Ep#118 Tending to the Body

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Hello my friends, this is Dex and after talking about tending to the soul in last week's episode, I thought I'd do an episode today on tending to the body, that other much neglected part of ourselves. And really partly this is because the body obviously takes a fair whack of collateral damage in burnout.

[00:00:43] But I'm also doing it partly because I've been having an experiment with monitoring my physiological stress, using health monitors. After discovering recently that some of my neurological systems weren't functioning that well, and my specialist suspected it was actually a lack of fuel, a lack of glucose to my brain that was the underlying problem.

[00:01:06] So we thought we'd check it out. Anyway, I'm going to come back to that in a minute, hold tight, because I really want to tell you about my rather intriguing experience, using monitors to help me learn about my system and correct how my body and mind are functioning together. And you'll be surprised when you hear how much control we actually do have.

[00:01:29] And also just to note that this is without pharmaceuticals or other interventions. It really did work rather well, can't wait to tell you, but more in a moment about that. But first of all, because maybe this applies to you, let's also explore what happens to the body in burnout. And in burnout really, most of us do suffer increasing physical debility up to and including chronic illness.

[00:01:59] And I think you already know what I mean. If you've got chronic stress, you've probably got an inkling. So what happens is, our body sends out a lot of distress signals at the effects of long term stress. It starts to suffer and it starts to tell us, it sends us pain signals and tension signals in our body and we get illness and it's trying to tell us to slow down.

[00:02:21] But when it sends us those distress signals, most of us strong go-getting professionals think we can overcome this by sheer willpower. And as a result, we quite often blithely ignore the signals, often until we're more or less broken down and things become quite elemental on us, and we get very sick.

[00:02:43] But really, I think when we're in that condition, if we didn't look the other way, if we actually stopped lying to ourselves about our physical suffering, the kind of outcome that might happen then is we'd have to stop work and tend to our body. And we really don't want to do that. We're too Type A for that.

[00:03:01] So we typically try and bust on through and just hammer it out, keep hammering it out. And I don't think in the end it does us much good. I think it catches up with us. It certainly caught up with me. And in my burnout experience, I recall having many signals that I was pushing things too hard. And I'm going to mention a few here just in case you can relate to them so that you're have some idea what might happen in burnout, because I was really later to discover that most of my symptoms, most of my distress signals were in fact archetypal of burnout.

[00:03:41] I didn't really know this at the time, of course. But anyway, here's a run through of some of the things that I noticed in my experience. First of all, I had severe ongoing insomnia, which alone can bring any human to their knees. I also had digestive issues, which are very prevalent amongst people with chronic stress, because when you think about it, stress and digestion are to a large extent mutually exclusive.

[00:04:11] We'll come back to that. Also my state of exhaustion was so entrenched that I woke up bloodshot in the mornings, utterly shattered and completely demotivated. My mood was relentlessly dark and pessimistic. I'd lost quite a lot of hope and I was very irritable and defensive. I couldn't find anything I liked doing, nothing felt good.

[00:04:37] And as that went on, I had this kind of sense of the sky closing in on me a bit. I lost faith in work as something that I enjoyed doing. I lost faith in life and in people. I didn't want to be around people anymore. I didn't trust myself and in that state I didn't trust other people either. All social interaction became quite painful to me.

[00:05:03] And for sure, of course, I didn't tell anyone I was burning out, even when I was pretty sure that I was. I was scared I would lose respect, or I'd lose my job, or I'd lose my career. Something calamitous would happen. And all of those features I've just described are really commonplace in burnout. And those experiences are a really big trigger for people to withdraw and isolate, to lick their wounds in private.

[00:05:32] But really that compounds the problem, because the ensuing loneliness and separation we then feel, although it seems to have kind of a self protective aspect, ultimately deepens our misery. We've got nobody to turn to for solace and normalization of our experience and self expression, because of course, humans aren't designed to operate as single units.

[00:05:59] And so if we do split off from our people, we often feel even more like we're letting those people around us down. We're letting ourselves down and we're letting our families down and that wounds us deeply. It's one of the deeper pains of burnout. And oddly we find it in our brains to resent others for that separation as if it's somebody else's fault,

[00:06:23] never looking for, or expecting to find the answers within ourselves. Burnout really I see as a loss of invincibility that terrifies us. We're used to being the fixer of all things. It's how we've previously gotten through life and built a successful career. So this loss of invincibility is, It's almost a mortal blow that we didn't see coming and we don't really know how to react to it, except to fold.

