Captions by Glenna Casalme www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017 (FOREBODING MUSIC) Can women have it all? Can they be a good mother and a good wife, and can they work at a job and do well? As an overachieving type of woman, out of nature, we wanna give and give and give and give. And so saying no is very, very challenging. There is more pressure on women to look great, have a great career and then come home and do the homely thing as well. Burnout is a big problem these days. People are very busy. They have demands at home; they have demands at work; they're all levels of being able to cope with stress. Why on earth are we prepared to sacrifice our own health in the pursuit of doing these things, being everything to everyone? We need to really take a step back and question why we're prepared to do that. Because without our health, we have nothing. (INTENSE MUSIC) (UNSETTLING PIANO MUSIC) The first time I had burnout, I was studying. I remember I was at a point in my life where I had a lot of negative feelings and I didn't know how to deal with them very well. Essentially, I just squashed them down and tried to go on. I wanted to be the best in my class. I thought if I can project an image of success to the world, then no one will actually know what's happening inside of me. And I wanted to have a great social life and look good with my friends and, you know, do everything that a 20-year-old did. And six months into that, I just had my first panic attack. (FORLORN PIANO MUSIC) The beginnings of my burnout started in high school. I was always that kid who was front and centre in the hockey fields and in the swimming pool in water polo. I developed an eating disorder ` anorexia. As soon as parents and friends showed their concern, physically, I became well again, but mentally, I just wasn't the same. Mentally I was walking around as if I was under this cloud of mist, of greyness. Why is that happening? The first thing I think to consider is that science suggests the humans have been on the planet for about 150,000 years. (CLOCK TICKS) So now fast-forward to the last 100 years, and you think about what has changed. So in 1917, World War I was going on. The role for women, especially, was incredibly different. (CLOCK TICKS) In the '60s, it was when the oral contraceptive pill was developed. That changed women's lives both socially, economically. It wasn't that long ago that women were given the opportunity to do what were traditionally their father's jobs, but they've maintained what were traditionally their mother's responsibilities. And then you fast-forward to now, and you've got this juggling woman who is being all things to all people. (INDISTINCT CHATTER) What I want people to deeply appreciate is that this is the first time in the enormity of human history, in that 150,000 years that we've asked our bodies to live in this way. The result of this for so many women are some significant health consequences. I think women and men sometimes can be raised differently as well ` what is expected of a woman versus what's expected of a man. We're the ones that are raised to hold families together. We're the ones that are supposed to make it all work. We're the ones who have oxytocin in us ` the hormone that helps us tend and befriend and develop and want to nurture others. (LAUGHS) I see women all over burning out to different degrees. It's as easy as if someone asks a woman, 'Can you do this?' Inside, her stomach's dropping; her heart's racing. She's thinking to herself, 'How can I take care of what I've already committed to and do what I just said yes to? 'But I don't wanna displease you. So I'm gonna say yes right now, and then I'll figure it out.' And in that moment, what she's done is not listen to her own body. Contributing factors to my burnout are the huge pressures I put on myself to succeed in whatever area of life it is. The second time I had burnout, I was 26 years old and I was living in Denmark and I was working at a great advertising agency. (UNSETTLING MUSIC) The big part of burnout there was experiencing some really severe stress with living overseas, putting a lot of pressure on myself to look good and do the right thing. And it all got too much one day, and then I had another big panic attack. (FOREBODING MUSIC) I said to my business partner, 'I want to open a studio.' I go from being a freelance yoga teacher to being now someone who is managing a team. Being a face of a business and walking into a studio every day,... And exhale. Up and over. '...at the same time, I was actually going through a breakup. 'I wasn't processing the relationship at all. 'I was putting all of my energy, heart, soul, everything into the business. 'I was in here at 4 o'clock if I was teaching an early, early class. 'And then back to a friend's couch at 10 at night. Finally, as you drop the hands, you're going to move the hips around a little bit there. 'I was running so fast ahead of myself that I couldn't keep up.' After about a year of just the constant showing up, smiling, where inside I was decaying, I was hardening; I was internalising. The best way to consider what's unfolding inside of us requires us to have a really good look at stress hormones and our nervous system. The autonomic nervous system ` it's under the control of our subconscious mind. One arm of it is called the parasympathetic nervous system, and that's the rest, digest, repair, reproduce. And I often refer to it as the green zone. (TREADMILL WHIRRS) And the other arm is called the sympathetic nervous system. That's the flight-or-flight response ` the red zone. And the challenge for so many people today is that they are living with that red zone constantly activated. So the main warning signs would be a feeling of exhaustion ` physical and emotional exhaustion ` feeling overwhelmed. Maybe changes with your sleep or flushing, or you're maybe more worried about things. So you can become withdrawn, maybe cynical, you know, start treating people like they're not really people. Or they may be behavioural ones. You might start to eat differently, be less healthy, exercise less, drink more alcohol, you know, to make yourself feel better, which of course doesn't help in the long run. (DRONING, UNSETTLING MUSIC) After a trip to London, I came back, and I just didn't feel great. You know, all the partying over there and drinking wasn't helping. (INHALES DEEPLY, SIGHS) I was prescribed some antidepressants. I just felt this huge wave of fear from the top of my head to my feet just come over me. And I didn't know what happened to me. I realised something had happened in my brain and I felt out of control and absolutely terrified. After that panic attack, it probably took a month before I decided to go to the doctor. I walked in and she said, 'Oh, it's burnout. 