My guest today is Cait Donovan. She’s one of New York City’s leading burnout experts, the host of fried the burnout podcast and the author of the book, the bounce back ability factor and burnout, gain resilience and change the world. I’ve spoken to Cait on a number of occasions and absolutely love her approach and her knowledge on burnout. And one of the reasons I wanted to bring her on this podcast is I know When I start working with a lot of clients, they have this combination of both struggling with drinking too much and too often, and also being burned out on work on life on everything else. And I think that the two issues really go together. Some of the things that are addressed similarly, and some are different. And it’s really important to be able to identify what burnout is how to separate it from over drinking and what parts you need to address.

So Caitlin and I are going to talk about everything. burnout one-on-one. So, how do I identify it, what it really takes to heal, we’re going to talk about the difference between burnout and depression, as well as rest versus restoration, which helps you heal your brain and your body.

So Caitlin, welcome.

05:54

Thank you so much. That was such a great intro.

Casey McGuire Davidson  05:57

Well, I am thrilled to have you here, we’ve actually talked a number of times. And I knew immediately I needed to have you on the podcast, because burnout, it is something that brings so many of us down.

06:09

Well, it’s so much easier to drink when you’re feeling stressed. And so you might not notice the burnout for longer if you’re drinking more. Because it gives you a way to numb the pain. So by the time you notice, if you’re drinking a little fear over drinking a little, and then you notice you’re burnt out, it’s probably been a year. You were probably burnt out a long time ago. But you sort of used drinking as your coping mechanism, which allowed you to sort of skate by for a while.

06:46

Yeah. And it’s really easy when you’re burned out to think that drinking is helping you. And also a lot of the symptoms of withdrawal and of hangovers can often mimic symptoms of burnout. And that’s what I want to talk to you today about because they often go hand in hand. And also, they can be confusing, right? I know for the longest time, I didn’t want to have an issue with alcohol, I desperately didn’t want to give up drinking. So I was like, going to my doctor or my therapist being like, I have anxiety, I’m having panic attacks, I’m depressed, I can’t sleep, basically blaming everything else except for drinking. And I think you really need to piece it apart and kind of figure out what are all the factors that lead to women to burn out to over drinking and how to separate all that.

07:41

So for me when you say that, I think back to the conversation that we had when you were came on Friday, and this sort of idea that once you decided that you were going to do your 100 day trial, you realize that there was a lot of other stuff going on that you weren’t dealing with. So I think that sometimes it’s an overlap and sometimes it’s just a different part of the process. It’s not even just an overlap. It’s the same damn thing. It’s just a different part of the process. But the overlapping symptoms are you know, foggy headedness, fatigue, frequent headaches frequent, the combo of headache and migraine happens in I think I did the statistics recently based on my own research, and I feel like it was over 70 something percent when you combine headaches and migraines as a symptom of burnout is a symptom of burnout.

Yeah. Let’s talk about how easy it is to have a headache when you have a bottle of wine at night.

Yeah. So, I think it’s really complicated to untangle symptoms of overdrinking and symptoms of burnout. Because the symptoms of burnout when you’re looking at just the physiological sort of responses to burnout can be anything in your body, anything that gets worse with stress. So that leaves us with a never-ending list of symptoms, right in order for someone to quote unquote diagnose burnout. And I say “because burnout is not actually a diagnosis in the United States just yet”, according to the DSM, where we like to put all of our ways that we like to label people for not being perfect according to some crazy standards. It’s labeled as an occupational hazard not as a disease process. But the things that are required to notice it in some one, our number one physical and emotional exhaustion, which like could mean anything. Right? You can’t get up to exercise in the morning. You’re really your fuses really short again, all things that could be from over drinking. So that’s the first one is physical and emotional exhaustion, which like irritates me every time I say it, because that covers like 98% of every symptom that could ever happen in human body.

Yeah, absolutely. What does that even mean? It doesn’t even mean anything. So that’s a tough one for me. The next one is cynicism and detachment. I mean, do I even really need to go into it? Like, of course that overlaps with overdrinking. Like, of course it does. It’s so easy to be cynical about the world. And it’s so easy to feel like you’re alone, when you’re not able to connect with people properly, because you’re not really present.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  10:23

Or you’re like beating yourself up or blame. Yeah, so for, you know, self-loathing in the morning, all the things

10:30

right. And then the next thing on the list to be able to say like this is definitely burnout is that you feel that your life and your work, don’t really have an impact. You don’t feel accomplishment from what you do. How accomplished you feel when you wake up after drinking a bottle of wine the night before.

10:48

Yeah. And I’m, I’m interested in those things that you were saying. Because, you know, when I think of burnout, I think of like the adrenaline, the mind racing, the feeling like you can’t get it done like that sort of manic energy and overwhelm. And it sounds like what you’re describing is sort of if I picture a curve and what I imagined burnout is, it’s the top of the curve, you’re sort of what I’m hearing you say is sort of the bottom right, like you’ve crashed. Yeah, this is burn out, your pilot light is no longer lit, right? You can’t turn on the oven, you can’t get your burner to go on, because the pilot light is out.

Casey McGuire Davidson  11:27

Yeah. And so you know, I know later I mentioned we were going to talk about the difference between burnout and depression. But what you were describing does sound sort of similar to depression, to So tell me about how those two things are different.

 

11:43

So again, there’s a lot of overlap. And I think this is one of the big issues with burnout is that we don’t have a way to measure it, I think we should have a way to measure it. And I’ll give a suggestion in a moment. But we don’t really have a way to measure it. So we don’t say that it exists because we don’t know how to quantify it. And depression, what you need to hit well, however, many five out of the 12 things listed in the DSM, in order to be diagnosed, a lot of the symptoms again, overlap.

 

This is not a question that has been answered. So I’m not giving a definitive answer for how to pull these two apart is something that I’ve done a lot of research on. I have pulled audiences. I have talked to people, I have talked to experts, nobody can really, really figure it out. But the most common thing that people say is burnout is directly related to the way that you work in your life. People say it’s directly related to work, I disagree with that statement. The way that you work at home at life as a parent as in a relationship, the way you work is one part. And depression is, can be related to one major significant event or unrelated to everything. And so I experienced burnout and depression separately.

