Breaking the Burnout Cycle: Strategies for Overcoming Exhaustion with Mental Health Expert, Catherine Moore
In today's fast-paced world, it's becoming increasingly common for people to feel overworked, overstressed, and burned out. Burnout not only affects our work performance but also our physical and mental health.
In this podcast episode, we'll discuss the signs and symptoms to watch out for, and, most importantly, how to prevent and overcome it.
Whether you're a CEO, a manager, or an employee, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to break the burnout cycle and create a more fulfilling and sustainable career.
After this Episode, You Will Be Able to:
Identify the signs of burnout
Implement boundaries to prevent burnout
Break the burnout cycle
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About the guest:
Catherine Moore, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Southern California. She has over 11 years' of experience as a Social Worker.
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Discovering My Burnout
I didn't intend to pursue a career in burnout. It just found me. So my background is as a mental health clinician, specifically as a social worker. And I love helping people.
I love helping them navigate through the challenges of life and life transitions.
And with that change comes a lot of anxiety, overwhelm, and of course burnout too. And that experience of helping other people through challenging life situations, coupled with my own episode of burnout, really led me into digging deep into this topic.
And I felt like I wasn't really getting ahead. I was actually falling behind, which was even more frustrating and more stressful. And so it was this vicious cycle of me working my butt off just to try to keep up with the demands of my job and of my boss because I was starting to get in trouble.
She even pulled me in to talk about my demeanor with my coworkers about how normally I'm just very friendly, very open, very conversational, and caring. But lately, I have been just very cold and short, and I would respond to emails with yes or no instead of “Hey, thank you so much for the question” and all this, all the fluff that we like to add to emails.
And that was essentially how I showed up in life which started to impact my relationships and my family and my personality. It went deeper than just getting in trouble at work.
Everyone noticed it except for me, and I was just in denial.
Until it all came up to an accumulative point. This one Tuesday evening when I had finished cooking dinner and I was washing the dishes and I'm looking around my house thinking what? A mess. There's so much that I need to do. I need to clean up. I need to still put my kid in the bath, and do bedtime stories.
I need to catch up with my notes because I can't be getting in trouble anymore with my boss. I have to be prepared for the meeting the next morning and I'm exhausted. So I need eight hours of sleep and I'm just in my head thinking there's no freaking way this is gonna get done tonight. There's just no way.
There's not enough time to do all of these things. And my husband, he is so sweet, and he interrupts my thinking and he says, “Honey, why don't you take a break and come watch a movie with us tonight?” I started crying. I was just bawling like there is no time to watch a movie.
And at that moment, I knew there was something wrong because I am not that girl who cries when I get invited to a movie. I love movies. I love hanging out with my family, and I knew at that moment that.
All of the things that I was doing, it just wasn't working anymore.
And it was just staring me straight in the face as I'm still crying, washing the dishes. Because I couldn't even stop to cry because there was just too much to be done.
I found that this is a common story for a lot of people where you just keep going and going and going. And even when you are forced to cry, you don't stop even at that moment.
Being a parent, there’s a pile of laundry over here and you still need to make lunches for the next day. It can feel nonstop and overwhelming, and there's something that you said that really picked up on and it needed to. When we start to get into that mindset of saying, I need to do this.
I need to cook dinner for my family, I need to do the bedtime routine. I need to read my kids a bedtime story. That in itself is a little bit of that self-awareness to go, wait a minute, I feel like taking care of my kids is a task versus enjoying creating the memories with our kids.
And that's a really great point because we lose that.
We can lose out on a lifetime if we're not careful.
I've learned to just kind of let it be so that I don't distract from the memories that I'm creating now.
Beat Burnout by Focusing on your Values
Focusing on the values and then breaking them down step by step into manageable tasks, into realistic ones, like what does that look like for me and what's most important?
Those questions you ask yourself when you put everything that you've got going on in your life and you look at, these are my values, prior, this is what's going on in my calendar, and does your calendar reflect your priorities?
And that is a gut-check question. That's hard to ask. So now you've taken the time and you've written down your values and you've recognized that maybe it's not aligning with your calendar. What did you do next?
So next, I figured out what things I personally have to do and what I can delegate.
So a lot of times we have control issues that we like to see things done in a particular way, which is great.
We have high standards.
However, when it gets to the point that it's causing problems, As it was in my life, then that's when you really need to reevaluate, is it important that I do this particular thing or can someone else do it?
And I have to just accept that they're going to do it their way.
What am I learning from this?
So you recognize that you were in burnout.
You realized the power of delegation and how that can release control.
So consistently remind myself, I don't have to be the one to do this.
Refocusing on the priorities and having those boundaries because I'm one that likes to help and I like to be a team player and to say yes, but what I had to really focus on is what's being asked of me, is this in alignment with my top five values?
And if it wasn't, then I'm sorry I can't help you.
Myth of Perfection
Sometimes we are able to participate in things, but it may just look a little bit different depending on where we're at in our lives and what's going on, and what's on our plate.
It’s all valuable.
So, never discredit that you're not doing things in a certain way, because they already have people to do things in a certain way.
You're gonna do it in your way and with guilt, you don't have to be everything to everybody all the time.
There’s gonna be times when “I'm sorry, I just don't have the capacity right now” and that is okay.
Knowing that this stage in life is temporary.
