Speaker A: Welcome to the Therapist burnout podcast, episode 50.
Hey, therapist. It’s 50 today. It feels like I’m halfway there, living out of prayer, y’all. Oh, my goodness, it’s a Saturday. I’ve been recording on Saturdays. I keep telling myself I’m going to do it in a week and it doesn’t happen, and that’s okay.
So I’m here, I’m doing it, and I’m happy to show up for you wonderful people.
Today is a continuation of a little series I’m doing this month of It’s Hard to Make Change.
I don’t remember what I said in the last episode, why you can’t make a change. We’ll go with that. Something. So in episode 49, I talked about fear and why fear is holding you back from making the choices that you need to make in your career, in your practice, in your life, because you’re burnout.
That’s the point. And burnout feels really scary. So I think just to remember, you know, remember myself when I was in peak burnout, that I was. I was really scared about what it meant.
And so just know you’re not alone in that. And a lot of people feel that way. I this week was listening to. I was listening to Rachel Rogers this week talk a little bit about burnout, and she was coaching someone that she works with who’s a business owner on Burnout and why pushing actually isn’t successful.
It’s not going to lead you to make more income, to take more clients, because you’re doing everything yourself. And there’s only so much resources that we have individually. Right. If we only have a finite amount of resources, then we really need to protect you, protect you from yourself sometimes.
I know that because I’m living it again. So burnout creeps in for me every once in a while. I’ve have been talking to my partner over the past couple weeks because my workload has increased.
I work a contract job, and last month we lost our dear dog. It was just so awful. And so it was like a week and a half where I just didn’t get anything done.
And I had a high workload at the contract job, came back from vacation, so I had like a week off. I didn’t do any work. No, I can’t say that.
Maybe I did some, like, kind of planning. I didn’t do any work. And so the past two weeks have just been really busy. My shoulder’s been hurting.
It’s not been good, y’all. So I feel like the work that I do it’s not heavy from like a compassion fatigue perspective. But I am just prone to push myself because that’s just my personality.
I kind of dive deep into things. I want to take on all the things and that’s not really benefiting me. I’ve tried to set up some guardrails this year with that contract job to make sure that I am not going to to burn myself out.
However, I found that I really need to think through some more of it. And the topic today is you’re tired. AF if you are depleted, you cannot make huge decisions with a great deal of certainty of time.
So you’re not afforded the ability to feel like, you know, I really took my time. I thought about this, I made a great decision. All the things right when you’re in chronic depletion, you can’t do that.
And so for some of you, I feel like you want to either close your private practice, start something else. Maybe that looks like some kind of coaching offer. Maybe that looks like speaking.
Maybe you’re like, I don’t want to do any of that, I want to get another job, or I just want to break.
I just need to rest.
And so somewhere you are there, you have no idea what you want to do next. And that’s even scary. So if we’re going back to the fear episode, you’re fearful because you have no freaking clue about what is next after this.
And so that brings up all kinds of identity issues of just spiraling and what the behavior looks like. Now I work in schools and so we’re thinking about like, I look at functional behavioral analysis a lot about what is the function of the behavior.
So for a lot of my clients, they are spinning and doing a lot of activity, thinking that’s helping them make a decision. Because I’m laughing because I did it too.
Should I start doing intensives? Should I, I don’t know, start some groups? Maybe that’ll get me out of one to one and doing all the things that I was trying to do.
And so I just want to give you some points about when you are in chronic depletion. And that’s what burnout looks like. I think we therapists just have a different flavor of it.
But I think, how do you start to untangle the web? And I think for a lot of us, at the end of the day, we get to the end of our clinical day.
And for me, you know, sometimes I do, I do work clinically, I use my license. I just don’t work in a therapy capacity anymore. I’m A psychologist at the end of the day, you know, or for me anyway, when I leave work, work doesn’t end.
So second shift starts, right? So I’m there with my kids doing all the things, taking people to drum practice, making dinner. And I feel like I’m constantly working until literally my kids go to bed.
Either I go to sleep or I watch a 30 minute show and fall asleep on the couch.
And part of that is season of life, right? Part of that is I’m in a busy season and with the ages of my children, I only have a few more years of putting them to bed and doing all this stuff.
And so I try to look at that, but right now it’s like it’s busy, it’s. And it feels like a lot.
And so if you’re like me and it’s go, go, go, go, go all day long, and maybe you don’t have kids, but you have other things. Like you feel like you’re constantly on with the clinical pieces or work never stops.
Maybe you’re, you know, on there responding to clients or trying to figure out your next offer or doing all the things and you’re not allowing yourself to rest. And so, you know, I have some ideas on if you literally have no space.
And that’s why you can’t make a decision. But, you know, you need to make a decision because you can’t go on, on the hamster wheel anymore. You need to get off if you’re tired and dreaming of working at Target.
