In this episode, with the help of the amazing Dr Jill William’s, we delve into the topic of burnout. There are many aspects to burnout. Contrary to popular belief, burnout is not working too hard. It’s about chronic stress and our body’s response to that stress. Often, it’s external factors, which are difficult to influence or resolve. Jill does such a great job of explaining the warning signs for burnout and the simple steps we can take to uptrain our brain to be more resilient to these pressures. And most importantly, make it out the other side.
Timestamps:
00:02:41 Jill’s journey, working in retail to lecturing at university
00:05:57 Experiencing burnout firsthand
00:10:01 Common warning signs
00:12:16 Burnout is multifaceted
00:14:06 Importance of confiding in a trusted coworker
00:15:45 Coming out of burnout with a new perspective
00:17:49 The stages of burnout
00:18:35 Self-employed and entrepreneurs
00:20:06 Jill’s road to recovery
00:20:50 That feeling of disconnect
00:21:38 The importance of taking time out
00:23:52 Peer support is a protective factor
00:25:34 Strategies for prevention
00:26:36 Doing the “opposites”
00:27:22 Societal factors, talking about our life outside work
00:31:50 Creativity and giving your brain space
00:37:50 The concept of rust-out
00:39:30 The uptrained brain
00:42:10 How to approach blocks and negative thinking
00:44:46 Unhelpful behaviours and risk factors
00:45:47 People pleasing
00:47:05 Putting a recovery plan together
00:52:18 Caregiver Burnout
00:55:43 How Jill creates her kind space
00:59:07 How to get in touch with Jill
00:59:37 Organisational changes are needed
Links:
Jill’s blog about her burnout experience; https://www.rethinktherapyconwy.com/post/if-a-psychologist-can-burn-out-my-personal-story-of-burnout
Uptrained Brain course & Book a discovery call with Jill: https://www.rethinktherapyconwy.com/uptrainedbrain
Free Recovery from Burnout Guide: https://www.rethinktherapyconwy.com/blog/categories/burnout-work-related-stress
Nick Petrie resources: https://www.nicholaspetrie.com/blog-1
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheUptrainedBrain
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jill-williams-92a907255/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uptrainedbrain/
X: https://twitter.com/UptrainedBrain
Transcript:
Caroline: Wonderful. So, through the magic of LinkedIn, would you believe I have a new friend to share with everyone? So today with me is Dr. Jill Williams, and she is an amazing psychologist and she is here today to help us to navigate and discuss the topic of workplace stress and burnout. And for me, this is a really important topic. I have a kind of personal story which we’ll be able to share a little bit about. Jill herself has a very powerful personal story about her experiences in academia. And so I think this is going to be a really insightful discussion and hopeful as well. So I think what I want to get from this is that people feel that they are not alone. It is not your fault if you feel any of these things. And, yeah, Jill is here to help. So, awesome. Thank you so much for joining me, Jill.
Jill: Oh, you’re very welcome. Glad to be here.
Caroline: So, to kick us off, it’d be so wonderful if you could give people a bit of insight into your background, what led you into psychology, and you obviously run your own business now as well. So if you could give us a bit of insight into how that came about.
Jill: Yeah, of course, psychology. Well, really, it started probably late 90s, really, when I was a single mum, just working part time on the Tesco shop floor, and I wanted to do something to exercise my brain a little bit more. And I think I’d always intended to go back to uni, but hadn’t really had chance with having children fairly young. And I just signed up for a one-off sort of Open University course on I think it was a mixture of psychology, sociology, economics, that kind of thing. And from there I got hooked, really. So within four years, I had my Open University psychology degree and I wasn’t prepared to stop learning then I was definitely hooked. So I went to my local university there and did a master’s in psychology, and from there on I went to do a PhD as well, in looking particularly at human emotion and motivation there. And I was very lucky, actually, that on my doorstep I had a really top psychology department as well, within the UK. So that’s how I got into it, by accident, I suppose really.
Caroline: Yeah. Gosh, that’s so interesting, because I feel like sometimes those accidents, they’re actually meant to be, aren’t they, when you kind of look back and you go, well, if I hadn’t done that, then all these other amazing things wouldn’t have.
Jill: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I ended up coming back to the full circle as well and teaching for the Open University, so it’s very nice. Not that this is an advert for them. But, yeah, they really did me. They were a wonderful resource for me at the time.
Caroline: Yeah, no, it’s wonderful. I’ve actually just joined the board of directors at Northeast Scotland College and I’m just so excited at the prospect of helping people on that journey. Like your story of studying alongside working and then who knows where that can lead. So it’s such a wonderful opportunity, things like the Open University and colleges.
Jill: Yeah. And when I was teaching in university, when I was lecturing as well, I think sometimes mature students feel a bit self-conscious because they sort of stand out a little bit from your average 18-19 year old. But actually, lecturers love them because they’re so motivated, they don’t have time to waste. They’ve got to be really organised and they’re the ones that tend to start the really interesting conversations.
Caroline: That’s so true, yes. What happened next on your journey?
Jill: Let me think. Okay, so I did my PhD. That was completed in 2010, and from there I’d already been doing teaching work as part of my PhD through the years. So I became a lecturer then in university, teaching a wide range of subjects, really, from neuroscience, behaviour change, emotion and motivation, and counselling a mixture. There’s different ways you can be a lecturer in university. A great many of them are there to do research with a little bit of teaching on the side. But the university I was at had, maybe there’s more of them doing it now, but had a different programme where you could be mainly in teaching with a little bit of research on the side. So that’s where I was and I really enjoyed working with the students there and supporting them.
Caroline: Awesome. Gosh. Academia, I guess it’s a career choice that I think a lot of people can experience stress and overwhelm. I think it’s one of those career choices that it takes a very special kind of person to want to dedicate themselves to that. I know in your case you did have some challenges and it kind of affected your health and your mental health and things. So maybe you could kind of tell us more.
