Burnout Resilience and Work Stress: The Pattern Hiding in The "Yes"

The 3 AM Work Spiral

0:21 SPEAKER_00: This great story teaches us something about being human. I'm Cheryl Paris and this is Work Stress Anxiety. Together, let's borrow a little wisdom from a story to help us navigate a very modern world.

0:42 SPEAKER_01: Have you ever caught yourself thinking I should be able to handle this by now? Because you've been doing this for years. You've managed difficult people, you've worked through restructures, deadlines, demanding clients, you know, impossible workloads, difficult bosses. And what's really interesting is that you've led teams, you've solved problems, no one else knew what to do with. And you know your job. You know how to perform under pressure. So why are you lying awake at three AM in the morning replaying a conversation that happened twelve hours ago?

1:36 SPEAKER_01: Why does one fairly ordinary email suddenly make your stomach drop? Why are you wondering whether perhaps you've simply lost your edge? I want to talk about that today because there is a belief I hear again and again from very experienced, very capable women. If I've been doing this for years, I should be better at coping with it. And yes, on the surface that makes absolute sense. Yes, your intellectual mind gets it. Experience should help. And it does.

Experience Helps But Stress Remains

2:23 SPEAKER_01: Experience can make you more skillful, more confident, more knowledgeable, it can help you spot problems sooner, it can teach you which battles are worth fighting and which ones can be allowed to die quietly. But experience, in my opinion, doesn't make you immune to stress. And actually, there is another side of experience that we don't talk about. Sometimes experience makes you better at functioning while stressed, better at hiding it, better at carrying on long after something has started costing you more than you realised.

3:11 SPEAKER_01: Because burnout doesn't always announce itself with some enormous collapse. There isn't necessarily a I don't know, dramatic moment when you throw your laptop through a window and announce that you're moving, I don't know, to Cornwall. Often it starts much quieter. You know, the reason why I laughed at that is because I actually have actually seen someone do that, literally throw their laptop.

3:49 SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean? A little more tired. Sunday evening begins to have its own type of atmosphere. You check your emails before you've properly opened your eyes. You know, you tell yourself that you'll slow down after this particular project and then after the next one, and then maybe at the end of this quarter, you stop exercising because you're just I'm just way too busy, you say to yourself. Then you stop seeing people because you're too tired, then you fill some of that newly available time with more work, which is beautifully efficient little system if the goal is to become completely exhausted.

4:39 SPEAKER_01: You know, that's why high functioning stress can be so difficult to recognize. And when I mean high function, I mean you've got so good, so so good at masking it that you look as though you're coping. Because from the outside, there may be absolutely nothing to see. You're still turning up, you're still solving problems, you still sound calm in meetings, still remember that everyone else has forgotten. Yes, still saying yes, leave it to me, or leave it with me. Because when you are competent, people do, they leave things with you, they leave problems, decisions, difficult conversations, that bit of work no one quite knows how to manage, you know, the emotional responsibility for keeping everything and everyone steady, and because you can carry it, you carry it.

5:48 SPEAKER_01: But I want to make a really important distinction here.

High-Functioning Stress And Quiet Burnout

5:54 SPEAKER_01: Capability and capacity are not the same thing. You may be completely capable of doing something that does not automatically mean you have the capacity to keep doing it again and again and again. That distinction matters because experienced people often use capability as evidence that capacity must still be there. Well, I've managed last time, I got through the worst of it, I've always been able to cope, and yes, you probably have. But there is a difference between surviving something and being unaffected by it.

6:44 SPEAKER_01: There is absolutely a difference between being able to do something and being able to continue doing it indefinitely without a cost, and sometimes your mind is very, very slow to admit that cost, that cost. Your body, however, can be rather less diplomatic, you know. I know that a lot of people, their sleep changes, their concentration becomes patchy. And let me just say that this all things being equal, these are the things that you start noticing. Your patience starts getting shorter, you feel tired but strangely wired at the same time.

