3 How to avoid burnout, Nina Nesdoly

0:00So it's day three, it's the day after boxing day, you're starting to forget what day it is. this is good, it means you're resting. So in this episode, we hear from Nina Nesdly, who breaks down what burnout really is and why founders are uniquely vulnerable to it. From decision fatigue and constant notifications to the emotional toll of being judged, Nina explains how our brains and bodies respond when demands exceed resources. This is a powerful conversation about capacity, focus, and the hidden energy costs of modern work, and why understanding your brain's cues, patterns and needs for support is essential to building something sustainable.

0:39So keep listening to hear from Nina and tune in tomorrow to learn everything there is about how to regulate your nervous system through breathwork from Jamie Clements. Thanks so much for having me, Juliet. My business is called Workplace Clarity. I do work stress and burnout prevention training for organizations. So I have an interdisciplinary background in neuroscience and management. So basically what I do is I combine research from those two fields to help people manage stress at work, prevent burnout and create better work-life balance. This is so key because especially when you start a business, you are doing something you've never done before.

1:14So you have no idea really what your day job will entail. So why did you start your business? It was really a merger of passions for me. I had been doing my master's degree and previously done my undergrad in neuroscience. And I had a big love of workshop facilitation. I used to work as a facilitator for Apple, not doing anything related. I actually taught people how to use phones and do art on their iPads and phone photography and code robots and stuff like that. But so I really loved workshop facilitation. I really love helping people understand technology and science and taking concepts from research that can be a lot to wade through on your own and making them really practical and applicable.

1:56So in July of 2021, once I was done my master's and looking around at how people were feeling during the pandemic, which was very burnt out, I said, you know what, I'm going to take these two things that I love, work stress and burnout prevention from a science perspective and workshop facilitation, put these together and start helping people and organizations. oh well thank you firstly for doing it because i think a lot of people lots of people i've spoken to is like well obviously you're going to burn out that's what happens when you start a business but the fact that you said burnout prevention is really exciting to hear because i think you're loading your plate up with all sorts of types of work that you've never done before the bit for me in communications i knew how to pr something i didn't know how to run a company hence the podcast really helping me learn a lot from other people but you are typically quite stressed and you're putting yourself in difficult situations, fairly high pressure, revenue and budgets are key, time is pressured.

2:50There's a lot going on. How do you even start with burnout prevention? So prevention probably better than a cure, actually. I might go there first. Probably. Fortunately, they kind of go together. So the things that prevent burnout are the same things that help you recover from burnout. There is a framework in the research that I really love. It's just a simple way to understand burnout, which is the job demands resource model. And this model basically says that burnout happens when your demands exceed your resources. So in terms of an easy place to start, it's to take a look at where can I build resources or cultivate my own resources.

3:28So as a founder of a business, for example, a big one for me was looking at what are the things that I'm not really good at, or even if they are things that I'm decent at, someone else is better at that I could outsource to someone else that could make things a bit faster for me. So I have lots of subscriptions and memberships that mean some of the content I need for social media, for example, is half done for me. I refer to experts whenever possible so that I'm using those resources and thereby reducing the demands on myself. So then you're also looking at, okay, where are my demands the highest?

4:01How can I reduce those? And you're looking to bring some alignment between demands and resources. So bring those back and then keep some resources for yourself so that you've got your own life outside of work and your own well-being too. It's not all about your business or your job. Is it not? Okay, good to know. I had a bit of a moment a year in thinking, oh no, no, I do need to sleep and eat and exercise. I have to function and the to-do list is never going to be done. I have to be at peace with the fact that my OCD is not going to be satisfied. There's always going to be more I can do. And that's what naturally comes.

4:35I think when you start a business, you get excited about, we could do this, we could do that and you want to grow it and it's really really exciting 99 % of the time but for example when you get a head cold or you genuinely have a sick days it's still going to happen even if you're a founder you don't get paid sick leave you don't get annual leave how do you manage that so for myself part of it is planning for it I think one of the mistakes that people make in work and in business and in any setting really is making plans as if they will be able to be superhuman. You set expectations for yourself and timelines for yourself that assume that you will never get tired.