 

When I was burnt out, I was not depressed. I was sort of a hedonic. Like I didn’t get pleasure out of things. But I could find moments of joy. And I didn’t feel like my life was covered in a great cloud. I got injured in 2019, I had an Achilles rupture. And I had to spend a few months in bed after that. And as someone who’s always been very active, being down for a few months really mess with my mental health. And during that time, I was depressed. My best friend came to visit from Poland. And she showed up and I was like, Yeah, she I guess she’s here. Like, it didn’t lift me at all. And that was the moment that I was like, Oh, no, this is depression, those two. So those two events were separate from me. But for a lot of people, they really overlap. So again, like burnout, depression, over drinking, it’s all kind of smashed. Yeah, it’s a similar thing. And I think at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that you find a word that helps you heal, and not a label that keeps you stuck.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  14:05

Oh my god. Okay, I love that. I absolutely love that. So, say that again.

 

14:11

At the end of the day, I think the most important thing is that you find a word that helps you and inspires you to heal. Not a label that victimizes you and keeps you stuck.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  14:22

Yeah, that’s exactly it. And I that’s something that that I always think about related to drinking, you know, I personally don’t use the word alcoholic. That to me is a label that keeps you stuck versus one that helps you heal. That’s for me personally, people write just me personally. Other people call themselves like a nondrinker or sober or alcohol free is a big one, like whatever that label is that empowers you, that makes you feel like you’ve taken positive control over your life. That’s exactly it. And so I’ve not Just a lot of times like when, you know, when I was working or whatever, saying that you had anxiety, or you know, something like your overachiever or whatever, and burnt out seem to have more of a positive connotation in the world than depressed, because and I’m just saying that for my purse because, oh, I have anxiety because I’m doing so much or whatever. It’s like, Oh my god, I’m so productive, right? In our culture and like being busy is often rewarded.

 

15:30

Yeah, well, and I think what you’re saying here is that, again, we’re relating burnout to work. Yeah, look at me, I’m doing so much. And that’s why I’m burnt out. It’s not, you can separate burnout from being part of your character. And if you’re looking at the studies, which again, I don’t agree with them 100% because I think that they’re outdated and need to be redone a lot of them which I’m sure they will be over the next couple of years because of the pandemic. But when you look at the research 80% of burnout is caused by your workplace. Now, the reason I disagree with that, on some level is because I burned out as an entrepreneur. I created my workplace. And my first workplace that I created was a small acupuncture office. I had two beautiful rooms. I had a fireplace in my waiting room that that also was a living room. I had a full kitchen. I had a separate bath. I had a parking space downstairs like, and I made all the rules.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  16:28

Yeah. Right. So yeah, so anyone can get burnt out, right? Yeah.

 

16:32

Yeah. I think that having this separation between burnout is somebody else’s fault. And burnout was my fault is sort of important. because nobody’s 100% at fault for their burnout. Yeah, no one. burnout is like accumulation of coping mechanisms that worked for you for a particular length of time in your life, and then they stopped working for you, they end up costing you more energy than they save you. One of them could be for instance, drinking, right. Another one is people pleasing. Another one is perfectionism. Another one is deciding that you only have value, if you’re being productive.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  17:13

And all those things are things that are like rewarded throughout your life. I know, I identify clearly with all four of those that you mentioned. But that like, that was how I got positive reinforcement because I was a people pleaser, because I was so productive, because, you know, I overachieved on everything and tried to multitask. And then, you know, so it’s hard to separate that like, innate, this is my value. This is my personality, because I want to get approval and move up the ladder, versus these are choices I’m making that are actually detrimental to my mental health.

 

17:52

Well, and I think this is the trick, they weren’t always detrimental. And they’re still not always going to be detrimental in the future. I promise you that what I’m doing acupuncture treatments. I’m a perfectionist. And I think that I should be I think your surgeon, when they go to work should be a perfectionist, my accountant. She better double check that shit. Yeah, yeah. You know, like, I want her to be a perfectionist. I’m not saying that I’d lose my mind if she made a mistake, because they happen. But there are places and times where these modes of being are actually quite useful. The question is, can you make a clear decision on when you’re going to use them, instead of allowing them to control your every action and decision?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  18:41

Wow. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I’ve seen you right before that you said while depression and burnout look different for everyone. They may simply be two sides of the same coin. But the distinction is that burnout is associated with high levels of stress, whether work or general life, while depression may not have a direct cause, yeah, is that right?

 

19:06

Yes. Yeah, you can’t burn out. Unless you are not transforming and processing stress well in your life, okay. But you can be depressed for a multitude of reasons. And, you know, the brain biochemistry is sort of disputed, so we don’t need to really get into that but that’s a that’s a questionable thing. Like is it your brain chemistry is that your genetics, they know that there’s a genetic component, but they don’t know why serotonin helps. You know, it’s not a serotonin deficiency, because you take a, you know, an SSRI, and your brain is flooded with serotonin, but you don’t feel relief for three weeks. So that doesn’t make any sense. You know, like they know that eventually for some people, it does work. So it’s useful, but they don’t know why. And it hasn’t actually led them to understand the true causes.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  20:00

Yeah, well, so tell us about your work and how you help people overcome burnout, is it mostly women are that women and men does that present differently.

 

20:11

My podcast and my book are both focused on female entrepreneurs. So that’s who I work with the most, just by, because that’s who I’m talking to the most, most of the time, which doesn’t mean to say that, I mean, right now I have male student, and, you know, two or three women who are in the corporate structure, so it changes, you know, but for me, this process involves honesty above all else, because I do believe and this is one of the things that I think, in time, we’ll be able to research more clearly. So when we’re burnt out, when we have chronic stress for an extended period of time, we know that the part of your brain that sits behind your forehead, which is responsible for executive functioning, which is damaged by drinking, that part of your brain shrinks, minimally, but you lose nerve cells, and that part of your brain when you’re burnt out.