Jill: Yeah sure. I think people often think of academia as this nice, sort of dusty place where you sit there with your feet up, just surrounded by papers, reading. But the reality is there is a lot of pressure there. You’re under a constant pressure to produce work, to get grants, to get publications. And when you’re teaching, you’ve got this real conflict there between trying to bring in innovative teaching methods that get you noticed versus what the students want. And very often a lot of the students kind of when they’re just coming in from 6th form and they aren’t used to university, they want that kind of same approach. They’ve just been given what they need to learn. And of course a lot of changes have happened in university in recent years, so now they have to be much more accountable with their money. Students are now paying for their courses. So it means that I think students as well have the attitude, and I have had some students say this to us where they’ve said, well, I’m not paying nine grand to have to go to the library myself and find books, or I’m not paying nine grand not to get an A. So there is that pressure there. But I also loved it as well because you have an enormous amount of freedom in you know. I maybe get told what I was teaching, but you’d have a lot of freedom in the methods you used to do that and the exact topics you used. And even before the days of Covid now we’re all quite used to people working from home, but pre Covid, that wasn’t really such a normal thing. But it was very normal in academia for people to work from home and nobody really cared as long as the work got done and as long as you were in meetings when you needed to be. I guess my problem was… everyone’s story of burnout will be different. And for me, what was making it, me perhaps more vulnerable to it was that I had some chronic health issues as well. So I wasn’t working full time, so it’s not like I was working 80 hours plus, but I was clearly pushing myself harder than was good for me. So, yeah and I got to the point where I was starting to struggle with my health, with exhaustion, with sort of brain fog, and I was really struggling with back pain, sort of sat at a desk or lecturing and I just kept pushing through. I was used to kind of dealing with various health issues on an ongoing daily basis. So I suppose for me, the line of where, oh, this isn’t healthy, I guess that line was more blurred and I just kept thinking, oh, this is a bit of a flare up, I’ll get through it, I’ll get through it, or things will be a bit easier in the summer. And I think that’s often what we do, isn’t it? Things will get better when this is done, when that is done, after I’ve had a break. And of course there comes a realisation that this isn’t really getting any better.
And I’ve quite recently written a blog, actually, on my experience, and it was quite a difficult story to write because it’s a really difficult experience to go through, actually. But I also realised that if I’m going to expect people to talk to me about it, then I need to be, you know, set an example, if you like, and talk about my experience. So I’d end up going home from work and the distance from my car to my door is probably about three metres. There isn’t a front garden to my house, so it’s very short. And I would struggle so much with back pain trying to get from my car to my house. And summers I would just get in and I would lie on the floor, I would pop some oxycodin and I would just have to lie there until I could move more. So all the things that keep us healthy outside work went to aside, and that’s very often what people do. So actually, in my blog as well, I’ve tried to make that links between not just to talk about my personal experience, but also to link it to more general things. So I wasn’t eating properly because I couldn’t stand properly to make meals. I wasn’t really socialising outside work. My physical activity outside work went right down. I then started in order, I found that my weekends were just about trying to be well enough to work on Monday, resting up and trying to manage pain to get myself to a slightly better place. And other people will find themselves doing that with stress as well, feeling so stressed they’re just using the weekends to try and feel okay enough for Monday. So, yeah, just really neglecting myself, actually, is what it is. And you will often find that it’s the things that employers like you for, the things that will burn you out, the things that got you to where you are, that dedication, that conscientiousness, that pride in your work. It’s the best work. Well, it sounds like I’m bragging now, but it tends to be the really good, conscientious workers that would be the ones that burn out because they ignore the signs, because they just want to keep producing a good job.
Caroline: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think it’s also true that it is so multifaceted. And I think your blog piece does a really good job of kind of like pulling out your story, but illustrating it with a lot of those different factors that you’ve just described for us. I think also it’s kind of a peculiar thing. And that when I look back, I think a lot of people don’t truly understand burnout until it’s happened to them, to be honest.
Jill: It creeps up on you. It’s sneaky.
Caroline: And when you, when you’re in the depths of it, you convince yourself, oh, it’s not that bad, it’s okay, it’s okay.
Jill: You really do, you really do. It’s an odd phenomenon. It’s like you just can’t see the wood for the trees when you’re in there.
Caroline: Yeah. And other people see it and they may try to help you, but if you keep pushing, it’s not going to end well. I think I felt very much like, well, there must be something wrong with me. But then I also kind of knew that it wasn’t just me because that didn’t make sense, because if it was just me, then this would have happened long before. So it definitely is a combination of factors. I think talking about it as an employee problem is often the place where the conversation starts. So if you as an employee, feel that there’s an issue and want to raise that with your employer, I feel like often those conversations start with, oh, we need to fix you.
Jill: Yeah. How can we support you with your stress.
Caroline: So what’s your take on that in the workplace? How would you advise people approach that?
Jill: Yeah, we know that it tends to be a combination of the two things, because, like you were saying, if it was just about the person, then that person would burn out in any circumstances they were in, and that doesn’t happen. And if it was just about the organisation, then every single person would be burnt out. And we do see cases of that. For example, teams in the NHS are really struggling in some places, but in general, we don’t tend to get organisations where every single person is struggling with burnout, so it tends to be a combination of the two. And of course, what’s happening in people’s home lives may affect things as well if they’ve got other responsibilities there as well, caring responsibilities or health issues they’re struggling with or anything else. And I think very often the conversations that people perhaps need to have with their employers about saying, do you know what? This workload is unrealistic. These deadlines are unrealistic. I don’t have a supportive line manager, this particular team, there’s some toxic practises going on here, or we need clearer work home boundaries. Those kind of conversations are ones that can be had, but I think, unfortunately, sometimes when people are very stressed, their confidence is starting to take a knock and they don’t feel in a good place to be able to have those conversations, but they’re the ones that are worth having and actually, sometimes it’s worth confiding in somebody you trust in work, because very often people feel like they’re the only ones that are struggling and actually when you start to talk about it, you will very often find that other people are struggling too. And sometimes that kind of solidarity gives you the confidence to get a few people on board and then go to a line manager or somebody and say, do you know what? This is a bit of an issue. It’s causing unnecessary stress. Can we work on it somehow? Can we suggest some changes? So I would say that’s always the first step, if you can, to confide in somebody else you trust in work.
Caroline: That would be so wonderful if we could do that. And I do wonder if, since the pandemic and in the recent years, where discussing mental health at work has become a bit more normalised.
Jill: Definitely.
Caroline: I would hope that people felt that they were able to do that. Yeah. Gosh, looking back at my experience, I almost had this numbness. I don’t know if that’s something that people have described to you before.
Jill: Yeah.Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
Caroline: I felt, like, disconnected.
Jill: Classic sign, yeah.