5:09You will never get sick. And when you budget those things into your timelines and add a little bit of buffer time, even add a little bit in your budget, having a bit of an emergency fund available so that when you do have to take a day off, it's not the end of the world financially. So you've got a little bit of space for yourself makes a huge difference. There's some fat in the schedule. Yeah, exactly. We tend to approach these things as if everything's going to go perfectly and can sometimes almost see it as a mark of failure or weakness if we anticipate that it won't. But the reality is nothing is a perfect trajectory, business especially.

5:46There's ups and downs, there's highs and lows. You're going to have great days where you get so much done and you're going to have days when you don't want to get out of bed and you're exhausted. And if you've given yourself a little bit of space in your schedule, then that's going to be okay. And you can give yourself the rest and recovery that you need. Well, we teach founders how to do their own communications. And I often say to them, you've got to budget time like you would budget revenue. You've got to budget that time and time is that limited resource. And if you can nail that, then I think hopefully the rest is a lot easier.

6:19And this season is all about founder health and wellness because if yeah if the founder isn't operating then the business isn't going to be either and I was going to say what are some of the key stress triggers that you should be aware of and equipped to deal with when starting a company stress comes in a lot of different forms in terms of the exact manifestation but some of the sort of core things that we as humans find very stressful that definitely come up for founders as well are being overwhelmed dealing with unpredictable and uncontrollable situations and handling social evaluative threats, which is when we feel like we're being evaluated or judged by other people.

7:00When you start a business, you massively put yourself in a position to be judged by other people. So these things can come up in all kinds of different ways, but just to kind of boil it down to like a core three overarching ones with overwhelm, it's about what we've been talking about with managing your time and your schedule. it can be really tempting when you start a business to take on a million different projects there's so many different ways you can do things and it's so exciting you get over excited yeah you're like yeah you're like oh I could when I started I was like oh I could have a course I could do one to one I can have a membership I can I can have this program I can have that program no I can't that's all hypothetically lovely but I can't run all of these things myself right off the bat.

7:46Yeah, you are just one human being and you have to function. Exactly. So for dealing with overwhelm, I think that's a big one for founders to watch out for is taking a look at when you have become overwhelmed and how you can set things up so that you're not overwhelmed. And just being really honest with yourself when it's coming, because if you become so overwhelmed that you eventually burn out, then you're not reaching any of your goals anyways. With unpredictability and uncontrollability, this is where people, we really just, we love to know what's going to happen. And we get very stressed out when we don't know what's going to happen.

8:23And we get really stressed out when things happen that violate what we thought was going to happen. Our brains try to plan and try to equip our bodies to deal with whatever's coming. So this is everyone, right? This isn't just me. This is everyone. No, it's Everyone. Yeah. So when things don't go our way, we get very stressed out. There's a violation that happens and then we feel the stress around it. So if you're dealing with sensations of anxiety and unpredictability, the best thing to do is focus in on what you can control, what is within your realm. And oftentimes that's your own behavior.

8:57That's how you show up. That's the daily actions that you take in your business as a founder. And for that third one, social evaluative threat. For me, I find the best thing to do with that is just to remember that it's human and it's totally normal. Our ancestors used to depend on being part of the group for survival. So when we have a sense that we might get rejected by other people, that we might not be liked by other people, that we might be thrown out of a group or evaluated in a social way, we become extremely threatened and nervous. I just like to remind myself of that, that it's a normal sensation and it's okay to feel that way.

9:34And then I find it can fade into the background a little bit. I also saw a meme recently that was like, stop trying to make everyone like you. You don't like everyone. I like that one too. Your business is not going to appeal to everyone. Oh God, why me told me that? Yeah. She said, I think I was 15. She said, oh, by the way, not everyone's going to like you and you're not going to like everyone. And that's okay. I'm like, oh my God, you could have told me that when I was 10. Yeah. I think we can tell each other that every day. I think as a business owner, you have to put your business out there.

10:02you have to tell people what you're doing. Otherwise, you won't have a business. You have to let people help you spread that word. And a lot of people aren't comfortable. They could be an incredible designer, but they might not be great at doing their own PR. And obviously, that's our side of the business is where we hope to help them. But being comfortable with that adrenaline rush and embracing that stress or managing the stress so it's a good thing rather than a bad thing. Is that possible? So recognizing it and then harnessing it? Absolutely. Yes, because stress, at least when you're in that fight or flight high activation mode, there is a lot of similarities between being anxious, stressed fight or flight to being excited in the zone pumped up.

