Tag: Stress

How to Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout Part 2

If you started with Part 1, you’ll already be familiar with my blue-yellow-green-yellow-red stress state system, what each state feels like to you, and have a variety of factors you can use to identify your stress state. If you’ve been tracking your state since last week, you may have already noticed some patterns in how your stress state fluctuates over the course of a day or week.

The next step is to identify what is making your stress state move away from the green zone (triggers) and what you can do to bring it back towards the green zone (relievers). Then we’ll put everything together to build a routine where you manage the stress you accumulate as it happens and keep yourself in the green zone as much as possible.

TRIGGERS

Triggers are anything we find stressful. Anything that changes our stress state in a direction away from the green zone.

Some are obvious – the ones that have already come to mind as you read this. Others you’ll have to discover by observing fluctuations in your stress state and looking for the cause.

Some are predictable and consistent – these are the easier ones to manage. Others are spontaneous or fluctuating in intensity and will take extra time, awareness, or effort to manage.

Types

There are lots of different types of triggers. The things that trigger a stress response in you is completely individual and valid. Here are some examples (but this is by no means an exhaustive list):

  • Personal
    • Health fluctuations, physiological stresses, pain
    • Security (income, house, car, work, finances)
    • Dysphoria
    • Addiction
    • Reminder of past trauma or loss
  • Interpersonal
    • Abuse, threats, violence
    • Discrimination
    • Worry or care for a loved one
    • Expectations
    • Deadlines
    • Tension in a relationship, broken trust
    • Loss
  • Societal
    • Political unrest or discrimination
    • Systemic discrimination
    • Sensationalist news cycle
    • Pandemics/natural disasters

This list is just to get you started and give you some ideas of where to look. Not all of these will be sources of stress for you and there are likely other things that are triggers for you that are not on this list. You can keep adding and removing triggers from this list as things change in your life. For now, let’s take the list you have and fill in some practical details for each one.

Effects

Some triggers have a consistent and specific effect on your stress state. For example, some triggers will always push you towards the red zone while others will always push you towards the blue zone. If you notice any triggers like this in your list, make a note of it.

Most of your triggers will have a more general effect of moving you away from the green zone in either direction. Which direction your stress state moves is not always predictable since we are complex organisms living in a complex societal system. We are not trying to create an equation or predictive model, simply look for patterns.

Intensity

Different triggers will have different magnitude of effect. Some cause a small amount of stress and might move you from green to yellow or yellow to red/blue (one step). Some cause a moderate amount of stress and could move you from green straight to red/blue or from yellow straight to black (two steps). Some may cause so much stress that you would immediately shut down or dissociate i.e. move from green straight to black (three steps).

Consider each trigger on your list and assign it a number value from 1 to 3. You can add a 0.5 value if there are some low level triggers that wouldn’t even move you a whole stress level. Or you can use whatever number system works for you (1-5, 1-10). Try to keep it as simple as possible. We want to be able to easily relate it to the fluctuations in our stress state and, as you’ll see in the next section, use the same system for our stress relievers.

Let’s take a look at those now.

RELIEVERS

Relievers are anything that decreases your stress level or shifts your stress state towards the green zone. These are not things that get rid of the cause of the stress (the trigger or stressor). They are activities that reduce the stress load on our system by helping us process or decrease the effects of the stress.

Types

As with triggers, there are lots of different types of relievers. I have grouped them into categories that I find practical.

  • Positive Interaction
    • A long hug
    • Intimate time with my partner
    • Positive social time with a small group
    • Exercising compassion by doing something nice for someone
  • Moving Your Body
    • Running or other cardiovascular exercise
    • Hiking or fast paced walking
    • Dance
    • Strength training
  • System Regulation
    • Deep breathing
    • Meditation
    • Yoga, stretching, Tai Chi, Qigong
    • Relaxation
    • Reading
  • Creative Expression
    • Creative writing
    • Art
    • Crocheting, sewing, or other fiber crafts
    • Singing or playing music
  • Productive Processing Time
    • Journaling
    • Therapy
    • Letting my mind puzzle through things, find connections, or clean up the mental clutter while doing housework, having a shower, or other mundane task
    • Doing a mundane task while staying focused on the positive effect I am having or the gratitude I have towards that aspect of my life

Some of these will occur over the natural course of your day. Some you will have to find time to engage in.