[00:06:51] We certainly don't want anyone to know we have it, right? We don't want to tell anybody that we're not at our best and sharpest. No wonder we withdraw. But I think all of this, all of these kind of experiences I've just described are how the stress snowball builds up in us. Until we can no longer see out, until it's become really chronic and taken over.

[00:07:14] And here's what's happening in our body while that's going on. We're in chronic fight or flight, day and night. So our rest and repair, access to the warmth of human connection have both shut down. So of course when we're in fight or flight we can't digest food, that gets shut down immediately, that mode is switched off.

[00:07:36] And fight or flight is supposed to be temporary, supposed to be an emergency measure. While we run away from the chasing tiger or whatever. But in burnout, our amygdala is triggered frequently and for a longer and longer period. So we become entrenched inside that too. And our rest and digest functions are chronically afflicted.

[00:07:58] And what I'm talking about here is digestion, growth, immunity, sleep, sexual function, urination, muscle and tissue repair, as well as a whole bunch of lesser known effects on hearing, vision, problem solving, autonomic functions, circulation, mood, social communication and so on. It's actually quite a big deal when you look up all of the things that are affected by being in fight or flight.

[00:08:28] But suffice to say we become depleted in many of the essential nutrients our bodily functions need to survive. So it's really no wonder we don't sleep. Of course, at the same time as sleep and digestion issues, we might also have more pain as our tissues don't repair. And also high stress might cause tight and sore muscles.

[00:08:54] For example, things like the TMJ in our jaw, neck or back pain, migraines. And we lose cognitive function, memory, concentration, focus, problem solving and decision making. All of that stuff goes offline. Plus, any mental health issues you may already have, such as anxiety, panic, depression, ADHD, are generally going to be more symptomatic.

[00:09:23] You're going to find them worse than usual. And under stress, here's a kicker, our impulse control goes a little bit haywire too. As our prefrontal cortex, our executive decision making brain, goes offline. And then what happens is, we have to go back and rely on our limbic or emotional brain, which makes very low quality decisions about things like alcohol, gambling, chocolate, using our phone, anything distracting or addictive that we do.

[00:10:00] So what that really means is our good habits are fading away and our bad habits are increasing and our social connections start to fall apart. We start to neglect them. We start to not want to be around people. And also we might gain weight. We might lose money or lose our job. We might stop exercising.

[00:10:21] We might stop doing things like meditating. And these are all the fallout of being in fight or flight for too long. So they're not, fundamentally, they're not really our fault. We just haven't got the part of the brain that we need to operate at our normal level working properly. And so that's why, when I hear somebody say that people should meditate to fix burnout, or they should exercise or eat better to fix burnout, it's going to be almost impossible to do that unless you fix some of the underlying stressors first.

[00:10:55] and give your prefrontal cortex a bit of a chance to join back in, because otherwise you're not going to have capacities to do those things in the first place. So I think deal with the stress first, then deal with the life experiences that aren't turning out the way you want them to. But what I'm saying at the core is, if you think you're in burnout, do something about it quickly, because burnout only gets worse

[00:11:22] if you do nothing, or if you try and stick a band aid on it and you can't discipline your way out of burnout. You can't wish and hope your way out of burnout. You can't try harder to get out of burnout. You can't stay up later and work to get out of burnout. You can do all of those things, they just won't get you out of burnout.

[00:11:41] So if you are in burnout and it's deteriorating and you're becoming more stressed and more exhausted all the time, then you need to do something different. But, here's what I suggest you don't do. Do not blame yourself for the experience or the effects of burnout. Whatever they are. Because really, once you get into chronic stress, burnout is more or less inevitable.

[00:12:06] You don't wake up one morning and go, Oh no, why don't I go into burnout, that'll be great. It's not actually fundamentally a choice you've made. To be lazy, for example. Or to not care. Or to be depressed. You didn't make that choice, it's just a sequence of events where chronic stress and probably lack of sleep and lack of digestion have ended up in a burnout like experience.

[00:12:32] So please don't blame yourself. If you're having any kind of experience around burnout, it's not appropriate to lay the blame on yourself or to criticize yourself for that. Because really the experiences you have are just your body and mind, doing their best to survive the actual burnout experience that you're having, with whatever resources they have remaining.

[00:12:57] So just as pain in your body is trying to tell you something in your body needs fixing, physical pain, right? Physical pain wants you to fix the body. Mental pain wants you to fix your mind. So they're just messages to you that something is going wrong and could you please attend to it? Could you please help it out?

