What is the difference between stress and burnout?

Dr Marianne Trent (: 00:00

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

(: 00:19

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. This is part of our series of episodes called Burnout Bites, which is being hosted for me for us by Dr. Claire Plumbly, who is incredible. She is the author of a brand new book all about 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 are 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 modelling with this special podcast series. They are all standalone episodes, but they are all grouped together under the term of burnout or should I say anti burnout, and it's a really, really brilliant fit for this podcast because if you are 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.

Dr Claire Plumbly (: 01:33

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 Plumbly. I'm a clinical psychologist. I work with people who 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. It 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.

(: 02:18

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 are in our sympathetic nervous system gear, this is an energised, 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.

(: 03:10

It's the tense muscles, it's the shift of digestion into just essential 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 a nervous system that is more about energy conservation and survival mode. So imagine this. Imagine that you are practising your tennis shots, you're practising your shots against a tennis ball machine that's throwing the balls at you.

(: 04:03

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, 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.

(: 04:43

But if there's no let up, we're trying to return the balls, but we're not getting them all. There's no way 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. 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 are on autopilot. These are all signs that you're not functioning fluidly through your gears and that you've either got stuck in that dorsal shutdown or you are 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.

(: 05:40

You might've come across it if you haven't. It's worthwhile looking up the Ys dogs and Curve, also known as the stress curve. It's a bell curve. I include it in 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 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 burned 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 we are in our green rest and digest mode.

(: 06:32

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 dorsal shut down 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 longterm 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 sure you're using them as frequently as you can and in a future one of these episodes, I talk about doing that 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.

Dr Marianne Trent (: 07:38

Thank you so much, Claire. That was absolutely wonderful. If this has wet 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 Plumbly 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 are finding you've got a little bit more time on your hands at the moment as well as reading Dr. Claire'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.

(: 08:33

Please do also take a moment to follow, subscribe to the show, which you 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 10:00 AM on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts from 6:00 AM on Monday. Stay kind to you and thank you so much for being part of my world.

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