7:34 SPEAKER_01: You start forgetting things you normally remember easily. You know, you walk purposefully into the kitchen and then you stand there wondering why you came in. And because you're experienced, you compensate, you make more lists, um, you double-check everything, you work later, you become much more organized, you create increasingly elaborate systems that allow you to keep functioning inside a situation that perhaps needs to be questioned rather than try to be made more efficient. And I think that's one of the traps.

8:14 SPEAKER_01: The very skills that make you successful can sometimes keep you kind of stuck because you're good at coping, you're good at pushing through, and eventually other people start believing they are easy to, including you.

The Hidden Cost Of Looking Fine

8:35 SPEAKER_01: Right, before I go any further, I want to take a moment to thank you. To thank all of you who listen to the podcast week in and week out, and this time I want to say a particular hello and thank you to the listener in Rye Gate Surrey who recently listened to You Look Fine, so why does resentment feel so heavy? You know, I genuinely love seeing where in the world you're listening from, because it's very easy when I'm recording this to forget that there's actually somebody at the end other end of this.

9:17 SPEAKER_01: It's easy for me to forget that, but I don't because I understand that you're probably listening in the car, or you might be walking the dog, or you're even making your dinner, or you're maybe taking 10-15 minutes away from your particularly ridiculous working day right now. And um I'd also really like to hear from you, yes, not simply whether you enjoy an episode, but what landed, you know, what made you think, what made what did you disagree with? Oh, I love people who disagree with me. So because your feedback helps me make, or I hope it does, help me make these conversations more useful.

10:08 SPEAKER_01: You can send your feedback, questions, or suggestions to podcastfeedback.com work stressanxiety. So that's podcastfeedback.com forward slash work stress anxiety, and thank you genuinely for listening.

When Competence Becomes Identity

10:30 SPEAKER_01: Now, because after years of being the capable one, competency can stop being something you do, right? It can start becoming something you believe you have to be, you have to be that reliable one, the strong one.

11:02 SPEAKER_01: Somewhere underneath, it can begin to sound like, well, maybe I can't handle this anymore, or maybe I'm losing my edge, and that fear can keep very capable people pushing for months and months longer than is healthier for them. And it's not because you're weak, right? Let's just make this clear. It's not because you're weak, it's because your professional identity has kind of become entangled with endurance because resistance is often mis sorry, resilience is often misunderstood, right? Resilience is not being unaffected by everything.

11:52 SPEAKER_01: It's not an endless, I don't know, tolerance. It's it's not the ability to absorb more and more and more pressure. If that were resilience, we'd all be measured, we'd all measure it in I don't know, concrete, right? Real resilience includes noticing, adjusting, responding, and recovering, sometimes saying no, sometimes asking for help, sometimes asking a much more uncomfortable question of yourself. Why am I trying so hard to become better at tolerating something that may actually need to change?

12:47 SPEAKER_01: Because I know sometimes the answer is not another productivity strategy, it's not another thing to your morning routine. You know, there are situations, I'm sure you've seen it, where the workload is simply too much, where expectations have quietly become unreasonable because maybe the department's failing, or maybe your team's failing, and it's where a boundary has suddenly disappeared, where your role has grown, but your resources haven't, where you have become an official safety net for everybody else around you, and experience does not make those things less, you know, harmless.

13:44 SPEAKER_01: And just very quickly, if these are the kind of conversations that help you make sense of what's happening underneath work stress and work anxiety, please do make sure you follow the podcast. You can follow the podcast at follow thepodcast.com forward slash work stress anxiety. That way the next episode should find its way to you rather than you having to remember to come look for it.

Swap Self-Blame For Curiosity

14:15 SPEAKER_01: Okay, so if you've been thinking lately, I should be coping better than this. I want you to try this. I want you to replace that question, and instead of asking yourself secretly what is wrong with me, I want you to ask yourself what has changed that means the way I have always coped is no longer enough. Yeah, you know the answer to that question. Just as you're listening to this, just as you're hearing my voice, your mind's already going away and looking for the answer for you. And maybe work isn't the only place where people need things from you.

