The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - How to avoid burnout - Psychologist Tips

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 141: How to Avoid Burnout - Psychologist Tips - Mental HealthIn this brilliant fifth episode in the very special anti-burnout series by Dr Claire Plumbly we bring you a closer look at how different times of our day and transitioning from one task to the next can be a key time to be more mindful to reduce burnout. It’s a fantastically interesting and helpful episode and we hope you find it so useful! The Highlights: 00:00 - Introduction00:23 - Host Welcome01:25 - Burnout Bites Series Overview02:15 - Managing Transitions in the Day03:15 - Recognising Strain During Transition Points04:42 - Creating Gaps in Your Day05:20 - Personal Example of Managing Transitions06:01 - Checking in with Yourself During the Day07:31 - Tools for Nervous System Reset08:17 - Setting Boundaries and Delegating Tasks09:03 - The Eight Pillars of Rest10:13 - Preview of Next Episode: External vs Internal PressuresLinks:📚 Check out Dr Claire's Book on Burnout: How to manage your nervous system before it manages you: https://amzn.to/3W9nsgi 📲Connect with Dr Claire here: https://www.tiktok.com/@drclaireplumbly https://www.instagram.com/drclaireplumbly/ 🖥️ Check out my brand new short courses for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals here: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/short-courses🫶 To support me by donating to help cover my costs for the free resources I provide click here: https://the-aspiring-psychologist.captivate.fm/support📚 To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0 📖 To check out The Aspiring Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97 💡 To check out or join the aspiring psychologist membership for just £30 per month head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/membership-interested✍️ Get your Supervision Shaping Tool now: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/supervision📱Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work with her, including the Aspiring Psychologist Book, Clinical Psychologist book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrent💬 To join my free Facebook group and discuss your thoughts on this episode and more: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aspiringpsychologistcommunityLike, Comment, Subscribe & get involved:If you enjoy the podcast, please do subscribe and rate and review episodes. If you'd like to learn how to record and submit your own audio testimonial to be included in future shows head to:

Hi there, it's Marianne here. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to quickly let you know about something exciting that's happening right now. If you've ever wondered how to create income that works for you, rather than constantly trading your time for money, then you'll love the Race to Recurring Revenue Challenge with my business mentor, Lisa Johnson. This challenge is designed to help you build sustainable income streams. And whether you're an aspiring psychologist, a mental health professional, or in a completely different field,

the principles can work for you. There are also wonderful prizes to be won directly by Lisa herself. And if you join the challenge by my link, you can be in with a chance of winning a one-to-one hours coaching with me, Dr. Marianne Trent. Do you want to know more? Of course you do. Head to my link tree, Dr. Marianne Trent, or check out my social media channels, or send me a quick DM and I'll get you all the details. Right, let's get on with today's episode. How can we avoid burnout? And what key times of the day could be triggering us that we

might be able to step back from? Let's learn these steps from a qualified clinical psychologist who is an expert in this field of anti-burnout. I hope you find it so useful. Welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent. I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. Now, we don't want you to burn out, whether you are watching this as an aspiring psychologist or whether you are watching this because you are feeling stressed or overwhelmed. Wouldn't it be great to have a step-by-step guide for how to step back from the brink of burnout and how to keep yourself well? I have drafted in one of my friends and colleagues, Dr. Claire Plumley, who is the author of Burnout, How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You. She's giving us a very special mini-series over the summer called Burnout Bites, which is all about how to avoid burnout.

This is episode five in the series of six. There is no need to watch all six. They do build on each other beautifully. So please do take a moment to watch the previous ones and listen to previous episodes if you do like this one too. Let's hand over to Claire and I will see you on the other side. Welcome back to Burnout Bites. This is episode five out of six short episodes all about burnout. My name is Dr. Claire Plumley. I'm a clinical psychologist. I specialize in anxiety, trauma and burnout. I'm based down in Taunton, Somerset, and also have a practice that works online as well. On the 18th of July 2024, my first ever book came out. It's called Burnout, How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You. And you can get a link to that in the show notes.