For me, I, I have a neighbor who weaves and they make these like, mats. I live in Maine, the state of Maine, and they make these doormats, like in front of your front door out of recycled boat line.
And I was like, you know what, I could do something like that. I could, you know, do anything besides constantly give in my job. And I feel like it’s creeping up.
I am. This is like a little call to Jesus for myself today, y’all, because I just, yeah, I have to start listening to my body more and more when it, when it tells me things because it starts to creep in.
So the first one would be to learn how to rest. It’s so simple. But it’s challenging to learn how to rest and to really accept deep rest in your life and know that you have to do it and there’s no other way around it.
So Rachel Rogers this week was saying to her coaching client, you need to become an expert on rest. And maybe you talk to your clients about this, but I know we are not the ones that take the advice very easily.
So I want you to think about nervous system deep rest, right? What does that look like for you? Because I think it’s a different recipe for each person that I talk to.
And I come from Neurorehab, where literally if you’ve had a brain injury, especially with like a post concussion syndrome. So I worked with a lot of folks post concussion and if they did not rest as they needed, they would be in the bed for two to three days.
And sometimes I see this with therapist, their burnout has gotten to a certain degree. Where they are in the bed, your body just gives out and says, no more. You get sick a lot.
You’re having health problems. That is a sign of chronic stress and, and it’s more end stage burnout. So I’d like you to really think through. If you don’t take rest, it will take you out, you will get sick, you will be in the hospital.
I’ve heard some people say, I wish recently I had a client tell me, you know, as they were in the process of closing their practice, they were saying like, I got really sick, but it wasn’t like I was in the hospital.
I kind of wish I was.
So I had an excuse. That’s tough. You know, that’s tough when you, when you feel like there’s no space for you to care for yourself. And you know, understandably, you know, it was a season for that person.
But I think a lot of us feel that way.
You know, if I was legitimately sick, quote unquote, that I could have that deep breath that I need. And so I think through the work I did as a therapist with folks with brain injury, and I really had to stress to them, if you don’t take the breaks, like you need to take them throughout the day, throughout the week, you will be taken out and you won’t have a choice but to be in bed for two to three days.
For some people, especially early on in their recovery, typically they kind of built in and recovered and were able to kind of build their window of tolerance for ability, you know, to just live their life right, Go to the grocery store, do kind of those basic everyday tasks.
And I think that, you know, that can happen for therapists, but it really takes a solid time in getting deep rest in your body, feeling like it knows that you’re going to take care of it, because otherwise we go into fight or flight and your body’s like, nope, we are not doing this today.
Not today. And many times I think initially when I came out of Working. It’s almost been two years in March, where I closed my practice, I was fearing burnout, so I was in fear that I would go back to burnout.
My burnout also coincided with a panic disorder. So talk about anxiety response and your nervous system telling you, we. No, we’re not doing that. And so I know that when I walk this line of depletion, that the consequences are pretty heavy for me.
Right. My body could take me out. My body could just, you know, suddenly get sick, suddenly decide that, you know, I’m going to have a panic attack over something. I don’t know what it is.
And I know I have great strategies for that now. I went through, you know, nearly a year and a half of emdr, and, like, driving isn’t the same completely. I don’t have panic attacks.
I don’t deal with that. But I don’t quite feel normal.
For you just to know that, like, your body has changed from this work, and I think the expectation that you can take on the level of work you took on early in your career when maybe you had, like, way lower stress.
You didn’t have family at home. You didn’t have a house to manage. You didn’t have two pets. Now, my poor puppy passed away. As I mentioned, such a grounding presence for me.
Can we just pause for a moment? Because my dog was a place of rest for me.
Not getting emotional, y’all.
I’m gonna leave that in. I’m just gonna grief.
Especially with a beloved pet. I just didn’t realize how much that relationship affected me. He was my therapy dog. He helped clients through things. So it turned out that I’m discovering things as I’m recording this process about what I need.
Not surprising, not surprising that my pup, you know, had been a place of rest and daily rest, you know, petting them. We, you know, know all the research on I’m petting an animal and the oxytocin release that we get when we pet an animal for more than 30 seconds.
And so if you have a beloved pet, I hope that you are, you know, utilizing them to rest during the day to, you know, rest at night. Okay, I think I can talk again.
So I lost my whole train of thought about my points on rest. I talked a little bit about my work with concussion. Yeah, grief, man. Grief when we’re in grief.
And how that really destabilizes our nerv nervous system. And I just don’t have, like, that fur baby to help me regulate, which I’d have for 15 years.
And so I think, yeah, when we have changes like that in our life, like our personal life causes this huge disruption in our life, whether that be the loss of a person or just chronic stress in a relationship, you know, changes in our.
In our own relationship patterns. Maybe you’ve, you know, broken up with a partner or, um, a partners become sick, for example. So many different things that can help us not be able to rest.
