When Stress Becomes Burnout (and How to Tell the Difference)

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1:01Hello, everyone, and welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we're going to be talking about when stress becomes burnout, why it matters, and how to tell the difference. I like this topic. I have been on both sides of this. I have been stressed and I have been burnt out. Stress is generally a good thing. It means you're working for something. Stress is not necessarily a net negative, I guess. Well, that's true. Even for kids, we've talked about that. Stress is how we grow. Stress is challenge, right? Right. Stress doesn't have to be a bad thing.

1:37Stress can sometimes be something we buy into and enhance with our own thought patterns, maybe. But being a mom is stressful. It just is. And then there's times when it tips into burnout, which I think is a word that we tend to really throw around. Yes. it's like I'm so OCD I'm so burned out I'm so like if you can say oh I'm so burned out you're probably not actually burned out being burned out is not something to be taken lightly and it's something that you can deal with but it's serious yeah yeah so we're going to talk today about what burnout is why it's a bigger deal than just I'm so stressed how it can lead to irrational thought patterns and then what to do about it and then what are some of the sort of early signs so you know like I need a break I need more than a break I need to recover from burnout as it turns out Yeah.

2:22And I think even having this conversation is a good sign. I've been rewatching Mad Men, which is just, it's such a funny time capsule about everything. And sometimes they play into it. There's a great, like the third or fourth episode, they're like, we're playing astronauts and it's Sally and a little friend and they come in and Sally has a dry cleaner bag over her head. Like the hanger is on her head and she has the dry cleaner bag all down her body. and the mom is like, Sally Draper. And you think she's going to say like, take that off. That's dangerous. You could suffocate. And she's like, if the clothes that were in that bag are now in a pile of my bed, you are in big trouble.

3:01It's just, they play up sometimes like, okay, Sally, go mix me a drink and light everybody's cigarettes in the room. And one of the things I think about is they all, I just look at them with all this smoking and the way they're eating and drinking all day. And I think, God, they must felt terrible all the time. And they're so stressed out. Some burnout. Well, it's interesting because the person who coined burnout, this was in the 70s. So it's post Mad Men, but it's still a long time ago, right? His name was Herbert Freudenberger. And he coined the term burnout. But the part that's interesting vis-a-vis Mad Men is he was interested in and studied burnout in executives, high powered executives, which even in like the 70s and early 80s was 99 out of 100 were going to be men.

3:49Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's who we said were burned out and they could have been, but that's the person who invented burnout was a man who invented the term burnout was a man and was interested in how it affected men. His definition was that burnout is an emotional state and process that is accompanied by and is often a consequence of an overload of stress. So the stress causes the burnout. And that stress was men doing important work. Yes. He said, unremitting stress and demands after decades of maximum effort, the individual finds himself screeching to an inexplicable halt. And so I looked at, I'll put in the show notes, he gave a lecture in 1981 in New York City about an executive with burnout.

4:31He gave it to a room full of executives, you know, how this might manifest. And the feeling he was sort of interested in, which I think is still what everybody would say, this whip or not is, is when you just can't go any further. You just like all of a sudden feel like your limbs are in cement. You're just not able to do what you usually do. On top of that, you also don't care. So you have this lethargy that's accompanied by depersonalization, which is just like, you just don't care. Your capacity for compassion and empathy and caring dwindles. So you can't get that much done. You can't get yourself to care that you're not getting that much done.

5:08And then the third thing he said is there's this feeling of nothing I do matters. This decreased sense of accomplishment, this what's the point that that is a sign of burnout. It sounds much more like moms than executives. And not to make this a Madman recap podcast, Madmen, but the wife in Madman, Betty, in the early episodes, I didn't remember the show very well. She drives off of the road and crashes her car because she's having this like weird cramping in her hands, basically. And she's like, something's wrong with me. Something's wrong with me. And she goes to a psychiatrist, which is considered, you know, very crazy.

5:52Like you must be a mess. Right. But then the amazing thing is at the end of the episode, Don, her husband, calls the psychiatrist and it's like, what's she talking about? And the psychiatrist is like, She's basically just like a teenage girl. It's just idle gossip and nervousness. She's like a child, the way she talks. And they're discussing her mental health. Literally, what is she telling you? And these two men are discussing her as like, what an idiot. What could she possibly have to be concerned by? She's just like an airheaded. She's just a beautiful, right. Yeah, she's just like a beautiful doll who only cares about suburban mom nonsense.

