Stress is natural. But, when that stress overwhelms us that can lead to not just reduced personal productivity. Detecting and managing burnout is a key capability for highly productivity individuals and that’s what we discuss on this week’s episode of ProductivityCast.
(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/079 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)
Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening!
If you'd like to continue discussing detecting and managing burnout from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post).
In this Cast | Detecting and Managing Burnout
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Detecting and Managing Burnout
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Good Stress, Bad Stress by Barry Lenson
Mindset by Carol Dweck, PhD
Discussion of Mindset at Productivity Book Group
“A practical guide to detect early signs of burnout.”
“Burnout Prevention and Treatment”
“What Causes Burnout and How to Overcome It”
“Overcoming Burnout: 10 steps to reignite your flame and shine brightly once more”
Ecstatic response (or, “post-traumatic growth”)
ProdPod: Episode 112: Overcoming Burnout: Rest and Rejuvenation for Sustainable Productivity
Getting More Done - Fitnesses
Raw Text Transcript
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
Read More
Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Francis Wade 0:23I'm Francis Wade.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners for this episode, where we will be discussing burnout. That is we're going to discuss really the functions of what, what are the pieces of burnout? How do we define burnout? And what are some of the signs that help to detect that you are burned out or that you are seeing someone else who is experiencing burnout because I think that's sometimes very helpful. In addition, we're then going to move on to discussing how we actually manage while in burnout mode. That is, while we're feeling this Explain when we're experiencing burnout, how do we deal with being burned out while we're burned out? And then ultimately, how do we overcome burnout? How do we get out of burnout so that we can get back to being the highly productive individuals that we are? Let's start off with defining burnout. What is burnout? Who wants to try and tackle that topic? First, I think the
Francis Wade 1:22most there's an extreme form of burnout. And that's the one people relate to the most, which is when you're physically exhausted physically, mentally, and otherwise exhausted and unable to function. I think it's an extreme position to be in. I think the people who get there usually aren't able or don't have the skill to pick up the early warning signs. So they don't know that that's where they're headed until it's too late. So it strikes me as a function of not knowing the signals, not seeing the early warning indicators, and then arriving in this position on wondering why do I feel this way? What happened? How do I get mess up back. But I think it comes as a shock, the very first time feeling of overwhelm and not being able to get out of it probably was but at the same time,
Augusto Pinaud 2:07the problem with burnout is that most people don't notice when they are on that way. And they made the moment they start identifying the exception, there is no much or no today can do. They're simply out and they the path to recovery, when you are that down that low. It is really, really difficult. And part of it is that I tend to believe that people don't know and don't have Well, good practices for self care, you know, we push and push and push and push and hope that things are going to last forever, but we do a really poor job on self care.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:45It makes some great points and I want to take a step back, I think and just educate our listeners on the different types of stress and how I look at the paradigm of burnout in the context of production. And so I first start off with the book, good stress, bad stress, which is by Barry Levinson. And I'm not sure I'll put a link to this in the show notes to see if it's actually still available for sale. But I've had some difficulty finding the book in in various sources over time. But either way, I'm reading from my copy, and, in essence, very tense and talks about the idea of stress being characterized in in two different in two different kind of checklists of qualities. And so you have good stress and bad stress you stress which is good stress, and then distress, which is bad stress. And so we have you stressors and distress, there's things that are positive or negative stressors, and so good stress is characterized by these various qualities. They offer visible rewards. It brings people together good stress also lets you develop and grow. It boosts your self esteem, it ends with resolution. Good stress also changes into something good when relieved, that is a kind of device Pass valve creates a positive outcome it opens up new possibilities when resolved results in high achievement, and it breeds optimism. Whereas on the flip side of things, bad stress has no desirable outcomes in sight and drives people apart while limiting you. Bad stress makes you feel worse about yourself. it merges into new conflicts and problems. And bad stress also becomes something bad when relieved it's dead ended. It lowers personal standards and bad stress causes negativism and defeatist attitudes. These two different things good stress, you stress and distress negative stress are these two competing forces in our worlds. Now, what we have to do is find more of the good stress and less of the bad stress but in essence, that's a that is categorical stress. That is once you you once you're experiencing distress It's negative and its impacts are negative, we then have volume based stress. And either either volume of use stress or distress can lead to burnout. That is, if you have distress of a particular say, impact, you know that that's a that is a very emotional form of distress, say someone very close to you passes away that categorical distress can cause some kind of negative emotional impact on your world. It's not necessarily going to cause burnout. burnout is when any type of stress categorical stress, good or bad stress is administered over time. That is you're experiencing those stressors over the course of time. This ultimately leads to physical, emotional or mental, some kind of prolonged behavioral stress. The goal for us is to recognize when we're experiencing that burnout, and really what happens is that You start to experience negative symptoms in your world. And the idea here is that when you are when you start to to recognize that there are emotional, physical and mental factors, and those, those excessive or prolonged stressor, stresses that you're experiencing, are there, you will start to feel burned out, you will start to feel all of that negative association with the work you're doing. The people you're around your social life, generally, you're gonna start to feel that impact. And, of course, it's not good on your on your body, it's not good on your wellness. And so that's that's how I see burnout. And then of course, that takes us then to what burnout means to your productivity. And usually, what I think of burnout is that you're poorly executing the tasks that you are doing, you are not doing the tasks that you Want and or need to be doing. And ultimately, you are getting feedback from the people around you that you're not performing at the level at which they expect ncu to typically be. So if you're if people around you are used to seeing you perform at a particular level, and all of a sudden, that level diminishes, that is a clear sign that you are burned out. burnout itself expresses differently based on the individual. So what your burnout looks like, is likely different than somebody else's burnout. And so sometimes people will think, Oh, well, I'm feeling maybe depressed, or maybe someone else says, Oh, I'm just feeling stressed out. I'm just feeling wired. For some reason. They're feeling more elevated emotionally, then, then typical. So everybody expresses burnout in different ways. And so you have to be somewhat sensitive to what's going on. You have to be a little bit more aware about what's going on in your world. So that you're able to recognize your symptoms, your unique symptoms of burnout so that you can then stop it. And correct course over the over time, let's talk about some of the symptoms of burnout. What does burnout look like? When you see someone or yourself in burnout,
Francis Wade 8:19I did it first and foremost, task overwhelm, but but not not to the sense that they have too much to do, but that they are not managing the things that they have to do well, so other words, they're there, they're not managing the demands of their time.
