens every single day. Women just go through a longer cycle. You need to first stabilize predictability. Same with the wake time, like same time of your meals every single day, same training slots. Burning out lives in volatility. Stability is going to restore safety so that your signals can be clear again. You you need to stop chasing your symptoms. Your libido's low. Oh, your mood is flat. Oh, your pump is gone. Cool. All downstream, all symptoms. You rebuild thoroughput upstream before touching hormones or any of the other fancy tools. It's a it's a removal time, not an addition time. Your your audit, uh, you you need to audit like your compensating behaviors. So extra caffeine, doom scrolling, oh, just one more set or one less set. Like these don't analyze those as part of your character, analyze as like your nervous system self-medicating and you're just prolonging the fucking hole.

SPEAKER_02 31:23

My compensation behaviors. I think I know what one of them is. Um, I think it is when my gym, like my routine at the gym, starts getting all janked up. Like, I'll start just skipping like a set here and there, or like I don't have time, and then what do I do? I'm like, I'm just gonna try to like make it up real quick onto my already, you know, two-hour gym set or whatever it is, and I start doing all this stuff, and so then you'll look at it and you'll be like, okay, we've been doing this for two weeks now. I think that there's something we need to pull back.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

Yeah, for sure, for sure. The other thing you need to do is reduce your decision load. This is very important. Um, I I literally started a gut protocol and I realized the protocol is very intricate, so I literally mapped out my day every 30 minutes, and I have it like locked on a schedule to make sure that this shit is there. Why? Sounds very overwhelming. It isn't. Also, this is not how I deal with my clients, this is how I deal with myself because this is my personality. Do not assume you know how my programs work if you're not in my programs. Anyways, you need to reduce some of your decision load because these burnout brains they cannot handle any complex programming. They need simpler training, they need fewer variables, they need fewer supplements, they need less noise. And the O5 system would just strip all of this shit before needing to redesign your program. You need to test your recoveries once constantly. Like, do a small D load, do a small like calorie bump, like if you've been chronically restricted. If your energy starts stabilizing, your mood lifts a little bit, so you need to be tracking all these things, and I have specific trackers for this for people who are dealing with burnout. That wasn't weakness, that was just under recovery. And you're like, you need to slowly reintroduce load, not because you're fragile and you're weak and you're a pussy, but because adaptation requires a certain margin. And burnout means you have no fucking margin, there's no wiggle room, everything is tight and locked in. And you need to also stop romanticizing intensity, goddammit. If you feel like you need to be crushed to feel productive, that mindset is what allowed you to get fucking crushed. Welcome, you're crushed. This is what feeling crushed feels like. Like you, you, you accept that you cannot objectively diagnose yourself while you're the one applying the pressure on your system. The same drive that caused burnout will try to shortcut the rebuild that you need to put yourself through. And pulling out a burnout is very fucking boring. Just like being in burnout is very boring. It's very controlled, it's very constrained based. It's saying no to a lot of tools you like because the layer you're in just doesn't allow for them. And like if you don't have a control system evaluating your measurement, your execution, your friction, your physiology before program changes, you will always either undercorrect or over-correct. Recognize that burnout recovery isn't about rest. It's not just about rest, it's about sequencing things properly. If you rebuild in the wrong order, you feel better for a short period of time and then you're gonna slid right back in. And and most people who are very driven like me, they don't fail because they can't work hard. They fail because they don't know when they're biologically not allowed to work hard. That's the catch. If you're already burnt out, you don't need more inspiration, you need governance. Governance is very, very hard to build from inside of the fire.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Why do people often come back better after forced breaks or setbacks?