6:38Crazy. So since Herbert Freudenberger, oh, Herbert, he was very worried about the executives. But I think Mad Men, you kind of see her burning out. The January Jones's character definitely stops giving a crap about anything, as is evidence by the dry cleaner bag. She just doesn't care. She just smokes and looks out the window and the kids raise themselves. She's burned out. So these days, when we think about burnout, we definitely, I think, since the pandemic, tend to think about parents. Yes. Parents weren't really, that wasn't really studied until the pandemic. Like before the pandemic, burnout was more in professions that require caring and helping.

7:18And so they studied burnout in teachers and then they studied burnout in the medical profession. And so this is like in the 2000s, right? There were studies, 20 to 30 percent of teachers admit to feeling burnout because they have to care all day, every day. Certainly medical professionals up to half in this study said they have experienced burnout. But even then, they weren't asking, like, who requires whose job requires a constant amount of caring and helping that is unremitting than parents and then the primary caregiver. And it's just interesting that that was kind of missed for so long in the study of burnout.

7:56Well, and we were talking on the last episode about going postal and like postal workers who have this constant flow of the same work. And I think that, you know, doctors, it's like you have fixed 10 people and then you turn around and there's 40 more people in line. Have you watched the pit that show? I can't do it because I'm too squeamish. I mean, I hear it's fantastic. But then every time I say I don't like blood, somebody's like, No, no, don't watch it then. Yeah, it's probably not for the squeamish, but it really captures, I think, one of the reasons it's so successful is it captures like, oh my God, this amazing rescue and you've saved this person.

8:32And you turn around and there's 75 people like banging on the doors. When are you going to help me next? And it's that Jesus Christ Superstar. I was just watching it with my daughter. There's a scene where like, all the people are like, save me, Jesus, save me. But that feeling of no matter how much you do, there's still dinner to make tomorrow. There's still a runny nose to solve tomorrow. There's still scouts that need their uniform press tomorrow. It's this unrelenting nature of no matter how much of a superhero you are on any given day, the clock goes back to zero the first thing the next morning.

9:09I mean, this is exactly what Emily and Amelia Nagoski wrote about. They wrote a book called Burnout, which I totally recommend. I'll put the link in the show notes. It's also in our bookshop. If you go to bookshop.org and you type in Wet Fresh How, you can see every guest we've ever had on the show and also just some of our favorite books for people we have not had on the show. I love this book, Burnout. I think it's amazing. Came out about five years ago and truly transformational. And they studied burnout in women, in caregivers, parents and not. So they define burnout as being overwhelmed and exhausted by everything you have to do while still feeling like you're not doing enough.

9:50So I think that's it. Like, I can't. There's 70 more people. I saved one life. There's 70 more people trying to get in the emergency room. I'm doing everything I can, and it'll never stop, and it'll never be enough. And then you tip into this. So what's the point? And that's burnout. Shout out to my special needs moms, my medical high needs kids moms. On top of the regular momming you're doing, only you can be your child's advocate and save them and talk to the doctors and do research and get laughed at for doing research on Google and bringing it in. but only you can take care of this. And I think we are unique as a country in expecting that from our moms in terms of, I mean, I have friends, I know a lot of people who have a medically complex child and they go from like, I was a bartender in my twenties and then I worked in marketing for a little while and got married and had a kid.

10:47And now I'm expected to be the medical caretaker for a child with constant, complex medical needs. Or the caretaker for a child who other people can't watch for half an hour because they don't know how to manage them. But you're not special and chosen to be the one person who can deal with a kid with, you know, violent outbursts or repetitive behaviors that are self-harming. But suddenly, it's you and talk about burnout. I mean, the consistent, and they say that one of the things that informs PTSD for people coming back from war zones is that it's the unpredictability, that it's really, it's not so much the danger, it's long stretches of boredom interrupted by life-threatening danger.

