Transcript
WEBVTT
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Welcome back to the women's mental health podcast.
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I'm randy.
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I'm And I'm Jess.
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And we are two licensed psychotherapists, and this is a safe space where we talk about mental health, well being, and strategies for coping with life's challenges.
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And how all of this is normal, and you are not alone.
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Today we're talking about a topic that affects us all.
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So many women, especially in today's fast paced world, occupational burnout.
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That is such a good topic, especially right around now in so many different fields.
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Yeah.
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And especially with the holidays coming up soon, I feel like a lot of us are going to be hitting a wall because all those pressures of being like the kinkeeper and taking care of everything and being the elf and being Santa Claus and all the things.
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And right now, too, with all the false sports and everything, I feel like everybody's just hitting a wall that I've talked to in my life.
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And not only can this happen in your occupation, but just everywhere, just regular burnout,
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we're being pulled in so many areas.
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So find us and more resources on women's mental health podcast.
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com.
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And so Randy, let's go ahead and do our, have you ever thoughts.
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Have you ever thought, what exactly is occupational burnout?
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What are the main symptoms of occupational burnout?
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Can burnout affect a personal relationship?
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Who is at risk the most for having this kind of burnout?
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How can I prevent occupational burnout?
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What should I do if I think I'm experiencing burnout?
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Is occupational burnout a medical or psychological diagnosis?
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What is the difference between stress and burnout?
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That's a good question.
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Can just taking a vacation cure burnout?
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If only.
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If only.
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Remember guys, remember it is a vacation if your kids are not with you.
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Yeah.
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Otherwise it is a family trip.
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And it
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can cause more burnout.
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Yeah,
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it's a family trip.
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Okay.
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What are the long term effects of occupational burnout if I don't address them or if I continue to work where I'm being burnt out?
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Burnout is a huge issue for women that juggle work, not just work, but if you're a stay at home mom, like I categorize that as work.
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That's a
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lot
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of work.
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Yeah.
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I would rather go to work than be a stay at home mom.
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I'm sorry.
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More power to y'all.
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I stayed home for nine years and then when I had my second, I was working and I was like, no way am I going back to that.
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Managing your home and everything in between, it just can create a lot of stress that leads to burnout.
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So let's jump into that a little bit more, Jess.
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Occupational burnout is a state of emotional and physical and mental exhaustion.
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It's caused by prolonged and excessive stress at work.
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We can see feelings of being overwhelmed, being drained, unable to meet the constant demands and the pressures of your job whether it could be any job.
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We saw this after COVID.
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All of the doctors, all of the therapists, so many people like right now, it's really hard to find a therapist and that's because a lot of therapists have decided to no longer be therapists
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because we got burn out
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because we got burn out or they're seeing less patients because we got burn out and so a lot of these people I have a lot of doctors that are no longer practicing.
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I know a lot of people who are like, yeah, I'm good.
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I, I'm, I need to do something different.
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And so what it is, is it involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.
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You're just like,
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because you've been so overwhelmed and almost suppressed because of all the demands and the load on you that you just, you have nothing left to give.
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Don't even know what you like anymore.
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Like maybe you don't like anything anymore because it's really affected you.
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So the World Health Organization, or as we sometimes call Yahoo, has officially recognized burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that hasn't been managed.
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If you're stressed and you're just not dealing with it, and it just cycles into this.
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burnout.
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it's really important to note that burnout isn't just feeling tired.
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It's not just being tired.
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After a long day, we can all feel that physical, tiredness.
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Even after a long project, right?
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This is a persistent, constant state of exhaustion, mentally and physically, and feeling detached from your job, your life, your family, and all those things.
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So Impacting your whole life and the way that you deal with things.
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And most of the time with burnout like this, what we see is that people go to poor coping skills.
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Because they don't have time for good coping skills and healthy coping skills.
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So
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they'll drink after work or they'll go out with friends, to happy hour or they'll grab
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fast food on the way home because they haven't been able to, or they'll just going to do nothing but drink coffee because they're so exhausted that they're not doing the healthy things that they need to be doing.
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burnout can affect anybody.
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So it's not just men.
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It's not just women.
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But it is really common among women though, because we face those, like what you're talking about earlier, the additional pressures of balancing professional and personal responsibilities.
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And let's be honest, we as women have a hard time saying no.
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Mm hmm.
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And
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instilling boundaries.
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And no is a complete sentence.
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Yep.
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Just so you know.
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No.
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You can just say no.