SPEAKER_01 34:37

Fuck, I could have a whole podcast just talking about my experience with this. I was actually thinking about your program today, about all of this stuff, and I think you're you're gonna make ridiculous progress at uh two times training a week. I really do think. Because why? Because that is what your system allows you to recover from. That fits your current life constraints. So that like if we are able to switch like one training day for one day of cardio, that's going to give you more VO2 max, which is increases your recovery capacity. We're literally raising your ceiling so that we can afford another push in the future and like borrow from your recovery capacity. So it's like it's it's so counterintuitive, and I I I bet my fucking assholes virginity that you do not want to hear training twice a week. Um, you know, but it's true. I might do four times a week for my next push phase. I don't want to change too many things, so I need to evaluate that very carefully. But it's like, I don't know. I feel like uh my recovery capacity is not what it used to be, and I need to listen to those signs and actually be in the layer that I'm in. So why do why do people uh often come back after these force breaks or these setbacks? Because they like the break actually removed the pressure that their system wasn't tolerating in the first phase, like you didn't level up and just stop fucking digging yourself. And most people are gonna just run like slightly out of like funds, they just run on this debt for months, and then your cortisol props up like your with your output and just enough for you to look functional, and then that force like break just removes all the artificial support you have. So when you're when what happens when your load drops, like your mitochondria actually finally gets some room to restore throughput instead of just costing like covering the costs, so to speak. That alone, dude, your mood, your cognition, your performance, it rebounds so fast, like a week, like so fast. And that that just like and the amount of time that it takes you to rebound, I'll just tell you how big of a hole you're in. Like your illness, your like injury, like burnout, like all of these things, man, that we talked about, like they're just your organism enforcing a ceiling. It's putting a cap on what you can and cannot do. The the March method is here because it always wins that argument. Like, whether you respect sequencing or not, whether you give a shit about what I say or not, is just true. Biology is always gonna win. And then during these like forced pauses, oftentimes your sleep stimulants get reduced. So your sleep is gonna extend. And while that training drop is is loading, your decision load is also shrinking a lot because you don't have as much pressure. And without realizing, you just clean out all of your operations and all of the friction. And now your nervous system zone is gonna stabilize, your cortisol rhythm is gonna, you know, normalize, your dopamine sensitivity is gonna improve so that when you return to training or to work, everything feels sharper because the signal is fucking clear again. And it also like rebuilds hunger like crazy for training, for output, for challenge, for that drive, for that like psychological rebound. Like that only happens when your body actually trusts that survival isn't being threatened. Survival is always gonna take priority over everything else. And at a break, when you ever take a break, it just exposes how distorted normal has been for you. So when you notice that, like, oh, I've been sleeping good, and it's like, oh my god, how have I been sleeping this bad for the past like six months? Like, what the fuck? People often misinterpret these rebounds, though. They think that the answer was just to like push until something forces you to stop. So they do these like auto-regulatory deloads. No, the answer was removing miss sequence load. Like, if you don't have a control system, they're gonna come back. Like, you're gonna feel amazing for like three to six weeks, and they're gonna ramp up volume, they're gonna ramp up stress, they're gonna ramp up stimulants right back to the previous levels, and then the cycle just keeps repeating. And that break only worked because it accidentally respects your body or your physiology, it reduced your output like to match your organism capacity accidentally. The 05 system does that shit intentionally, it checks like your measurement, your execution, your friction, your physiology. Why like before your organism is forced to revolt against itself? And and people come back better after all of these force breaks because their system was just finally allowed to adapt instead of just fucking surviving. The real question is why like they actually improve after a setback. That isn't the question. The real question is why they wait for a fucking collapse to get the adaptation that they could have literally engineered into their system before.

SPEAKER_02 38:47

How do you build systems that prevent burnout instead of reacting to it?

SPEAKER_01 38:51

Well, speaking of systems, it's just flowing. It's it's my fasting. Burnout is gonna happen when your output outruns your capacity and no one fucking stops you. Like, and most coaching, self-coaching as well, is gonna chase output. When you ever talk to people about their goals, their goal is always a six-pack, their goal is always stepping on stage, their goal is always like get fitting into the clothes that they used to fit when they were 15 years old and they're 36. With my methodology, we regulate your capacity first. That's the entire fucking difference. The the March method is gonna set the ceiling for you. If your mitochondria is unstable, your regression is going to be capped. If your absorption is very compromised, your inputs are going to be reduced. If your resilience is very low, your volume is gonna be throttled. It sounds like I'm speaking in code here because I am referring to every single one of the components in the O5 system. You you don't want like to get your want like past your biology. The O5 system is gonna like govern your behavior inside of that ceiling. So it doesn't gonna like assume compliance, it's actually gonna audit your measurement, your execution, your friction, and your physiology before it touches your program. So we fix like the leaks and then we can increase the load. Otherwise, we're just gonna keep fucking leaking. And most systems that people have in place just wait for the fucking system. But the March system actually prevents all of this downstream collapse because it sequences things upstream first. So first we get energy, then we get clearance, then we get resilience, then we get signal, and then we can think of growth and fat loss. If you skip that order, your burnout is literally baked into your fucking system. And most coaches, whenever they see progress slowing down, they're just gonna fucking escalate everything. The O5 system is gonna check if the data is valid before creating any sort of reaction. Like half of plateaus are just noise, they're just friction, they're nothing to do with insufficient effort. Like most programs are gonna reward grind for people. We reward predictability completely different. Don't fucking tell me that every coach does the same thing. This is not true. If your energy is not stable week to week, nothing is gonna get intensified. You literally cannot afford to do more. Burnout is usually just miss sequence fucking stress. And the March method here is gonna prevent biological stupidity. The O5 system is gonna prevent behavioral stupidity. That's why I implement the MARCH method within the O5 system. Other coaching just gives you a fucking plan. We run a control system. Like plans assume ideal conditions. Control systems actually adapt to real life, and most people think that burnout is emotional. It's actually psychological debt compounded by your ungoverned execution. So we monitor every organism continuously, your recovery markers, your digestion shift, your mood volatility, way before your output degrades. And when whatever friction rises, friction comes in the obstacle or uh layer for me, domain, not a layer, sorry. It's like travel, stress, cognitive, like overload. It's just the O5 system is gonna adjust to all of these operations before the organism has to pay for it. There's no room for white knuckling in Optolab. And then like when your resilience nips, if that happens, we reduce the load very early. Not when you snap. Like early correction prevents collapse every single fucking time, and collapse is just a down road of burnout. When your hormones look fine on paper, but your symptoms start drifting, and the March method is just gonna fucking refuse to chase these numbers upstream until every single upstream layer is stable. That alone prevents like all of these dependence cycles that people find themselves in when establishing a system to prevent burnout. There's there's no other coaching. I stand by my word that blends fucking sequencing doctrine with a live feedback control loop. Most have one or the other. I run both simultaneously. That's what I fucking build. Prevention is not just rest days and mindset tips you find on TikTok. It's governance. It's knowing when the systems are not allowed to be pushed and having the structure to enforce that in your life. Burnout is only going to happen when no one is regulating the interaction between load and biology, and I am regulating that continuously for you so you don't have to worry about it. And that's why my clients they don't need to force breaks or to be able to come back stronger. The system just never lets them dig that hole like that deep in the first place, you know? So that's that's basically how you create a system that prevents burnout. You copy my system because no one else does what I do.