 

And so, right now, it’s too expensive, and too much time to have people scan their brains once a year to see what’s happening. Also, there’s a natural age-related decline that we don’t really know the rate of yet, because we’re not measuring people’s brains every six months for their whole entire lives, like that kind of longitudinal study has not been done yet. So we don’t have that kind of data available. But I do believe that if we did have that data available, that we would be able to sort of catch things maybe earlier and find things out. But another thing that’s happening in the brain during burnout is that your limbic systems or your animal brain, the way you react to things spontaneously, without sort of giving them any thought, is hyperactive. Right, and then the front of your brain is hypo active. So your animal brain is like, show me where all the alerts are. Let me fire the alarms, I need to know what’s going on, I’m gonna keep you safe, don’t worry, like you go into Animal Mode, and you don’t have enough function in the part that keeps us human to sort of really filter those messages from that part of your brain. This is something that it forms during our teenage years, most of the time, for most people, this talk back and forth between those two parts of the brain is really important. My guess. This is a hypothesis. This is not a theory, this has not been tested. But my guess is that those of us that are burnt out, have been under such high stress for so long that we’ve ruined the sense of communication between those two parts of the brain. And we just aren’t handling things anymore, because we don’t have a rational approach to things left. So, we do everything on automation, right? So we people please, we go perfectionism, we have a glass of wine, we do. It’s just a bunch of bad habits.

 

And one of the ways we reconnect those two parts of the brain, this is fascinating. This, this blew my mind when I learned that one of the ways that those parts of the brain that their communication is reinforced, is by truth telling. So we do a lot of truth telling. So people will say for instance, like, this is what’s happening my life. And this is a problem. And that’s a problem. And this is a problem. And I’m like, Yeah, but what’s the truth? Well, this person did this to me. I’m like, Yeah, but what’s the truth? Okay, yeah, but what’s really true, people don’t usually know what the truth is, because we’re so accustomed to protecting ourselves from monitoring our own behavior, from monitoring other people’s behavior, unless we can directly tie it to our own behavior, like I’m doing this because that person did that, that we notice. But the rest of it, we totally eliminate. So, if we can start to get to truth, underneath things, it helps reconnect those parts of the brain that make us more rational, that that gives us that, you know, Viktor Frankl in a Man’s Search for Meaning talks about the space between a stimulus and your response. And that’s where freedom comes from. Your ability to have something hard happen to you and for you to choose to respond in a way that’s beneficial to you, and not hurtful to other people. But that space requires this conversation between your limbic system and your frontal cortex, that that space gets bigger and better when you’re telling the truth. This is why the positive thinking movement positive psychology overall is a great idea because it includes allowing room for difficult emotion. But positive thinking out in the world of means and Instagram can be really detrimental. Because you’re saying, I’m gonna make you know, $5,000 next month, but you have $12 in your bank account and rent to pay like you need to seriously look at your shit and figure it out.

Casey McGuire Davidson  24:40

So, does that mean that like part of dealing with burnout is to seriously look at your shit and figure it out?

24:46

Yes. Seriously, look at your shit. Just really stop and say do I actually like this job? Or am I still doing it because it’s safe because I’m afraid of change because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next. Because I had a Call recently and somebody was talking about their boss, really acting wild. Just the behavior was like he was ignoring her talking behind her back to other people. And she spent a few months trying to fix herself so that he would stop doing that. Mm hmm. And we were on the phone and I said, but it’s not you. And she said, what do you mean? I said, I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. I think he’s just being wild. And she was like, Oh, I said, I think he probably just wants to get rid of you. But he doesn’t want to fire you. So he’s trying to make you miserable, so that you leave, and you’re doing everything in your power to be perfect at your job so that you can stay. I said, he doesn’t want you there. And she stopped and her whole body like, sunk and she started crying. And she went, Oh, my God. That’s true. Like you’re burning yourself out to be at a job where you get tortured and bullied. Because you think it’s your job to change everybody else’s opinion of you. Hell no. Get out. But we tell ourselves stories. My work situation is so bad, but it’s good to be the same somewhere else. All bosses are like this. There’s favoritism here. But that’s just the way that No. Yeah, up with the stories.

Casey McGuire Davidson  26:23

Yeah. I mean, you’re basically putting yourself in an untenable or unsustainable situation. I certainly do that, like, in my mind, it’s, you know, and it was total fear, like the idea of like, Oh, my God, this is so hard. But you know, I go somewhere else, it’s going to be same shit different day. And just like forcing myself to, like, live in that perpetual state of anxiety, for way too long before going and go, not burnout? Well, yeah. And you want to like not be a quitter, and to do a good job, and you have all this fear and all that stuff. So let’s talk about like, if you’re at that place, where you’re feeling all those symptoms that you talked about, whether it’s, you know, physical and emotional exhaustion, or cynicism and detachment, a feeling of purposelessness, or just extreme anxiety. How do you heal from that? I know you said, like, what is true, take a look at your shit. You know, sometimes it helps to have someone else help you process that, like, it’s almost impossible to do it by yourself. So you’re not like,

Casey McGuire Davidson  27:27

Am I fucking crazy? Like, yes, me, you need someone else to be like, No, man, that’s, that’s crazy. 

27:33

No, this truth telling doesn’t happen and doesn’t have the same effect on your brain. When you’re doing it alone. It’s just not effective. Because you never know, if you’re really getting there, you have no feedback. And when you get to the truth, and somebody says something, or you say something, and you’re like, Oh, damn, that’s the truth. Your body physically changes in that moment, you can feel it. Yeah, you know, you’ve that’s a physical, physiological reaction to something. So that number one cannot be done without another person.

Casey McGuire Davidson  28:08

When also, as you’re describing your client, I certainly have imagine being in the situation, whether it’s manipulating, you’re being manipulated, or you’re being gaslighted. Right? Yeah, you’re literally like, second guessing. What’s going on? It’s really hard to like, evaluate, am I feeling this way? Because of X or because of y and what is normal? And what is baseline?

28:34

Right, exactly. And so in the beginning, we usually sit down and do these are the internal causes of burnout. These are the external causes of burnout, how many of each are in your life? This is another reason why I don’t subscribe to the 8020 rule that 80% is your work, because most people there’s about equal on both sides will say, well, these are all the things I do internally, well, these are all the things that are present in my workplace, and it ends up being 50/50-ish, most of the time, over time. What I don’t, I am not for people quitting their jobs, before they have a plan. I’m not for having to quit your jobs for however, getting to a place where you’ve done as much as you can within your current circumstance. And if it can’t move forward, if you are stuck, because the circumstance doesn’t allow you to grow, then it’s time to move on.

