The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - What is the difference between stress and burnout?

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. Coming up today, what is the difference between stress and burnout? How might we recognize

Starting point is 00:01:07 that in ourselves and how might we help our clients to understand that too? That is the topic of today's episode. I hope you find this so useful. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. This is part of a series of episodes called Burnout Bites, which is being hosted for me, for us, by Dr. Claire Plumley, who is incredible. burnout and you can learn more about that in the show notes. I really want to model to you guys, whoever you are, whether you are listening because you work in mental health and you're an aspiring psychologist or whether you're listening because you have an interest in your mental health or that of someone that you care about, I want you to know that it's always okay to ask for help. It never makes you look weak and it's always a great thing to do and that's what I am modeling with this special podcast series they are all standalone episodes but they are all grouped together under

Starting point is 00:02:12 the term of burnout or should I say anti-burnout and it's a really really brilliant fit for this podcast because if you're a long-term listener you will know that I often ask people at the end of the podcast what their top tip for reducing burnout is. So I love that we've got Dr. Claire talking us through this in more detail. I will look forward to catching up with you on the other side of this. Hello and welcome back to Burnout Bites. This is a short series of episodes where I'm talking all about burnout in the hope that you can learn a little bit more about this topic to keep yourself as safe as possible from it and of course the people you work with as well. I'm Dr Claire Plumley. I'm a clinical psychologist. I work with people who

Starting point is 00:02:54 have gone through traumatic events, feeling anxious and feeling burned out. I've also written a book recently and it is out now. It's on this topic. Burnout is called Burnout, How to Manage Your Nervous System Before It Manages You. There's a link in the show notes to the book sales page. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the difference between stress and burnout. Often those words might be used interchangeably. So it's helpful to get a distinction between the two. I know I'm preaching to the converted when I say that not all stress is bad and our body is designed for stress. We have this amazing bit of kit, our autonomic nervous system, that in an ideal world would shift between its gear settings quite fluidly. When we're in our sympathetic nervous system gear,

Starting point is 00:03:37 this is an energized, motivated place. We might move from being in that ventral vagal parasympathetic branch, often known as green mode or rest and digest, into this kind of sixth gear where everything might feel a little bit more urgent. We get this urge to fix and get stuff done. We get more racing thoughts. And of course, we get the other allostatic changes, so the changes in our body systems to prepare us for that fight or flight response. Types of changes I'm talking about, again, I know you already know this, and I'm sure it's your bread and butter with your own clients, but it's your increased heart rate, it's the tense muscles, it's the shift of digestion into just essential

Starting point is 00:04:16 mode. And of course, our body isn't designed to stay in that gear for too long. We should come back to our rest and digest mode so that our body functions can resume business as normal if those sympathetic changes carry on for too long then this allostatic load builds up but what's more is that our attempts to try and flee or fight the situation if they continue but the chronic stress just doesn't let up then i think what happens is our nervous system dips into the gear that we talk about most in trauma therapy and this is the dorsal vagal system. This is a part of the nervous system that is more about energy conservation and survival mode. So imagine this, imagine you are practicing your tennis shots, you're practicing your shots against a tennis ball machine that's throwing the balls at

Starting point is 00:05:04 you. You've got this, you're hitting the balls back. But hang on a minute, now someone's rolling out a second tennis ball machine. So now you're having to work at twice the speed, you're hitting double the amount of shots. This is the equivalent maybe of stress at work. And then maybe there are problems with your children's schooling or things going on at home that you're going to have to deal with as well. But what if a third machine is pulled out? Maybe this is strains with friendships, or maybe you've got elderly parents who need caring for. This is what a lot of people I work with,

Starting point is 00:05:32 and I'm sure you resonate with this in your own personal life, go through these times when we have the equivalent of multiple tennis ball machines throwing balls at us. And our attempts to hit these balls back can become quite frenetic. But if there's no let up we're trying to return the balls but we're not getting them all there's nowhere to escape there's no quick exit out the back of the tennis court then we might do the only thing left that's available to us we might curl into a ball to avoid being hurt by these shots as best we can

Starting point is 00:06:00 this is really similar to the learned helplessness idea that you might remember from your training days. This is where we see the symptoms described in burnout. Feeling hollow and like you're on autopilot, these are all signs that you're not functioning fluidly through your gears and that you either got stuck in that dorsal shutdown or you're oscillating between the sympathetic and the dorsal shutdown without really spending much time in that calmer rest and digest part of your nervous system. So hopefully this gives you an idea and a framework for understanding the difference between stress in a positive type of stress, which is also known as eustress, and distress, which tips into burnout. You might have come across it if you haven't, it's worthwhile looking up the Yerkes-Dodson curve, also known as the stress curve. It's a bell curve. I include it in

Starting point is 00:06:50 my book as well, and it's quite a well-known one. So if you don't already know it, it's worth taking a look. I found in my work that having this understanding of the nervous system has helped to understand why certain techniques aren't quite right for where someone is. So for example, the type of advice that is often given for people who are burnt out makes so much sense. We need to rest, absolutely we do. And the kind of things that will help us do this is things like journaling, mindfulness, exercises to problem solve and time block, challenging unhelpful thoughts. These are all really sensible. However, a lot of them also draw on our cognitive faculties. And these are more available to us when

Starting point is 00:07:31 we are in our green rest and digest mode. Of course, our thinking switches gear into that more urgent, more rigid, more black and white type of place when we are in our sympathetic nervous system. And we really struggle a lot when we're in dorsal shutdown to have any ability to have creative thought or ability to have solutions or ways to start moving out of this stuckness so my argument in my book and where i provide tools is to try and soothe the nervous system to get back to that place because yes absolutely in the long term we need those things but they might not be immediately available and you might already have tools that you use these are often somatic type of tools for calming so my hands are on my heart right now because breathing using your hands to soothe yourself and using movement so if you already have tools up your sleeve for those make

Starting point is 00:08:18 sure you're using them as frequently as you can and in a future one of these episodes I talk about doing that at certain transition points in the day so I'm going to sign this episode off and I hope it's been really helpful. I'm going to meet you in the next one where I'm going to start talking about the three different subtypes of burnout. You're going to want to hear that because it was a real penny drop moment for me when I learned about this. Thank you so much, Claire. That was absolutely wonderful. If this has whet your whistle please do check out the details for the book in my show note please do come and connect with me on socials let me know what you thought to this episode and come and follow Claire too where she is Dr. Claire Plumley

Starting point is 00:08:56 everywhere come and join the free Facebook group the aspiring psychologist community with Dr. Marianne Trent which is the exclusive home of Marianne's mindset and motivation sessions, which happen weekly. If you're finding you've got a little bit more time on your hands at the moment, as well as reading Dr. Clare's book, you might well find the aspiring psychologist collective book and the clinical psychologist collective book useful. So do check those out. And if you've read them, please take a moment to drop me a review on Amazon and or Goodreads as it really does help the books to reach a wider audience. Please do also take a moment to follow, subscribe to the show, which you

Starting point is 00:09:38 can do on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, and of course, YouTube. It really is the kindest thing you can do for any podcast that you are a big fan of. And of course it is totally free. Thank you so much for your time. I will look forward to bringing you the next episode, which will be along for you on Saturday at 10am on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts from 6am on Monday. Stay kind to you and thank you so much for being part of my world. It's the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast with Dr. Marianne Trent.

Starting point is 00:10:36 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 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 and everything will be okay but trust me you will not put the book down once you

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The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - What is the difference between stress and burnout?

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