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**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yup. And this is a place that I don't think anyone wants to be, but realizing that, you know, when you're saying neuro- endocrine, it's our body's systems. And our body is always trying to manage its energy resources, and so it's saying, "Hey, I've upset the homeostasis internally for so long ... |
\[06:24\] We've talked about this in previous shows, around the difference between homeostasis and in humans allostasis, wherein our bodies and brains don't go back to a baseline pre-perception of threat or reaction to threat, but actually reallocates upwards regarding that threat. So when I am perpetually stressed, my... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. And you mentioned the fact that it's now an ICD code... Alexandra says "Many of the symptoms of burnout overlap with the hallmarks of depression, including extreme fatigue, loss of passion", which you were talking about there, to some degree, "creativity, and intensifying cynicism and negativi... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. Look, and this is so prevalent in the mental health world... Look, anybody who's depressed doesn't wake up and go, "Oh, I think that's a great idea. Let's do that. Let's make everything harder, so I feel like I'm operating through molasses in every activity I choose to do today." No! Oh ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[09:48\] Yeah. It's sneaky, it's cunning... As this other fella who wrote another article. Having been through burnout, Kieran Thai, self-described as a freelance writer, originally from Sydney, Australia, but now living in Denver, wrote a post called "Recovering from burnout" on his personal blog.... |
But this idea that it's a thief - like, it's sneaky, it's cunning... It's almost like it's out the getcha. In the pre-call we were talking through some of the details of this... I'm like "Well, that's just kind of doing life." And we can kind of go through what we were talking about there, but you know, all the things ... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. I think of it like the drift. We don't recognize drift until we look back. And so this is why I think this topic is so timely, because we're closing out a year, and a tough one for many of us. And going "Can you look back and see how you're drifting? Or have you set up sort of tethers in... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. In regards to the drift, I think it's -- some have said in regards to remote work and sort of progression in certain directions, I wonder if there's regression in the other directions, which haven't really been talked about. So there's been discussions around, "Oh, COVID and the global pandemi... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right. And I think for you and all of our industries -- I mean, I'm so familiar with healthcare, and this is what we've been trying to manage... Because one thing that healthcare workers don't have control over is flow. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. There's sort of a -- they're at the mercy of flow. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. And look, many people in the field of healthcare go into healthcare because they do what? They care about people. And they want to help people. And guess what it feels like this year? They're not helping, because they can't help to the degree or in the way in which they want to help. And... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What I find interesting from Alexandra's article is that this topic of burnout was broached 1976. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[14:08\] You might as well just say 1776. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, that's a long time ago. I mean, it's many years ago. Rough math - sub 50 years ago, right? The title of the article from -- I'm not sure how you say this fella's name; I think that might be a fellow. I'm assuming, at least... \[unintelligible 00:14:22.07\] is the person's name. An article ti... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. We often talk about the importance of naming things, right? That this has been around, but it hasn't necessarily allowed people to recognize that it's not a personal thing. It's not somebody trying to do this to themselves. It's an interplay issue. And so again, even the World Health Org... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Alexandra says - a few sentences down from that section where I was reading, she says "Burnout emerges when the demands of a job outstrip a person's ability to cope with the stress." |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yep. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And newsflash, I was incorrect assuming gender there. \[unintelligible 00:16:33.20\] is a woman. She discusses that just a few sentences later; I could have read a little further... Sorry about that. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. This is what is just so, so challenging - we just can't adapt. In the world of mental health I work with people doing this routinely, and it's so important, guys, to be able to acknowledge legitimacy around constraints. Like, it does stink; it's aversive. "I don't want to be navigating t... |
One of the things I've encountered a lot throughout this year is people struggling with loss. And be it people in their lives, or expectations they had for things they were going to do... I mean, even more locally, for my world, is adolescents who have worked their whole lives to prepare for college in a sport of some ... |