Casey McGuire Davidson  29:28

Okay? And you should be doing healing within that period, right?

29:34

As much as you can, knowing that it might be limited because of the circumstance environment really does matter. So if the environment that you’re in is, you know, has bullying and lack of fairness, and your workload is mismanaged and there’s no recognition or praise for your work and the values that you have don’t match the values of the company. You work for all of these things. You can’t 100% heal if you stay in the situation, yeah, but you can heal as much as you can, by doing the internal stuff first and then seeing what’s left. Yeah. And it’s really hard sometimes to see the difference until you’ve done one side or the other. I had a client recently who went through this whole big process, you know, and we’ve figured out kind of what were her parts as much as we could. And then she left her job. And she called me a couple weeks later, and she was like, Kati, I had no idea how much my own behaviors were adding to that toxic environment. Wow. Right. And you but you can’t always see that when you’re in it. So when you need to recover, like truth telling is a big thing. And if you are in a position where you have to do something by yourself in the beginning, my recommendation always is to look for resentment. Resentment will teach you all of the places where your boundaries are broken. And that doesn’t mean where other people have broken your boundaries. That’s about 15% of the time 85% of the time, is you over giving overdoing over volunteering, meddling, you know, being over involved in shit, that’s just not your business.

Casey McGuire Davidson  31:12

Yeah, I love that. I love that because like boundaries are your best friend. And sometimes we are so uncomfortable setting those up are we so want to make people happy that we’re bending over backwards when no one’s even asked us to.

31:28

Exactly. And so this is why I don’t believe in learning to build boundaries by learning what to say first. First, we learn what your internal boundaries are, and how you’re crossing them before we decide that anybody’s crossing your boundaries any day of the week. Because the majority of them will be yours. Internal boundaries that no one else talks about this. So this is could be a whole separate episode, because I’m writing an entire book on this.

Casey McGuire Davidson  31:53

I love that. So how do you identify that internal boundaries, you identify by resentment, and you identify by they can shift you can you can transform this resentment if you shift your behavior, and you don’t actually have to have a conversation with anyone. Right? They don’t require conversations with other people. They require you making a commitment to yourself.

Casey McGuire Davidson  32:16

Can you give me an example of that?

32:19

Yeah, so I’ll give you an example of somebody who did an internal boundary as an external boundary and really didn’t work. I bought a template from this company, you know, like a sales build landing page or sales page template. And of course, you can buy them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because it’s online. And it was 75 bucks for a template. Like, I thought it was fairly expensive, but worth it. So I bought it. Friday, at about one or two o’clock, I sent them an email, asking a question. And they wrote me back at 515. I responded, thank you. And they had an automatic responder turned on at that point. And their automatic responder said, you know, we just love what we do so much. And we’re so obsessed with our business and our work and our clients that when we get emails, we always have to check them because we just love this so much. And so we just want you to like, really consider what time you’re sending us emails, because we don’t want if you could email us between nine to five, and then we wouldn’t be drawn away from our families by our phones. And this, Whoa, and I was just sitting there, like, what just happened? If you can’t stay away from your phone after 530 and not open your damn Gmail, that is not my effing problem. Nor is it my fault. Yeah, do not blame me, because you can’t get away from your phone. This is an example of an internal boundary, that they tried to make an external boundary, they tried to make it all of their customers responsibility.

Yeah, to work within their timeframe, which is just not your customers responsibility, first of all, and second of all, you’re selling an online product all over the world. You want people in Singapore to be looking at the world clock to make sure they’re not writing you outside of your office hours. Right? So here come two things. First of all, they can write a simpler email that says, hey, we’re after office hours will write back within our office hours, which are nine to five Eastern time. And you’d be like, Yeah, whatever. You know, like, okay, like, nobody would respond to that because everybody would be like, fine if you didn’t write to me and wrote back to me tomorrow, like, but okay, if you feel like you need to have an immediate response. Just let us know you’re going to write to us tomorrow between nine and five. But the real work here is why are you picking up your damn phone after five o’clock if you don’t want to and you’re trying to prioritize your family. If you want to prioritize your family, go ahead. None of my business as your customer.

Casey McGuire Davidson  34:55

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Although I have to say like that’s customer versus business, right. And I only say this because this is something I experienced when it’s your boss. And I know a lot of my women I work with have bosses who, you know, email them on the weekends, everything’s high importance will text them etc. And, you know, I have a couple examples of this. The first one was when I worked at L’Oréal, we had a general manager who was working nights and weekends and constantly and, you know, got a lot of feedback that that was incredibly stressful for the people on our team, particularly our management team, right? Like, you get an email from the general manager, basically the CEO of our business. On Saturday at three, you feel like you need to respond, you know, and she would, of course, send it to like five people and someone would respond, and everybody would have to rush. So after all that feedback, she actually just put on a signature on her email, which made everyone just take it, you know, that was an internal sort of fight or flight response every time an email popped up. That said, you know, we work flexibly at L’Oréal, I am sending this email now because it works for me, I do not expect you to respond outside of normal business hours. And just having that there brought everything down from like, a nine level of emergency to respond to like three. You know, before that, you know, I definitely did try to set boundaries. I remember going to my therapist, I mean, like, oh my god, I’m checking. I was setting my alarm for like lumpia 12am. When I worked on e commerce to check the sales numbers for the day, it often shot up like just insane stuff. And my therapist was like, what would happen if you didn’t do that? And I was like, oh my god, I would be more stressed out if I didn’t do that. Not true, by the way, cuz like not true. But that was in my mind, like I was in this hyper alert status as a coping mechanism. This is how I’m going to protect myself. It might have helped you in the beginning of your career, and you got some good feedback for it. So you kept it without checking in again with yourself. Is this still serving me?

39:12

Yeah. And it clearly wasn’t right. But it’s a terrible idea. But this is one of the things that comes down to workplace culture. Yeah. And that work can cause burnout. If you have a boss that’s constantly writing to you on Sundays, you need to be brave enough to have the conversation to say, Hey, listen, I would prefer to not work on Sundays. Do you mind if I don’t answer until Monday? And if they do mind, you have to get another job if you don’t want to answer emails on Sundays, because this person expects that, and you don’t want to do it. This is a values mismatch. It’s that simple. I say that simple. I understand that. It’s not always so easy to just get a new job. 

