Hi Fried Fans!
It’s Cait, comin’ atcha with another #straightfromcait episode! We are close to winding up Season 2 of FRIED The Burnout Podcast. You’ve got this week’s sfc and then next week, I have the owner of incann CBD products on to talk to us about CBD and burnout (I loved it so much that I became an affiliate for her brand.. So while the episode isn’t sponsored, I’ll be sharing about why I love their products :)) and then I will be starting Season 3 after a short 1 week break around Thanksgiving. We’re starting Season 3 off with a bang and having a chat with a codependency coach. This is a massive topic and I’ll be excited for you to get that info to help you unwind some unhelpful patterns you might find yourself in.
This week, I want to talk to you about burnout myths. There’s a lot of them, but we’re just going to go over 3 big ones. You MAY have heard me mention this a time or 5 on the podcast, but I think they need to be repeated as often as possible and as clearly as possible so that we can collectively change our mind about these ideas. Doing so means that we’ll be more apt to notice burnout and therefore more apt to take it seriously and choose to heal from it.
Let’s jump in
Burnout myth #1
If you work in something that you have a passion for, you’ll never burn out. Or, if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. I AM BEGGING YOU. PLEASE STOP THIS NONSENSE. If you have tendencies that lead to burnout and are in culture that promotes burnout, you can burnout no matter how much you love your job or no matter how much you really DO want to make a difference in people’s lives.
Burnout is not a result of a passion deficiency.
The problems with this thinking are that it prevents people that are passionate about their jobs from recognizing their burnouts and it makes everyone who knows they are burnt out question their passions.
Your passion isn’t the problem. It’s also not the solution.
Burnout myth #2
Burnout only happens to weak people. Oh boy, I hate this one. There are, for reasons that scientists can’t figure out, people that are more resilient than others. They also can’t agree on a how much adversity or stress increases resiliency and how much breaks it down - because it’s different in each person. Everyone has a threshold for how much they can take and that threshold has nothing to do with your strength. In fact, the strongest among us often carry more than our allotted load, therefore diminishing our resilience and leading us to burnout.
Being resilient and increasing resiliency doesn’t make you STRONGER. It makes you more adaptable, more agile, more flexible.
Your threshold is a due to a combination of your genetics, your current health, your current environment, the health of your childhood environment, the number of trauma adaptations you have, the amount of support you have, and and and and and. There are so many factors in play. It’s not about weakness, it’s about systems that get overloaded due to factors that are very often outside of the systems control. Burnout myth #3
You can get through it if you just keep pushing. In a world that tells us we should never quit, never give up, just keep on keeping on - this one is a hard one to swallow. Burnout will only heal if you allow a certain amount of PAUSE into your life. I’m not saying you have to pause everything, but there are some things that will have to go on hold in order for you to be able to heal. You’ll have to drop some proverbial balls and be okay with pulling away from living life at 200% all the time.
Once your threshold has been crossed, you cannot reestablish it by continuing on as if nothing happened. You’ve got to retreat, at least a bit, so that your resilience can be re-established.
This is especially important when we’re talking about a full burnout recovery. When you’re burnt out and your brain has shrunk, the only way for it to regrow is to convince the nervous system to convince the brain that it is no longer under attack and can rest and regenerate. In order to do that, we’ve got to eliminate some of the stressors on the nervous system. Figuring out which stressors to move away from is why you do things like hire a coach, hint, hint.
What other burnout myths have you heard? What other beliefs do you have about burnout that make it more difficult for you to heal? Send ‘em to cait @ caitdonovan.com so that I can make an episode and walk you through them! In the meantime, we’re heading into the holiday season so I want to remind everyone that you deserve space and kindness and boundaries. If you’ve been struggling all year, it is time to get off the struggle bus. Book a call with me, let’s start busting through this burnout cycle that’s got you feeling like you’re stuck in the eye of a storm. 2020 left a lot of things out of our control, 2021 is for building resilience.
You can book your call at bit.ly/callcait.
Talk to you soon!
XOXO C P.S. TLDR, the top 3 myths are: 1. If you're passionate, you can't burn out. 2. You only burn out if you're weak. 3. You can push through burnout and it will go away.