Welcome to episode 214 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 1 of a discussion with Cait Donovan, talking all things burnout from what it is and is not, how we miss diagnosing it, burnout prevention and recovery, seeking help, and some patterns and trends.

Original Recording Date: 1-21-2023

Topics – Meet Cait Donovan, Definition of Burnout and Why We Miss Detecting It, Patterns of Burnout and Values Mismatch, Recovery vs. Prevention, Seeking Help, Corporate Burnout Trends, This Is Over

2:47 – Meet Cait Donovan

• Cait Donovan loves everything nerd.
  • She spends most of her time giving keynote speeches, recording audio for her podcast (FRIED: The Burnout Podcast), authoring books, and / or working 1-1 with coaching clients who are going through burnout. Everything falls under the umbrella of burnout recovery (her main focus).
  • At the time of this recording, Cait is working on another degree focused on the way stress impacts the body from prenatal times until death. There is a lot of research Cait has access to now that she can read which didn’t previously exist.
    • Cait spends her time thinking about burnout, dreaming about burnout, talking about burnout, and writing about burnout.
    • Nick remembers hearing about Cait’s study of acupuncture on an episode of Teach the Geek and says a study of stress makes complete sense. People would definitely appreciate the focus on continued professional development in their coach!
    • Many people talk about the research these days and share what the neuroscience says.
    • Cait wanted to pursue a degree to read the research firsthand and really digest it to understand the research as well as she can at her level. She’s not a neuroscientist or a neurosurgeon, but when we’re talking about a stress response in the brain Cait has a pretty good handle on it.
    • Nick refers to this as seeking the holistic context points around burnout.

5:09 – Definition of Burnout and Why We Miss Detecting It

• After listening to Cait’s podcast, the use of the word burnout may be equivalent to the use of the word cloud. We don’t always know if people mean the same thing when they say it. So let’s level set and define terms!
• As of the date of this recording (January 2023), the World Health Organization (or WHO) has an agreed upon definition for burnout.
  • Burnout is the result of chronic stress in the workplace that has been mismanaged or unmanaged.
  • In order for us to say a situation is burnout there must be 3 things present. All 3 must be present to call it burnout.
    • Physical and emotional exhaustion – counts as one thing but could encompass 700 or more symptoms
    • Cynicism and detachment – being negative, feeling you cannot connect to people at work or people in your family, etc.
    • Feeling like your work is not impactful, having low productivity, feeling a lack of appreciation for what you do and why it matters (listed in various ways and forms but boils down to these items…with this possibly being a more holistic definition than what is listed on the WHO’s website)
  • The thing that differentiates burnout from something like depression in the mind of the WHO is that burnout is about your workplace / is a workplace syndrome (which Cait disagrees with). At present this is the only delineation (which seems nonsensical).
  • Cait shares a story about a post on LinkedIn in which someone wished we would stop using the term burnout and say we’re depressed.
    • While there may be some overlap between burnout and depression they are not really the same thing. In a similar light, depression and anxiety are not really the same thing though they do share an overlap.
    • We may not have enough information on how stress sits in the body over time, about neuroscience, and on the gut microbiome, to really wriggle out strict differentiators between this and that.
    • Cait has experienced each of these at different times, and her own experience says they are different things.
• Cait realized she was burned out in 2016. At that time she had not really even heard the word burnout. Even at that time it wasn’t something commonly said at all.
  • Now burnout seems to be part of our normal lingo, and people may be saying when they are tired (definitely not the same thing).
  • Cait feels people may also not be using the term when they should be, so burnout is over and under used at the same time.
• When Nick asked how people might be able to notice / determine they are burned out earlier, Cait uses the analogy of hip pain.
  • Have you ever noticed random hip pain while sitting at your desk? This seems to only happen when you sit too much and doesn’t require a doctor visit. So you put a small cushion underneath you and make an effort to get up once an hour to stretch.
  • Two months later you are used to the hip pain. It’s not better or worse, and you have many mechanisms to deal with it. And then your neck starts hurting (which is likely connected to the hip pain even without you realizing it).
  • After a number of adjustments for your neck, you start having consistent migraines a couple months later. It begins to really become a problem for which you are seeking help.
  • If you had dealt with the hip pain months ago, you might not be in this situation.
  • Burnout is much the same. Many of the stressors that come into our lives are things for which we end up creating coping mechanisms that mostly work. With all the adjustments we are making we don’t realize something is wrong until we are unable to do our work, to get through a day, or to wake up and feel any motivation.
  • Cait says it seems like people get judged for not taking action sooner, but we shouldn’t judge them. It is human nature to have a problem and then adapt. We need to give people a bit more grace when it comes to noticing something before it reaches this stage.
  • Nick suggests this is equivalent to the aggregation of marginal gains that Ben Bergeron references in Chasing Excellence but more like an aggregation of detriments.
  • Cait says things can be as small as ignoring your bladder signals when you have to pee.
    • If you do this all day long your body starts to get tense. That tension tells your body that you are stressed.
    • "The only thing you’re doing is writing 3 more e-mails instead of going to the bathroom. But when you do that, all day every day it becomes part of a pattern. What do you ignore next?" – Cait Donovan
    • Next you start ignoring drinking water because you don’t want to have to go to the bathroom because it’s interrupting your e-mails (and you’re holding it anyway). Now you’re dehydrated.
    • "It’s just this series of missteps. None of them have to be very serious or with any sort of malintent. You’re just trying to get your work done." – Cait Donovan
• Since the pandemic, many are working from home, and many are working more than before.
  • Cait doesn’t agree that one needs a commute to work. But the commute did get you up, showered, dressed, and walking to your car, from a car to an office, getting up from your desk at the end of the day, and having a ritual that broke up your working day from your home day. We don’t necessarily have those things in place any longer.
  • Cait says this is dangerous. We need those rituals and transitions. Cait has a recommendation for coaching clients who work from home to help here (a closing ceremony if you will):
    • Shutdown your computer fully when you finish your day (not put to sleep but completely shut off).
    • Cover your computer with a blanket or something else as an indication that your day is over.
    • The person is not to uncover the computer until it is time to sit down and get back to work.
  • Nick calls this a shutdown routine for the end of the workday and mentions we don’t often have one of these.
    • We understand many will merely move to using their phone upon computer shutdown. Ideally there would be some separation from the phone as well for work related items, but that’s an area where both Cait and Nick themselves struggle.
      • Where are Cait and Nick’s respective phones during this interview? Would they do the same during a work day? Listen closely.