[00:13:19] But of course, don't try and fix the effect before you fix the cause. No, there's no band aid cure for burnout. So if you're trying to fix the effects, like some people put on weight and they're trying to lose weight, or they're not exercising and they're trying to exercise, it's really not going to stick.

[00:13:37] And probably the effort and failure cycle around trying is going to generate more guilt, shame, self blame and despair in you. So don't try and fix the effects. Fixing the cause of burnout is where you're going to get the gain and then the effects will start fixing themselves. So fixing the cause of burnout is actually what burnout coaching does.

[00:14:03] We go back to root causes so that you stop generating the after effects that you don't like by fixing the original problem. It's basically giving your brain and body and soul the space and the energy and the time and the prompting to heal. And then at that time, most of the symptoms of burnout start to self correct and fall away.

[00:14:28] Your energy, mood and vitality bounce back. And only then, once you're resourced up and you're cheerful and you're functioning well again, then any remaining effects that you don't like, such as weight gain, can be addressed much more easily and reliably and consistently and quickly. So I just wanted to review that so that you know that you're not alone if you're suffering any of those experiences.

[00:14:55] And you're not broken either. You're simply having some suffering that you might need some help in reversing out. Okay, so that's the bit about burnout and those experiences and how that plays out a little bit in the body. Let's get back to talking about the monitors, my favorite bit. Because here's what's happening.

[00:15:15] Because I'm having some sensory difficulties neurologically and my specialist said okay let's have a glucose monitor on you so you can find out whether enough fuel is getting to your brain to run all those systems or not. So he asked me to use a continuous glucose monitor which is to find out what my glucose is doing and whether in fact my body and brain are getting the fuel that they need consistently.

[00:15:42] So I actually did this test more or less in the absence of other changes. For example, I did not change my diet. I didn't even record my diet. I just stuck this little plastic thing on my arm and away we go. If you don't know what a continuous glucose monitor is, and I use one called the Libre Freestyle.

[00:16:04] It's a little plastic disc. If you're looking at the video, maybe I can show you. It's a little plastic disc with a pin in the middle that you stick onto the back of your arm and you leave there, you leave it sitting there for 14 days straight and it measures your glucose levels 24x7 and it feeds the data back to an app on my phone which shows me a real time graph of my glucose level.

[00:16:31] So to cut a long story short in my case I have a rather modest amount of glucose in circulation. So the graph is on a scale of 0 to 21 and the target range apparently is 3 to 7 before meals in a fasted state and 5 to 10 after meals And according to the CDC, because I looked this up on Google, unmanaged diabetes is indicated by a level over 20.

[00:16:58] I'm not an expert, I just looked that up. Anyhow, the scale goes from 0 to 21, anything under 4 is a problem. My levels typically range between 3 and 7 over any 24 hour period, and they're really quite stable. And I do tend, historically, to have low blood sugar, I already knew that, but the app shows me a 24 hour graph of all my readings over the time, and anything under four is considered low blood sugar, and it shows up in red on the chart.

[00:17:28] It's an emergency, what they say really is that's triggering your fight or flight system, because that considered by the body to be an emergency signal. But really anything under four is, I get to see that I ran out of gas in that moment. I ran out of fuel for my body. Here's the interesting bit for me.

[00:17:46] I'm only measuring it for two weeks. The device dies after two weeks. And the first four or five days, I had quite a lot of red spots on my graph, low blood sugar, during the day and in the night. As I kept looking at the charts every day, the number of red spots went down just by looking at it. I didn't do anything else.

[00:18:07] That's quantum physics, right? What you observe changes by itself. And now, in the last four days, I haven't had a single red spot. I haven't actually done anything. I don't record or monitor my food or my mealtimes or anything like that. I haven't changed my diet. So that was curious to me. But, here's the other part.

[00:18:33] Here's part two. I actually have two monitors running. I've got the glucose monitor and I've got another one which is called a whoop. It's a little thing on my wrist, and it measures heart rate, sleep, exercise, recovery, respiration, oxygen, temperature, and stress. It's just a whole bunch of things to find out how my body's performing physically.

[00:19:00] And I wear this one 24x7 as well. And I really thought when I got it, I didn't really want it, but he wanted the data, so I said, Anyway, I thought I wouldn't like it, but I do. So here's some of the things that it shows to me and I'm talking about it here in case this is helpful for other people because it really helped me understand my stress patterns better, effectively.