Caroline: I didn’t know as much as I know about anxiety and these sorts of things at the time, but clearly had anxiety because I totally had the chest tightening, I had weird tingling on my scalp and I was sleeping fine and I was eating fine and outwardly fairly healthy.
Jill: But, yeah, your body was starting to tell you, wasn’t it, that something’s not right here. You’re putting too much on me.
Caroline: Weird things.That just weren’t healthy. And I kept pushing through until the point where I quit my job. Yeah, but that seemed to fix it so.
Jill: Yeah, you know whatsometimes, I mean I work with people with burnout. I have a programme for burnout and sometimes people will go, will work with somebody and will get to a place where they’re more confident, where they’re coping with stress better, and they will still decide, you know what, this is not the right workplace for me. But at least then they’ll have a clear head to be able to do that and they’ll have hopefully experienced. Because sometimes burnout can be a really helpful experience if you use it to trigger some really deep reflection on, right, what’s going on here for me. Why is this not working for me? What do I really want from a workplace? What do I really want from my life?
Caroline: And that last question, honestly, I was like, what am I doing? Why am like, what? This is not the right job for me. I was actually really lucky around that time. There’s an organisation in Scotland called Equate, and they do work with women in the STEM industries, and usually their support is around encouraging people into the workplace to address gender balance. And it’s very much about looking at more senior people in the workplace and ensuring that we’re not losing women at that senior level. So I was getting some support from them. And that whole realisation of, well, what do I really want? And this isn’t what I want. Although the burnout and that kind of spiral that I was on was quite, you know emotionally a really difficult time. It’s almost the best thing that could have happened in that it allowed me to say, what am I doing? I need to give myself space.
Jill: Yeah.It’s not what I want. This is not good for me.
Caroline: Yeah. So I kind of look back on it now and see it very much. As weirdly as it was a good thing that it happened and that I never got to a point where I got to completely the end of the road in terms of collapse.
Jill: You weren’t completely broken.
Caroline: Yeah. Recovery, I guess, was easier. Do you tend to see people, what kind of stage would you say that you see people reaching out for your support?
Jill: Probably quite sort of moderate burnout. So a stage where different authors or researchers have defined different levels of burnout. So there’s no one way of defining it. But if you think of moderate burnout as a stage where stress is more constant, more long term, it is affecting your productivity in work. It’s very much affecting your mindset, your emotions. You’re feeling exhausted. You’re not at the point where you’re feeling utterly broken, but you’re not in a good place either. That’s what I tend to see. And you know what? Very often I see self-employed people there treating themselves in a way they would never treat any of their employees.
Caroline: Yeah. Oh, gosh, I’m so glad you’ve mentioned that, because in recent months, quite a few of my entrepreneur friends and things and just seeing discussions on LinkedIn, there’s been a lot more discussion about burnout. And I do wonder if that’s because inherently, when you think about an entrepreneur and how driven they are and how often, especially, like, in our business and what I do, it’s very mission focused, like, we’re here to help. And so when you’re in that role, you can almost forget your own needs.
Jill: Because we’re so passionate about what we’re doing, aren’t we? We care about it so much. It’s not just a job.
Caroline: I wonder if there’s also some protective factors to that as well, because if I think about my own mindset now, I very much understand that for me to do the greatest good, I actually do need to look after myself and the mission itself and what we’re kind of building with our business, it fills me with so much hope and so much that longer term vision, I’m not thinking about the next twelve months, I’m thinking years and years from now and what I want the world to look like. So I feel that that really helps with my whole mindset towards the work, if that makes sense.
Jill: Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve really kind of taken that experience and put it to good use to really reflect on it. And I’m in this position now where my experience of burnout was really quite severe, I suppose, and again, exacerbated by sort of chronic health issues. And I found myself, I got to about May time. I pushed through to the end of the semester, which is probably a bad plan, but you don’t want to let your work colleagues down because you know that they’re all working really hard as well. So you push through to all the marking was done to the summer when it’s an easier period. And I took some time off. And I expected to be back in a couple of weeks and it was almost like once I’d stopped, it really hit me full force. And I spent the largest part of about a year on the couch, utterly exhausted, not able to focus on anything, struggling just to shuffle around the supermarket. And it was a real wake up call for me. And actually some of your symptoms, they might not have been quite so severe, but they sound like classic symptoms there as well. You talked about.
Caroline: Oh, yeah.
Jill: We talk about, first of all, there’s the exhaustion, which is what everyone will associate with burnout, that kind of emotional and physical exhaustion. And then you get, as you’ve described, that feeling of disconnect or negativity towards work, or feeling cynical.
Caroline: Yeah, more pessimistic.
Jill: Yeah. Just very, quite numb and just negative generally. And you notice yourself just becoming less competent and less efficient. So what people will often do then is they work harder to try and make up for the fact that they’re not working, that things aren’t coming together as quickly as they should. And they get into this vicious circle of working harder, being less efficient. Working harder, being less efficient.
Caroline: Yeah. It’s so easy for it to spiral, isn’t it?
Jill: Yeah, absolutely. And even now, having had that experience that I’ve had, I’ve been working really hard this year, putting together my sort of Uptrained Brain programme, which we’ll probably come to later, but I have to be careful myself because I’m so passionate about that. There’s so much work I could do on it and I haven’t been taking much time off this year. And it got to the point of Christmas where I recognised you know what? I’m not feeling quite as motivated as I would do and I’m feeling things are feeling a bit more of a chore and I haven’t been seeing my friends very much and it’s like I need to take a proper two weeks off this Christmas. Not just a few days here, back in for a few days, back off for New Year, straight back in. So I did take a proper sort of ten or twelve days off. Totally. And use that to properly relax because that’s what I needed. But I have to be careful myself because, as you say, entrepreneurs, when you’re self-employed, you’re just really passionate about what you do.
Caroline: Yeah. And quite often you don’t have a team around you to rely on and to delegate to. And I think you often feel like while there might not be deadlines, sometimes you feel like, well, I might miss an opportunity. So you push yourself that bit harder because there’s that kind of what if or.
Jill: Yeah, absolutely.
Caroline: You’re worried about cash flow and all the other things that we worry about.
Jill: You’re taking on so many different hats. I suppose you’re sort of accountant and head marketer and all these different things.
Caroline: Yeah. Gosh, marketing is a full-time job in itself. Yeah.