Effects

Some relievers will have a stronger effect towards relieving stress from specific sources. For example, I find exercise to be particularly helpful for acute triggers like an interpersonal interaction where I experienced discrimination and creative expression to be particularly helpful for chronic low level triggers like dysphoria, systemic discrimination, and typical daily stress.

Some relievers will have a stronger effect when you are in a specific stress state. For example, I find system regulation relievers to be more helpful when I am in the yellow to red zones and positive interactions when I am in the yellow to blue zones.

Some relievers will be effective no matter what stress state you’re in or what the trigger was. For me, this is productive processing time.

If you notice any of these specific effects, make note of them next to the relievers in your list.

Intensity

As with triggers, each reliever will have a stronger or lesser effect. Some will bring you one level closer to green, some will move you two levels closer to green. However, in my experience, triggers tend to be better at moving us away from the green zone than relievers are at restoring us to our green zone. So if you used the 1-3 scoring system for triggers, it’s likely that you’ll be using 0.5 or even 0.25 for some of your relievers. Even though it seems like an activity that relieves so little stress wouldn’t even be worth doing, it is important to have these relievers in your list. You’ll see why in a second.

Energy Cost

This is a really important aspect of relievers to consider. How much energy does it take for you to initiate or complete each relieving activity? You can use a number system again (1-3, 1-5, or 1-10) or a traffic light system (red for hard, yellow for moderate, green for easy), or any other system that makes sense to you.

The important thing is to know which activities you can do with little to no energy reserve, which ones will take a bit more energy, and which ones will take considerable energy. This shows you which ones to engage in when you’re in an extremely burnt out state (black), which ones you can manage in a moderately stressed state (red/blue) or slightly stressed state (yellow), and which ones you’ll only be able to engage in when you’re at your best (green).

For the most part, I have found that the higher the energy cost, the greater the intensity of the effect on my stress level. This means that the low cost relievers have the smallest effects. But sometimes, if that’s all I can manage, that is where I have to start. Don’t forget these effects are cumulative. Four easy stress relieving activities can bring me out of the black zone and back into blue/red. I then have enough energy to engage in slightly higher cost activities that have a stronger effect.

Now that you know all about your triggers and relievers, let’s design a practical strategy for managing your stress level and keeping you in the green zone.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

So far, you have:

  • Identified your stress states and described them using physical, mental, and emotional cues
  • Identified patterns in how your stress state fluctuates throughout the day or week
  • Identified your triggers, how they affect your stress state, and how intense that effect is
  • Identified your relievers, what types of triggers or stress states they are useful for, how intense the effect is, and how much energy they cost

Now you will learn how to use this information on a daily basis to manage your stress as you accumulate it. The goal is to develop a routine that is sustainable and helps keep you in the green zone. That way, when you encounter unexpected triggers or routine triggers are suddenly more intense, you have a buffer before you end up in the black zone and you have the energy reserve to engage in the most effective relievers.

Here is one example of a daily practice you can follow:

  1. Monitor your stress state (as discussed in Part 1)
  2. Make note of the triggers you encounter – type, effect, intensity
  3. Make note of the relievers you engage in – type, intensity
  4. Determine amount and type of unresolved stress
  5. Engage in appropriate and manageable relieving activities

You will see a pattern of typical triggers you encounter and typical relievers you engage in. If your day to day activities are sustainable and allow you to stay in the green zone, you will find you are engaging in enough relievers to match or outweigh the amount of stress generated by the triggers.

If your day to day activities are slowly leading you towards burnout (or other black zone state), you will find that your typical daily relievers are not sufficient to counteract the stress generated by your triggers. Are there triggers you can do a better job of avoiding or resolve altogether? Are there relievers that would be more effective that can replace the ones you are currently using? Are there relievers you can add to your routine that would be low cost or ones you can do while doing other things?

After a few weeks of assessing your stress state and the balance of triggers and relievers, you will figure out which relievers work easily into your schedule to most effectively balance the majority of the stress from your triggers. But at some point, you will encounter one of those spontaneous triggers, one that was suddenly at a much higher intensity, or a seemingly unending stream of small triggers that add stress faster than you can deal with it. This is when you’ll need to add something to your routine.