11:43Like when you're in country, you mean? Yeah. If you're on the battlefield, right? If you're on assignment, yeah. You're there. And in a lot of ways, a lot of moms are dealing, even moms with neurotypical or typically developing kids, it's the feeling of like total boredom. And then where is my kid? Did they walk into the road? Are they choking on something? Did they get into the medicine cabinet and take something they shouldn't have? That it's not so much the stress of constant difficulty, difficulty it's the stress of long periods of quiet interrupted by extremely high stakes danger so what emily and emilia nagoski would say what they said in the book that was sort of revolutionary i thought as an idea was that it was about these moments of stress in the book like it's not laziness it's not poor time management it's not you gotta you know eat the frog and get up a little earlier every day.

12:39It's not that. It's stress that isn't resolved. That was what they circled. For sure. That you have, for example, you have a kid who has seizures, right? And like that seizure, the stress of that for you as a parent, that you will carry that with you. And that stress that isn't resolved with the unremitting demands of daily life on top of it, and you carrying something that you haven't had a second to process, that adds up and that's burnout. Because you haven't finished the process of your stress cycle. And that's what makes you depleted. You're not just tired. You're not just sick of it. It's more than like you need a margarita with your friends on a Tuesday.

13:23Although that's definitely useful for preventing burnout, Like friendships are important, but it's so much more than that. It's interesting that you said, like, it's the boring and then all of a sudden incredibly stressful that they would say, exactly, it's that. It's the unprocessed, very stressful moments that pile up and become burnout. And again, burnout isn't, now I'm really stressed. Burnout is this numbness and disconnection. And I think there is an aspect to this that makes it harder for moms than for most people. So let's take a break. And I want to talk about that after this. Hey there, I'm Kendra Adachi and my show, The Lazy Genius Podcast, helps you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

14:09And you get to decide what matters. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to give you a new way to see. Episodes of The Lazy Genius Podcast are full of compassionate time management tips and permission slips to do what makes sense for you. New episodes drop every Monday. Follow and listen to the Lazy Genius podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

14:54stressful job than some other jobs because you have a high level of control in that job. Oh, that's interesting. The control of outcome is literally in your hands. And so it can be less stressful than some jobs where like, you're very dependent on other people for outcome. But I think the acknowledgement of how hard certain roles are, the communality of those experiences is lacking for moms. You're doing it in isolation. I mean, I think that everybody would, there's an old expression, if you've met one kid with autism, you've met one kid with autism. Your experience is isolating and it's not necessarily, I mean, there's Facebook group, there's other things you can find.

15:36And I think people always recommend that you reach out and try to find community, which maybe is a little bit easier now with the internet, but it is really different when you're bringing your medically complex kid to the soccer game sidelines and you're talking to 10 moms who are like, well, after this, we're going to go to brunch, then we're going to go to mama, and you're going home because you need to change eight tubes. You are very isolated by that experience. You're right. That's situational stress that you're like, you just need to put yourself out there. Like that's not an option. No.

16:08And yet burnout can be, I mean, the reason it's important for moms, it's important for moms because our mental health matters, but it's also important because relationally, of course, we're less able to show up for a mother who is really burned out, like January Jones and Mad Men is not taking care of her kids, right? And it's not unable to fulfill their duties. And another way that it manifests relationally is that you withdraw. I mean, I've definitely when I've been burned out in my life. Yeah, that's what you need. You need to go talk to your friends, you need to go experience joy, you need to laugh.

16:42It's the last thing you want to do, right? Nobody will understand. It's not worth it. What's the point? I'd have to get a babysitter and then they'll call me in an hour and say, you got to come home. You know, there's no point in me trying to have friends. And then I'm going to go out and talk about how hard it is that their kid didn't get into Harvard. And I'm sitting here with a kid who isn't going to be able to go to college and may live with me for the rest of my life. Like, I don't want to deal with that. I'm not talking about myself, by the way. I'm just using it as an example. But I think that's right.

17:12And I do think that like a lot of problems, it is a spiraling problem that spirals downwards because you're then burned out. You're less attached to your kid. You're not getting along with your spouse as well. Maybe you're making bad choices and drinking or doing bad behaviors, which makes it worse, which keeps you farther from people. It's frustrating that problems often beget bigger problems and you kind of wish that problems begot solutions, but that doesn't tend to be how it works. That doesn't tend to happen. Right. Right. So there was this study, this was kind of interesting, I thought, in Russia two years ago.