10:41So if you can reframe as something that feels really threatening and look for the ways that you can be excited about it, that you can embrace it, then you can absolutely shift from feeling really stressed, really overwhelmed by being evaluated by other people, by putting yourself out there to feeling excited about the opportunities that putting yourself out there is going to bring. And other times, you might just choose to protect your peace. I have TikToks go viral sometimes where the comment sections are out of control. I reach people who don't like me and don't like what I do. Sometimes you just have to turn that off, take a step back and say, you know what, there are lots of people who do like what I do.

11:21I'm not going to listen to this other group of people. Yeah. I've read somewhere that the brain, if you were given 100 or 99 compliments and one insult, your brain fixates on the negative. Is that true? Do we tend to obviously look at the negative comments and that's why we should try and ignore them? We do tend to. I don't know if that exact ratio is the exact way that it works, but we absolutely do tend to focus on the negative. And part of that is because your brain is ultimately trying to protect you and keep you alive, not keep you happy. So if something is threatening you, your brain is going to give that a lot of energy and attention.

11:57Of course. So we need to then harness and proactively choose to the happy part rather than just stay alive. Yeah. Yeah. Your brain actually, unfortunately, has very little interest, very little prioritization of making you happy. It's just very concerned with survival, with basic functions, with breathing and getting you through the day. So absolutely orienting yourself towards happiness, focusing on gratitude and things that you enjoy and are excited about in your work is really important to move away from those negative voices and feedback that can feel so loud. And really debilitating as well.

12:32And someone said, I think in season two, that if something's coming up and taking up headspace, you're not able to then put that space to something more productive. So if it's a problem, automate, delegate, solve. and it's my favourite piece of advice I've had, I think, in my life. I love that. Because, you know, you need to move on from it because otherwise you're never going to achieve anything else. And lots of people have also said about boundary setting in the sense that you do need a work-life balance. You do need time away from work to then get excited to come back to it. And I read an article where you explain that we should tune into those sensory cues if we struggle to detach from work at our home, especially if we're working from home.

13:08And you suggested maybe using different music between work and home and changing the sense around you. How does this help you detach from that work zone? This is again, a way of tapping into your brain to use your brain to your own advantage to create better work-life balance and prevent burnout. Your brain loves cues and associations and patterns. If your brain can pair a couple of things together, it is going to. This comes back to that predictability element. Your brain is trying to predict what's going to happen and wants to prepare you to do things and to respond to situations. So your brain is going to take a cue and associate it with something that you should be doing, some way you should be responding, some way that you are going to feel.

13:53Similar to when you see a massive bulletin board, you're driving down the street and you're like, wow, that coffee looks amazing. I want it. This is a cue and now you're salivating and you want to go stop. You want to get that coffee, frappe, unicorn, Starbucks drink, whatever it is that you're excited about. So when you're working, there are lots of different cues that signal to your brain that you are working. Some of these are the things that you're looking at, things that are in your physical space, be that at the office or in your home. Some of it can even be what you're smelling. Some people, for example, might have a cleaning product that they use in the office that is really strong, that smells nothing like what's going on at home.

14:32or you can even actively pair different scents with your work. Scents like peppermint really help with focus, whereas a scent like lavender or chamomile is really good for relaxation. You have different sounds at work that might signal you to tune into work, things like notifications that are coming from your devices, the Microsoft Teams sound that we all became so familiar with throughout the pandemic. We can all hear it in the back of our mind. and we underestimate how much those cues remind us of work and put us back into work mode. So if you differentiate between the two, so for example, I have Spotify playlists that I only use for working.

15:10And so those really are fantastic for focusing and getting in the zone. I don't use them in the gym. I don't use them out for a walk. I have different music that I listen to. So I am reserving those for work. So I'm really creating that sensory distinction. So I know that when I put on my noise canceling headphones. I put on my Spotify playlist. I sit down at my desk. I never move my work to other places in my home. I have a glass of water ready so I don't have to get up. I can just get in the zone and really focus. So it's boundary setting in another way, isn't it? Yeah. Exactly. It's boundary setting.