Determine which relievers you have the energy to engage in and of those, which would be the most effective based on the type of trigger or the stress state you are in. If you’ve been doing a good job of relieving your daily stress as it happens, you will be starting from a fairly stable place and it will not take nearly as much work to return to your green zone.

You can add extra relieving activities to your schedule a couple times a week to process any extra stress beyond your typical that you accumulate from those unpredictable triggers. If your stress is well managed on those days, these become bonus green-zone-reinforcing activities!

I hope this set of emotional processing and stress management posts has helped you! If you have questions, need clarification, or simply need a sounding board to work through some of these steps, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can send me an email or comment on a post.

If you have a different way to process big emotions or manage ongoing stress, I’d love to hear it! Please send me an email or comment below! My strategies won’t work for everyone. Maybe yours will be the strategy someone is looking for!

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How to Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout Part 1

In an ideal world, stressors would be concrete and transient – easy to identify and able to be processed to the point of relief. But in the real world, there are a lot of stressors that are nebulous and persistent. It’s hard to relieve your stress when you can’t identify or get rid of the source.

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. The stress is still there whether you acknowledge it or not. It is still affecting your hormones, behaviour, emotions, and brain function. It builds up and builds up until you are forced to remove yourself from contact with the stressor via sickness, burnout, addiction, or breakdown. While stress is not always the cause of these states, in my experience, unmanaged stress will inevitably lead to these states or something similar.

I have struggled with burnout for a number of years. During this time I have developed and refined a strategy for monitoring my level of stress and taking daily action to relieve as much of it as I can to prevent it from building up and causing burnout. In this post I’ll talk you through the monitoring component. In Part 2, we’ll work through the managing process.

You may be able to process and resolve some of the areas of emotional stress in your life. I have a different system for this which I talk about in two posts: How to Work Through Areas of Emotional Stress Part 1 and Part 2. The more areas of stress you resolve, the less stress you have to manage on an ongoing basis. And being good at managing your stress will help you stay as happy and content as you can while you’re working on cleaning up as much of your emotional chaos as possible. Both processing and managing stress are important. You can start with either one. The important thing is to put in consistent effort until it becomes automatic.

STRESS ZONES

The first step towards managing your stress is to identify what your different stress states feel like to you. I colour coded my stress states as follows:

Green: good, happy, relaxed, calm, confident, optimal, not stressed at all.

Red: anxious, irritable, angry, chaotic, antsy, hyper, spazzy, fight or flight.

Blue: tired, heavy, sad, numb, scared, avoidant, fatigued, freeze or flight.

These three states (what I think of as neutral – green, high – red, and low – blue) are the easiest to identify. But you don’t want to wait until you are all the way in the red or blue zones to recognize a shift in your stress level. So I include yellow zones – one between green and red, and one between green and blue. I also added a black zone beyond red and blue to indicate that spending too much time in either of those states will lead to burnout or sickness (or whatever your system shutdown mode is).

I laid out my page from top to bottom as follows: black, red, yellow, green, yellow, blue, black.

Now you are going to add as much detail for how those states feel like to you as you can. We are going to use three different indicators: physical, mental, and emotional. For each of these, start with whatever colour is easiest for you to fill in (typically green, red, and blue). Move on to the harder ones (typically the yellow zones). If you’re not sure what to put in the yellow zones, write down a gentler version of what you have in the red or blue zone. For example, if you put angry in red, maybe put frustrated in yellow, or if you put fatigued in blue, put tired in yellow. Don’t worry about filling in black – your system will tell you when you’ve hit that level whether you know what it feels like or not.

Let’s go through each of these indicators separately.

Physical

How does your body feel when you’re in that state?

How much energy do you have? Do you tend to sleep more or less than your average?

Do you have increased muscle tension or heaviness and fatigue? Does your body feel hot, cold, tingly, or numb? Where in your body do you feel these sensations?

Does your appetite change? Do you feel nauseous, queasy, or hungry?

Do you feel dizzy or lightheaded? Do you get headaches, body aches, or other types of pain?

How does your breathing feel? Is it faster or slower, deeper or shallower? Do you breathe more with your chest and shoulders or your belly?

How does your heartrate feel? Is it faster, slower, or erratic?

