Dealing With Burnout

Dealing With Burnout

Episode Description

In this episode of Mind Your Mind, Tim Unsinn talks with psychologist Dr. Hannah Baczynski about the signs of burnout, how to prevent it, and how to know if your burnout is related to general life stressors or a mental health disorder. They also talk about the difference between fatigue and burnout, as well as how to support yourself and alleviate burnout when you’re experiencing it.

What to Expect

  • Brownout vs burnout
  • How to prevent burnout
  • Differences between neurotypical & neurodivergent burnout


Resources: Learn More

Things to Think About

  • Changing jobs might temporarily solve your burnout, but it will likely come back if you don’t deal with the underlying causes.
  • Fatigue may be caused by not eating or sleeping enough, while burnout is caused more by persistent stress.
  • How can you manage your daily stress to help prevent burnout?

About the Hosts

Hannah

Dr. Hannah Baczynski works with people of all ages—providing diagnostic and psychological evaluations for children as young as 2, adolescents, and adults, as well as individual therapy for adolescents. As the clinical director of Dakota Family Services’ DBT Program for Adolescents, she also provides Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and is a firm believer in using treatments that are well-supported by research and that match the client’s goals. When she understands the “why” or the function of the behavior of difficulty a client is experiencing, she collaborates with them to set goals and find new, more productive skills and behaviors.

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Transcript
Dealing With Burnout

Featuring Dr. Hannah Baczynski, Psychologist, Dakota Family Services

Tim Unsinn:

Welcome to Mind Your Mind, a podcast presented by Dakota Family Services, an outpatient behavioral health clinic located in Minot, Bismarck, and Fargo, North Dakota. In this podcast, I will talk with our experts about understanding and nurturing our mental health and wellness. I'm your host, Tim Unsinn. Join me each episode as we explore the intricacies of our minds, decrease the stigma of mental illness, learn practical tips for managing our mental health and wellbeing, and recognize when it's time to ask for help. Join me now to mind your mind. Welcome to this episode of Mind Your Mind. Our guest is Dr. Hannah Baczynski. Dr. Baczynski is a psychologist with Dakota Family Services in Fargo. Dr. Baczynski, it is great to have you on Mind Your Mind. Our topic is dealing with burnout, which many of us have dealt with, coped with, just gotten through. We're gonna talk about that today. Just a great topic. Thank you for bringing it up. Before we get to the topic though, there's a question I ask all of our guests, and that is, why do you do what you do?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

I decided to be a psychologist because I like to figure out why things happened and people's behavior, I think, was the biggest puzzle as to why things happened. So I started out just trying to decide how people do what they do, how they decide, what they decide and what makes them tick.

Tim Unsinn:

Great topic today, dealing with burnout, and I think that's something that a lot of us have, have either dealt with or are going through. So what is burnout and what are some of the signs you are in that burnout mode?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

So there are actually two different like stages of burnout. Most people before they get to full-on burnout are in something some researchers, some mental health professionals call brownout. And so brownout is when you start to get tired, when you start to not want to do the things that you're doing when maybe the stuff you used to enjoy isn't as interesting or fun anymore. You just have trouble getting going, getting out of bed, maybe at work you're making more mistakes.

Tim Unsinn:

So before you get too deep in there, one question that popped into my head-- is there a way to tell the difference between fatigue and brownout?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

Absolutely. So fatigue would be something that, you know, you might feel if you're not getting enough sleep or you're working maybe too many hours, but brownout is what starts to happen when you are really stressed a lot. So fatigue, if you were just tired from not sleeping, you could sleep or rest and that would go away. Brownout isn't the kind of thing that would go away with just sleeping one night. And if you push through brownout too much, you're working at too high a level or you're under too much stress for too long, you will get to burnout. And burnout is a state of just complete mental, physical and emotional exhaustion where you are making mistakes at work, you're forgetting things at home like paying the bills or you're not engaging in your hobbies, you're not going out and being social with your friends. You're maybe you have more negative attitudes about yourself and others. You just really can't do what you need to do. You almost can't even get out of bed sometimes.