Casey McGuire Davidson  39:55

Once I know a lot of women haven’t even tried like I work with women, especially in early spring. to, you know, lower the bar and take time for themselves. And, you know, half of it is like you’re an A plus student, you stress out if you don’t get an A plus, like, lower it to a b minus for a couple of weeks, like I swear to God, you have built up goodwill, your B minus is better than most people’s, you know, a level of effort. Not only that, but just like actually setting the expectations like emailing your boss on Friday and being like, hey, I’ve got a thing doesn’t matter what it is, right? I’ve got an appointment, just want to let you know, I’m going to be logging off in 45 minutes. If you need something before Monday, please let me know. Or you know, just kind of like setting. I told my boss at some point, and this is after I got through that hyper state, just saying, hey, on the weekends, I’m not planning on tip, checking email, text me if there’s some emergency. Now, better plan would have been like, don’t text me, but I had right baby steps, right?

41:00

Fair. I don’t believe in wiggle room when it comes to boundaries. Okay, if you’re gonna set a boundary with someone, and you leave wiggle room in that you don’t actually want to leave in. You know, if you say I’d really love to help, but no, you wouldn’t don’t say it. Yeah, it but if you need to reach me, but no, no. Yeah, you don’t leave people wiggle room, you don’t leave them ways to respond. When we’re when we don’t require a response. And when we don’t desire a response. Just state the thing and walk away.

Casey McGuire Davidson  41:38

And that’s so hard, right? I mean, it’s a muscle to be work.

41:43

It is. And it’s not always practical in every job environment. Yeah, I do understand that. But there are things that can always be done. And if your job environment is completely mismatched with how you want to prioritize your life, you need a different job. Might need six months to plan for it. So you might be spending energy answering emails on Sunday, because that’s the requirement of your office. But it’s time to start making a plan.

Casey McGuire Davidson  42:14

That you’re not a victim. Right? You have options, you have choices.

42:19

Values mismatch is one of the top six reasons we burn out at work. Yeah, one of the top six external reasons. 

Casey McGuire Davidson  42:27

So that’s number one looking at you know, your resentments. I love how you say that, you know, because we hear so many times, okay, you, you should practice gratitude. I do believe in gratitude, right. But like the idea of like, just be grateful and look at the bright side. But I love how you say, like, create space for anger and resentment, because we have this idea that they’re bad, but they’re our emotions, telling us something telling us that there’s a boundary that needs to be placed. That’s, you know, and when we drink, like a lot of us drink to stuff down or to tolerate those, those resentments, those anger, the like death of 1000 cuts, right? We don’t want to feel those emotions. And we don’t want to have to change or cause conflicts. So we drink to basically shut ourselves up.

43:19

Yeah, and resentment is one of these emotions that if you learn how to process it properly, it’s not a venting session. I’m not telling you to vent. I’m telling you to look at it, figure out what needs to be done. And take an action step. It’s an it’s very objective. It’s a clear set of, you know, rules. This is how you do it. And it works. Because it’s the truth. When I ask people to start the resentments, usually the, it’s like a hoot. But then it’s like, well, but get honest. Where are you actually, it’s one of those truth telling things. So that’s really important. The next thing is not the next thing because every single person is different. And so I don’t have a particular order that things go in, the order goes in whatever order you’re in right now, you know, because everybody’s at a different place. But one thing that almost everybody needs to work on during the course of it is like you said in the beginning this difference between rest and restoration. Restoration includes nourishment. What nourishes you, and how do you feed yourself that nourishment, rest is just stopping. And most of us don’t even stop, really, we stop and then we scroll through Instagram, that’s not rest. Your neural circuits are so active.

I’m laughing because it’s true.

You know, like, it’s just no to that. But when people think about rest, they think like scrolling watching TV, you know, maybe taking a nap which I’m cool with that like that can be restorative. But most of the time, what we think about is rest is not really restful. is not really restorative does not really recharge your batteries. And a lot of us don’t know what recharges our batteries because we’ve been so focused on making sure everybody else’s batteries recharged all the time that we’ve forgotten the things that feed us. So this sometimes is going back to childhood and did you love to color you know, lay it’s sometimes it’s really silly things. And sometimes it is remembering what your favorite foods are. Remembering that, you know, I always joke I tell this all the time, like I was about maybe two and a half years into burnout, recovery, feeling pretty good. And I was making sandwiches to take on a hike and I was slicing the tomatoes for the sandwich. And as soon as I started, I was like that I love when tomatoes are sliced this then because when they’re sliced, then you can spread them all around the bread evenly. And then they don’t move around so much when you bite into them. And every single bite has a piece of tomato in it. And like I like you know, this, this whole process about slicing tomatoes. And, you know, I was 37 and I had I didn’t know what my preference was about tomatoes, because I didn’t know what my preferences were for anything. Because I knew how my husband liked things. I knew how my family liked things. So I would do what they wanted without ever stopping to ask myself. Is this the way I like broccoli cooked? You know?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  46:23

Yeah, absolutely. When I was thinking about childhood, and it’s, it’s something that I occasionally do on my front porch, or my kids have a big trampoline, like when they’re not around, I go lay down there, but it’s like laying on my back and having the sun shining down on me. And like for some reason, like, you can feel it go over your eyelid or you can see it like it’s this weird thing, but I remember it from being like seven or eight years old, just that sort of laying on your back with his eyes closed and just sort of being aware of everything. So I was, you know, just on my front porch after a lunch doing that. So that’s my like, little,

 

47:03

little thing. Yeah, yeah, restorative, it’s rest. But it’s restorative rest. It’s not just stopping for the sake of stopping and then like waiting anxiously until you can start again. Because that’s what most of us do. We stop and we’re like, I’m forcing myself to stop. But I would like to pick up my phone and can I turn on the TV and I will. Sally needs a lunchbox. like yeah, it’s that’s you don’t do that when you’re in when you’re restoring yourself. When you’re nourishing yourself. You stop and absorb it for a moment.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  47:33

What are other examples of restoration because I bet a lot of women listening to this are like, I can’t think of anything.

