The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - What are the 3 Types of Burnout? Stress and Mental Health at Work and Play

Starting point is 00:00:00 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,

Starting point is 00:00:32 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. Did you know that there is not just one type of burnout? Coming up today, we are looking

Starting point is 00:01:09 at the three types of burnout that are distinctly different Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. I love that every day is a school day and that we might have felt like we had a reasonable understanding of a particular psychology or mental health concept. And this is going to be a brilliant episode guiding us through the fact that there are actually three different types of burnout. So this can crop up for us at any stage of our life or career. You might notice this for your own personal insights for your life, or you might notice it for your professional life and I have loved learning about this. This is one of our special Burnout Bites series which is hosted for us expertly by Dr. Claire Plumley who is the author of a brand new book called Burnout

Starting point is 00:02:18 How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You and I'm taking a little bit of time off over the summer and passing the hosting reins over to Claire. You absolutely don't need to commit to listening to or watching all six of the episodes, but understandably they do build upon one another, but they are all standalone too. I can't wait to learn more about what these three types of burnout are. So let's crack on and I will catch you on the other side. Hello and welcome to Burnout Bites. This is number three in this series of six little episodes where I'm bringing information to help you understand burnout and ultimately look after yourself so

Starting point is 00:02:58 that you don't burn out. My name is Dr. Claire Plumley. I'm a clinical psychologist and I specialize in trauma, anxiety and burnout. I've recently written a book. The book's called Burnout, How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You. And in this book, I bring my knowledge and learnings from my experience in trauma therapy and I bring this to this topic of burnout. There's a link to it in the show notes. In this episode, I want to talk to you about the three different subtypes of burnout. Now, I found this really useful when I learned about this, because think burnout is often considered as a kind of one type of thing, mostly exhaustion. But actually, this research by Barry Farber, Professor of Psychology and

Starting point is 00:03:39 Education, into specifically therapists and teachers, showed that it's not actually like that. There are three dominant subtypes and these are different ways of reacting to work-related stress. He also pointed out that we might oscillate between these at different times and I have recognised all three of these patterns at some point in my life so it'll be interesting to see what you think here too. So let's have a look. We've got three subtypes are frenetic, under-challenged and worn out. So the first one, frenetic, also often talked about as overburdened, is the subtype that we most commonly experience as burnout or looks most familiar when we use the word burnout. Well, frenetic working, working harder and harder in

Starting point is 00:04:22 response to stress. It happens when the demands of work outweigh the resources that we have access to, to do it comfortably, and often is married up with an ambition to do well. So your work-life boundaries start to slip. Work becomes all-encompassing. If you really passionately care about what you do, you're going to be vulnerable to this type of burnout. The typical trajectory of this through the domains of burnout tends to be that you start with a high anxiety irritability where you're frenetically working hard and your stress levels are high. This is followed by becoming physically exhausted by all of that energy output. This then leads to more emotional numbing and becoming cut off from it all, generally starting to disconnect from others from your surroundings and that cynicism

Starting point is 00:05:05 starts to set in of note is that this is particularly a problem in staff who are new to their jobs or have a new career and they're building their career because this is when we're particularly passionate and we've got that steep learning curve where we're trying to absorb a lot of information and do our best and often prove ourselves and work our way up the ladder so it's really important that you know about this if you are an aspiring psychologist potentially more vulnerable to this right now. Second we've got under-challenged burnout. This is sometimes I've heard referred to as bore out. So burnout doesn't just occur as a result of being overstretched. Monotonous work or work where there's no prospect of self-development is really under-stimulating.

Starting point is 00:05:44 If you carry out repetitive tasks and there's a lack of variety in what you do, this can lead to this type of under-challenged burnout. You're not being mentally stimulated enough. Now the trajectory through this is that the tedium is what makes you cynical towards work. This then leads to feeling exhausted and detached and generally you start to become less effective because you're not maybe doing things as well as you used to. You're not really bothered. So you might not prepare for things like you used to. You might forget to do things you said you would. Perhaps the detachment is experienced as more of an indifference. So it might be very subtle, but watching out for that could be a sign that you might be in burnout. I've often seen this in people, for example, like parents

Starting point is 00:06:21 or informal carers where they've got high need dependence there's a lot of repetition in preparing meals cleaning up tending to hygiene personal hygiene this can feel really monotonous without the intellectual stimulation going on but it can also happen in workplaces where you've got people who appear to have quite intellectually stimulating jobs but actually specialized or got to that level where they're not got as much variety in their day anymore so in my book i talk about a vet friend of mine who had a specialism but got to that level where they're not got as much variety in their day anymore. So in my book, I talk about a vet friend of mine who had a specialism, but actually said that her workload had become very, very samey. So it's kind of a double edged sword with specialising, I guess. And this is exactly what Barry Farber's work said that people who are high achieving can