SPEAKER_02 43:10

What does sustainable intensity actually look like?

SPEAKER_01 43:14

Sustainable intensity is very predictable under pressure. So like predictability is the thing. It looks like you're training hard without your recovery markers drifting week to week, like your resting heart rate, your HRV, like your libido, like all these things. If those are moving, like intensity isn't sustainable. You're just borrowing, you're just creating debt. It looks like you're like waking up with energy that matches the load that you're applying. It doesn't look like dragging yourself through sessions with more caffeine just to be able to function. It looks like you're being able to like actually increase volume or stress and see adaptation from that, not just surviving your training program. Like if your performance is only going to hold steady while your effort is increasing, you're fucking digging yourself. And sustainability is going to like within intensity is going to respect sequencing every single fucking time because sequencing is the key. If your mitochondria and your resiliency aren't fucking stable, you don't escalate load. Period. Every single time. It looks like hunger being appropriate to output. That's what it looks like. It looks like not being suppressed from stress. No chaotic, like from like cortisol drift. It looks like your sleep is going to deepen with your training blocks, not like fragment itself. If you if you're needing more stimulation, like constantly to get through the day and you need more sedation to fall asleep, that's literally dysregulation. I've fallen myself into that trap like so many fucking times. It also gonna look my like being able to deload without anxiety. If you still have rest that feels very threatening, your identity is attached to stress, it's not attached to your results. Fix that shit. It also looks very fucking boring. Like same waking time, same meal timing, same, fucking meal, same fucking training slots. Intensity on top of stability, that's a banger. Intensity on top of chaos, burnout. Sustainable intensity is also going to mean that you can like handle life stressors before, like without your body actually like composition or your mood or your recovery completely fucking imploding. It it looks like making the smallest effective change when progress slows. Not panicking, not doubling volume. Like that's that's the O5 logic that you can apply. Like it's measurement, execution, friction before we make any program changes. And it also feels very controlled. It feels aggressive, but it doesn't feel frantic. Like these hard sessions are followed by actual recovery, not just by like checking the box and moving on, you know? And it means that you can like zoom out and you can see these like trend lines without white knuckling every single week. And if your intensity is just requiring constant willpower, it's not fucking sustainable. Sustainable intensity reduces your decision load because your system is actually structured. And it's the difference between building capacity and extracting from capacity. And most people they've never experienced sustainable intensity before, they've experienced spikes and they mistake all of these crashes for normal. Real sustainable like intensity actually feels like very underwhelming in the moment. It feels like you're not doing enough. But six months later, you're stronger and you're leaner and you're sharper, and you're not crawling to the finish line. That's the fucking difference. It's it's it's actually very, very different when you pay attention and think about it.

SPEAKER_02 46:04

And I feel like it's a good analogy, is like the kid at the gym that's throwing the weights around, you know, trying to whatever, push hard. Like that's one type of intensity, but then there's another type of intensity where you're counting your reps and you're like doing a full rep every time and you're controlling the movement. Yeah, controlled aggression. That's kind of how I think about because I can um I can do a really hard set, and it probably looks hard if people are watching me, but it's not the same type of intensity, you know, it's not defined in the same way as the kid that's throwing weights around. And I think that that example, you extrapolate it into the rest of your life and the rest of your program. It kind of is a picture of what that controlled intensity looks like.