Jill: I’ve been on a very steep learning curve for digital marketing. Can’t wait when I can hand it all over to somebody else. But not quite there yet.
Caroline: That would be the dream, wouldn’t it? I’m so glad that you got some nice time off over Christmas. We were similar, so had two weeks off because the schools were off and did very little. It was just us and the kids and it was really lovely. Yeah, definitely. I wonder, so thinking about entrepreneurs. So this is something that I came out with, some of the discussions that I was having. So if you’re in the workplace, you can go to your employer. If you’re an entrepreneur, how do you go about getting support? Do you think that you can do that as a peer support thing with other entrepreneurs that are around you or what would you advise?
Jill: Yeah, I think that probably could be useful actually, because I imagine that if somebody is approaching burnout, I imagine if you saw that in somebody else, you would call it out immediately and say, wow, that sounds like a lot. How are you coping? Yeah, you want to be doing this? That sounds like. Yeah, it doesn’t sound.
Caroline: You don’t seem yourself if you are, maybe a little out of sorts.
Jill: Yeah, that could be useful. And we know that peer support generally is a protective factor as well, just feeling connected to other people. So sometimes in any workplace it can be worth thinking? Who am I connected to? And are they helpful? Are they supportive? Could I spend time on making more supportive and helpful connections? Sometimes it’s great to hear that other people have struggled with things. Other people have messed up and made mistakes. That’s what we want to hear. As well as the inspirational stories of people that have done fantastic. We also need to hear the stories of how many times they’ve failed before they got there. Because that’s part of it, isn’t it?
Caroline: That’s such a good point, because we were just talking about social media, weren’t we? There’s a tendency for us to only show all the cool stuff that we’re doing and how successful we are. But yeah, sharing the more challenging times, I think can really help.
Jill: Yeah, being a bit more authentic. I think for entrepreneurs struggling, I think that peer support would be really useful. And also just thinking generally about balance in your life as well. You can push yourself really hard at work for a limited time and then it’s going to start to show up in some form or other. Whether it’s in, like you say, in being a bit less effective in what you’re doing, whether it’s in just feeling more negative, less motivated, whether it’s in physical symptoms such as not sleeping as well, having aches and pains, having stomach issues, having palpitations, whatever it is, it will show up in some way if you’re not taking care of yourself. And those kind of things are the same things that will be for anybody in any workplace, really, which are making sure you’re staying connected to people that are important to you, taking time out for those relationships and friendships, perhaps doing hobbies that leave you feeling recharged. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be all about relaxation. It’s doing something that you come away from feeling good. It’s not always just rest that we need. We need something that replenishes us somehow. There’s one researcher, I think, Nick Petrie, who did a lot in leadership and is now looking at burnout. And amongst their research of talking to people with burnout, one of the things they came up with that seemed to be quite a common theme is people doing something that he called the “opposites”. So that’s where people can lose themselves in something that seems. That is using or doing opposite things from what they do in their work life. So, for example, very often in work life, we’re very much in our head problem solving and decision making. So just going out and taking a dance class or going hiking or just something that’s very different from what you do in everyday life, something that’s maybe more in your body than in your head.
Caroline: Yeah. Or vice versa, if you’ve got a more manual job. Very interesting. I have been listening to, Jennifer Moss has a book on burnout that I’ve been listening to, which is much more focused on the workplace than, and for the employer, I guess, than the individual. But there’s quite a lot in there that talks about some of the societal factors as well, that kind of result in us overworking, which is really. Well, I was going to say, fascinating. The things that she talks about. You see in every workplace, it’s presenteeism. Working all these hours is not a measure of productivity. And I think our society is maybe still a little misaligned, I guess, when it comes to that.
Jill: Yeah, since you know, I’ve been, after my burnout, I had to take a slightly, kind of really consider what was good for me. And I took a slightly different route and I started doing more counselling training, CBT work, and started becoming a mental health therapist and coach.
Caroline: This is making me think about, like, during the pandemic and we were all working from home and all the Zoom calls and we’re obviously juggling things like homeschooling. So I had my kids at home. And that, I think, has helped to normalise the fact that people have lives outside of work and maybe normalise a little bit more. Like, if there is something happening outside of the workplace that’s having an impact on your mental health or your physical health, you feeling like you’re able to share that? When I look back, I do think a lot of what happened to me, although chronologically it was quite spread out, the reason why we live where we are, we have quite a big house is my mum was very unwell, so she had bowel cancer and we knew that it was incurable. And so to kind of plan for that inevitable decline, I was like, I’ll buy a bigger house, we can all live together. And then no one needs to stress about what’s going to happen and how are we going to care for her. And although my burnout happened, I think it was two years after she passed away, I do feel like that whole process of caring for her.
Jill: It’s bound to had an effect, yeah.
Caroline: And how that affected me, like juggling work, it was bound to have an effect. And did I take enough time off of work when that happened? I mean, we had a few other things happen…
Jill: Especially, with the loss and the grief as well to balance as well. That’s an awful lot.
Caroline: We don’t often talk about these things, though, do we?
Jill: No we don’t, we feel like we leave our everyday life at the door when we walk in the office, don’t we? And although that’s in this professional thing to do, the reality is we’re all humans. We’re there because we’re humans, because computers can’t do our jobs, or certainly not yet anyway.
Caroline: Not completely, no.
Jill: And humans are fallible. The best of us are. And I have just remembered what I wanted to say before. Perfect example of me being fallible. Before going off on something and completely forgetting where I was going, we were talking about those societal challenges. And the point I was trying to make is, when I started being a mental health therapist, I would feel really guilty initially about taking time off, because you have clients that aren’t in a good place and some of them rely on coming to see you every week. And there was always be that guilt there about you’d make sure that everyone was kind of okay with it. And actually, what you realise is that when you take time off, whether it’s a one week, two week, when you come back in, your brain is so much fresher. You see things you hadn’t seen before. So, yes, I totally agree with this idea of just being in the office all the time and working long hours is not a sign of productivity. There is a reason we have those breaks built into the working year. There’s a reason we have lunch breaks and we’re meant to have other breaks in the day is because we do come back to it with a fresh perspective on things, with a brain, which is working better for us. And my clients always actually benefit from me taking time off because I come back and I see things slightly different and I think of different areas that we can go with and different things that I can talk to about them or query in them.