Tim Unsinn:

So that would lead to different types of burnout then?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

Right. There are different types of burnout and a lot of the different types of burnout really they're just two big ones. And it really depends on if you are neurodivergent, like have autism or ADHD or are more of the neurotypical. If you are more on the, like, work burnout side, which can happen to anybody changing how you work, like changing the amount of work that you do, changing the pressure on you at work can relieve some of that burnout. If you're on the other side, the autistic burnout side, changing what you do needs to be pretty drastic. Where you aren't going to be relieved by resting, aren't going to be relieved by slightly decreasing what you're doing or allowing some mistakes at work. It takes a lot longer to recover and it is much more pervasive. So you're not maybe meeting your basic needs, maybe you're having more meltdowns or shutdowns. If you're in this autistic burnout, maybe you have higher anxiety, increased health issues. If you are autistic and you have this burnout, you might even go mute for a while or non-verbal, you have a lot of difficulties with sensory things where just generally sensory input like noises or lights are, are harder to deal with. So there's like work-related burnout that anyone can get and there's this other type of burnout, autistic burnout that you get if you're more on that side of the spectrum.

Tim Unsinn:

So one question is, is a change of job enough to change the burnout mode?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

At first it could be. And so some people get so burned out that even if they really like their job, they are just done. They wake up one day and they can't go back and they have to change careers completely. If you change your job, your burnout is likely gonna go away, but if you don't deal with the underlying causes of burnout, then your burnout's gonna come back.

Tim Unsinn:

So is burnout different from anxiety and depression and what are some of the dangers of burnout?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

Yeah, absolutely. Burnout can lead to anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression can be part of burnout, but burnout is really situational. Like you are under a lot of pressure at work. You are, you have too many demands in your life. It doesn't even have to be at work. Like I think of people whose kids are in a thousand activities and you gotta go to an activity a day or even multiple activities a day. Like you can get burned out from parenting as well just the same way as work. And if you have work stressors on top of parenting stressors, you're gonna be more likely to get burned out as well. But having burnout can lead to depression, can lead to anxiety. But I was reading about a way to kind of test if it's depression or anxiety. So if you imagine going on a wonderful trip to like the beaches of The Bahamas or something, is that trip going to make you feel better? And if it does, you might be in burnout because you're getting that rest and relaxation. But if you are truly depressed going to The Bahamas, you're just gonna be depressed in The Bahamas. And so that won't relieve that feeling of tiredness, that feeling of not wanting to do things, that lack of motivation. So if a trip would solve it, at least for a little while, you might be burned out.

Tim Unsinn:

You're listening to Mind Your Mind. Our guest is Dr. Hannah Baczynski and we are talking about burnout and we've been talking about, you know, the differences and what it looks like and the different types and brownout and burnout. And this is probably like the million dollar question. So everybody pause right now. Get your pen and paper. How do we prevent burnout?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

So if you imagine that there is a curve, right, of performance and effort, if you put no effort into something, your performance is gonna be pretty low, right? If you have like a maximum level of effort, a hundred percent, if you try to go beyond that 100%, your performance is also gonna be pretty low because you just can't do it right? If you are, say, running a marathon, if you don't put any effort into it, you're not gonna finish that marathon. But if you try to run it as fast as like Usain Bolt or something, you're just gonna pass out and die perhaps, I don't know, not really die, but right, you're not gonna finish. Your performance is gonna be really bad. And so we have this like maximum level of performance that we can work at. And what happens is that people believe that they need to be working at 100% maximum performance all the time.

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

Like you cannot make mistakes at work or you have to take on more and more and more projects to prove yourself. And that's simply not true. Like most of us, most of the time would do fine at work or in our home life, putting in 70% effort that's sustainable. That's like trying to run a marathon at like a comfortable speed. You might finish. If you try to run at your hundred percent, you're gonna get tired, you're gonna get cramps, like it's not gonna work out and things are gonna start to decrease. You're gonna start to notice mistakes at work. You're gonna forget one of those activities that your kids have or you're gonna show up late or you're not even gonna pay for it or something.

Tim Unsinn:

You dropped the kids off but forgot to pick them up.