Mental

What thoughts go through your head when you’re in that state?

What words do you use when describing a situation such as going to work or attending a family gathering when you’re in that state?

What words do you use when describing yourself when you’re in that state?

How is your ability to concentrate? Are you able to shut out external distractions? Are you able to ignore distracting thoughts and emotions?

Are your senses heightened or dulled? Are you hypersensitive to any particular stimuli?

How easy is it to learn something new? Are you able to remember things just as easily as when you are in the green zone?

How would you describe the inside of your mind? Is it chaotic, filled with static, fritzing, dark, foggy, cloudy, bright, open, constricted, porous, etc?

Emotional

What emotions do you feel most often when in this state? To make this nice and easy, refer to an emotions wheel such as this one.

Don’t be afraid to write down conflicting emotions for the same colour. Each state isn’t always triggered in the same way so we can definitely experience a range of emotions.

You may find describing one of the indicators (physical, mental, or emotional) to be significantly easier than the others. We all experience stress differently and pay attention to different stress responses. I still recommend you try to write down something for each indicator in each stress state. Sometimes when we’re calm we can most easily identify one aspect but when we’re actually in this state it’s a different aspect that is most obvious.

MONITORING YOUR STRESS STATE

Once you have a list of physical, mental, and emotional descriptors for the five stress zones, you can start using it to monitor your stress level. You can’t manage something you aren’t aware of. Set an alert on your phone to go off at regular intervals or pick a few times a day to do a quick check in. Try to pick a few times a day when you are in different environments – when you wake up, when you’re at work, when you’re with family, before bed.

You can quickly answer the above physical and mental questions and pick out three emotions on the wheel and then see which state your responses line up with or you can refer to your descriptions of the zones and do a physical, mental, and emotional check in to see where you land. Whichever way gets the most honest and accurate response without taking so much time that you won’t stick with this practice.

The goal is to get familiar with your own stress states and symptoms so that you don’t have to consciously do the check in. You will notice when your muscle tension, energy level, or breathing pattern changes. You will hear a repetitive thought in your head and know that you’ve shifted to a different zone. You’ll realize your reactions to people around you are different, indicating a new emotional state.

I recommend documenting your stress state. If you’re monitoring it, why not track it as well? You can use a pocket calendar with coloured stickers (make sure you differentiate the two yellow zones somehow), an app in your phone, a journal, or even a series of sticky notes if that’s what’s handy.

You can track your stress for a few days, a week, or longer. It’s up to you. This information will show you any consistent patterns in how your stress changes throughout your day and throughout a week. These patterns will be very helpful when we work through the second step in this process: managing stress.

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How to Work Through Areas of Emotional Stress Part 2

You will want to start with Part 1.

How is everyone doing? If you have started working through steps 1 to 3 already you might be feeling a bit emotionally vulnerable, bruised, or drained. That’s ok. It’s part of the healing process. But make sure you take care of yourself. If you push yourself too fast and don’t let your emotions settle again before tackling steps 4 to 6, you will be too overwhelmed to use your analytical skills and too vulnerable to be as honest with yourself as you need to be.

In case you missed it before, here is a blank chart you can use as a guideline to fill in as you work through the steps.

Processing-Emotional-StressDownload

Now, let’s continue on to steps 4 through 6.

4. IDENTIFY THE SOURCE OR TRIGGER FOR EACH EMOTION

This is the hardest part in terms of thinking and detective work. The goal is to answer the question “Why do I feel this way?” for each negative emotion that you listed in step 3. Some examples of sources or triggers for emotions are:

  • Beliefs held by others close to you or society as a whole
  • Formative experiences
  • Influences of people who had an impact on you
  • Physiological factors
  • Dysphoria
  • Your own actions
  • Personal values or priorities
  • Personal beliefs or attitudes

Sometimes you need to work backwards a few steps. For example:

  1. Area of stress – feeling like I’m not a good parent
  2. Aspect of control – belief;
  3. Emotion – inadequate;
  4. Why? Because I can’t lift my kid due to pain (physiological factor). Why does not being able to lift my child due to pain make me feel inadequate? Because I have an expectation that in order to be a good parent I need to be able to lift my child when they ask to be picked up (personal belief). Why do I feel like being a good parent requires lifting my child? Because that is the model of parenting I am exposed to by society (belief of society – ableism).