Caroline: That is so true. And I think that’s something that I definitely do more of now. So one thing I’ve recognised in my whole journey is that I was an engineer before I worked in a more kind of corporate environment. And in that kind of environment, you can’t be overly creative. You literally are like, follow the recipe and then out comes the design and it is quite formal. And so what I’ve realised now, with all this space to be more creative, is that I actually really enjoy that and I enjoy doing this kind of thing and using my voice and kind of sharing my voice more. I think you can’t do that unless you give yourself these kind of breaks or the opposites, as you were describing, choosing an activity that is completely opposite, it works your brain in a different way and unlocks things.
Jill: And even thinking back to when I was doing my PhD, some of the best ideas would come to me when I wasn’t thinking about it. During your time off, you’d suddenly have this little, oh, actually, that’s a way of looking at that and someone’s turning off. That’s just the way the mind works, actually. And then come back again to this idea of societal pressure. We have these sayings, don’t we? Like, oh, the devil makes work for idle hands or I’ll sleep when I’m dead. And we see relaxation or turning off from work as a really kind of negative thing to do. Look at you with your feet up, swanning about. We say these things where actually I try to stress to people that what’s happening when you relax, you’re not just relaxing, you are improving your immune system. We know that when you’re rested, your immune system heals wounds better. You get over viruses better. You are better at problem solving when you’re in a relaxed state, you are better at relationships. We have all kinds of things that we are meant to spend time in that state. It is good for our body as well as our minds.
Caroline: Yeah, it is necessary.
Jill: It’s part of who we are, is what we are meant to do. Even when you look at civilizations now that have quite a hard life in some ways that are hunting their own food and things like this, even they have times where they sit and do nothing or just relax with people. When you can go back to our ancient history and even cavemen were taking time out to make art or to make music or to make decorative items, we’ve always had those things. It’s part of who we are.
Caroline: Yeah, it’s like inherently part of nature. I had a previous podcast guest on before, and we kind of talked about this topic as well. About it is important. Rest is necessary. It can be. Think about Thomas. When we’re working, he’ll sit next to me and he does all the coding and the more in depth computer work.
Jill: I wonder if that was your dog for a moment. I guess not, if he’s doing coding.
Caroline: So I often will find him not coding and playing computer games or whatever, but I just leave him because I know that actually he needs that. You cant, it’s quite intensive work. You can’t do work like that over long periods of time. Everyone, make sure you take your breaks.
Jill: Yeah. And you know what? Even stepping away from, I can be guilty of it as well sometimes just grabbing a lunch and eating it at your desk. But actually, when you step away from the desk, there’s all kinds of good things that happen. For example, we know that we get more stressed when our vision is very focused and very short. We have this very short focus, which is, of course, what we’re doing when we’re either looking at books or looking at screens or looking at paperwork. And actually, when you step back and take a wider focus and take in landscapes, there is something about that that brings our stress level down, which is probably why it’s good for us to spend time in nature. But even just stepping away from the desk, you change that visual focus. I don’t know whether it’s because the brain feels like if we’re focused on something very close to us, that there might be a threat there. It just naturally raises stress. Interestingly.
Caroline: That’s interesting. Yeah, I heard that before. A weird thing, maybe, that I do that other people don’t do. I don’t have an alarm clock. I just wake up when I wake up. And when I wake up, I love to just think. Like, I just let whatever thoughts come into my. I guess it’s like meditation, but not like going and doing a meditation literally.
Jill: Not aformal one, but yeah.
Caroline: But, yeah, I probably need to do some more research because I think there’s something special about your brainwaves when you first wake up. But I find that that time is so special for me and that literally, I’ll just lie in my bed for, like, 15, 20 minutes, and I’m not thinking about anything particular or my day ahead or anything. I just..
Jill: let your mind wander.
Caroline: And sometimes the most amazing, beautiful things pop into my head and I’m like, this is great, brain. Thank you very much.
Jill: Yeah. And we don’t take time, do we, to do that sometimes we just let our brain be still.
Caroline: So maybe I should do some more meditation to try and capture that state more often. But, yeah, I don’t have an alarm clock and I just let my brain just gently come awake.
Jill: Yeah. That is the beauty, isn’t it, of being self employed. You’re able to be a bit more flexible and work in ways that works for you. I’ll very often take a break in the middle of the day and then come back to do a little bit more in the evening, because that often works well for me.
Caroline: I was going to say I’d never have been able to do that before. Like, when I was working before, it was like, drop my daughter at nursery..
Jill: Yeah it’s such a rush isn’t it.
Caroline: Drop my son at school, run and do this and. Yeah, it was just craziness. I don’t know. No wonder I was burnt out.
Jill: Yeah. And it’s interesting you were talking about creativity as well. There’s also a term that’s known as rust out, which is actually. Whereas we think of burnout as being linked to workload, an excessive workload. Rust out is more about being under stimulated, not doing things that interest you, being bored at work.
Caroline: Oh. So you kind of become frozen.
Jill: Well, that can be sort of a stress for other people. We all have different kind of arousal levels or stress levels that work well for us. We talk about stress as if it’s always a bad thing, but actually a certain amount of stress is good for us. We are designed to work better with a certain amount of stress. It makes us more focused, it makes us more motivated. But everyone’s optimal stress level will vary. And for some people, if they’re doing a very mundane task, that in itself will be stressful because they crave more stimulation.
Caroline: Yeah, rust-out, I’d never heard of that before. Nice.
Jill: And that could be a sign that they either need more challenge in their job or they just maybe need to be reconsidering what they’re doing at all.
Caroline: Yeah. Look at a different career choice or a new path. Gosh that’s so interesting.
Jill: Yeah. That feeling of they get up one morning and think, God, I can’t keep doing this. This is awful. It’s mind numbingly terrible for some people. And some people will like that kind of, that predictability of a job. For some people that will work and for other people, it will just be experienced as stress.
Caroline: Yeah. Gosh, that’s so interesting. And it just shows you, like, they want more challenge multifaceted these sorts of issues are.
Jill: Yeah, we’re all individuals. Yeah, absolutely.
Caroline: Wonderful. I was going to ask you a bit more about your programme, the Uptrained Brain programme. And it might be useful for people listening as well, to have a better understanding about what you offer and how it works. And we were talking a bit about the kind of different stages of burnout. So the programme, I guess, is to help empower people with tools and a bit more understanding so that they can kind of guide themselves through the process. Or do they get some support from you as well? How does it work?