So today we're going to talk about protecting yourself from burnout, in particular thinking about the transitions in the day so that you can find those moments to settle your nervous system. I think it's a really good point actually that Marianne has lent out her podcast seat to me here because this is one of those examples of what you can then do when you're tuned into what you need. She has delegated, she's given and trusted me to hold her podcast. Hopefully she feels that I'm doing this in a satisfactory way. And this has allowed her six weeks of space to focus on other things. When you're running something like a podcast, it's really easy to burn out because you're often really passionate

about this project. So this is the kind of thing that hopefully you'll have some more ideas about by the end of this short episode. So you might remember in the second episode when I described the difference between stress and burnout that a sign that we are in good well-being is that we can move in and out of our nervous system gears with fluidity and that one of the signs of burnout is that we are struggling at those transition points of the day. So when we stop or start work when we begin to eat a meal and when we move from you know sitting in the car to getting out and going get the kids or putting them to bed all of these are typical times when you might really notice a strain different activities require different cognitive faculties different levels of energy

and movement and so not being able to move fluidly through all of that can cause us real difficulty. So this episode is all about an invitation to notice the transitions in your day. I've made social media posts on this, and I often refer to them as micro moments. So the moment before you start something else, we're often so busy, there's often so many demands on us that we crash from one activity to another. You know, the number of people who struggle with their sleep and yet they're still working on their computers or doing something, you know, work related right up until bedtime. It's a lot. So this is the time if you're beginning to feel burnout or wanting to work on

yourself to try and create gaps so you can pace yourself throughout the day. This might be creating gaps even when it feels like there's no possibility of a gap being created. So a classic for me is when I go and get the kids from school. What I used to do is shut my computer down, go and get in the car and park as close to the school as I could so that I could do it all at the last minute. What I found I did when that happened was I was in my head and I was unable to really be there for the kids with whatever they were bringing from their transition coming out of the classroom and you know feeling unhappy that so-and-so said this or the teacher had given them this to do or

you know I wasn't able to absorb that in a way and be there for them in a way that they needed because I was still stuck in my own head feeling quite irritable that I'd had to break my concentration to come and get them. This was particularly the case when I was writing my book actually and I was really in my flow and really didn't want to give that up. So what I realised was this was not benefiting anyone. We were all miserable. So even though that extra five, ten minutes of writing felt really hard to give up, I did train myself to stop and got used to committing to myself that I would park in a certain place. The kids actually got really used to it and this just became a joyful part of their walk. So there's a little place I can park and it, unfortunately, it walks down the back of a little stream. So I can really use all

of the things around me to ground myself. And there's, you know, rich fodder for me, you know, there's squirrels jumping from tree to tree, there are usually some sort of dog being walked. There's the tree grass, and I try and put my phone either in the car or the bottom deepest pocket of my bag. And I resist any urges to check so I'm not breaking out of this kind of ability to be grounded. So I was having this discussion with someone in supervision recently, and they started to do this with their own clients. And I think something we identified was how hard it is to even notice the transition points when we're so used to kind of crashing from one thing to another without paying attention to them and it's such a familiar feeling isn't it for

for example everyone to arrive in a meeting a little bit like they've raced there and the thing is you're still carrying whatever you were doing with you so your head's either in the past place you know i've got to do this i've got to remember this and um or what do they say then how will i remember or all these types of worry thoughts about the past. Or we're beginning to think about the next thing. Well, how will I get to there in time? Or what are we going to eat for dinner? Or what will I do when I need to present on this? We're very rarely in the moment. When we pause and have these gaps, this is the time that we can kind of check in with ourselves and ground ourselves. So by checking in, I mean

tuning in, scanning your head down to your toes. What's here in my body? You know, am I tense? Do I need to stretch it out? Do I need to move my body and discharge a bit of the energy and adrenaline? Or do I need to just be there for myself? Now, this is typical if I've had a really heavy session of, you know, a client who's really traumatized, maybe I just need to pause. Sometimes then, you know, once you've paused and seen what's here in your body and the quality of thoughts, they're racing or busy or self attacking, I can then do something to meet my need. And whatever that might be, you know, you'll have different tools already in your toolkit. My book also offers more of that. But it might be some sort of self compassion or slowing down or comforting. It might be something more energizing and uplifting so for