15:04 – Patterns of Burnout and Values Mismatch

• We know (due to studies on it) that doctors and nurses are highly stressed and at high risk for burnout.
• Event planning is on the top 5 list of most stressful jobs (and would be at a higher risk).
• In the medical field, veterinarians and dentists are higher than most anyone else.
• Even in the tech world, we are looking at 52% of people at a minimum are saying they are on the edge or burned out already.
• Nick does not remember hearing anything about burnout before around 2017.
  • Cait says in the tech world so much of the work does not / may not rely on human connection, which is a protective factor against burnout (also a longevity and a happiness factor over the course of a lifetime).
  • Though someone may love working on a computer all day and not really needing to deal with people, but long term it works against you.
  • Nick mentions a TED talk about longevity and connection (view the video here).
  • Cait mentions a Harvard study (85 year study) on happiness and longevity with the most important factor being connection. Read more on that here
  • Nick asked if these studies and talks were speaking specifically to in person connection or whether our context of connection extended to video calls and other remote options. Cait says she believes they both count.
  • "The idea of connection and community is around feeling safe and accepted and that you belong somewhere." – Cait Donovan
  • The understanding that you will not be alone in really harsh times and that people will support you when things go haywire is the most important piece. This kind of connection requires people know each other long enough, be in each other’s lives long enough, and go through enough ups and downs together to have confirmation that the belonging is real.
    • Cait says the breakdown of church communities, for example, can be an issue on the belonging scale for many people. Even if they were not big believers people still would feel like they were part of a community which would support them in difficult times (i.e. if a house caught fire, etc.).
    • We’re missing the belonging piece, specifically the belonging to each other (which Cait says is very Brene Brown).
    • Nick says this is similar to marrying into a family and having the realization one day that you really do belong. Nick says his father-in-law treats Nick as his son.
    • Cait says not everyone has this kind of experience with their in-laws or even their own families and that we must choose carefully who we surround ourselves with.
  • The stress response is not just about being in physical danger as Cait says. The other incredibly being factor was being ostracized. We used to live in very small communities of people (like 50-150 people).
    • If you’re part of a community this small everyone has their function (helping others get food, ensuring they can sleep well, etc.).
    • If you’re ostracized and only ever learned your skill you have no way to protect yourself, no way to gather food, no way to feed yourself, no way to cook anything, etc. Being ostracized was just as dangerous as being chased by a tiger.
  • This belonging piece has been very much overlooked in a lot of literature.
  • Cait says you don’t need to belong to a large number of people. It can be 1 or 2 even. You need to have a space where you as you are accepted fully for who you are, where you can mess up and still be loved.
• Nick suggests many people in the workforce are looking for this belonging in an organization / their employer.
  • Cait says this is psychological safety and is a huge area of study as far as workplace development and workplace culture are concerned.
  • Is Cait seeing a big mismatch in the way people want to work and the way they are forced to work?
    • If you’re being forced to work in a way that you don’t want to in today’s day and age, go get another job.
    • Every single worker needs something different, and we cannot make every work environment ideal for every worker.
    • If most people are cool with the way things are and you aren’t, get yourself out of there.
    • We cannot put all the responsibility on our employer and have to own the fact that we are choosing to show up somewhere.
  • There is a ton of research by [Christina Maslach](Christina Maslach) and Michael Leiter (considered the leading burnout researchers of the past 40 years). One of the 6 main factors they notice in the workplace that leads to burnout is a values mismatch.
    • A values mismatch can become evident when you want to work one way but a company wants you to work a different way. For example, your value is in this case being home with your family while the company value is being connected to people at work.
    • The mismatch is more in the values and not the method of working.