Jill: Yeah, there’s support from me as well. So this programme was influenced, really, by all the hardworking clients that I see and also, like you said, by the fact that we’re now talking a lot more about work stress and burnout and mental health in the workplace. So it’s a five stage programme aimed at helping people cope better with work stress and burnout. And there’s lots of linked things that go with that in my experience of working as a mental health therapist and a psychologist. So what my programme does is it has five steps. The first one is educating people about stress and burnout so they can first of all start to understand what it is about me and my situation that I’m finding stressful and helping them avoid burnout, hopefully, because hopefully they’re not quite there yet or understand how they can recover. And it will also include some sort of first aid techniques, if you like, for coping with stress until they’ve gone through the rest of the programme. And hopefully those first aid techniques won’t be needed anymore because we’ll be dealing with the real underlying things. So it’s not just about relaxation. So the second step is about dealing with that horrible inner critic lots of us have, or self-criticism, or a lack of self-care, because we know that that can be a big part of being stressed and burnt out, is just not caring for yourself enough, putting the needs of workplace over your own. And we also know that actually, if you go straight into working with other things, with people. So, for example, I’ll use quite a lot of CBT in my course. But we know that with some people that have a lot of self-criticism, which is very often your really conscientious workers, we know that with them, if you go straight in with cognitive behaviour therapy, sometimes it just doesn’t land very well because you can highlight all the ways that they might have unhelpful thoughts and they’ll just use that as another stick to beat themselves with. Oh, God, why? My thought process is wrong. So this is a way of really helping people to understand how self compassion is not about being soft, it’s about being realistic, it’s about dealing with your problems head on, but it’s also about being realistic in your expectations of yourself.
Caroline: One thing I was going to add there was that I remember at the time, my work offering resilience training, and in my head I was like, yeah, how is this going to help me? Because I am very resilient. Honestly, when you think about what I have been through in my life.
Jill: Yeah, it sounds like a bit, doesn’t it?
Caroline: What am I going to take from this? But actually, I should have been more open minded. I very much. Well, it was the numbness. I had closed myself off and I was in a very negative place. So being quite careful with how you position the CBT and the kind of positive psychology, I can see that having someone like yourself would be able to kind of identify if there is a block there.
Jill: Yeah, absolutely. And all my steps are designed in a certain order that usually works best for people. A lot of thought has gone into that. And so the self-compassion work or getting over that harsh self-criticism, is, it’s not about being soft on yourself, it’s not about dropping your standards, it’s about treating yourself the way you would somebody else. If you were mentoring somebody else, there is no way, if they made a small mistake, you would go, what the hell are you doing? What kind of idiot are you? How have you done this? You would never say that to them because you would know that would be utterly demoralising. And yet we do it to ourselves all the time. Some people are not even a where they’re saying these kind of things to themselves until I start to query them on it and they’re like, yeah, I am pretty harsh on myself. Oh, my God, the names I call myself. Somebody came in once and said, I cannot tell you the way I talk to myself, because it’s awful. I didn’t realise until you highlighted it. It’s just full of expletives. So it isn’t about being soft, which is what I think a lot of people think self-compassion is. It’s more about being realistic in what you expect of yourself and realising that actually, if you criticise yourself all the time, in the same way if your boss was criticising you or a coworker was criticising you all the time, you are not going to get the best out of yourself. So if you do need to improve, why not be the best version of self-improvement that you can? So that’s the second step. And of course, that self-criticism, can lead to, can impact your confidence. It can add to impostor syndrome where you feel like you’re not good enough. You feel like a bit of a fraud in the job you’ve got. So that’s the second step where we can hopefully set a really good foundation for people to then be able to change if they feel like there’s something they do need to change or could improve on to help their mental wellbeing. So the third step then is looking at unhelpful behaviours and we’re all guilty of these to some extent. So things like procrastinating or avoiding things or being excessively people pleasing, that was one that I really had to work on.
Caroline: I’m going to tick these off as you go.
Jill: Yeah. Lack of assertiveness, not speaking out. That was definitely one for me. Being excessively, excess perfectionism, they’re probably the top three. Yeah. I can tick them all off myself as well, in the past. So looking at those unhelpful behaviours and actually looking how they get us stuck in a vicious circle, we don’t feel good enough. So then we kind of force ourselves to be really perfectionistic, but then inevitably we set standards that are not realistic. We’re always going to fail, we’re never going to be perfect at everything. So then we still feel bad about ourselves because our standards were unrealistic and then we carry on being perfectionistic to feel better. So that’s one example. And again, with people pleasing you think about what we’re teaching ourselves there. We’re teaching ourselves that other people’s needs and opinions are more important than mine. So it’s looking at those vicious circles that our behaviour can drive without us realising.
Caroline: One of the things that we chatted about before was that a people pleasing tendency can often come again from things that happen outside of work. So if you’re someone who…
Jill: It could have been childhood.
Caroline: you knowexperienced relationships where that is the norm and that’s how you think you are supposed to behave, it’s actually very difficult to change that mindset.
Jill: People just perceive them, I think sometimes as just part of their personality. They don’t necessarily question them. So we’re looking at that in the. Where are we up to the third step?
Caroline: Yeah, that’s super helpful as well.
Jill: Yeah. So the first step, looking at stress and burnout and understanding it properly, doing some first aid techniques. Second step, looking at that harsh inner critic to be more realistic with ourselves. Third step, looking at unhelpful behaviours and how they drive unhappiness and stress. Fourth step, looking at worry, how we manage that mental landscape that we have. How do we turn off from work at the end of the day? How do we manage worry or rumination? If you’re somebody that’s always kind of doing postmortems on your past conversations or worrying about every possible thing that might go wrong with a project you’re doing, how do we manage that? Teaching people new techniques that can actually change the way you deal with that thought process. And the fifth step, and just as important in all the others, is where people will be able to consolidate what they’ve learned. And together we will put together a plan for how they can keep progressing without me. So they’ll almost have a blueprint, I call it a future blueprint. They’ll almost have a map of how they got to where they were, how they can get out. And there will be, and as you said, there will be time with me along the way. So it’ll be part flexible online learning from webinars with me. There’ll be weekly group Q&A sessions for support, and they’ll also have. I’m still working on the details, but it will probably start out initially with three sessions with me, could possibly go to two sessions with me, depending on how that works. So there will be real time with me as well, one to one, for that individualised touch as well.