Result: I am affected by the belief that I am not a good parent which makes me feel inadequate because society tells me I should be able to lift my kid when they ask to be lifted and I can’t always do that because of pain.

This process takes time. You have to sit with each answer to the why question for a little while to see if your mind is still searching or if that resonates with you as being the root cause. I have found that talking to a trusted friend or family member is very helpful at this stage. They often have similar experiences or insight into my own beliefs, thoughts, experiences, feelings, and actions.

During this process you may uncover a new influential or formative experience from your past that is the root cause of the area of stress you originally listed in step one. You can either work through this area of stress again by starting with the newly discovered cause or you can list this experience as a separate area of stress and work through it at another time.

Sometimes the root cause of an emotion is something that is within our control (matches something we wrote in step two) and sometimes it’s not. When it is, we can be reluctant to accept that this is true because it would mean we are responsible for some of the emotional distress we have been feeling. But be honest with yourself and fear not! The next step will help you use this hard-won accountability to your advantage.

5. TAKE ACTION

By now you have separated out your different areas of stress, identified what aspects you have control over, experienced the emotions that are triggered, and discovered the root cause of those emotions. Now you are going to decide what actions to take.

The purpose of taking action is to interrupt the link between the root cause (step 4) and the negative emotion (step 3). We can only act on things that are within our control (step 2) so for each emotion that you want to disrupt, you have to identify which link closest to the root cause is in your control and choose an action that will address that. Using the example from step 4, the root cause (societal ableism) is not within my control so I would back up to the link before (personal belief) and target that with an action plan.

Some examples of actions are:

  • Reframe the experience or adjust your beliefs through journaling, art, or a list of affirmations
  • Change your behaviour or adopt a new habit
  • Re-evaluate your priorities and values
  • Seek out community, connection, or support
  • Channel your personal experiences and strong emotions into advocacy
  • Talk about your experience or struggle and embrace the vulnerability
  • Confront negative influences
  • Set or re-set personal, emotional, or relationship boundaries

Be creative. Take actions that resonate with you and will help support you. Avoid actions that will drain you further or take more time, money, or willpower than you can give. You may be able to find an action that will break more than one cause-emotion chain.

Take small steps. No action is too small but most actions that you come up with initially will be too big.

Set short term goals (hour, day, week at most). Our brains are constantly measuring the distance to our goal, how much progress we are making, and how much effort it is taking to achieve that progress. If progress slows down too much or takes too much effort, our brain automatically shifts into stress mode (which we are clearly trying to avoid) or flight mode (I don’t actually care about this goal anyway, I’m fine). This is such a common occurrence for us that we are pretty terrible at noticing when it is happening. Thus, the reason for step six.

6. REVIEW YOUR PROGRESS

Don’t leave this step for too long! When you are working through hard stuff to get out of a stressful emotional loop, a month can feel like eternity unless you can tell you’re making progress. At the same time, this process can be so emotionally intense that you need to dedicate a week to working out the root cause of each emotion for one area of stress.

So pick a timeline that works for you – two weeks, a month, three months. I would say six months is too long no matter how slowly you have to work through your areas of stress.

You can start your timer from when you initiate your action plan or from when you started with step one. It depends if you are reviewing your progress with one specific area of stress or the whole process for all areas of your life. You can set different review periods for both of these if you’d like.

When the time to review comes up, look back through your notes from step one through to step five. Do they all still resonate with you? Have the emotions that you experience when you replay the event or delve into that area of your life changed? Do you have new insights into the root causes or triggers for those emotions? How have you done with following through on your action plan? Did the actions you took help the way you wanted them to or do you want to try something else?

If a lot of the stress from an area has resolved, try working through the steps again as though it is the first time. If there are aspects you still need to work on, this will make those clear. If you’re happy with how well it has resolved, consider that area of stress complete!

WHAT IF THE CAUSE OF THE STRESS IS ONGOING OR OUT OF MY CONTROL?

Not all areas of stress can be resolved by processing them. Sometimes we process the parts we have control over (challenging our negative beliefs, adjusting our priorities, finding community and support) and it is still a moderately high source of stress.