15:07 SPEAKER_01: Maybe you've spent years being incredibly good at meeting everyone else's expectations, and you have finally reached the point where your own needs have started to knock even louder at the door.

Experience As Information Not Armor

15:24 SPEAKER_01: You know, there is something else I want you to consider. What if all the experience that you've been gathering was never supposed to become armour? What if it was just supposed to be information? Because to me, there's a big difference. Armour says, I've survived this before, so I should be able to survive it again. Whereas information kind of says, I know what happens when I work like this for a long time. I know what happens when I ignore this feeling that I have.

16:29 SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's a usually that second thought waiting behind it. So what do I do about it? And I'm not going to tell you the answer is to dramatically do something like resign. No, you do not need to burn your career to the ground and run off to that beautiful cottage that you've seen in Wales to make sourdough bread. No. Unless that's happens to be a long-standing ambition of yours, then yeah, go for it. But something may need to change.

Small Boundaries That Change Everything

17:10 SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm talking about. And it may, it might be something um that you've been thinking about, you know. Maybe you've been having this conversation to yourself, you know.

17:27 SPEAKER_01: It's to me, it's almost like an evening when you don't open your laptop again after dinner. Just that one simple thing, or asking for clarification rather than simply absorbing another responsibility, or saying this, you know, I I can't do this now, but I but I could do it by Friday. Because one of the questions I think every high functioning professional needs to ask occasionally is this what am I doing because it genuinely belongs to me, and what am I doing simply because everybody knows I will do it?

18:16 SPEAKER_01: Hard question sometimes to answer. You get that feeling sometimes. I know where I get that feeling, right in the middle of my chest. It's almost like a it's almost like you know, my body takes a shallow breath, and I just think to myself, oh yes, yes, Cheryl, you need to ask yourself that. So, what does this all mean? Just with some curiosity for a moment, because your body may be giving you information, your professional brain has become extremely skilled at overriding, and you don't need to solve your entire career right now, you don't even need a five-year plan.

19:04 SPEAKER_01: You don't even know need to know exactly what happens next. Sometimes I think the first step is simply to stop arguing with yourself, yeah? Stopping that endless internal um dialogue, you know, almost like in the courtroom where the prosecution keeps producing evidence that you should be able to cope. You can be experienced and overwhelmed, you can be successful and anxious, you can be very, very good at your job and exhausted by the way that you're currently what you're currently having to do. Those things can exist in the same person, and acknowledging that doesn't erase your competency, it does not mean you've suddenly become incapable, it means you are paying attention.

Two Questions Before You Unravel

20:06 SPEAKER_01: So I want to leave you with these two questions, just two okay. The first is what is it costing me to keep doing things this way? What is it costing you? Your sleep, your relationships, you know the answer. And the second question is this what is one thing I could change before circumstances force the change on me? One thing, it doesn't need to be dramatic, it simply needs to interrupt this pattern because if you're listening to this while still turning up, still delivering, still looking completely competent from the outside, but somewhere, somewhere inside, you know that you're starting to unravel.

21:02 SPEAKER_01: Please, please, please don't use the fact that you are still functioning as evidence that everything is fine. Sometimes functioning, in my experience, is simply what experienced people are exceptionally good at doing, even when they're exhausted, anxious, or they've been carrying on for far too long. And perhaps your experience has served you, can serve you differently now, right? Not like I said, not by becoming a stronger armor, but helping you hide, not by helping you hide it better, but by maybe recognizing something's going on sooner, listening sooner to what your body is telling you, responding differently, and to stop measuring your strength by how much discomfort you can carry without anybody else noticing.

22:05 SPEAKER_01: You know, it is how to know when something needs to change. That's your strength.

Progress At Any Pace

22:23 SPEAKER_01: Now, finish your coffee, take a breath, and remember progress is progress no matter the pace. Until next time, bye for now.