15:43And then in addition to that, it's creating signals for yourself when it's time to stop working. If you want to change into comfy clothes, grab a tea, put on different music, maybe soften up the lighting. I have four lamps on right now and whenever I'm doing virtual talks, I usually turn those off. It's not going to be automatic if you don't currently associate certain cues with work or non-work, but you can give yourself a little reminder and say to yourself, okay, I put on my comfy clothes. I've got my tea going. I've turned the lights down. This is my personal time. And eventually your brain will pair those things together.

16:20It's so interesting because so many founders I've spoken to about this across mobility, breath work, nutrition, the brain isn't necessarily helping you the whole time. And you have to almost consciously kind of trick it into being a better supporter. So it thinks it's doing the right thing by you, but actually you need to really go, no, no, no, let's help each other out here. It's fascinating because you think, you know, why wouldn't it just know best, but clearly it doesn't. Not in this day and age with the kind of work that we do. No. Well, exactly. I think, yeah, technology is a blessing and a curse.

16:50But on that point, you said notifications. I am a big fan of having zero notifications on any device, because I figure if the world is ending, someone will phone me and tell me. We are in communications. We are not saving lives. And there was another statistic that if you even see a notification or hear a sound, that for three seconds that your brain's gone to think, oh, I know what that sound is, you're distracted from the deep work you might be doing. Are you an advocate of turning off notifications? Where do you stand on this? Because my team always have notifications on. I'm like, I can hear your email dinging.

17:21It's giving me anxiety. But they're fine with it. I have no notifications on. They are too distracting. They pull you away. Like you said, as soon as you are attending to a notification, you've moved out of either a deep work state or if you're on your personal time, you've moved out of relaxing. And the thing with notifications is it's kind of like a very small form of multitasking where now you're attending to different things. People do become practiced at responding to notifications, kind of acknowledging and ignoring them. I read some research showing that for people who work in jobs where they're getting a lot of notifications, they eventually kind of learn to look at them quickly, tune them out and get back.

18:01But there still is some impact on that, that it is taking you away momentarily and you do have to actively re-engage with your work. So I have no notifications on at all, ever, except for phone calls. I check emails, but I don't get alerts telling me that emails have come through. I dedicate time for that. And in the evening, I have absolutely no access on my phone to any of my work or business emails. Oh, wow. So you block it, basically. you can't even go to if you wanted it that's really interesting because also if people are looking at the notification and learning to ignore them then why bother seeing it in the first place if you're just going to ignore it it just just leave it alone yeah it's i'm obviously a convert yeah it's just a lot of extra stimulation it's a lot of extra work for your brain to process attend to and even the decision to ignore it that's still now it's another decision that you've made and i think i read somewhere the average person makes 35 000 decisions a day when we account for all these micro decisions that we're making.

19:01That's a huge energy consumption for your brain. Yeah. And when you think about your brain as a battery and the health of that battery, you need to do everything to preserve it and protect it. And then what are the best ways for founders to develop a supportive community around them to prevent stress? Because I read a lot around that, that I know myself, I'm a people person and I would say potentially an extrovert. Like I love being around human beings. It fuels me. There's lots people who may be introverted and quite happy working from home alone. Is it still important for them to find a community?

19:29Absolutely, it is. In the research on burnout, one of the six main risk factors for burnout is lack of community. So even for people who are founders and who maybe like to work alone, I'm definitely one of those people. I love working from home by myself a few days a week. I also love when I get to do workshops for organizations and interact with clients, but there's some depleting there. I have to go home and watch sitcoms for an hour to recharge that social battery. So having community though, it is very important. Humans, we're really wired for connection and for community to the point where having communities is part of our mechanism for resilience and how we deal with stress.

20:13It's really amazing. There is a phenomenon called social buffering, where when you're feeling stressed, two things happen with oxytocin in your body. You may have heard of oxytocin as like a happy hormone or like the cuddle hormone, but it's also really heavily involved in stress. So first, when you're stressed, your body will increase levels of oxytocin to try to convince you to go and seek out social support. And second, when you're receiving social support, when you're having positive interactions with other people, that's giving you another increase in oxytocin that helps to regulate your stress response and actually bring down stress levels in your body.