I have a different system for managing stress that I share in another two part series: How to Manage Stress and Prevent Burnout Part 1 and Part 2. It is visual, practical, and straightforward. There are lots of ways you can adapt it to create something that will work for you.

As always, reach out if you need to.

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How to Work Through Areas of Emotional Stress Part 1

My experiences have taught me how to work through intense situations and process emotions so that I’m not holding on to negative sources of stress and being influenced by them in ways I don’t like or can’t control. I wanted to share my strategy in the hopes that it will help you do the same.

This process is based on the belief that we can, for the most part, control what is in our own heads and are responsible for our own emotions. We can absolutely be manipulated, traumatized, abused, gaslit, or have a chemical/hormonal imbalance but my hope is that working through this process will help separate the manipulation and influence of others or physiological causes from what is genuine to ourselves and under our control.

This process has six steps:

  1. List areas of emotional stress
  2. Identify which aspects are within your control
  3. List the emotions
  4. Identify the source or trigger for each emotion
  5. Take action
  6. Review your progress

In this post, I will explain steps 1 to 3. In Part 2 I will cover steps 4 to 6.

Here is a document containing a blank chart that you can use as a guideline to fill in.

Processing-Emotional-StressDownload

Now, let’s look at the first three steps in detail.

1. LIST AREAS OF EMOTIONAL STRESS

What takes up space in the back of your mind that nags at you, wears down your emotions, or takes energy to keep it pushed to the back of your mind? When you’re having a day where you are stressed, tired, irritable, numb, or teary, what negative things does your brain say to you? What aspects of your life make you feel stressed when you are forced to think about or focus on them?

These can be a variety of things:

  • Past experiences that were traumatic, difficult, or had a lasting negative impact on you
  • Negative beliefs about yourself
  • Broken relationships
  • Components of your life that feel like a constant struggle
  • A future event (though this is often causing stress because of a present or past situation or belief)

Still not sure what is specifically bothering you? Think through each area of your life: health, work/vocation, relationships, childhood, finances/security, identity, or anything else that is important to you. Do you frown, feel your body tense, or experience a negative emotion when you think about that area of your life? It’s a good bet that one area of stress relates to that area. Break that area of your life down into smaller pieces if you can and watch for the same reaction. The more specific you can be the better.

2. IDENTIFY WHICH ASPECTS ARE WITHIN YOUR CONTROL

Often when something happens to us we feel like we have no control over the situation or event. This naturally leads to the belief that we have no control over the outcome or effects of the event. In my experience, this is not true. We always have control over SOME components of how a situation is affecting us presently. For example:

  • Our current actions
  • Our current beliefs and attitudes
  • Our ability and willingness to adapt
  • Our willingness to seek out and accept support

Be honest with yourself. This isn’t about figuring out the truth of a past event. This is about identifying how that past event is currently affecting you and what parts of that effect are under your control. What you learn from this step will be important for building a useful action plan in step 5.

3. LIST THE EMOTIONS

This is the hardest part emotionally. You might want to pick one area of stress to focus on and continue from step 3 to 6 with that one area before you process another one to avoid being overwhelmed. You will likely want to work on this step in a private, safe space. I recommend having a self care plan in place in advance – when you are in emotional turmoil, what helps you regain a sense of emotional stability? Plan to engage in these activities or have a friend standing by for you to connect with as often as you need while working through this step.

The goal is to list all the emotions that are brought to the surface when you delve into each area of stress. Some ideas of how you can do this are by:

  • Replaying the experience in your head
  • Writing about that area of your life or that situation
  • Listening to the self-talk that relates to that experience or aspect of yourself
  • Talking about it with a trusted person

Don’t forget about the positive emotions! Often we focus on the negative ones and once we list the positive ones along side them we realize we have a more balanced experience than our brain has been telling us.

I recommend you refer to an emotions wheel (such as the one you can find here) to help you find appropriate words for what you are feeling. I have definitely had the experience where I feel something, or more likely many things, and it is overwhelming and difficult to find a word that describes it which leads to frustration. You can also use the emotions wheel as a prompt – work your way around the wheel thinking about each emotion separately, what that would feel like for you, and if that feeling matches something that came up while replaying or sitting with an area of stress.