[00:19:23] So here's the first thing it shows me. It shows me my sleep analysis every night. It tells me when I went to bed, how long I was in bed for, how long I slept, how many times I woke, what my stress levels were, how much REM and deep sleep I got. And it calculates my sleep debt every day. And it tells me when I ought to go to bed and for how long.

[00:19:45] And it tells me what my sleep performance is as a rating. So maybe it's 83 percent today. So basically, that's how restored I should be after my sleep. And of course I'm pretty curious about this. Today, it's telling me that the amount of sleep I need tonight is 9 hours and 10 minutes. 'cause last night I got eight hours and one minute, what a winner.

[00:20:10] And my sleep debt is down to 44 minutes. My sleep time consistency, which is when I go to bed, is 88% restorative sleep percent is 39%, which is REM and deep sleep. And my performance last night was 87 actually. And guess what? Seeing all this on a little graph every day, and then being sleep coached is actually shifting my results.

[00:20:38] I feel bloody fantastic for one thing. Again, I haven't really consciously changed my sleep routine at all. And still my performance seems to improve as the days go by. It's a little bit like my subconscious is doing the work for me just by seeing the charts. and reading the little prompts. So that's been a real breakthrough.

[00:21:01] I feel like a million bucks now my sleep performance percentage has come up from about 70 to towards 90 percent. The other thing it monitors is heart rate, average heart rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, which is all about recovery. And it gives me an exercise recovery score every day.

[00:21:25] And same thing there, the numbers just keep improving. Then it has a function called strain. It really fascinates me and it calculates a strain score for each activity each day and it gives me a total daily strain score and it sets targets for me to hit every day. And so what it does is for each exercise, it scores it based on activity type, heart rate and duration.

[00:21:54] So it gives it a loading depending on what kind of activity it was. And also for non exercise times. It also gives me a score and I think that must be more based on heart rate because what else would it be? But what it does is it adds up all the activities I told it I did. And then it times them for me.

[00:22:15] So I, I press start to start an activity and I tell it I'm in the gym. And then I press end when I finished in the gym and it calculates the score for me about the gym. Or if I'm on the bike, I just press start and I tell it I'm on the bike and tell it when I finish and that's that. And it gives me a strain rating to offset against my daily strain target I'm supposed to be reaching.

[00:22:37] So maybe my strain rating in the morning is eight and I need to get to 15 in the day to hit my maximum fitness and energy potential for the day. But here's the thing. It also notices when I didn't tell it about an activity. So if I go surfing, I'm not going to take my phone in the water.

[00:22:56] Sometimes I don't bother to tell it I'm going surfing, but it notices. And when I come back, it says, Oh, you've had an activity between, 6am and 6. 42. What was it? And it asks me what I did. So it notices when I did an activity, I think by the heart rate monitor that it's got running.

[00:23:15] Here's the really funny bit. This week it created a little add on activity for me, which it detected whilst I was having a haircut. So I thought it was pretty cute. And then it created another activity for me when I was cooking dinner one day. And then sometimes it misses if I go for a run or a cycle and it doesn't create one for me

[00:23:35] automatically and I don't know how it knows or doesn't know what I'm doing. It seems to be a little bit chancy. Anyhow today when I'm making this I'm having a little bit of a rest day so my my target I think is 17 and I'm under 14. 5 at the moment.

[00:23:52] And then the app on the phone gives me little tips. It tells me when I've been exercising too little or too much or too hard. It tells me when I could do more to improve my fitness, but it will impact recovery levels tomorrow. It tells me when I've not had enough sleep to fuel the exercise that I want to do and it distinguishes between muscular strain and aerobic effort.

[00:24:19] And also stress, which can be physiological or mental. And it also shows my heart rate that I've maintained during the activities. So it's got quite a lot of depth of information, and then the little coach in there sends me little tips throughout the day about how to get better results.

[00:24:37] And sometimes it tells me to do more, and sometimes it tells me to do less, or sometimes it tells me what will happen tomorrow. Whichever, all my scores keep going up there as well. So I think here's my biggest win with it, is it rates my stress. There's a little stress graph that runs 24x7, and it rates the stress between zero and three.

[00:25:00] And it tells me which third of the chart I spent most time in. You spent X minutes in the top level, X minutes in the medium, X minute in the low. Or, Oh, you've been in the low stress band more today than yesterday. Things like that. And I'm particularly engrossed with my sleep stress, because we think we don't have any control over that.

[00:25:22] And it does peak if I wake up in the night at unexpected times.