\[18:04\] So we then have to switch gears and go, "How can I find a way to buffer and cope with that loss? And are there opportunities that lie within some of those disappointments?" And in no way am I negating the loss, but I'm also going to look at it like an addition equation and go, "What other opportunities are th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'll give you a real funny/simple example. Repurposing parking lots. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Okay... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right? So just yesterday we did an outdoor museum, essentially. It was an outdoor exhibit of dinosaurs; larger than life dinosaurs. We drove through it in our car, and it was in a mall parking lot. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right...? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Two weeks before that, when we had family here - I know it's early, but we went and saw Christmas lights. We did an outdoor drive-through of Christmas lights. Guess where it was at? A parking lot. So it's not a one-to-one, but it may be negative that the parking lots are empty... But it's a positive... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** I love it! |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So... Write that book if you want to. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** I love it. And that is so key, because part of our buy-in around these sort of challenges is going "How does it have purpose, or in what way does it provide meaning to me?" Because loss stings, any way you look at it; but at the same time, in what way can I find meaning within that, that holds... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** But if I don't go reflect and go, "I want to expand my mind to the broad view. I got to look bigger and wider", which - emotions are involved in that process. Because if I'm stressed, guess what I'm not going to be able to do? I'm going to see the itty-bitty, narrow, square view. Definitely no... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, the one thing that's interesting that she points out here is this vicious cycle; she mentions that new research is showing just how devastating this kind of occupational stress can be to the brain. Talks about resisting state functional MRIs... I think we might have talked about that in ou... |
So it was just sort of comparing these two... But this idea of this neurological dysfunction that can come from this vicious cycle; this long-term change that's stress, which we talked about in "I'm so stressed." But if burnout is sort of an umbrella of many things - you've got stress, you've got emotional fatigue, you... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[22:01\] Right. So we've talked about this relative to our amygdala, which is sort of the seed of emotional processing, and then our prefrontal cortex, which is sort of like our executive assistant in our brain. And the issue is that our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for attention, ... |
So we've long said, but stress is really deleterious, or bad, just bad over the long haul for our bodies and our brains, because we're not designed to do that. This is fight or flight; if we look at stress, it's going "Do I fight, flight or freeze?", that's designed for a purpose, to help us survive really threatening ... |
And this is what was super-interesting... There's a neurologist out of the Department of Women and Children's Health, Ivanka Savic, who confirmed this, that our brains suffering from burnout - they don't just function differently, guys; the structure changes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you see sort of a regression, or this change inside of your brain from all these different things, like a growing or a shrinking of the amygdala, for example. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right. So this research \[unintelligible 00:23:42.25\] and took these MRI - so MRIs are super-fascinating, because they give us more access to the brain, in different ways... And so it looked at measurements of cortical thickness in the amygdala, the anterior cingulate cortex, and this medial ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, life - we're all dying, so to speak... Life is a process, I suppose, to get to death, or some sort of fatal point... And some of us speed up that timeline or slow it down; they call it anti-aging. It doesn't mean you're actually turning around time, it means the way that your cells, or i... |
Yeah, it's interesting how there's this cognitive cost, too. Beyond just simply changing the brain's anatomy, she says scientists are beginning to understand how burnout can affect people's cognitive function; so disrupting their creativity, not being able to problem-solve so easily in dealing with working memory... An... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Oh, yes... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hypochondria? |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** That's one of them, but I'm... See, now I'm blanking. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Maybe I'm okay then \[unintelligible 00:25:53.24\] But you know, you think you have something because you read about it. The doctor says, "Hey, don't go google this, because you will find things and hear stories... Here's what your real prognosis is; here's your real diagnosis", and they say "... |
\[26:21\] Anyways. So the point is - cognitive costs. It's not just simply losing your ability to function as well as you can, or having that constant chronic stress towards things that are sort of imbalanced in your life, but this inability to be as creative as you once were. And it kind of goes back to that - the sne... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. I think I've referenced this before, but this is part of what I love about the work that I've done and continue to do, is looking at -- I do evaluations for people who think they have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and/or cognitive deficits, or sort of neurocognitive issues. A... |
And similar to that, people come in, "Hey, I'm concerned. This person is having memory impairments", which might look like a degenerative process, like dementia, and they had been severely stressed for a long period of time, and going "There isn't a sort of pattern which is consistent with what we would expect for some... |
So I don't want to scare people in any way about this, but I just want to give legitimacy to like you're not making this up, and then how do you move over into "Okay, if I know this is the case", behavior change - "What do I do different?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the easy answer would be stop being so stressed. |
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