 

47:42

If for you if you thought that restoration was in a wineglass then maybe it is, and you just change the liquid. The act of ritual is usually restorative and Chinese medicine ritual is what calms the heart. So if the ritual of opening something in something and pouring it into a particular glass and mixing or not mixing, if that ritual is useful to you, then you can use it just like have some kombucha. I can hate kombucha, but you know, whatever.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  48:14

You know what, I don’t really like kombucha either. But lots of people do. Lots of people do know, I am here on Friday, you know, when I go outside by my fire pit, like, it’s the ritual, it’s the taste, but not the alcohol, not the hangover.

 

48:30

Yeah, exactly. So and so it can be that, you know, if that’s part of something that you know, sort of brings you joy, if you’re a cup of coffee in the morning brings you joy, actually restores you is not just a habit, stop and drink it. If you have to wake up three minutes earlier, so that you can sit for two full minutes, and just drink your coffee without doing anything else. That can be restorative, anything, can be restorative, if done with intention to serve yourself.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  49:04

Hmm, that makes sense. And I know like when I start working with women, because they’re so used to wine being their one reward, they’re one treat, the one thing they look forward to creating their own like list of sorts of sober treats and anchor activities. Anchor activities are like what you do during the witching hour are kind of big blocks to fill this empty time. But there are just hundreds of different ways to do it and ideas and some of my clients like they have their list of sober treats. And it’s like 50 different things, right. It’s like this deck of cards that you can pick from when you want something and when you’re in stress or when you’re bored. It’s really hard to think of something so it’s nice to have, you know, as you’re wandering around, like jot things down or take pictures of things and put them in an album of like ideas of things that bring you joy or that are interesting to or whatever it is.

 

50:03

Yeah. And know that if you decide something that is restful to you is going to be restorative. It helps deal with the guilt. Because resting is indulgent. It’s not really, but we think of it that way. Oh, we do. Yeah. But restoration isn’t necessary.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  50:22

Yeah, I can use that. I get that calling it restoration does sound active, right? Rest sounds passive. And we’re so used to like not to want, you know, we’re always like, we’re so busy. we’re so busy. Whereas restoration, sort of like meditation, to some extent feels like something that you do. That is that is good for you. I saw something the other day that I had to save because I loved it and said, can we please stop calling things we enjoy Guilty Pleasures? Yeah, exactly. Just like that guilty thing like you shouldn’t take time to do things you enjoy. Right?

 

50:59

Right. Like we all know, we need to plug the battery back in. But resting still feels indulgent. Yeah, if you are actually charging a battery, then you’re charging a battery like it has to get done. We all get that everybody has a phone.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  51:13

Yeah. Well, so I’m curious. There are so many more things I want to go into. But I saw that you work with corporations, a lot of women who listen to this are working moms, and you talk to them about sort of focus on any burnout culture. And so I’m curious when you’re when you’re talking, you know, in the corporate space, about any burnout culture, what are the big things that you want them to think about?

 

51:42

So, like I said earlier, mismatch of values is one of the top six reasons that we burnout at work, right. It’s also one of the top six reasons we burn out in our lives, because we’re living lives that are not in alignment with our values. So this is sort of a bit of a crossover. But when we go through this, this workshop we go through, these are all the six reasons why burnout is created in a company. And what can we do? What can everybody do to shift these behaviors? So one of them is mismanagement of workload. So if Sally number two is always getting all of the assignments, because she’s always saying yes to them, and she’s, but she’s like, crushed on the inside, we need to start paying attention to that. Just because she’s able to do it sometimes doesn’t mean she should have 90% of the workload all the time. So workload is a huge one. lack of recognition and praise is another. And when we say recognition and praise, we’re talking about actual very specific, not like good jobs slap on the back. But hey, listen, you sent out that email last week, it was perfectly worded, you really hit the spot, you know, like managers need to learn how to give positive feedback without the whole like sandwich where there’s like positive feedback, negative feedback, positive feedback again, you know, none of that. Just tell your people when they’ve done something, well, people need to hear this. And on a neurological basis, this is absolutely necessary. So this is really important. Another thing is unfair pay, fix the goddamn pay gap already. Deal with it, face it head on as a company. This is massively important. Yeah. Then we have mismatched values, then we have lack of community. Right? So if you haven’t, this is Oh, this also goes I think this is a separate category, according to the research, but this goes with the values mismatch, like if you don’t really match with the people at your office, and you can’t create a community together. There’s no sense of shared responsibility. There’s no sense of shared vision, there’s no sense of shared values. It’s really hard to feel supported. And it’s really hard to ask for help. Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s almost impossible. And then the last one lacks control or lack of autonomy, so being micromanaged. Yeah. How can we micromanage less? How can we give people more autonomy? How can we so we go through all of those factors and sort of break down what everybody can do in their own teams to break the bonds of burnout culture?

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  54:12

Yeah, I think that’s so interesting, because as someone who’s been in many, many different corporate cultures, I think the getting everyone in a room to have that conversation and have sort of that shared understanding of the different factors can be really helpful because a lot of times like I think of it, it’s like, shit flows downhill, right? Like your VP is getting a ton of pressure and a ton of pushback or whatever and, and they just bring it to the directors who bring it to the managers who bring it to the people who are doing the actual work to some extent and it just flows downhill in terms of not good enough and unfair expectations and unrealistic deadlines and all of those things. So you know, even you know, the people at the director level and the manager level they’re getting squeezed, right? And so it just is such a vicious cycle that it’s, it’s hard to get out of it without feeling like if I say something, I’m a slacker.

