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Kamini Wood works with high achievers on letting go of stress, overwhelm and anxiety that comes with trying to do everything, and trying to do it all perfectly
Voiceover: [00:00:00] Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way. From emotional intelligence through cognitive distortions, certified life and wellness coach Kamini Wood is on a mission to help people see the magnificence of their own unique human spirit. Through these small bites of self-visualization and self-confidence, you can have healthy relationships, success in business and career, and live the life you want to live. Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way.
Kamini Wood: Hi there, and welcome to another episode of Rise Up, Live Joy Your Way. Whether it's morning, afternoon, or evening, thank you for spending some time here with me. Now, maybe you've been told burnout means you need to rest, so you took a vacation, or you slept in, or you blocked off your weekend.
Maybe you even said no to a few things. Uh, maybe you even started to exercise again, or you downloaded the latest meditation app, and you did all the things that the articles told you to do, and you're still exhausted. [00:01:00] You're still burnt out. If anything, maybe you're even more tired now than you were before you even tried to fix it.
The rest didn't actually restore you. The sleep didn't actually catch you up. The vacation gave you a, a brief hit of relief, but it disappeared the Tuesday after you got back. And now there's this new layer of exhaustion, which is the exhaustion of having tried to fix the thing and it not working, and so you've started to wonder if there's something just wrong with you.
And let me just say, we're not gonna shame ourselves. There isn't something wrong with you. What's happening is the model of burnout that maybe you have been handed is not the model that is actually what you're feeling, and until you have, um, uh, the... a better model, none of the interventions will land because they're applied to the wrong problem.
So burnout is not, is... Okay, burnout is not just, "I need more rest," right? It's not primarily a rest problem. So I really wanna talk to you today about what burnout actually is, what happens in the body when you're a [00:02:00] high-functioning person who's been quietly running on a survival operating system for years, and what your burnout is trying to tell you and what the, the narrative might be missing.
So here's what almost nobody names about burnout. The standard explanation treats it as this is- it's a problem of output. You did too much. You worked too hard. You didn't take enough breaks, and so the solution is, okay, we just need to do less. Don't... Just say no to things. Don't add things to your plate.
Partially true, right? It... I wanna say this. Ex- Th- That's not wrong completely, but it's not a complete- answer to what burnout is. It's, it's inco- it's incomplete in a way that I think truly actually matters because the burnout we see in high-functioning people is often not that they're just doing too much.
It's the burnout of doing it from a particular way of showing up. You know, this, this ... It's, it's more of a particular way of, um, I would say that it's a posture of vigilance, if you will, right? The, the posture of I, "I have to do this." You weren't just working, [00:03:00] you were running on s- a survival operation while you were working.
You were tracking everyone's moods. You were kind of monitoring the emotionality of your entire team. You were anticipating problems. You were absorbing the things that nobody else could absorb. You were performing so competently because nobody would be able to catch the parts that, that you're able to catch, right?
And, and so you keep going. And so that's not the same thing as working hard. You know, that's working hard, but there's also something else happening. There's a survival, I call them pressure patterns, but it's a survival pattern that's running underneath. It's, it's constantly running underneath the work.
And the, here's the thing about that, right? It runs on the same fuel as your immune system. The same, the same level as your sleep. It, it runs on the same level as your capacity to feel love and joy and curiosity and calmness and, and, you know, happiness. So when that engine, right, that survival engine is continuously running and running and running, it runs out of fuel, and that's what we call burnout, right?
It's the moment that our system runs [00:04:00] out of fuel for everything that isn't survival. And so the... And the rest that everybody talks about, it's not capable of refilling it because the rest doesn't address what's been happening with your nervous system, right? It addresses fatigue, that surface level fatigue, but it doesn't address what's been happening within your body.
You know, taking the vacation, that's why it feels good for a brief respite because your nervous system might calm down, but then you're right back into it, and it, and it literally is right back online to the same thing. We're repeating the same pattern. And so it's really important that we name what's going on with your nervous system because it, it contributes to burnout.
And it's your sympathetic nervous system, that part of your nervous system that handles activation. It handles moving you when there's a threat. And what happens is when you're in this for a prolonged period of time, it becomes a new baseline. And when you're in that new baseline, that is what contributes to this idea of burnout.
Your [00:05:00] parasympathetic nervous system, the part of you that handles the rest and the repair and the reconnection, and even things like your digestive system, right? They don't get switched back on because your sympathetic nervous system is constantly on the go. So if the sympathetic nervous system is constantly running, we never get the parasympathetic to come back online and allow for some rest.
This is why a lot of people who are constantly go, go, go, go, go, their sympathetic nervous system is always on, they're complaining about gut issue problems, and it's because one of the things that is shut down is their ability to digest normally. So You could be lying on a beach and sleeping on that beach for hours, and honestly, your sympathetic nervous system could still be activated, right?
'Cause if it becomes your new baseline, that's the thing that we have to address, and this is the, this is truly why people might have a brief moment of respite from their vacation, but it really, when they get back, it, it comes right back online. [00:06:00] So, you know, for a hypervigilant nervous system, the, the idea of safety is an unfamiliar one.
It almost feels wrong. The system has been trained to just interpret stillness, any type of stillness or calm, as being unsafe. It's, it's bad because we're so used to going all the time, and this is the part that most of those rest-based interventions for burnout aren't accounting for. They're account- They're saying, like, if you stop, then everything will be fine.