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

You forget to pick 'em up, right? So if you stay at a hundred percent effort for too long, your performance starts to suffer because you're tired, because there's too much on your mind. And so one of the best ways to prevent burnout is to remember that you don't have to be perfect. Like you don't have to give 100% a hundred percent of the time. If you stick at your sustainable level, which is probably around 70, 75%, you are going to be much less likely to get burned out. 'cause You're not gonna put all that pressure on yourself that probably you think other people are putting on, but maybe other people aren't expecting as much of you as you think. So that's really the first way to allow yourself to make mistakes, to allow yourself not to be perfect

Tim Unsinn:

Life's marathon, not a sprint. Absolutely. Let's keep that in mind. So once we've come to the realization that we are burnt out, what do we do for help?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

One of the things that you can do is if it's like a work related thing is go to your, your manager, your coworkers and talk about how to set better boundaries, talk about which projects maybe need more effort versus other efforts, prioritizing, and just really figuring out how to reduce those demands that are too much on you if it's at work or in your personal life for like work or personal life related burnout. Working with a therapist can really help on how to reduce some of those demands and figuring out what needs to happen and what doesn't need to happen throughout your day. You wanna build in breaks to just relax, whether it's for five minutes, 10 minutes, you know, whatever, and do some mindfulness, do some breathing, do a little bit of stretching, yoga, those kinds of things help your nervous system remain calm so it's not running at a hundred percent all the time.

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

Building in exercise, establishing routines, making sure that you're engaging in things that give you energy, those hobbies, those friends, family, those things that really you feel refreshed after you engage in. And then learn to build and reinforce boundaries like work-life related boundaries. It's like I said, if you got a new job, your burnout might go away for a little while, but if you don't know how to set those boundaries, if you don't know how to say no, if you don't know how to leave work at work, which can be really hard for people now that everyone's working at home and things like that, if you don't know how to leave those things at work and separate those, it doesn't matter how many jobs you change, you're probably gonna get burnt out again. The other side though with autistic burnout is you want to really bring it down to the basics. If you have this autistic burnout, you want to minimize even social interactions because those drain people with autism, social interactions, or they can. You wanna minimize stressful environments and unexpected things, a lot of sensory input. If you are feeling like you have autistic burnout, you might even wanna avoid the grocery store because lots of unexpected things happen. They have fluorescent lights, it's loud, you know?

Tim Unsinn:

There're people.

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

There are people like, yeah, bring, you know, get your groceries delivered. If you're in autistic burnout, that's okay. Maximize your sleep and rest. Increase spending time on your special interests. The things that you really, really enjoy. Increased stimming can also help. So stimming is any like soothing, repetitive movement. So the thing that we all think of is like hand flapping or rocking. But it can be a lot of different things like just rubbing your hands together or spinning in a chair or like any sort of of those repetitive movements. And then really increase support from others. Like have, you know, Alexa, remember to pay your bills or order food or those kinds of things. Have a friend do the dishes for a while. Lean on supports that you have, whether they're family or friends or neighbors or even just, you know, your smartphone. Lean on those to remember things for you to make sure that things are automatically happening. And it can also help to stick to safe foods, you know, whatever that comfort food is, stick to that for a little while.

Tim Unsinn:

It's food.

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

It's food.

Tim Unsinn:

It's food. Dr. Hanna Baczynski has been our guest on Mind Your Mind. Some great information on burnout and I know as we listen to podcasts, it's so easy with today's technology to pause and rewind and go back and listen again and again because there's so many pieces of information that help us, we want to do that and we encourage you to do that as well. And feel free to share Mind Your Mind with others. And I know that there are many have dealt with and are going through burnout. I think really important as well to have a friend that can be honest with you. Just that thing where there's no rules when we talk together, you know, they're honest. Dr. Hannah, thank you so much for being with us. Appreciate you. Before we wrap up, there's always that final question I ask all of our guests and that is how do you personally mind your mind?

Dr. Hannah Baczynski:

Well, we've been talking a lot about hobbies and things that are interesting and fun to you. And so I have a couple hobbies that I've taken up recently in the last like year or so, and one of them is ice skating and I have been taking ice skating lessons and I do that every week, which is really a nice physical activity. And then I have actually recently started trying to do those aerial silks where you do yoga, like suspended from the ceiling, which is actually really fun. Painful but fun.

Tim Unsinn:

It's the fall that'll get you <laugh>. Well, thank you so much. We so appreciate you being with us and appreciate you sharing insights on burnout. Thank you as well for listening to Mind Your Mind. Thank you for joining us for Mind Your Mind, a podcast presented by Dakota Family Services. You can't have health without behavioral health. Remember to mind your mind. For more information, links to additional resources, contact information, and much more, go to Dakotafamilyservices.org.

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