And so just having you think of all that and giving yourself space for what you need in this season.
And just speaking of seasons, December, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. Right. My husband thinks I’m a Grinch, so he is a Christmas elf and loves Christmas. And I try to put on a good face, y’all, I really do.
But it just feels like a lot of work. And he does a lot.
He buys the presents, he does a lot. Lot of that. I wrap them. I don’t know, it just feels like a lot of work to me. I’m happy for when it’s over and when I can just sit at the end of the day on Christmas.
So my whole point of trying to rest more in Christmas this year is getting to the point after, like, the hustle of the Christmas kind of opening and stuff like that.
I just want to do absolutely nothing. Like, nothing like I just want to sit in the chair like most of the day and let the kids play with their toys.
We’ll just heat up leftovers because I don’t feel like I want to eat after, like, the food marathon that’s going to happen between Christmas Eve night and the next day.
I just. I’m not hungry for Christmas dinner. Communicated that need, that I don’t need to cook again. Hoping that’s going to be honored. It will be. It’s fine. Yeah. So what do you need to rest this month?
So let’s just start with like, today, this week, this month. So I’ve thought through the holiday and what I need to rest.
I’m going to try to take care of my future self today by wrapping presents that’s on my agenda. So I don’t get into right before the holiday of needing to wrap presents and stuff like that.
So that’s one thing.
Yeah. I have not set myself up well for next week. I have probably a lot of writing to do with my contract job. Hopefully that will be all over tomorrow because I have to work through the weekend because of what I set myself up for anyway, so resting.
Be an expert on rest. So I’m. I’m going to put that on a sticky note somewhere and just say you are the rest expert. You talk to people about rest and you’re not doing it, Jen.
And that’s humanity. Right? If I know that my personality tends to push, I have to constantly remind myself you can’t do that. So I’m going to be asking for help.
I have hired my house cleaner back. I’m going to find a way to make that work financially. I really love, you know a lot of people say a lot of times we’re like wanting to hire in our businesses if you can hire, if you have that availability.
I didn’t hire anyone one until gosh, I took on my own billing, did everything for yeah the first six or seven years and I hired a billing person which I highly recommend if you’re in private practice to not do your own billing because I was awful at it.
Number one. I thought I was like oh it’s so easy through this ehr. And I did insurance based, I had an insurance based practice. You just can’t navigate the system alone.
I, I don’t recommend it. So having someone you work with, if you’re doing private billing then maybe you’re fine, you know, maybe it’s easy. I don’t know. I, I didn’t have all private pay so that wasn’t my journey.
So thinking of hiring help also at home, you know, can you think about any support you need like house cleaning or laundry or things of that nature that can help support you?
So perhaps you can feel a little more rest and we think about if we take on, if I take on one more hour of clinical work, I can get my house cleaned every week.
And so what is that energy exchange for me? It’s actually pretty easy for me to take another hour on of work and to get my house cleaned a week. That feels way more energizing for me if I think through that.
So I just have to. You think through that energy exchange. Is it one or two clients and then you can hire some personal help at home or some laundry support and you know, we just don’t think to take on that rest.
Especially for female identifying folks that, you know, we should manage all that stuff in our home or like who has a house cleaner who gets their laundry done.
We just need to stop all that and think through what do we need? What do we need? What do you need? Okay. Okay. And second. So the first is one is rest.
Be an expert in rest. That is your whole job is to learn how to rest again.
Number two, think through your most depleting moments in your week. So I am going to do, I keep telling myself I’m going to do a time study and look about my week and what the heck I’m doing all week because I feel like I’m doing a lot of work and I need to change that.
So I am going to highlight my most depleting sessions, experiences, tasks and really identify that what are those things that I need support with? What can I let go that I don’t need to do anymore, right?
Just not do it, period. Stop. I’m not doing that anymore. I’m going to see what it is. So I usually ask, you know, everyone I work with, if they’re still in therapy, what are your most depleting sessions every week?
And then looking clinically at those situations, at those clients, do we need to refer out, do you need to terminate services, discharge? Maybe they’ve met treatment goals, but they just want to do check in therapy and they’re just draining you or they need another service because you’ve been with them, you’ve worked on, you know, the whole therapeutic, you’ve, you know, provided them.
Everything you provide can provide them in therapy or the therapy that you do. And it’s time to go. It’s just time to go. And sometimes you just need that little support.
I think my clients need the support rather for me to encourage them to say, are they done? Are you done?
You can be done.
And so I’ve worked with people on discharging those clients that, you know, why are we still holding onto them?
And we don’t stop to pause to say, I am not effective in this relationship anymore and the client is no longer benefiting. And so even ethically, if we’re looking at ethically standards, then we should discharge.