'Here's some mild antidepressants, and here's the number of a counsellor that you can talk to.' To be just given some pills and be told to just head out and try and get on with it was really upsetting to me. I felt alone, and I felt like I should be able to cope with this more than I am. And it was bigger than just a fix of a few pills and a couple of sessions with a counsellor. Adrenaline ` that acute stress hormone ` for 150,000 years has communicated to our body that our life is literally in danger. So a tiger would come out of the jungle and started to chase us, or someone from another tribe got their spear out and started running after us. And in those moments, we go (GASPS), and we're in that fight or flight response. In modern times, what leads us to make adrenaline is caffeine and our perception of pressure and urgency. Often, when people perceive stress and pressure and urgency, it's with smaller things across their day ` their emails, their to-do list. That has a whole host of biochemical changes inside you. (TENSE, JANGLING MUSIC) The first thing that happens is our blood pressure goes up. The second thing that happens is the blood supply that is normally so fantastic to our digestive system is diverted away from our digestion to our periphery. The third thing that happens is the fuel supply, that the body believes is safe and appropriate for it to use, changes. When you are living on adrenaline, the belief of the body is that your life's in danger and it's gotta supply you with a fast-burning fuel to get you out of this supposed danger. So take a wild guess between glucose and fat which is the fast-burning fuel. It's glucose. Further to that, adrenaline keeps us ever so slightly awake. It doesn't want us to sleep deeply and restoratively. Another thing that happens is the adrenaline drives a huge amount of inflammation in the body, and the body knows that it can't sustain that going on all the time. It's incredibly damaging; it's ageing; it's very destructive to our long-term health. Stress comes from many levels, and then how it shows up ultimately, physically, as a physician, what I see is I see migraines; I see insomnia; I see anxiety; I see depression. My mind is always on go-mode. It hardly ever switches off. If I'm sitting down at my desk at work and I get a wave of panic that says I actually don't know how I'm gonna make it through the day, often I'll start thinking some really fearful thoughts or I'll just realising myself getting really panicky about really small things. (ELECTRONIC DING) The more I stress about it, the more I stress about it. And the more I stress about it, the more of a number I did on myself. But after a while, it started to take its toll. I was masking. But I could feel it. I could feel the tension in my jaw, in my shoulders; my digestive system was off, um, because I'm always tensing and holding on to the anxiety there. When we have all of that inflammation, then the body says, 'I can't sustain this long-term,' and you move into the second stage of stress, which is when another stress hormone called cortisol then is elevated. For 150,000 years, the only long-term stress humans really had were floods and famines and wars. Food was scarce. So one of the jobs of cortisol is to slow our metabolism down. But the reason you make that in the second stage of stress is because one of the good things cortisol does is it's a powerful anti-inflammatory. With a slower metabolism, even though you're eating and moving in the same way, your clothes get tighter. And when people notice that, often their response is they think, 'Oh, I better go on a diet.' And when they go on a diet, well, you eat less. And then that just confirms to your body what it perceives as true, which is that there's no food left in the world. So you haven't dealt with the high adrenaline; it's still amped up, and you're making all these inflammatory compounds; but now you also have elevated cortisol trying to dampen down all that inflammation. And some people stay in that second stage of the stress response long-term. I got to a point where I just walk out of the studio and I couldn't bear to be around anyone else. I thought there must've been something wrong with me ` that I wasn't happy and that I wasn't energised and that I... that I wasn't this picture of health, feeling like the picture of health that everyone said that I was. It was the effort of talking, and it was the effort of leaving here, going home and talking to flatmates. I couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel ` that's it. So I thought I was just gonna be working like that forever. A really important thing when you're learning to recognise the signs of burnout is to know when your brain has just gone on to autopilot. It's releasing a whole lot of cortisol and won't, sort of, shut down by itself. That's when I have to actually just literally stop everything and go home and get into bed. We've learned to strategically survive by numbing the early signals. 