Starting point is 00:06:59 be at greater risk of burnout, because they're needing that challenge and that stimulation to thrive. And if you've been in your job a long time you know everything back to front and inside out you might need to find ways to keep yourself protected from this and obviously that is a little bit of a double edged sword because I found when I moved into private practice that this under challenge type of burnout happened when I was just seeing one-to-one clients face-to-face having left the NHS I wasn't doing all the variety of things I used to do supervision meetings all sorts of different night away days and all these fun things and although I really enjoyed my work I wasn't being stimulated in the

Starting point is 00:07:34 way I needed and this is where I then started to take on other projects I started to do social media started to run a group started to write a book and then I had tipped into the kind of more frenetic burnout so yeah finding your balance between these is something I think that maybe is an ongoing lesson for me and something I'm always working on but helpful for maybe you to be mindful of as well so finally we've got the worn out type of burnout I've heard this referred to sometimes as brown out so this isn't about the volume of work or how stimulating it is. Rather, it relates to how aligned your work is with your personal values or sense of achievement you're getting from it.

Starting point is 00:08:09 For example, I worked for a department set up to help people improve their mental health with therapy. This was back in the NHS several years ago. But the targets that were pushing down on us affected how much I could see a client and how many sessions I could offer. This really did not work with my values. I wanted to offer good quality therapy in line with nice guidelines and instead I was being told I could only see them for x number of sessions for 45 minutes. I didn't have as much time to plan the sessions as I wanted and so I felt really frustrated in my ability to achieve what I wanted with my clients. So the typical trajectory here might be emotional exhaustion. As a starting point, you're feeling

Starting point is 00:08:51 kind of low, this then physically weighs you down, you become detached. And the detachment is a form of self protection, protecting yourself and caring so much because caring isn't getting you anywhere that you want. And again, more experienced staff might be more susceptible to this. I think there are roles where all three of these can happen at once. So for example, imagine a GP, a GP only has 10 minutes to do their consultation, they might also end up seeing very similar cases day in day out. So there we've got the frenetic burnout where they've got too many people to see not enough time to do the work they want. we've got the frenetic burnout where they've got too many people to see, not enough time to do the work they want. We've got the worn out burnout where they're not aligned with the values giving their patients the amount of time that they would like. And you've got the

Starting point is 00:09:33 under-challenged burnout where they're not really doing enough that might stretch them unless they're involved with other projects. So whilst Barry Farber talked about oscillating between them, maybe it's possible to have all three at once. Triple whammy of burnout, which is really unpleasant. So I hope this has given you a bit of food for thought, maybe thinking about how to protect yourself from all three of these burnouts and being careful if you're trying to protect yourself from one that you don't inadvertently step into another one.

Starting point is 00:10:01 I look forward to seeing you in the next episode when I'm going to talk about the five stage model of burnout. How brilliant was that? I'm sure as you listened to or watched that content, you were able to think about how this might crop up for you in many areas of your life, both personal and professional. And I think they're really useful points to consider when you might be working with clients or when you might be chatting with your friends to think that actually, I wonder if this could be burnout. Thank you so much to Claire for episode three in this series. If you have enjoyed this episode, please do check out the other two that are already available. And the next episode will be available from 10am on

Starting point is 00:10:45 Saturday on YouTube, where I am Dr. Marianne Trent, and from 6am wherever you get your podcasts for the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. Do come and follow me and Dr. Claire on socials. She is Dr. Claire Plumley, and I am Dr. Marianne Trent. Do also come and join the free Facebook group, The Aspiring Psychologist Community with Dr. Marianne Trent, which is the exclusive home of Marianne's motivation and mindset sessions, which happen once a week. If you love this sort of content, I think you'll really enjoy. The aspiring psychologist membership and if working towards your goals for professional and if working towards your career goals in psychology is something on your to-do list then please do consider joining us which you can do from just

Starting point is 00:11:39 £30 a month with no minimum term. Thank you so much for being part of my world and I will look forward to catching up with you soon. Take care. Thank you. My name's Jana and I'm a trainee psychological well-being 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 of 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

Starting point is 00:13:13 and everything will be okay. But trust me you will not put the book down once you start.

The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - What are the 3 Types of Burnout? Stress and Mental Health at Work and Play

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