So I’ve talked a lot about that in my termination episode that’s 35, I’m going to look it up. Oh, yes. So episode 35, check that out if you want some more thoughts on when to let people go.
All right. And number three, give yourself more space in your schedule. I’d like you to think about where are spaces where I could be more human, where can I walk, where can I have more enjoyment in my day, in my week?
And but when that’s reduced, what are my signs and symptoms? So for me, Friday was supposed to be my regulation day and I’ve been working on Fridays. It’s not been good.
So I have to really think about, you know, in the new year kind of taking back my Fridays as my regulation day.
And what does that look like Right. That might look like I have reduced capacity for clients or for taking on contract work. And so I had to kind of look at that, you know, look at what, what I need.
And so part of me feeling more human is, is, you know, doing the things that I love. And I love fitness instruction. I teach two classes a week. I teach like this yoga ish format and I also play tennis.
And those times really feel. I feel like they’re life giving for me and I really enjoy them. Also. I think I’d just like to maybe have a date night at least twice a month.
And that’s money. So I have to kind of think of how are we going to make that happen, how are we going to, you know, get a sitter or do something like that where we can go out and have some more time together.
Parenting in this season right now has been tricky for us.
And yeah, our kids are with two active boys and it feels like everything in the house is breaking and lots of fights. So it’s a lot of energy I think we’re outputting right now in the season.
And yeah, I think we need more time to be together. So that’s one thing I think I need for you.
Where do you need more space?
Where can you be bored in your week? You know, I know it’s silly and I don’t. I know we don’t say like self care is getting your nails done or doing the bubble baths, but you know, it is weird when I get a manicure, um, it’s the only time my hands are truly tied up.
I have to look at the wall and my mind wanders and that’s a good thing. And so it is a nice space for me to really unwind and allow myself to have, you know, kind of a moment to myself.
You can do that in so many ways, right? It doesn’t have to be getting your nails done. For me, that’s something that really helps. It’s not a weekly cadence for me to get my nails done, but it’s just an extra special treat that I like.
But what is that for you is that I go on a without my phone hard when it’s cold. But I have to get back to it. I have to get back to it, even if it’s a quick walk.
I just listened to an episode of On Speaking of Psychology, which is the APA’s podcast, and I would love to have this guest on to talk about. She. Her research was on winter and she lived up near like the Arctic Circle for a year and kind of studied what do they do in that community to help them enjoy the cold, enjoy winter?
And why is actually winter important for us?
And so I’ve been kind of leaning into that talk a little bit because winter and I have not had the best relationship. I don’t love cold, but I do love a warm fire and kind of cozy clothes.
And so I’ve been leaning into that a little bit and I’d love to have her on just to talk a little bit about that. I thought about when she talked about when they don’t have sun there they also have kind of like sometimes six hours of like a sunset.
And I’d be like well that’s kind of cool to have a six hours of a sunset.
So just thinking through different things about what kind of winter brings. I usually get to see the sunrise every day here. It’s the sunrise is probably around 6:30 right now where I live and while it gets dark before four right now I’ve been enjoying sunrises.
So in the summer it, it’s super early where I live cuz we’re one of the first people to see the sun in the United States. So our sunrises are sometimes in the summer like 4am so I’m not going to see the sunrise in the morning.
So I’ve been enjoying that looking at the sunrise and we had snowfall last week and I really love seeing the snow. It’s beautiful. I digress. So I want, I just have my notification on my computer that we’re going to get another some snow on Thursday which is great for my kids.
They were out all day playing in it when we had it.
Looking forward to that. And I would just have you think of these things. Can you be an expert on rest? If you’re tired, think of your most depleting times. Don’t do any, don’t do it anymore.
Just stop it. Giving you the stop it button. And three, giving yourself space in your schedule to be human, to be bored, to have fun. There’s so much great research on play and how that is regulating to the nervous system.
The other thing that I do is yeah, I think I mentioned I play tennis. My son is learning drums and he’s getting a drum set. So I’m thinking of, of like taking up the drums.
It’s bilateral motion for my EMDR folks.
We’ll see what that that brings to regulation. Okay, I hope you found this helpful. I do have a freebie for you. So I usually don’t promote this one because it’s like one of the first ones that I developed and but it fits so well with this topic and it’s little prompts on what you need to do before you quit and it’s really doing a deep dive into what is depleting me and my burnout.
What are my next action steps kind of as I get away I think looking at the depletion can help give us I need to let that client go or this environment I’m in is the thing that’s depleting me.
Sometimes it’s hard for us to diagnose what’s going on and it can kind of give you those first steps in thinking of what needs to change because a lot of times we have no idea what even needs to change.
So grab that guide. It’s a freebie in my in the show notes. So if you’re in a podcast player just scroll on down and it’ll be down in there and you can click on it and grab that free guide.
All right, I hope you guys have a good one. Bye.