    • The values determine the method, and they are actually more important than the method. We needed to go one level deeper to really understand this process.
    • A values mismatch can be between a company and a person. But it can also be between a company’s spoken values and its values in action (i.e. what the company does vs. what it is saying). If company actions and words are mismatched, many employees can have a values mismatch because of the lack of integrity. This is a major contributor to burnout.
    • As an example, Cait has been studying health since graduating high school (roughly 23 years) and probably would not go work for Philip Morris due to a clear values mismatch.

24:06 – Recovery vs. Prevention

• Nick states that we’ve hit on root cause analysis twice in the discussion (values mismatch and hip pain that turned into a huge problem). These seem very helpful for burnout recovery. What about burnout prevention?
  • If you’re a naturally high stress person, focusing on burnout prevention is a decent plan. However, Cait doesn’t really believe in burnout prevention because most of the time we’re not aware that burnout is happening.
  • Likely everyone should be on some form of cancer prevention diet, but the chances we are going to do that before there are some signs is minimal.
  • If there are signs of something being wrong, we already have to talk about treatment.
  • "Burnout prevention tools are stress management tools. There is no difference. That’s just what they are." – Cait Donovan
  • People who already have cancer need treatment, for example. It is the same with burnout and those who are already burned out. They need treatment, and prevention won’t get you anywhere in those cases.
  • Burnout recovery requires unwinding layers of adaptations and coping mechanisms, the minor shifts you have been making from a young age to…
    • Please other people
    • To be a perfectionist
    • To not have boundaries
    • To never say no
  • You’re unwinding all these things in an effort to create a better system for yourself. The layers of protection you’ve put on over the years that you thought would keep you safe have now become too heavy a sweatsuit to wear all the time.
  • Cait has created a holistic board of what makes people vulnerable to burnout (see this page for the link).
    • The biggest shift we would make if we could control it would be for everyone to grow up in a family that loves them, secure attachment would happen, and we would learn emotional intelligence as we grow. This likely is not going to happen.
    • Cait grew up in a very low income family in Massachusetts. The people she grew up around and in that environment don’t have time to think about these things. They are just trying to feed their children more than twice a day.
    • "We cannot expect the people who do not have the skills or the resources to make the kind of shift we need them to make so that people don’t burnout 30 years later." – Cait Donovan
    • This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with resources (i.e. resources inform and shape the priorities like feeding your family, etc.).
  • If we look at overall root causes of burnout it is a combination of
    • Your health
    • Your constitution (genetics / epigenetics)
    • Your family of origin
    • How you were spoken to
    • The kind of coping mechanisms you created to survive and feel safe
    • Cultural factors that protected you from or enhanced the coping mechanisms
  • This goes to show that fixing corporate culture is only one part of the picture.
  • Cait mentions a very interesting piece of research which states that if a mother is pregnant with a daughter and has a very high stress event during her pregnancy, it possible for an epigenetic shift in the fetus makes the daughter’s stress response less apt to function at a normal level (often times 30% less). This is typically passed down by a mother to a daughter and can make it really hard when we tell someone to go find a new workplace to get out of a less than ideal situation.
    • Epigenetics do not modify DNA but certainly impact the function of DNA (like pa volume lever on a DNA chain).
    • These types of things can be shifted into a better situation, but it requires safety, belonging, the ability to receive love, meditation, a good amount of movement, good food, etc.
  • If you’re born with this condition you’re at 70% capacity and are already more stressed out than anyone else. You create coping mechanisms around eating and drinking.
    • You’re not getting the things you need but don’t know you need them.
    • You might start to judge yourself because you cannot get as much accomplished as everyone else.
    • If you grew up in a family with some kind of an addiction or something else, that adds even more complication.