SPEAKER_01 46:50

Yeah, yeah. Controlled intensity. I fucking love that. I need to put it on a shirt. Do you guys want shirts by the way? I don't know. I want a shirt, but um, speaking of shirts, this is nothing to do with shirts. But people also ask me questions about burnout on Instagram, and I've been keeping tabs on them. So let's address some questions very rapidly for our friends from Instagrams, which by the way, we're almost about to hit to like a fucking thousand followers. Just go ahead and fucking follow, just share my shit, just repost it. Just let's just fucking get through that because we're we're on our way to 10k, bro. We're on our way to 20, 50, 100k. Just fucking just just go. Just do this more questions. All right, what's the question?

SPEAKER_02 47:24

How do I know if I'm overtraining?

SPEAKER_01 47:26

When your body stops rewarding effort, that's when you're overtraining. So if you're like adding volume and the only thing increasing is your soreness, is your irritability or like your caffeine intake, you're literally exceeding recovery. You're you're not building capacity.

SPEAKER_02 47:39

Is being tired all the time normal?

SPEAKER_01 47:41

No. Stable systems don't fill drain daily. It's common, but it's not normal. Like chronic fatigue is usually just strep a stress-adapted state. It's cortisol holding you together while your production is lagging.

SPEAKER_02 47:54

Should I take a delo even if I don't want to?

SPEAKER_01 47:58

I mean, if you emotionally resist deloading, that's often just an attachment to stress. Like deloads aren't about feelings, they're about preserving your adaptation.

SPEAKER_02 48:07

Why did my motivation suddenly disappear?

SPEAKER_01 48:09

It doesn't. It rarely disappears suddenly. It actually erodes. Like high stress blunts a lot of dopamine sensitivity, and drive is gonna drop because like your nervous system is literally protecting energy. It's not it's not because you got lazy.

SPEAKER_02 48:23

Can too much cardio cause burnout?

SPEAKER_01 48:25

Yeah. If it exceeds mitochondrial theropid. Cardio is adaptive when recovery is scaling alongside of it. Without recovery, it just is just cumulative stress.

SPEAKER_02 48:35

How long should a break last?

SPEAKER_01 48:37

Until your energy feels stable enough without needing more stimulation, like literally. And if you need to like have a lot of caffeine to refuel like your baseline, you're still not recovered. You're just masking that shit. So pull the stimulants out. I hate saying that though.

SPEAKER_02 48:50

Will I lose progress if I rest?

SPEAKER_01 48:52

You may lose some like transient inflammation and edema and also fatigue. So you're gonna drop some weight. Like true adaptations, like then your muscle, your conditioning, neuro efficiency, they don't evaporate in a week or two, man.

SPEAKER_02 49:06

Why do I feel guilty not training?

SPEAKER_01 49:08

Because you equate stress with virtue. Like your identity is built on output. So rest is always gonna feel like regression instead of recalibration. You literally have no sense of alignment.

SPEAKER_02 49:18

What's your earliest burnout signal?

SPEAKER_01 49:20

Mood compression. Mood compression 100%. Like when things that used to feel neutral start feeling very heavy, like that's a sign. And that's gonna happen way before your performance drops. So you need to be paying attention to the signs outside of the gym.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

What helps you reset fastest?

SPEAKER_01 49:36

So if you lower your total stress load before changing the program, you're gonna reset much faster. Like simplify your training, lock in your sleeps, reduce your stimulants, and stabilize all of your operations. That's that's the fastest way to do it.

SPEAKER_02 49:47

What do people misunderstand about rest?

SPEAKER_01 49:49

Rest is not the absence of effort. It is rest is strategic removal of load to restore your signals. Without rest, intensity just becomes an extraction point. It's not growth. You can't adapt from it.

SPEAKER_02 50:03

What lesson did Burnout teach you that success never could?

SPEAKER_01 50:08

So Burnout taught me something that success really never could, and that's like you can win while your system is quietly collapsing. Like you can still hit your PRs, you can grow the fuck out of your business, you can get leaner, you can look sharp as fuck on the outside, but your cortisol is propping you up and your mitochondria is barely able to keep the lights fucking on, man. Like success doesn't expose misssequency. Burnout exposes miss sequencing. And it like burnout showed me that I wasn't intense, actually. I was just ungoverned. I was I was pushing a lot of output without ever modeling my organism layer and like escalating the load without running the control loop. I had no ceiling, I had no constraints, I just had ego and fucking momentum. That is why I build the O system. It's I build the O5 system to control behavior. And I put and implemented the march method inside of that to control your biology. One tells me what I'm allowed to touch, the other one makes sure that I don't actually lie to myself when I'm touching it. With both of these in place, I don't have to try to burn out anymore. It literally cannot happen because my load never outrun my capacity anymore. How about you though? Can you say the same about your system?