If all the different areas of stress in your life seem to cause the same set of emotions or if you only seem to experience emotions from a narrow spectrum of the emotions wheel, consider the possibility that there may be an underlying physiological cause such as a neurochemical or hormonal imbalance. I am not a doctor. This observation comes from personal and second hand experience.

You are halfway there! Steps 1 to 3 are all about discovery. In Part 2 we explore steps 4 to 6 which are about analysis, action, and reflection. Take your time with this process and take care of yourself as you work through the tough stuff. I’m always here for you if you need community and support.

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How Dysphoria Contributes to Burnout and What You Can Do About It

WHAT IS BURNOUT?

I have struggled with cycles of burnout for many years now. For a long time I felt like I was making it up, or being lazy, or finding an excuse to avoid the mundane but challenging parts of everyday life. Very little of what I was feeling matched the symptoms of depression but that was the closest I felt like I could come. Until I heard about burnout.

When I’m in a state of burnout, the thought that keeps going through my mind is ‘I just don’t care’. I know I should, and usually do, but I can’t muster up the emotional energy to engage with almost all aspects of life. This is not me. In this state, I don’t feel like myself. And because I don’t have the energy to care, it is very hard to make myself do the things that will help me get out of the state of burnout.

I feel numb, heavy, and drawn to escapism. It feels like the world is happening around me and I’m just going through the motions. I don’t keep up with house chores, I eat less and more poorly, I socialize less, I exercise less (usually not at all), I am often late, and my productivity at work decreases.

If this sounds like you or someone you know, I highly recommend the book ‘Burnout’ by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Not all of it resonated with me but the parts that did have been very helpful by giving me language to discuss my experiences of burnout with others, different ways of thinking about and noticing how I’m functioning, and practical strategies to prevent and recover from burnout.

HOW DYSPHORIA CONTRIBUTES TO BURNOUT

I have found that dysphoria is a large contributor to my burnout. There are three reasons for this:

  1. It takes a lot of mental effort to ignore the buzz of dysphoria in order to focus on what I’m supposed to be doing. It takes mental effort to check in with myself, identify what aspects of dysphoria I’m feeling, and use appropriate management strategies. It takes mental effort to identify and avoid situations that trigger my dysphoria (as much as possible). And it takes mental effort to reframe the dysphoria or fight it’s effects by using positive self talk and affirmation. So yah, lots of mental effort.
  2. Dysphoria is constant. It goes up and down depending on the day, my emotional state, my physical state, who I’m around, and what situation I’m in, but even at it’s lowest it’s still there. So lots of constant mental effort.
  3. Generally, there is a lack of understanding from others about what dysphoria is and how it affects me (or how it can affect people). The situations where my dysphoria is triggered the most and which are unavoidable are also the situations where I’m surrounded by and interacting with people who do not understand dysphoria. So lots of constant mental effort that is invisible to or misunderstood by the people around me.

WHAT BURNOUT FROM DYSPHORIA FEELS LIKE

For me, certain symptoms of burnout are specific to dysphoria. Three main ones are:

  1. Decreased attention/focus. So much of my attention is taken up by ignoring, managing, avoiding, and fighting the effects of dysphoria that I have less mental space to spend on other things. It is harder to stay on task, perform multiple step activities without getting derailed, maintain momentum on a task, block out distractions, and remember details.
  2. Irritability/easily frustrated. Dysphoria is an internal irritant that is constant and unavoidable. No matter how good I am at managing it, it will never be zero. So I already have a baseline irritation that I am working to ignore. That means that I have less patience for other sources of irritation. Less patience leads to more frustration. The more dysphoria I have, the more easily frustrated and irritable I am.
  3. Physical, mental, and emotional fatigue. The constant mental effort I talked about above is exhausting. The feeling of being misunderstood and invisible and at odds with myself or how people see me is emotionally exhausting. We feel our emotions in our bodies so I end up with a feeling of heaviness and lethargy that means I don’t feel like I have the physical energy to exercise or do any extra tasks (even though that is what would often help me the most).

WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

Over the last few years I have developed a number of different strategies to help manage my burnout. After reading the book I recommended above, I have some more language to explain it and some practical strategies to suggest.

Prevention

Identify the sources of dysphoria for you. Develop strategies to decrease as much of the dysphoria as you can (more posts on this in the Related Posts list below). Where possible, avoid situations that trigger high amounts of dysphoria or repetitive situations that trigger even small amounts of dysphoria (such as getting dressed in a room that doesn’t have a mirror).