But when you're in that survival pattern, your nervous system is in that survival pattern, just stopping that is not gonna reset anything. What the body actually needs in this state isn't more rest. It needs repeated experiences of safety that the system can now recalibrate and relearn from. You know, slow body-led, low stakes, you know, moments of co-regulation with another grounded person, the kind of presence that lets the nervous system finally come back out of being on into a place of being, uh, [00:07:00] reconnected, right?
That's a different... This is a different idea of how we address burnout. Instead of just saying, "Get more rest, take a break," which again, I'm not saying those aren't good ideas, we have to pay attention to the nervous system, and it's a conversation worth having. And I think more and more people are talking about that.
I think we're, we're hearing more and more about nervous system education, but this is really, really important. In your body, you start interpreting your systems- What ends up happening is w- we will say it's a personal failure, right? I'm just so tired. What is wrong with me? We, we kinda say, like, the fatigue is a problem.
Uh, the fact that I can't focus. What's wrong with me? And it gets pathologized, and, and you end up shaming yourself through it, right? And you try to add more wellness routines, and then that doesn't work, and you get more and more upset with yourself. You try to fix your sleep problems, and you know, maybe we add more vitamins to our list, and it's just...
it's... it... what we need to pay attention to is what's actually going on in our body. You know, we have to look at what's going on with that nervous system. It's not just asking [00:08:00] for more sleep, and I'm not saying, again, sleep is great. We need to make sure we're getting enough sleep. But until you actually pay attention to r- regulating the system, nothing is really gonna change.
We also end up seeing this pop up in our relationships, right? When our nervous system is activated, and we are in this chronic survival activation, the capacity for connection, those high-quality connections, really narrows, not because we don't love the people in our life, but because the connection requires you to be in a regulated state, and when you're not in that regulated state, we're not able to connect.
I mean, think about this. I, I know this, I... when I'm p- coaching parents, they'll admit to me that they have a really hard time connecting with their child because they're so stressed out or overwhelmed with work, and they come home, and they can't have a conversation with their, their teenager, and it's because they're not...
they're so dysregulated. And so then that relationship gets further and further apart. So it's important to, for us to, to have these conversations because if, again, if nothing changes, nothing changes. We [00:09:00] might even see this end up affecting how we choose to lead in our, in our, in our business, right?
Because if we're operating on autopilot, uh, our ability to strategically think and creatively think will start to get quieter and quieter because when we are on autopilot or we're in this survival mode, the only thing that's really firing is the amygdala. That prefrontal cortex is not firing with all of those creative ideas.
And guess what? Your team's gonna feel it. They might not know what's going on, but they're gonna sense that you're not fully there and that w- we're not getting the full parts of you showing up in these meetings. And what ends up happening is this will compound and become a bigger and bigger issue.
You'll feel worse and worse, and then not only will you f- feel burnt out, but now you're in a shame spiral, too. So how do you know if you're just tired or if you're in survival burnout? Tired feels like, kinda like, you know, the low battery on your phone. If you charge it, it's gonna bounce back up. So if you do go to sleep and you feel better, you might have actually just been really tired, right?
You take a real weekend, or maybe you take a vacation, and you don't feel [00:10:00] like you've just fallen right back into old patterns when, right when you get back, that, then maybe you really are just tired. The survival burnout, it was more like the system no longer knows how to respond to when you do sleep more.
The system no longer knows how to respond to, uh, quieting down. It's just constantly feeling, you know, knotted up, so to speak. You know, tired feels like- One part of you is drained, but survival burnout's gonna feel like everything is drained, right? You might feel like you're in a fog when you're in survival burnout.
You just can't quite think clearly. You know, tired can feel like if I take these things off my plate, I actually feel much better. That's more tired. Survival burnout requires more than just taking things off of your plate or stopping. It's important to kind of see these distinctions and figure out, is this really just I'm tired, or am I really maybe in survival burnout?
So if you kinda want a quick, uh, cheat sheet, so to speak, you know, tired wants rest, and survival burnout just wants things to stop, right? They w- it [00:11:00] wants out. If your burnout has been craving that out, you might really want to pay attention, right? And again, this isn't about judgment or shame. I n- I never want us to go down that spiral because it gets us nowhere.
It's about what do I wanna do with this awareness? What is the action I wanna take? So this is what I want you to consider. And again, I'm gonna say, your burnout's not a weakness. It's not something that is wrong with you. It's saying that I can't continue to operate this way, and what do I wanna do differently?
You know, maybe if I've been taking on everything, maybe if I've been holding everything for everyone, maybe if I'm the one who doesn't get to put anything down, those are opportunities to shift things around. You know, maybe I don't have to carry everything for everyone else and, and it's on me to take action, right?
Burnout is not there's something wrong with you. It's an opening to say, "I want to do this differently, and I need to do this differently for myself and for those around me and the relationships I have." If you'd like to [00:12:00] talk about how coaching could support you through working through things like burnout or to move you forward professionally or personally, feel free to book a time to speak with me at anytime at coachwithkamini.com, and until next time, stay well.
Voiceover: Thank you for listening to Rise Up Live Joy Your Way. For more information, Book a chat with Kamini at www.chatwithKamini.com, or visit her website at www.kaminiwood.com. You can also find Kamini on Facebook or Instagram username, it's authentic me. Thank you for [00:13:00] listening!