31:22 – Seeking Help

• At what point do people generally ask for help, or what does it take?
  • Most people that burn out are DIY (do it yourself) type people who think they can do it all themselves (which is part of the reason they made it here in the first place).
  • At first people seek out help independently and will find a podcast like Cait’s (FRIED) or will reason some books (Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski).
  • After 6 months or so when people still don’t feel right is generally when they begin to seek help. There are many things that can help you, such as:
    • Therapy with a trauma informed therapist who understands burnout (i.e. look for trauma informed and burnout on a therapist’s website).
    • Coaches can help, but you have to be careful because coaching is not regulated. You need to be around someone long enough to ensure you can actually trust them.
    • This is one of the reasons Cait has FRIED. If you don’t trust her after over 180 episodes, then you never will. She is not your person. And that is ok. Part of burnout recovery requires that you feel safe.
    • "If you’re not going to trust me and you’re not going to feel safe with me, we’re not going to make progress." – Cait Donovan on the importance of finding the right someone to help if you’re burned out
    • You need that belonging (must be there). It can be therapy, coaching, or community work / volunteering (even though it seems like extra work at first but in the end creates belonging and safety).
    • You can try yoga, rapid transformational therapy, EDMR, etc. There are millions of ways to begin the recovery process.
• During the recovery process, the things that you need to know most are:
  • You need to feel safe.
  • There will be coping mechanisms and things you think are "just your personality" which will need to shift (requiring you to let go of some things).
    • Cait shares a story from the FRIED Facebook Group in which someone was worried about going back to work. Cait had to tell this person they can’t be a give it 200% kind of person any longer. Get it down to more like 110% or even 80%. That kind of effort is what originally got the person to where they ended up.
    • Identity, personality, and trauma response mechanisms get mixed together often times.
    • We have to let go of some coping mechanisms that got us to burnout without demonizing them. The number 1 rule in FRIED burnout coaching is to never demonize a client’s coping mechanisms.
    • When these mechanisms were created, they were useful and probably worked for 20 years. They would not have been repeatedly used if they did not work.
    • "But now, something in the system has changed, it’s hurting you more than it’s helping you, and it’s time to make a change." – Cait Donovan on getting away from certain coping mechanisms
    • Cait gives the example of being rewarded as a child with ice cream and this process continuing to the point where you’ve given yourself diabetes as an adult.
    • "Nobody became a perfectionist just because. They became a perfectionist because they did it a few times and got praised for it." – Cait Donovan
    • We don’t demonize the coping mechanisms because they were originally put in place to protect us. Be thankful it was so useful in your life.
    • Look for areas in your life where the mechanism is still useful (i.e. a neurosurgeon being a perfectionist in surgery) and the areas where you might need another way (i.e. no need for perfectionism in the way a neurosurgeon fold towels, etc.).