As much as possible, make these dysphoria prevention, management, and avoidance strategies automatic. Restructure your environment, schedule, or routine so that you don’t have to spend mental energy on remembering to do things in a different way. The goal is to decrease your baseline mental workload, not increase it.

Protection

In psychology they talk about protective experiences that may be completely unrelated to the harmful experience but help build resilience and emotional capacity or offset or heal some of the negative effects. There are a few protective experiences that I have found to be important in decreasing the burnout caused by dysphoria.

  1. Euphoria. Notice moments of gender euphoria and seek them out. Avoiding dysphoria is helpful to tell you what doesn’t work for you but moving towards euphoria tells you what you should do. Moments of euphoria can pass us by or be overshadowed by dysphoria unless we notice them, focus on them, and celebrate them. In this way, they can be a beacon of light to look forward to and to remember when we feel overwhelmed by dysphoria.
  2. Support. Whether through therapy, social support groups, online groups, friends, or family, support from people who understand what you are experiencing and can give you a sounding board to process and strategize with is important. Your support person/people can also help bring your attention to the symptoms of burnout you are experiencing and provide some external motivation to socialize, exercise, or engage in whatever other activities are necessary for you to recover.
  3. Affirmation. Dysphoria is constantly telling us that something is wrong, that we don’t fit in our body or in society, that we don’t look the way we should, and that maybe we’re making this whole gender identity thing up. Finding sources of affirmation, whether from your support network, from positive social media influences, or a personal journaling, self-talk, or meditation practice can be extremely helpful in offsetting the negative thoughts and feelings associated with dysphoria. The more the affirmation comes from an outside source, the less mental work we have to do to provide the same level of protection and, often, the more likely we are to believe it.
  4. Activities and Interests. Part of burnout, for me anyway, is a lack of interest in things that I would usually enjoy. The frustrating thing is that engaging in things I enjoy makes me feel better. The trick is to find activities and interests that do not trigger any dysphoria. This allows you to engage in your activity or interest with less mental effort so that it doesn’t make the burnout worse which results in a net gain of positive emotion and energy.

Process the Stress

This concept is directly from the book I recommended earlier. The gist is that we experience our emotions in our bodies as a chemical and neurological process. When we are under constant stress (as with dysphoria), our bodies are constantly in ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ mode. Even if we get a burst of euphoria or a period of relief from dysphoria, our bodies still have to complete the chemical reaction or neurological pattern that was triggered by the stress. If we don’t engage in activities that encourage this completion to happen, our bodies remain in the stress state which only gets stronger the next time we experience stress (five minutes later).

So while we can’t necessarily get rid of the stressor (dysphoria) and stop it from triggering a stress response in our bodies, we can do various things to move through the stress response in our bodies, complete it, hit the reset button, so that the responses to this continual stress don’t compound as much. For me, the most useful activities are physical activity of any kind, breathing, affection, positive social engagement, and creativity (writing, painting, and crocheting). With so many options, it is easy to engage in at least one per day, usually more.

One of the tricks to making this as effective as possible for me is to do these activities mindfully. To focus on the calming effect it is having on my body, mind, and emotions. Or, if there was a specific situation that was stressful that I am ruminating on (because my body is still stuck in that stress cycle), I focus on that situation at the beginning of the activity, think through it, feel the emotions that I felt at the time (or didn’t allow myself to feel at the time), and continue the activity until the emotions and the associated physiological response dissipate. The amount of relief this brings in a very short span of time is pretty incredible.

Tl;dr

Burnout sucks and makes us feel numb, exhausted, and irritable. Dysphoria can lead to burnout due to the constant mental effort that is invisible to or misunderstood by the people around us. You can help yourself avoid repeated cycles of burnout by preventing as much dysphoria as possible, protecting yourself against the negative effects of dysphoria, and processing the physiological stress triggered by dysphoria (and any other sources of stress).

I hope this helps you. It is what I needed to hear five years ago. Leave a comment below or send me an email with your thoughts and experiences of burnout. Maybe your experiences are similar to mine and maybe they are very different. Either way, your experiences have value and I would love to hear about them.

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