'Oh, that's not a big deal. I can keep going.' Or, 'I'll get a` Make it a double latte today.' Right? So we keep ramping up, not realising that what we're doing is numbing the very signals that could protect us. (GRINDER WHIRRS) (STEAM HISSES, GURGLES) When you wake up in the morning and you have really low cortisol levels, you feel like you've been hit by a bus, no matter how much sleep you've had. And it's not just a tiredness of, 'Oh, I'm really tired because I work hard.' It's a deep, deep fatigue that's relentless. You feel like you're never gonna be yourself again. And they move into the third stage of stress, which is what we refer to as burnout, or it's become known as adrenal fatigue. (TENSE, TICKING MUSIC) When you're in that burnout situation as well, there are many changes that go on inside you, and you feel incredibly stiff because you've lost that anti-inflammatory action as well of the cortisol. If they've put weight on during that stress response, unfortunately, it tends to stay there. They'll say to me that they can't thrive. They feel like they're just in survival mode, feel incredibly depleted, but they're also wired. Sleep is a massive challenge for so many adults. And when your body has lost the ability to do something that is so fundamental, so basic to its survival and to its health, if that's not some feedback, I don't know what is. Hmm. When you can't shut your brain off, you want to just have one more hit of social media or one more session at the gym, or one more chat with your friend. And it snowballs to become this huge sort of beast inside you that you can't turn off. I can easily fall into the rabbit hole of social media where I can't go to bed at night, and next thing you know, 20 minutes later, you're on your friend's cousin's sister's Instagram shots. People's great bodies or people's great relationships or great travels ` I feel the pressure from those to be that. I wanna do that. All of a sudden, you go to bed with all these negative thoughts about yourself and your life. Social media actually is a really big part of the problem. It creates this idea of the ideal of a perfect life and that, 'Everybody else is happier than me; 'everybody else is achieving more than me.' The second thing that social media does is it stops people learning to connect in a real way with real people. And, you know, loneliness and isolation spirals into depression. There's a famous quote about social media is essentially you comparing your own life to someone else's highlight reel, and it can be confronting living in that world of comparison all the time. It also means that when we're using those backlit devices, we're exposing our eyes to a lot of bright light. And the clearer the screens have become, it's because the amount of blue light being emitted from the screens has increased. And that blue light, especially, it actually stops our body from regulating certain hormones effectively, particularly hormones involved in sleep. If I did give myself an off button, I might lie on the couch and be on Instagram or on my phone, checking emails. But at the time then, during the burnout, I just didn't wanna talk about it. It's too exhausting. I felt fraudulent. I felt like inside I'm just tense and high and I just wanna sleep for a week. What I find about a lot of women is they worry about others, and I find them up at night. Well, that's the time that your own immune system needs to recharge and repair itself. It's like this cycle ` worrying about others, not sleeping, 'My immune system goes down. Now I'm at more vulnerability.' But when people get physically ill, the amazing part about that is it's the universal time where everybody is willing to give them a break. When you're tired, it impacts the food that we choose, whether we get off the couch and go for a walk or not, jobs that we would apply for, friends that we make, our self-talk and the way we speak to everyone we love in the world. Other consequences include, I think, the effects on our relationships. Because when we're constantly in that rush, it can be very difficult to remain patient and kind with strangers and with people we love. My close friends were the ones to pick up on it the most. One of my friends, in particular, she's like, 'Who are you? I don't know who you are any more. 'You know, you're zombie-like. You come out; when you come out, you're not present.' OK, good work. That's exciting. Bye. (CHUCKLES) They will show up in my office with anxiety, wanting me to give them a pill to fix it. I can temporarily get them through with giving them a medication, but we haven't solved the root of the problem yet. What is stress, essentially? There would be some people who would probably argue that it's almost like an achiever's word for 'fear'. So if stress actually is what we're frightened of ` these little things across our day ` instead of getting caught up in the stress response ` you might not show it to anyone; it might just all happen on the inside and you can feel really worked up, and let's say it happens when you're running late ` if you can pause and just catch yourself in that response and think, 'OK, if this is actually what I'm frightened of, what might that be?' And usually what people see when they pull the curtain back on what is stressing them out is what they're worried about is what other people think of them. So when you can pause and consider that, you'll start to be able to make some different choices. (QUIET, POIGNANT MUSIC) The first thing is to just pause and start to consider what are some of the things that they perceive are leading to them to feel like this. And there are things in our life that we can change, and there are things in our life that we can't. If you don't like how you feel or you don't like what's happening with your health or your body, taking that moment to pause and consider what you can change. That might be not using social media on the weekend. It might be that your focus is on eating