20:55So having people that you trust, that you can turn to, that you can go to, it's not just a nice to have. It's mandatory. Part of your biology, something that is really important for stress relief and burnout prevention. Well, you said that was community is one of six. What are the other five? So workload, probably unsurprisingly. Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Lack of control. Yeah. Mismatch of values. In what sense that you think you need to get to one level and you don't get there? So often things like a mismatch of values between you and your company. Founders are kind of in a good position for that one because they typically get to do things that are fairly aligned with their values that are their choice but you can imagine working in a job where you don't agree with the mission of the company yes and you feel like you don't belong there that makes a lot of sense see how what you're doing contributes to society and that you're feeling disgruntled or not disgruntled but frustrated that you're not you're working so hard but for a business that you don't believe in their value exactly i'm so pleased you said that because i keep constantly asking my team to say what matters to you what's important to you i i feel transparency is our number one value?

22:03Do you agree? Like we debate it as a team because I feel like I've got a responsibility to start as I mean to go on and I've got the opportunity to build a company culture that can be a good one. So I think I'm reassured to hear that. And what were the other, I think we're down to next. But here we go. Workload, lack of control, community values, reward and fairness. So feeling like you are under rewarded or feeling like things are unfair. Those are the two other ones. Really? And unfairs, and again, you get frustrated that you've either worked really hard on something and it's not going the way you want it and you feel unfair about it.

22:36Anything that builds up that feeling of resentment, I guess, is not going to help. Yeah. And in particular, feeling like processes and the way decisions have been made are unfair. It's interesting when we look at research on fairness and justice, humans are a lot less concerned about the outcome of a process, like who got promoted, who got a grant, maybe you're applying for something in your business, who received something, they're a lot more concerned with the actual outcome than with the process. If you believe that that process was fair, then you're probably going to be okay with it even if someone else got something you wanted.

23:12But if you think that the selection process was not fair, your boss played favorites, a granting agency didn't take you seriously, you're going to be really frustrated by that. All six of these things come back to that demands resource idea that we talked about earlier. you are attending to demands and you feel like you are expending resources you want to get resources back for the work that you do so all of these six different burnout factors have some element of feeling like you are wasting your resources or you don't have enough resources and the demands are too high or out of your control you'll laugh maybe not laugh you'll probably be a bit worried about me when i say this but i've got to the point now where i've sort of analyzed how much time things take.

23:54So I think I need to make a cup of tea before I start this podcast recording because help with my voice. I can do that in 30 seconds. I can do fill up a bottle of water in 15 seconds. I can, you know, whatever it might be, I've sort of got it down to the seconds. I'm like, this is not healthy if I have to work out how much bandwidth I've got to do things as fast as I possibly can. So what is your big takeaway in terms of giving yourself that space and giving yourself that break as it were? Is there any advice you give the founders and me to map that in? I think ultimately what you're talking about comes down to expectations on ourselves.

24:28We set really high standards for ourselves. And as business owners, as founders, I think part of what drives you to take on that kind of challenge in the first place is that you want a lot of autonomy and you have really big goals and often really high expectations for yourself. But if we let those expectations get away from us, we set them up too high or we make them unrealistic, then we get into a place where we just have so much going on and we're being so hard on ourselves that we are counting the seconds that it takes to make our tea. So sometimes it's just a matter of looking at the standards, the expectations that we've set for ourselves, and looking for places that we can feel a little bit nicer to ourselves, scale back on them, and remembering that because you're in a founder position, no one else is going to step in and do that for you.

25:19At workplaces, we hear about the nightmare boss whose job expectations are just way too high and it's too much on employees. But we also have feedback from what's going on around us. And the reality is that most bosses and managers are actually pretty great. I get to be inside a lot of organizations. Most people are really trying hard to take care of their teams. Yeah. 90.9 % of the human race are decent. So you've got to hope. Yeah. Yeah. People are generally pretty good. You hear some horror stories, but people are usually pretty good. And when you have colleagues around you, you have other people who, you know, you see that they're exhausted.