 

55:14

Right? Right. And this process gets like stuck, because there are also internal reasons that we burn out. Because of the people pleasing and the coping mechanisms. And the perfectionism and the, you know, all of this stuff also factors in So after we go through that, and people are like, Oh, good, we could really make a change here. Then we flip to the next slide. And I’m like, by the way, there’s also all these reasons that you could work on in your own time to avoid being part of the problem. Well, yeah, and

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  55:41

I love that you said, the start with the internal boundaries, because I can also think of many, many times when it was my own internal boundary that needed to be set with my boss, and I was trying to make the organization set it for me, right? Yeah. So I wouldn’t have to

 

55:59

exist. So I wouldn’t have to well, and like I want to give another example of an internal boundary, because we’re talking a lot about work. But we do this all the time. So I used to ride the tram to and from work in Prague. Because it doesn’t make sense to drive in Prague, there’s nowhere to park and you can get everywhere on a tram, and it costs 150 euros for the entire year. So like, why would you drive. And it’s so convenient. So get on the tram, take my eight stops, get off and walk my seven minutes and be at my office. And on the way there. I was taught to be overly considerate. So on the way there, I would get on and if the trend was full, I would start being stressed out. Because at some point, an old lady is going to get on the train, and somebody is sitting in the seat that is set aside for elderly and differently abled, and pregnant

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  56:45

people. And it’s not even used sitting in the seat not even know what else he

 

56:48

is someone else. I’m already worried about it. Right? Then I see an old woman standing on the side, and she’s getting ready to get on and we’re coming up to her stop. And I’m like, this is gonna be bad. I’m stressed out about it. She’s about to get on. And if this person doesn’t get up, then I have to say something. Because this person isn’t doing the right thing according to my morally superior rules on life. Yeah. Right. So then the old woman would get on. And I would intervene because inevitably, the person would just sit there. And most of the time 90% of the time, the woman would say, Oh, no, I’m only going one stop, it’s fine. Right? This is also an internal boundary. For me. It is not my job to manage the tram. It’s not my job to decide whether another people’s behavior in a public place is acceptable, according to my damn rulebook that nobody else got. This is arrogant, and judgmental, and disempowering. It’s arrogant and judgmental, because I’m looking at the person sitting in that seat. I don’t know if they’re actually differently abled. They might be and I just can’t see it. Like so rude. They have fibromyalgia like what is it? You know? Like, what like, what if they have Ms. And they’re having an attack this week, and they can barely stand? Like, who the hell am I to make that decision for that person? Right? arrogant because I think I know better. And then I’m deciding that this 86-year-old woman who has been riding trams in Prague, her whole damn life, probably the same tram line, probably the same apartment she grew up in, because that’s real common there. I’m deciding that she doesn’t have a voice.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  58:29

She needs you. Yeah. Yeah, which is totally disempowering. What makes me think that this woman isn’t good, can’t speak up for herself. But I wouldn’t speak up for myself. So I become the hero for other people. No, no, no sister. If you are being the hero for other people all the time, that’s an internal boundary, pull your hero in his back into yourself, be your own damn hero for a second, take care of the things that you want and need. But when I was so busy for most of my life, checking in with what other people needed to be comfortable, I lost total and complete sight of what I wanted, what I desired, what I needed. And what I preferred. I can’t You can’t know those things if your energy is totally somewhere else all the time.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  59:17

Yeah. And is it like a distraction that you’re to some extent doing consciously or unconsciously, so that you don’t have to look at yourself?

 

59:26

Of course, one so that I don’t have to pay attention and deal with my own needs to because I decided that I was only worthwhile as a person if I was useful. So I created rules that made me useful helping people on the tram, keep holding doors open for people and then when they walk in without saying thank you yelling, You’re welcome after them. Real passive aggressive tone. Right? That’s if you want to do something for someone do it but not for Thank you. Is it polite? Yeah, but I mean, whatever. You didn’t have to hold it open. And if you didn’t want if the only reason you wanted to hold it open was so that they would make you feel better by thanking you and being Uber grateful, then you didn’t really want to do it. Yeah. You wanted to be praised for doing it.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:00:19

That’s hard work, right? Because it’s ingrained in us. All those things like all of those are part of your identity and part of your internal Yeah, judgment system and your internal like ideas about how the world should work. You have so much great stuff to offer in terms of burnout in terms of ways of coping. I love your podcast, you at one point talked about the four things that helped you most along the way. I love them all, but the one I’m looking at right now is regularly reviewing your values.

 

1:00:54

Then this is my most downloaded freebie.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:00:57

Oh, really? Tell me about that. Maybe I can wait to it.

 

1:01:00

it’s a very typical coaching exercise. I did not make it up. It is not it has a little bit of a twist at the end that makes it different than some but basically, it’s a find your true values coaching exercise that everyone who’s gone for coaching certification has learned

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:01:15

Yeah, I do. Like we’re values work all the time with Mike. Yeah, it’s like what

 

1:01:19

coaching one on one. But it’s so it doesn’t even matter like that. So that’s something that people find a lot because we talk about it a lot on the podcast but taking the time to pay attention to what your values are, make your decisions more clear and easier. Because you can take that so you can look at a decision that you need to make. And you sort of Plinko it down through your values and see where it gets stuck. If it gets stuck on three out of five, because there’s a mismatch. You can’t do that thing, no matter how much your head says that it’s the right choice. And when you start doing that on a regular basis, it becomes really easy to just be like, Oh, no, I’m not gonna step in over there. Because my value is saving my energy for myself so that I’m not crushed at the end of every day. Right? My value is not being arrogant like mine, when I decided that I was going to really look at this and start paying attention to it, I came up with the whole theory called the not blah, blah, blah. It’s in the book. And when I started noticing it around me, I made a commitment to myself to stop being so arrogant. That’s what it was focusing on. How often are you being so arrogant that and abandoning yourself at the same time? So my value in that moment was be kinder to yourself by being less arrogant to others. Yeah, you know, but I did that for probably about 18 months before, like, the big things were gone. I still I still catch myself sometimes like kind of overstepping, especially with family and in relationships, it’s so much easier to overstep. So I still catch myself sometimes, and I’m sure I don’t catch myself sometimes, too. But I, when I got rid of the big things, it was time to I don’t need to focus on that anymore, undervalue that I need to focus on, because that’s already built in. So what do I actually want that I’m not getting? How can I add that in. And so you have to redo them frequently, so that you know what you’re looking for. So that you know whether this action you’re about to take is worth it for you or not. It just makes life so much easier to know.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:03:20

Yeah, just to sit down and say, Okay, this is what I value. And so you know, usually when you’re feeling resentment or irritation or anger, it’s because you want to your values is being violated, right? You know, whatever it is,

 

1:03:36

or you’re violating your own values. This is I keep going back to this because I think this is like we’re so apt to blame other people. And I don’t need you to feel at fault for everything. But we need to take a serious look at like, where are you violating your oath, you are telling everybody all the time that your priority is your children, but you’re working until eight o’clock every night? I’m sorry? That’s just not true.