Caroline: Yeah. So people kind of get an opportunity to go through, this is the things that are coming up for me and what I’m thinking absolutely work on in terms of that step five. And then you’re kind of able to kind of.
Jill: And setting small goals as well, because this won’t just be a passive read, it will be about making some small changes along the way in order to learn that this stuff works. But the goals that they set will be very much up to people, individuals. They can go big, they can go small. And sometimes when people are in a delicate state, it’s best to go small, just start small and consistent.
Caroline: That’s a good point.
Jill: That spread over ten weeks, this course is.
Caroline: Yeah, because one of the questions I had was, if you are feeling so overwhelmed and that numbness, what is the first thing? If you were wanting to try and get through that and start your recovery journey, what do you think is the first thing? Would it be speaking to someone else?
Jill: Yeah, I would always advise them to speak to somebody else first. I think if there is somebody in your workplace that you can speak to, sometimes it can be really supportive to hear that you’re not the only one that’s struggling. Time off is not the answer, but sometimes it can be useful, because when you have a bit of distance, you can see things more clearly and you can see the difference between you in work and you out of work. When burnout gets bad, it affects you across the board, really, but when it’s in its earlier stages, you can see a whole different you when you’ve had a week or two off, so that can be a good chance to just look and see. And also, I advise people as well. And I do have a book on my website as well, a free recovery guide to think about what unhelpful thought processes are going on for them. Do they have this idea that they have to be perfect or there’ll be some consequences? Do they feel like they always have to keep impressing people? Do they feel like it’s the worst possible thing to ever make a mistake? These are probably not helpful or realistic beliefs to hold, but a lot of them do have them when we start digging deep.
Caroline: Yeah. And we maybe don’t realise how much that they’re risk factors. I certainly didn’t appreciate that. I have a lot of the risk factors. That resource we will definitely link that in the show notes so that people can access that. That would be really helpful for people as a first point.
Jill: Yeah. And can I just say that this programme is not, you don’t need to be utterly broken to seek help. I’ve named my programme the Uptrained Brain because I really would like to see people seeing the use of psychology as just a natural extension of your training. It’s not about being broken, it’s about finding a smart way to lead a more rewarding life in and out of work. Psychology is all around us. Consumer psychologists are selling us stuff every day. Even the government has its own nudge unit. They call it to try and influence our decisions without having to change laws. Why not get a bit of that for ourselves, get in on the action and get that advantage?
Caroline: So true. Definitely, yes. Because if we can understand ourselves better, then so many other things will fall into place. Oh, thank you.
Jill: And it’s for people who are not broken, but who perhaps just feel like they could be coping a bit better as well. Feel like they want to build their confidence, feel like they want to go for promotion, but they don’t feel they’re quite ready or they’re not quite coping in a new role as well as they’d like. It’s designed to be sort of an all-round package, really, for everything, I think most professionals would really benefit from.
Caroline: Yeah. Do you know what I love about that? I think the whole thing starts to normalise these discussions, doesn’t it? So it’s rather than how we kind of started off, this conversation was like, you might feel like, oh, there’s something wrong with me and not want to share that, but actually, I think if everyone’s got a common language and there is more understanding about it is a complex issue, then we can all be in a better position to ensure that it doesn’t happen and we don’t end up in these really stressful situations.
Jill: Yeah. It’s setting good foundations, isn’t it?
Caroline: Oh, that’s a good word, yes, foundations. Oh, wonderful. Oh, gosh, we’ve covered a lot, haven’t we? One of the other things that I had been reflecting on with burnout, and, again, we were talking about caring for my mum and the business that we’re building is very much inherently about supporting people to age well, helping the care circle to be able to better look after their loved ones. So, with the smart home hardware side of our business and caregiving, I think it is one of the most selfless things that anyone can do.
Jill: Yeah. It’s a tough job.
Caroline: And I know for me, I was lucky because I had people around me to support us through that journey. So we had support from Macmillan and also Marie Curie as well. The nurses there were just so beautiful, and they helped not only mum with her health and the palliative care, but also the rest of us as well, which was so lovely. So, for some caregivers, I know that it’s physical and emotional and it’s relentless. Every day is..
Jill: It’s an incredibly tough job.
Caroline: …is hard, and I’m wondering how much of these sorts of tools that we’ve discussed and strategies could be helpful in those sorts of situations as well.
Jill: Absolutely. Carer burnout is real as well. We tend to talk about it in the workplace, but I’ve seen it across so many different things. It’s basically just chronic stress that isn’t managed well enough or where you don’t have time to recover from it. And I think definitely that idea of connecting with other people, and it can be hard when you’re a carer. It’s hard to have your own life, it’s hard to get out and socialise. But even if you’re reaching out like you did to carer organisations and do it sooner rather than later, because I think we all like to think that we can cope and we’re strong and we’re doing this great. And of course you’ll feel like you’re doing great until all of a sudden, one day you’re not. Put those things in place sooner rather than later. There’s this saying that you can’t keep pouring from an empty jug. If you were a carer, you are really important to the person you care for, we need to take care of you. If you were a machine that was really important to that person’s health, you would make sure that machine was serviced. And yet we see ourselves as superhuman and we’re not. Just connecting with other people and appreciate, and even just talking with other carers and realising that everyone sometimes finds it tough. Everyone probably has times where they feel a bit irritable with the person they’re caring for. That’s normal, it doesn’t make you a bad person.
Caroline: Yeah, so having somewhere where you can share those feelings.
Jill: Yeah, with other people that understand, that understand what you’re carrying.
Caroline: Yeah. Oh, that’s so helpful. Thank you.
Jill: And watching that harsh inner voice as well, you’re not going to be perfect at it. There will be times where you don’t feel like you can achieve as much as you want and just trying to be realistic and treat yourself the same way as you would if somebody else was that carer. Think about how you would talk to them if they didn’t feel they were achieving enough or didn’t feel like they.
Caroline: Were doing a great job. Yeah, that’s great advice. Oh, thank you, Jill. This has been so lovely.
Jill: Oh, you’re very welcome.
Caroline: With all of my guests, I love to wrap up the conversation with a bit of a discussion about creating your kind space and what that means to you. So, actually, I was at an event very recently, and the question I love to ask people is, what’s your go to thing? So what is the thing that helps you when you’re feeling out of balance? So it’d be great to get an insight into how do you relax.