me for example even though social connection is really really good for all of us and i know i really benefit from it there are times when there isn't anyone to do that with you know when i'm in my clinic i'm on my own but one way i can do that is to look at videos i've got a few videos that just make me always smile they're of my kids being silly and also a little secret here but I do get quite a lot of benefit from watching guinea pig videos and the algorithm has found me and tends to send me lots of funny guinea pig videos when I get home from a heavy clinic there's a half hour gap in the past I have sometimes used that try and do admin but now I know I'm so kind of wrung out from you know holding a lot of emotional distress I try to make sure I use that half an hour just

have a cup of tea and stare out into the garden or have a cuddle with a guinea pig so I'm paying more attention to what I need and tuning in and actually doing it so using your mindfulness skills and any reset nervous system skills that you already have are really important once you start to do this it might also be helpful to get an accountability buddy or two or three or more, you know, agree with each other. What's the compassionate way of managing our day together? Is it rushing from one thing to another? Is it finishing the meeting 10 minutes earlier? Even if we haven't finished everything on the to-do list or the agenda, actually it's better to have had a conversation that went well and we know we've got that 10 minute to have some downtime and reset together

it might also be learning some skills in areas that you know maybe you're a little thin on the ground on so for example setting boundaries delegating like marianne has done with this podcast what are the barriers to that is it it about, for example, trust? Is it about feeling worthy of having boundaries and saying no? And is it perhaps practical things like scripts and words and what that actually looks like? So I go through the types of things this might look like at the end part of my book. But I do want to leave you today with a model that I find really, really helpful. It's Susie Redding's model. It's called the eight pillars of rest. And I read it in her book, Rest to Reset. She's kind of given me permission to

share it in my book as well. But essentially what she's got are eight pillars that show what you might need if you've been doing something so that you can rethink what rest actually looks like. Rest tends to get pigeonholed as kind of stillness and stopping. But obviously, if you've got a lot of nervous energy, that's not helpful. So for example, she's got a pillar, which is solitude. So if you spent a lot of time on your own, maybe what you need at that point is to fill up emotionally. If you've been moving a lot, maybe it is to come to some sort of more peaceful pausing kind of energy. But equally the opposite is true. So her pillars make it super practical and simple to see what is it I've been spending

my time just doing, tuning in, checking what I need. And here's an example of what might be the opposite of that. So I do hope this has been helpful and that you're able to take some of these ideas and make them really practical and make them your own. I will see you in the final of this short series in episode six, where I'm going to go through the difference between external and internal pressures so that you can separate them out and know where you can maybe do some work on the internal pressures to support yourself thank you so much claire what brilliant

food for thought you are offering us and how to kind of step back from burnout at those key transition points in the day is going to be so, so useful for me and for everyone who is listening and watching too. Please do come and connect with Dr. Clare. She's Dr. Clare Plumley everywhere. And whilst you're on social media, why not come and connect and follow me too, where I am Dr. Marianne Trent. We are doing beautiful things in the Aspiring Psychologist membership. So please do check that out and do come on over if you think that the time is ready and you're ready for this next step in your career. You can join from just £30 a month with no minimum term. Check out Dr. Clare's book with the details in the show notes and also search for my books, the Aspiring

Psychologist Coll collective and the clinical psychologist collective too there's also the grief collective talking head and i have an upcoming book with two of my colleagues looking at people diagnosed with autism who work in the health profession come and let me know what you think to this episode what you think to this series the burnout bites series with dr claire by coming along to the aspiring psychologist community with Dr. Marianne Trent. Please do take a moment to subscribe to the show, to follow the show. It really is the kindest thing you can do for any podcaster and it is totally free. Thank you so much for being part of my world. I'll look forward to bringing you the next episode, which will be

the final episode in our Burnout Bites series, which will be available to you from 10am on Saturday on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast from 6am on Monday. Thank you so much for being part of my world and I'll see you very soon. Take care. then let this be your guide with this podcast that you'll find to be on your way to being qualified it's the aspiring psychologist with dr marianne My name's Jana and I'm a trainee psychological wellbeing practitioner. I read the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. I found it really interesting about all the different stories and how people got to become a clinical psychologist. It just amazed me how many different routes there are to get there and there's no perfect way to become one and this kind

of filled me with confidence that no I'm not doing it wrong and put less pressure on myself. So if you're feeling a bit uneasy about becoming a clinical psychologist I'd definitely recommend this just to put yourself at ease and everything will be okay. But trust me you will not put the book down once you start.