37:19 – Corporate Burnout Trends

• From Cait’s perspective, toward the end of the pandemic there was a big upswing in wellness resources and benefits offered by different companies.
  • But, with current fears of an impending recession, some companies are making cuts. Some of the first things to go are employee resources.
• Some companies made promises and commitments that they meant and continue to dig in, while others are ok waiting a few years to really take action on providing employee resources that would help in regard to burnout.
  • Some companies that have a great culture might think they are ok and that they don’t need to do anything at present.
  • Burnout isn’t just a workplace issue. One of the reasons it went so high over the course of the past couple years is because dealing with the pandemic was hard. It was emotional and introduced the needs for all kinds of coping mechanisms (some we had, some we never knew we needed).
  • No one had the wherewithal to deal with some of these things in the moment. People are just now beginning to be able to deal with the pandemic’s impact on them.
  • A lot of companies are waiting for the bomb to hit. If only 5% of employees are experiencing burnout, perhaps some leaders would say it isn’t worth it…yet. The numbers will continue to increase until eventually an intervention gets requested.
  • People Cait knows working in the corporate space are doing 12, 18, and 24-month corporate interventions and charging a hefty price to implement the work (i.e. might take 8 people to help implement the necessary changes for coaching an executive team, etc.).

40:50 – Watching the Signs

• People who burnout and recover are more likely to burnout again.
• Cait has to keep an eye on herself. Her natural coping mechanisms are to overdo it, ignore her body, be a perfectionist, please everyone around her, and not say no.
• When Cait finds herself in those positions, there are specific signs with her physical sign being neck pain and emotional sign being resentment.
  • When Cait is resentful more often than not she is not in a good space. That means she has committed herself to too many things, she isn’t happy about the way the commitments are paying her back for her time, and at this point Cait needs to do an assessment of what needs to drop off.
  • A keynote presentation requires around 40 hours of prep for a 1-hour presentation, and once it is over, Cait needs some time to recover from the depletion.
  • For example, Cait received a request to present at a summit during a week when she was already committed to doing 2 keynotes. The person running the summit was planning to allow free access and then paid access at a later time. In this instance Cait would not have benefitted from participating and not being compensated. The keynotes are paid work and in front of Cait’s target market.
    • "I didn’t even say yes yet, and I was already a little bit resentful. To me, that’s a beautiful thing. Because as soon as I see that resentment I’m like, oh…I don’t actually want to do this. If I do this I am going to be mad about it. I don’t want to do things I’m going to be mad about….If I’m going to do something, I want to be able to show up the way I’m able to show up today. I’m happy to be here. I was excited to talk to you. I like what you’re doing, so I’m happy to show up and be here fully and be engaged in it. If I’m not going to do it that way, then I don’t want to do it." Cait Donovan on using feelings of resentment to help make decisions about a time commitment
    • Cait ultimately said no to the summit request but feels several years ago she would not have been able to say no.

43:56 – This Is Over

• Speaking of saying no, Cait had to say no at one point to continuing in her acupuncturist business.
  • People who go through burnout have to release a way of working, which is releasing an identity, and there is a grieving process you have to go through for this.
  • Cait was an acupuncturist for 13 years, moved back to the United States, and wanted to open an office there but could not due to a ruptured achilles. She couldn’t even stand as a result, so it took her a while to look into investing in opening an office.
  • Once she opened the office and wasn’t in constant debt, COVID hit, shutting them down for 4 months. Things started to open up a little, but people were still nervous.
  • They were shutdown a second time. It was too much of a fight and wasn’t working. Coaching and speaking was working.
  • Holding onto the acupuncture business meant Cait was spending 2 days per week going into New York City (a 45 minute commute). She would get there around 10 AM and get home at 9 PM, and there was no room for anything else during those days (no coaching, workshops, speaking), leaving only 3 days per week left over to pursue what was working.
  • "It just was a smarter decision for me to throw all my eggs in this basket and really try and make this part of things work." – Cait Donovan on deciding to give up her acupuncture business
  • At the same time, Cait did not close the door to the possibility of opening another acupuncture business in the future. These services are great for mental health.
  • Even though this was a "not right now" kind of thing for Cait, she treated it as "this is over." She needed to allow herself to go through the grieving process and not sit in the "what ifs" for years. She continued staying educated on acupuncture topics to keep a license.
  • "I have to say goodbye to this right now…because I can’t be both feet into building this business if I’ve still got a toe over there." – Cait Donovan

Contact us if you need help on the journey, and be sure to check out the Nerd Journey Podcast Knowledge Graph.