Jill: Yeah. Because sometimes there are times where I can be dealing with people that do feel like they’re in crisis and it can be a lot to hear some days. And I had to learn quite early on in my career as a therapist and coach to be able to turn off from that when I left the office. And that doesn’t mean you don’t care about your clients. I think I always care about my clients, but you’re not doing them any good taking it home with you and dwelling on it and making yourself tired and exhausted with it. So what I learned to do quite early on, for me, if I’m having a tough day, is to take the dog straight out on the beach. And for me, dog owners will resonate with this, that moment where you take the lead off and they just run with joy. Just that feeling is kind of contagious, isn’t it, when you’re on a big, wide-open space on the beach? That, for me, has always been the best way to be able to turn off those sort of, and leave some of that emotional load till the next day. That’s a good go to for me.
Caroline: I love that. I love the beach. We stay quite far in land now, but I grew up near the ocean and so that’s one of my happy places when I get to go to the beach. I also have a dog as well. I love cuddles with my dog. She gives the best cuddles.
Jill: Oh, my dog’s good like that. She’s far too bouncy. I call her Lola, the far too bouncy to be a therapy dog. So, yeah, maybe when she’s older and calmer, she could come into the office if people wanted her there. But she’s very bouncy and very fun. But yeah, just finding something joyful in your life, isn’t it? Someone’s life can be all about chores, it can be all about work. And even if it’s just ten minutes of just blasting out some music and having a silly dance around the room sometimes. And that’s another go to is mine as well. I’ll just get in the car and blast some music.
Caroline: Yeah, music is a go to for me as well.
Jill: Yeah
Caroline: That’s so nice. So before we wrap up, I need to make sure that we’ve covered everything. Is there any other projects or things that you wanted to talk about?
Jill: I don’t think so. Like I said, maybe just to direct people to the fact that at the moment, because the Uptrained Brain is fairly new, it’s work I’ve been doing day in, day out, but the online version of it is new. So for the time being it’s half price. So it is a fantastic offer at the moment of £545 for the full ten weeks, fully inclusive downloadable resources, time with me, weekly Q and A’s. So it’s half the price it’s going to be at the moment because I just want to get people on it and I want to get the reviews in, make any little tweaks. And for the first running as well, people will most likely get more time with me because I want to make sure people are really happy and make sure that we kind of fix any problem they have together.
Caroline: Yeah. So that is a great opportunity.
Jill: That’s going to be running in February.
Caroline: Nice. Okay, so we will definitely include all the links to that as well. Yeah. Amazing. And if anyone actually has any questions, is it okay for them to get in touch with you as well?
Jill: Absolutely. And I offer a free on my website as well. They’ll see they can book. If they’re interested in the programme, but not sure if it’s for them, they can book a free call with me. And I absolutely don’t do sales pressure. I would hate it myself, so I don’t do it to other people and also it not in my interest to take people on the programme if it’s not right for them. So if it’s not right for you, then I will try and signpost you to what might be the right thing for you at this moment.
Caroline: Oh, that’s ace cool. Thank you very much. So we will include all that information for everyone. I hope that has helped, because I think burnout is an issue that in today’s society is potentially getting worse. I would say. I don’t necessarily know any of the stats and things around it, but just kind of from my own networks and conversations that are happening. And obviously, we have huge crises when it comes to our care workers, our people working in the education sector, caregivers. We have some significant issues for… How we address that. I don’t know, it makes my heart so sad.
Jill: Yeah. And when I talk about building people’s confidence and resilience, I’m absolutely not putting the blame on them. But if we can make ourselves stronger, we can either cope better with what’s the wrong word again? But perhaps we’ll get more confident and we can raise the issues in work that needs to be raised, or we can reassess our own situation and think about whether there might be a better workplace for us.
Caroline: Yeah. And I hope it makes it easier for people to talk about so that they feel less alone and that collectively, where changes are needed to be made at an organisational level, and a societal level, that we’re able to do that, I guess, is the bigger hope, isn’t it?
Jill: Yeah, that’s it. And we’re hoping that organisations, I think the large and more conscientious organisations now are seeing that these kind of one off, wellbeing things don’t work. Just often people kind of, oh, here’s an afternoon of mindfulness, or here’s a voucher to go to the gym or have some yoga sessions free. It needs to be more of a comprehensive look at processes and culture within the workplace, and that’s what works to improve. And actually, we know that it’s in their benefit. I think one Deloitte study has found that, for average, every one pound spent actually properly changing the organisation to improve well being brought back five pounds return. So it affects the bottom line in a good way. So if we can get that message across to organisations that this isn’t just about being nice, it’s actually about profits. Maybe they’ll be more likely to. Sadly. Maybe that’s what will make them show an interest as well. And they will retain their staff better as well. They won’t have to keep rehiring, retraining.
Caroline: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I hope we haven’t ended on too negative. I know with the. It’s obviously a very difficult subject.
Jill: No But things are definitely promising. Much more organisations now are considering it, people are talking about it more. So, yeah. I’m hopeful that things are going to slowly keep improving.
Caroline: And then maybe you can work yourself out of a job.
Jill: Who knows? I always says to my clients, that’s what I’m doing. I’m basically working to make myself redundant, so you’ve got the skills you need without me.
Caroline: But yes, that is a nice way to think about it.
Jill: Yeah. And there’s that free guide on my website as well that people can check out.
Caroline: Oh, wonderful. Thank you again, Jill.
Jill: Oh, you’re very welcome. Lovely to speak to you.
Caroline: Yeah, I hope we can catch up again soon.
Jill: I hope it’s helped someone. Yeah, thanks.
Wow, I feel like that was a mini therapy session. I really hope that this discussion has helped you if you are feeling burnt out. And while everyone’s experience of burnout will be different there are ways that you can reduce the risk and support your recovery. That said, I need to emphasise that burnout is not your fault. But if you can, speaking up about the underlying issues can help. It might not, there are some things that you just can’t change. So it’s really important to make sure that you have someone to talk to, perhaps someone like Dr Jill, to support you through the experience. My sincere wish for you is that you make it through and can look back on this time with some positivity because you will have learned so much about yourself and what you want from life.
As the podcast series continues, I encourage you to get in touch and share your stories and tips, I’d love to hear from you! Pop me an email at caroline@tltechsmart.com or message on social media @createyourkindspace
