Signs That You’re Burnt Out & How To Fix It | Jonathan Fields EP 771

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11The recent focus on burnout is really fascinating because there's some kind of obvious things, right? There's the fact that when we kind of annihilated the separation between work and home in terms of like the actual physical setting. It's all happening. It's work and home. Right. You know, you used to have a much easier time creating boundaries. You know, there's sort of like, okay, so I'm leaving the place where I do that thing called work, Even though the boundaries have been blurred a lot more in the recent years through technology, there was still some level of boundary. And now when it all exists in one space, and most people, they never learned how to create that boundary within the same space.

0:47It's a whole different thing. And then you pile on an existential crisis, a global health crisis, extreme stress and anxiety about well-being. and we don't have the cognitive bandwidth to actually figure out how to remake our work world in a way that actually allows us like to breathe. And so I think that's part of it. I think, and I think that's what a lot of people are pointing to. They're like, basically it's the conflation of everything happening in one place, the demands of the workplace, not going away and people not being structured and set up and having the systems and process and boundaries to do it.

1:21But I think that's not the whole story. Okay. You know, because I think we're pointing to that. But what I think we're missing is the fact that this is not a new problem. It's been exacerbated for sure. But burnout has been on the rise on every survey, every bit of research that I've seen for the last 10 to 15 years. Right. So this is just kind of bringing it to the surface because it was the perfect storm of circumstance. But it's been going on for a long time. And I think there's an underlying issue. And that is that the average person tends to wake up in the morning and go to do something that is not necessarily well aligned with a fundamental impulse for work that would nourish them in a deeper way.

2:04And over time, that level of misalignment turns into outright conflict. But we never really deal with it. We never address it. A lot of us just sort of look at work as the thing we do. Put money on the table, a roof over our head. And it does all those things. and those things matter to everybody. But this has caused a level of sort of existential crisis where people are saying, you know, like not only am I working way more hours with no boundaries and no understanding. With the things I don't enjoy doing. Right, but also the fact that I'm doing these things that really don't nourish me are making it that much worse and everything is imploding.

2:43But there's an amazing opportunity at the same time. I was working as a lawyer in a very past life, you know that. And I was working insane hours, just like nonstop, basically 100-hour weeks with very little break, sometimes never going home for a couple days at a time. Huge amounts of stress because I was a securities lawyer at a big firm and the stakes were massively high. And you had to be perfect. That's what we got paid for. And I ended up, basically my immune system fell apart. a large infection kind of exploded in the center of my body, eating a hole through my intestine from the outside in, sending me into emergency surgery.

3:21Wow. Yeah, I mean, literally, like, my body was eating a hole through me from the inside out. It was beyond burnout. It was sort of like I had nothing left. That was a huge wake-up call for me. Like, I went back to work after that. You know, like, I recovered. I took a couple of weeks. I went back to the office. But from that moment on, I knew, like, I had this question. which was like, how do we do this differently? How do we do this thing called work differently? How can I show up and say, well, I'm doing something that's meaningful where there's a sense of purpose behind it, where I feel like I'm alive when I'm doing this thing, where I'm excited and enthusiastic to do it.

3:56And there are a lot of things that contribute to that. But the seed, I think, it's because I've been trying to trace it back recently. I think the real original seeds for this work were planted 20, 25 years ago. What I've learned over time is that as a multi-time entrepreneur and somebody who just works really hard. I've trained my mind to a point where my mind can actually take a lot. But even when my mind is kind of like, you know, the world is spinning, but my mind is relatively okay. The tell for me is my body, my physical body. It manifests in illness and pain and all the stuff you just laid out.

4:28Information. Right. And I've learned over the years that if I don't listen, eventually it brings me to my knees. And it's fascinating to me that like when you go into somebody who takes a very holistic or functional medical point of view, very often the first session with them is hours long and it's not just let's look at all of your labs tell me where it hurts tell me about your relationship like how are you feeling are you stressed out are you sleeping well like yeah right how many friends you have in your life how often do you like all this other stuff because there's definitely a growing acknowledgement the fact that the way you live your life that the you know the appearance of stress the appearance of you know poor relationships it affects you in a really powerful way huge way yeah it's not just about self-control it's not just about willpower you know there's there's a whole bunch of inner and outer scaffolding that you can create that make it so you don't have to wake up every day and use all this cognitive bandwidth to make the decisions to make everything stay okay but there's also a lot of things that we can kind of put on autopilot that will help us basically take the actions that we want to take by default without even having to think about them right right you're in a moment where something's spinning in your head that's stopping you from taking action and you make all sorts of assumptions about it that paralyze you.

5:40You ask these really simple questions like, is it true? Where's the evidence for? Where's the evidence against? So I think a really simple set of prompts can be incredibly powerful with that. If you're really in a rut where it's causing you mental illness or genuine emotional struggle, seek help. Obviously, you know, go and find professional help. One of the anchors in my life is a meditation practice, a daily meditation practice. You know, I wake up every morning for over a decade now, and I have both a breathing and a meditation practice that changes my physiology, but it also changes my state of mind, you know, so that as I move into my day, things may go south.

6:23You know, there may be things that drop into like my day that I don't wanted to happen that I didn't see coming that really just knocked me back. But what I found is that over the years, that practice creates a baseline level of equanimity that allows you to sort of like be more intentional about the way that you move through it. And also relating back to being in a rut, zoom the lens out a little bit, take a little bit more of a meta view into the thing that is causing you this feeling of stuckness and be able to kind of say, huh, what's really happening here because usually it's not the thing that you think it is there's something bigger going on and if you can address the bigger thing then everything starts to free itself on its own

7:11i am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong if you enjoyed this episode make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.