17:52They're finally now studying mothers and burnout. So in Russia, they studied 100 mothers who self-identified as having parental burnout. In this study that was defined as literally like you're finding yourself unable to take care of your kids. You're unable to fulfill your parental responsibilities. And other kids were under seven. So it's kids who really do need daily attention in many ways. The mothers in that study were found to struggle with other things more than moms who didn't have self-reported parental burnout, such as catastrophizing, which is like, if this isn't perfect, then everything will fall apart.

18:26That any little thing going wrong will be a disaster. That's called catastrophizing. And mothers who had burnout were more likely to catastrophize. I'm excellent at catastrophizing, by the way. I should get a prize. They were more likely to also judge themselves. Like, I'm a bad mom for feeling this way. Of course, the mom guilt of, I shouldn't be burned out. Why can't I get my act together to go throw together some chicken enchiladas for the kids? That there's just a very, very harsh judgment. So they were more likely to feel that than moms who didn't report burnout. But of course they were because they were burned out and they weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing.

19:02So then, as you said, it's a spiral on the way down. And then the third thing was that your frustration tolerance really plummets, this study argued. I'm having that a little bit right now, that frustration. I noticed this very much in myself that the first thing to go is my ability to tolerate the day-to-day with my kids. Yeah, just can't do it. It just gets very, it gets bad quickly. And then it again, it's just a spiral. Like, then you're getting into bed and being like, what kind of person has three kids and then yells at them all day for just being kids? It's me. Hi, I'm the problem. And I think that then you just feel so bad.

19:44And then the next day starts with, no, today I'm going to be Doris Day, mom. And then you're just again, it's just once it starts, it cycles. Well, that's a good example. So say you're like, OK, I'm going to do such a better job tomorrow. I'm going to get up early. I'm going to make muffins for the kids. And when they come into the kitchen, I'm going to be I'll have a chopper no matter what. Delicious muffins. Right. But if you have but if you are in burnout and therefore have lower frustration tolerance, then if the kid says, you know, I thought these were chocolate chips, they're blueberries, right then you will like your frustration tolerance is zero you snap at them i guess i won't bother next time then you catastrophize i can't do anything right and right you really you really can get stuck in a loop on the way all the way down and i think that just in thinking about this out loud that there are seasons where this is particularly hard like i was burnt out when i had little kids for sure in terms of being extremely tired right but every day my kids would just be so funny and cute and make me laugh and be like, my mom looks like a princess and a Barbie.

20:54Like they're just so cute and loving. Parenting teens is a very different experience because your kids are basically like you stink and everything you say is dumb. Right. I'm speaking in huge generalities. My kids are not like this. I often argue that I love having teenagers and that this is a great phase of life. And I feel that but the burnout is different at different phases. I think physically now I'm getting nine hours of sleep a night if I want to I can get into bed at nine o 'clock and say you guys do your homework, go to bed, I'm going to bed now, I'm much better rested, but the emotional burnout is higher for me at this point.

21:33The physical I mean, I can say like order a pizza, I'm going to bed at seven and good taking care of myself, which I couldn't do when they were little, no matter how tired I was. It's like, put chicken nuggets in the oven, put peas on the plate. You had to do it. And so I think it can really change with time. Sometimes it's much more physically burnt out and sometimes it's much more emotionally burnt out. Right. And the emotionally burnt out is like, fine, don't eat, don't have dinner. What do I care? Right. That's the cynicism and sort of depersonalization. You know, you kind to know you've gone to another place, which doesn't mean you're a bad mother.

22:09It means like, oh, I'm burned out. There's something I need to do about this. Can we talk briefly about the physical manifestations of burnout? Yes, please. Insomnia. Okay. Constant fatigue. Like, I do get enough sleep and I'm still tired. Sometimes the other side of insomnia, which is only want to sleep all the time. See me right now. And the stress, this is something that the Nagoski sisters talk about in burnout is that it can manifest like stress over time built out, not completed. We'll talk in the next part about how to complete the stress cycle. When you don't complete the stress cycle, it compounds in your body and it can lead to things like high blood pressure, autoimmune illness.