more whole and real food. (PLASTIC BAG RUSTLES) Over the course of about two years, where I had to uncover all these beliefs about myself and what I wanted to achieve, that actually resulted in me realising what it is that contributes to my burnout. I've had to just learn to put my social media away sometimes ` sometimes go on a diet of social media ` and that seems to help a little bit. I tend to try and work out at least three times a week. But if I feel myself pushing it, then that's actually one of the first things I pull back on. I make sure I try and cook a really good meal for myself most nights of the week, and I try and actually connect or talk with people every day. Because I'm so achievement-focused, I can tend to just block out people and relationships in my life. And so I'm really trying hard to make a big effort to chat with my friends or a family member or a flatmate or someone at work. Some people are more able and more willing and more self-aware and pick these things up, and others tend to cope by denying and avoiding things. I have to keep watching myself. Because this week I got to a point where I felt like I was at a tipping point, and that's when I go, 'OK, it's time to put down the books 'and to put down the laptop and to put down the phone.' Because I was constantly on the run and doing, I wasn't taking my medicine; I wasn't doing my usual rituals and practices and all those things that help me feel like me and all the things that I used to do for the love. (POIGNANT PIANO MUSIC) The next thing I would say that every single human can do is to become breath-aware. For so many people, the only part of them that moves is the upper part of their chest ` so short, sharp, shallow breaths. And when you breathe like that, that's adrenaline that's driving that. We wanna activate the other arm of the nervous system. The only way you can activate the PNS, the green zone, is to extend the length of our exhalation. If we can get rituals in our day... If you sit at a computer, it might be every hour, on the hour that you do 20 long, slow breaths and move your belly in and out as you breathe. It might be that you get a restorative-type practice ritual ` yoga or t'ai chi, Pilates. Anything breath-focused is gonna help you move into that diaphragmatic breathing. When we breathe diaphragmatically, it communicates to every cell in our body that we are safe. In terms of my daily rituals, I use Headspace every morning, and I meditate for at least 10 minutes. I find that my head is sometimes like a computer, where it can just get logged and jammed up. And as soon as I meditate, it lets go of all those crazy thoughts, and maybe a lot of fear that I keep in my body. I personally have a morning ritual that I don't compromise. Ideally it's an hour ` I can't always do that ` but it's a minimum of 20 minutes. But even if people can only do five minutes of time to themselves ` it might be simply reading, might be going outside, might be going for a walk, having a cup of tea. Whatever it is that really nourishes your soul can be game-changing. It can be putting your hands on your belly, diaphragmatically breathing, looking out the window, feeling grateful for the day ahead, for the gift of their life. Whatever we focus on is what we feel. If we can focus on what we're grateful for, you can't make stress hormones at the same time as you're feeling grateful. (SOOTHING, GLOWING MUSIC) Mindfulness is a state of mind where you're choosing to put your attention in the present moment, and you train your attention. You train your attention usually to focus on your breathing or how your foot feels against the floor or something like that. And it's very clearly shown to stop` make it less likely you'll have recurrent depression, and a whole raft of physical improvements in health, and psychological improvements. (SOOTHING MUSIC CONTINUES) I do feel like when we get caught up in the rush, we often lose touch with just how fortunate our lives are. So keeping that front and centre, I think, can be incredibly beneficial to not going into that red zone. Just put your feet in the sand, hear the waves. It's magic. Just to be in nature ` no phones, no other people. This place, it reminds me of when I first started teaching and that really special time of just really teaching for the love of it ` without all of the other aspects that got piled on top when you run a business, that happen naturally. You can serve other people until you have first taken care of yourself. So I think that's one of the major shifts that needs to happen ` that self-care is not selfish. It's actually prepping you and allowing you to serve genuinely in the world. You know what, I see burnout in some respects just like an addiction. And so like any addiction, you've gotta be mindful of what tips you over. So I know my rituals, and I know the things that I need to keep up so that I don't fall off the edge. Thanks, everyone. I think joy also makes a difference to us, and when you talk to people who are dying and you ask them what they're gonna miss the most, they say the most simple things. They'll say their partner's face, the smell of a freshly-cut lemon, or the night sky, or the feeling of their dog's fur under their fingertips. We have all of that right now. And so for me, joy is about letting ourselves have what we already have. Because I think, forever we're looking to the future and what we might obtain or achieve, and yet there's so much joy to be experienced right now. Knowing what I know now, I do feel I'm enough. I do have periods where I struggle to think that I'm enough, but I recognise that those are just wrong beliefs and negative thoughts. If I was to say anything to young women in particular, it is, 'You are a human being and not a human 'doing', and you have value and worth just as you are.' (RISING MUSIC) Captions by Glenna Casalme. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017