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:04:02

Yeah. You know what’s interesting, okay, I was just talking to a woman on the podcast about like, stop over producing and under living. And she does core value work as well. And we were talking about it and she has twins who are Elias age, my daughter, and she was like, yep, first thing I do. Everybody says family. So I always tell women Nope, can’t say family. And they’re like, but that is my number one value, just like Sorry, it’s off the list.

 

1:04:29

No, it’s Yeah. Which is interesting. And it’s easy to justify, right? Because you’re like, Yeah, but I work this hard for my life shots,

 

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:04:37

the socially acceptable value, right? You’re just like, Oh, my kids.

1:04:42

Well, and this is, this is the second reason I don’t love gratitude work. Because people start gratitude journals. And instead of being really specific, in a way that actually like, lights up their brain. They write things like I’m grateful for my children. Shut up. You hate them 50% of the time if you’re like every other average human, yeah, at the same time as loving them, I’m not saying you don’t love them, I’m just saying you hate them 50% of the time?

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:05:11

Well, I was gonna say like one of the things that that is really hard for women to admit. And for me, as well as that your kids can be one of your biggest triggers to drink. I mean, I quit drinking when my daughter was 22 months old. There is nothing like a two-year-old to trigger your desire to drink because they are willful but not rational. They are the ultimate, I have done 17 million things for you today. And it’s still not good enough. And you’re screaming at me and throwing a tantrum, and I haven’t done anything for myself. And you adore them and love them. And they’re cute and squishy, and all that and they can still be a trigger. And you don’t have to feel guilty about that. It just is like it’s like we’re just going through the Brits are designed to be assholes. That’s how their brains are designed for them to be. Absolutely not always for you. Like, yeah, yeah,

1:06:05

you know, not 100% of the time.

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:06:09

I always tell my daughter, and luckily, you’re luckier to be hated, and not nothing dismissive. It’s all about work. Looks ways, but I’m just like, dude, you’re killing me.

1:06:19

Yeah, absolutely. And so I think this is another one of the things to get honest about and like gratitude. The studies on gratitude are actually quite mixed, and the meta-analysis study, so a meta-analysis was when they take like pretty much every study known to man on the subject, as many as they can, and as many as fit the research protocols, and, and pull all the data into one, so that they can come up with an actual conclusion, natural conclusion behind gratitude so far, is that they don’t know that it’s actually useful. And I think that the differentiation is this number one, when your brain is burnt out, you can’t actually feel gratitude, you don’t feel it physically. And I think you have to be able to feel it physically. For it to actually be productive. This is, again, this is a hypothesis. This is not, this is not a theory, I have not tested this, but I feel like if you can be like, I am just so grateful right now, because I have this mug that’s lined in stainless steel, which means my drink stays warm for hours. Like, it’s so lovely. You can feel that, because you’re being really specific, just like feedback. When you give praise. It’s got to be specific. When you give gratitude. It’s got to be specific.

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:07:30

Yeah. Yeah.

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:07:36

I totally hear what you’re saying that, that makes a ton of sense. Okay, I have a quick question. I know that you study traditional Chinese medicine, and you also do acupuncture, which I just started myself, so I’m just learning about acupuncture. But tell me, do you use the acupuncture for people who are experiencing burnout or for other stuff as well?

1:08:01

Right now, by the time this comes out, I think I’ll be just about shutting down my New York City Office, because the rest of my business is so busy, that I don’t have as much time for acupuncture as I used to. But I do use acupuncture to treat burnout, because there are specific point protocols that have been shown to make chemical changes in the brain. So we can increase serotonin, we can regulate dopamine, we can also help the brain to regrow. So when there’s been, you know, the connection isn’t as good as it should be from front to back, or back to front, really, we can help regulate that with acupuncture. Also, any single symptom that gets worse with stress gets better with acupuncture. Any symptom that you can imagine, so if you’re having physiological symptoms that are bothered by how much stress you’re under, acupuncture will make them better.

That’s tough. For most of most of the time, across the board, of course, there are always exceptions. And there is never been a medicine on the face of the planet that works for everybody all the time. Not even surgery, there’s nothing that always works for people, some people have to use aspirin and some people have to use ibuprofen, and they’re, you know, whatever. But acupuncture can be used for any symptom that worsens with stress. So it’s really important, I think, in the both prevention of and recovery from burnout.

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:09:20

Alright, so anyone listening to this, who is resonating with this message, who is looking at burnout in their lives? Definitely check out Kate’s podcast, fried the burnout podcast, I’ll link to it in the show notes. Her book is the bounce back, the bounce back ability factor, and burnout, gain resilience, and change the world and Kate, how can people get in touch with you?

1:09:46

I think honestly, the best place is to just go ahead to the podcast and then on all the show notes, there’s links to book calls and links to email me and that, you know, everything’s there. So I think that’s the easiest and fastest way for people to find me.

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:09:58

Awesome. That’s Perfect. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

1:10:02

Thanks so much for having me.

Casey McGuire Davidson  1:10:06

Hey there before I jump off this episode, I want to remind you that you can sign up for my brand new 60-minute masterclass, The 5 Secrets To Successfully Take A Break From Drinking, even if you’ve tried and failed in the past, by going to hellosomedaycoaching.com/class. Now, this training will not be around forever. So if you’re interested in figuring out what you’ve been doing up until now, and why it hasn’t been working, and exactly what to do. Instead, I encourage you to take a few moments, sign up, pick a time that works for you, and actually attend the session. I’ll teach you how to shift your thinking. So you can get out of the really shitty cycle of starting and stopping and starting again, and it’s okay if you’re thinking that you don’t actually want to stop drinking. I promise you, if you attend this class, you will change the way you’re approaching this process. So save your spot. Go to hellosomedaycoaching.com/class, and I can’t wait to see you there.

So thank you for coming on here. I couldn’t appreciate it more. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Hello Someday Podcast. If you’re interested in learning more about me or the work I do or accessing free resources and guides to help you build a life you love without alcohol, please visit hellosomedaycoaching.com. And I would be so grateful if you would take a few minutes to rate and review this podcast so that more women can find it and join the conversation about drinking less and living more.