[00:25:27] It also peaks on things that I don't anticipate. It showed me my stress was peaking when I was at coffee the other day, and I wish I could remember what we were talking about. So it's really, it learns. It learns what my base rates are, my normal rates . And it learns what alarms me. I basically can journal and tell it what's happening for me.

[00:25:46] And it'll start correlating all the data and understanding my pattern. So for example, with stress, I might notice stress if I wake up sweating in bed at night, but I might not detect it while I'm running or having coffee, apparently. Today, for example, I spent 46 percent of my time so far in my low stress zone.

[00:26:12] And when I think to the beautiful harbour ferry trip I went on, I'm not surprised. And then I did a little bit of coaching and it was low again. Then I tried to get support for my Stripe account because it looked as if somebody had taken some money off me and I was worried I'd been hacked and my stress ratio is going up.

[00:26:30] So it's quite useful in understanding where my physiological stress is a good match for my perceived mental state of stress or physical state of stress and where it's out of whack. Because where it's out of whack is me not being in touch with my own body systems really. If my stress is high and I think it's low, it's just that I'm telling myself a different story about it.

[00:26:57] I don't really understand my own stress. Or if my stress level is low and I think it's high, then I have greater resilience than I imagined and I could start telling myself a different story about that. I could start thinking differently about that activity. It's not a high stress activity at all.

[00:27:13] So I think in those areas where my physiological stress is not a match for my perceived stress, it's very educational. It can help me learn about my own body and what works and what doesn't work well for it, or where the danger signs are that I'm not picking up. I can perhaps start to notice them more directly.

[00:27:32] Or where I've got something that's really high stress, I can find ways to actively choose to bring the stress level down during that activity. So for me, it's been very insightful so far. It's been 11 days in so far, and my biggest takeaway perhaps is that with both of these devices, how true it is that you can't change what you don't measure.

[00:27:58] So the glucose monitor, I don't need to keep using that to keep seeing my patterns and to understand that my system has been undernourished. It's been undersupplied with glucose. No surprises there, but I can take action to correct that. But the whoop is actually going to stay for a while. As long as I am learning new ways to improve my sleep, my stress profile, my recovery rates, my heart rate variability, and all those other measures of health, I'm going to keep using it because who doesn't want to be more healthy?

[00:28:27] And effectively, in burnout or high stress, without that level of health, what are we? It's never going to help. For people who don't use monitors, maybe you knew everything that I tried today, but that's the first time I've used one of those health monitors. And I am finding it pretty exciting.

[00:28:44] But if you don't have monitors and if you don't want to use them, then if you do have chronic stress in your body, if you're in fight or flight a lot, there is another really great way to bring down your stress time spent in fight or flight. When we're in chronic stress, we tend to stay in fight or flight much longer than is indicated by the situation.

[00:29:07] So a really great way to bring that down by yourself is through vagal nerve exercises, which are really simple exercises you can do at home to reset your parasympathetic nervous system. So you go back into rest and repair function. And also it brings your cognitive faculties back online and your social communication faculties back online.

[00:29:31] It's a very useful place to be. And you can stimulate that yourself using vagal nerve exercises. And there's a very good book on this by Stanley Rosenberg that demonstrates each exercise with pictures. And you can learn the exercises in there and they only take a couple of minutes. You can do them every day.

[00:29:51] And the book is called Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve. I'm going to include it in the show notes if you'd like to look at that, because it really does work no matter how shredded your nervous system is. And it can restore energy and function to you. But essentially, of all the things we've talked about today, if under chronic stress, your mind and body are playing up, they're not functioning as normal, the best thing to do is learn how to dial back your stress.

[00:30:24] And this is one of the core skills that I teach and coach on in the Burnout Recovery Program that I run. Because if you're in burnout, I seriously do want you to have a better life than this. And I can show you how to get there. There is a step by step process to come out of burnout where you learn and apply new skills to address the root causes of stress in your life, so that you can return to being.

[00:30:50] So if you are in burnout, please do come and talk to me about how to recover quickly and sustainably and get back to your best performance, leadership, success, and well being, and most of all enjoyment inside work and out. You can book an appointment to speak with me at DexRandall. com. Also, if you enjoyed this episode, please help me reach more people in burnout by rating and reviewing the podcast.

[00:31:16] I'd love you to do that right now. If also you know somebody else who's heading towards or in burnout, please send them the podcast link because it's packed, as you know, with practical tips for burnout recovery. And I do recommend that new people get acquainted with it by listening to the first five episodes.

[00:31:37] Thank you so much for joining me today. Hope some of that was useful to you.