22:48I developed vitiligo after a particularly ongoing stressful burnout time in my life. Vitiligo, meaning your skin was bleached out. Yeah, your skin. Yeah. Yeah. And it's come back with like a lot of treatment and stuff. But yeah, it's an autoimmune disease where your skin cells start attacking themselves and it happened out of nowhere. And it was during the pandemic with other stuff on top of an extremely stressful, long-term stress situational time in my life that I couldn't like you go girl my way out of it. And you write about it and happy to help that some of the reaction from doctors is like, you need to calm down.

23:24Nothing's that bad in your life. And I keep using this Mad Men example because I'm watching it. But very much the attitude towards Betty Draper, January Jones's character is you are beautiful and you live in the suburbs and your husband pays for everything. He works all day. Right. Nothing to be stressed about. And I think that, you know, it's funny to see it in the 1950s version. They play it up a little bit as how absurd it is that her husband and her psychiatrist are kind of conspiring. but it's not that far from some of the stuff we're still dealing with and you talk about in the book that you develop this vitiligo at the end of a very stressful time and that the doctor is like would you have a car crash or something really stressful that happened because I don't understand how a stable mom of three who is doing fine by all outside appearances could be stressed out enough to get an autoimmune disorder.

24:25Yeah. Yeah. So here's the real twist. The things that we do to deal with stress, if we're just in a moment of stress, there's a project due next week. Oh, shoot. I have two things that are both due tomorrow morning. Okay. I know. Tonight when I get home, I'm going to have to stay up late and maybe get up early to get both of them finished. That's stress, right? That's a moment. And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to power through. I'll get up an hour earlier if I need to, to finish the second thing that I need to do. That works for stress, for burnout to try to like double down and get up earlier and get by and just work harder actually makes the burnout worse.

25:01Yeah. And the thing I do when I have a lot to do is I withdraw. I withdraw from others to concentrate and get more dumb. Shoot, this thing is due Friday. I'm going to say I can't have lunch this week. That's fine. When it's a situational, when it's a moment, right? Stress can be a moment. And then the things you do are work harder, get up earlier, withdraw, drink more coffee, drink more wine, whatever, you know, like I'm going to get through this moment. But all of those things that we do to motivate and get ourselves through actually can cause burnout to be worse. I think from knowing you for a long time, you respond to stress by like, I'll do more.

25:36And I respond to stress by I'll do nothing. I'll stop going to the gym. I'll sit and play Candy Crush for three hours on my phone. like, I deserve me time. I'll eat 10 sleeves of Oreos and like, no one will take this from me because I am stressed out. And they're both kind of bad choices from different ends of the spectrum, which is like, the doing more is just, it's not fixing it. But the kind of retreating is not fixing it either. And I think that it's, I see both as problems. That's a good point. Like I know that if I'm stressed, I should go to the gym and like I should be around people and I should pick three things a day to do.

26:20But I tend to get very like, this is a hard time for me. And therefore, I'm going to lay in bed and watch a Real Housewives for six hours. And then I just feel, by the time I pick up the kids, I'm kind of like resenting. Well, I didn't get anything done today. And it just gets very cyclical. I think however we respond, it starts the cycle going. All right. Let's talk when we come back about how to make this better. What works when you're in burnout, how to catch it a little sooner. There are things we can really do about this. Love it. Okay, Nicola, Quizfrage. Homeoffice-Bastater oder Fahrtkosten?

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27:29your mom skills for your getting back out there job resume. From the What Fresh Hell podcast. You survived twins. I have experience maximizing positive outcomes while overseeing simultaneous projects for diverse clients with opposing goals over multi-year periods. You fed three children regular meals. I oversaw purchasing and distribution of foodstuffs on a strict and limited budget. I successfully provided a variety of healthy options for varied diets, including special attention to allergens, on a three times a day basis for a diverse and demanding set of diners. You had a two-year-old. I displayed an array of conflict resolution skills on a daily basis in a high conflict environment with a demanding and unreasonable overlord with consistent success.