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Practice it today.
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No.
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Tell somebody no.
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Act like you're a three year old.
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No.
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Yeah.
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Nope.
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Nope.
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I don't want to do that.
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And the concept of burnout was really first introduced in the 1970s by a psychologist named Herbert Fruedenberg?
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Berger?
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Fruedenberger?
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Fruedenberger.
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Fruity Burger.
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Fruity Burger.
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Oh, I'm sure that's gonna be a great one.
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So he noticed that severe stress and high levels of exhaustion among workers in especially helping professions like nurses, doctors, psychologists, therapists, especially in, the health field.
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Teachers.
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Yeah, impacting their work and their life.
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And over time, this term, burnout, has expanded to include all professions because in today's modern age, the demand to work in the United States, let's Like, be specific with that has really intensified.
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Like we do not support our workers.
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We do not have good laws around what is healthy.
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Like we don't like, what is the common here?
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One week vacation, like two week, maybe we
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don't even have postpartum
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baby
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leave.
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There's very minimum support for that, depending on the state.
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Some states have better leave than others, but most states still do not.
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There's not a lot of sick time There's
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grieving, you get one grief a year, and if you happen to have two people that die, You're screwed.
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Good luck.
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Because you can only take your time for the first one.
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You're like, okay, but will this happen too?
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A lot of states and a lot of companies don't have that because it's so costly.
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We have like this hustle culture that I feel has been like, you're just supposed to work, work, work, work, work, and never take any time for yourself or your family or any downtime.
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And it's frowned upon even though they've done a lot of research showing that when people work in a positive.
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environment, they output more and they do better work.
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so
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it's like some of those big tech companies that have even here they have one of the big companies Sensi.
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They have a, you can get a meal a day.
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Yeah.
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They have a great, from what I've heard, they have a great cafeteria.
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Is that what it's called?
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Yeah.
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I've eaten there before.
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So like Google, like they have their own work bus that, takes people so they don't have to drive like they have oh, and it has
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internet so y'all can work on it as you're driving if you
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want.
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Nap pods and self care workshops, it's really a whole culture and environment.
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It's just not like that in, most industries or hourly paying jobs Retail
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around the holidays.
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Yeah.
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And yeah, exactly.
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So what we see with burnout is that this is really being linked to high workloads, a lack of control or autonomy over your poor work life balance.
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Sometimes it's like we were saying, even some cultures of work don't prioritize it.
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I'm hearing a lot of the companies are now saying you have to come back into the office.
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You have to come back into the office and their employees are saying, no, I don't want to go back into the office.
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They don't want
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to have that effect of how their work life and their load was so poor.
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And it's hard though, because a lot of these states we live in one too.
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It's a right to work state.
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So what that means is that you don't have a lot of rights.
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They can fire you for any reason.
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Well, other states was, an at will, meaning that you can still do it.
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But this one here, there's no lawsuit.
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And with the rise of technology, it's really made it blurry, between personal and work life, because now we can't disconnect and recharge.
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We are expected.
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I have people We're always
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online, right?
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Yeah.
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So people think that they always have access to you.
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Well, you have
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a phone, and most of us don't carry around two phones.
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I used to carry around two phones because when I was off, I didn't answer it.
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Now I got an app that I still don't answer.
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I didn't want to have to carry my phone and I didn't want it to be the same thing because I never knew it was like trauma every time it rang.
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Is it a client?
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Is it my mom?
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Is it a client?
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Is it my friend?
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Yeah, so it's one of those things that most people just use one phone,
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right?
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When I work in addiction if I ever got a phone call after hours, it was for somebody that overdosed so it was really hard to like You know when I went into private practice, I really had strong boundaries about I don't answer my phone after hours because it had been so emotionally draining for me.
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Of course, I made sure my clients, had resources if they needed to get help, but I was like, I can't keep putting myself in that situation where I'm just so triggered, like worrying that somebody is dying on the other end of the phone.
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And let's be honest, I don't answer my phone at all because nobody out there answers their phone.
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No, you can send a
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text message instead.
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All, yeah, all I do is we just go back and forth.
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And most of the time we're doing other stuff anyway.
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So most people want text messages.
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Yeah.
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And on top of it, like we were mentioned before with kin keeping, the added burden for women of being being the unpaid laborer, the help, the chauffeur, the maid, the caregiver, the dentist driver, yeah, the dentist
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maker, oh yeah, the appointment
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maker, the
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dentist maker.
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I know, I was like, I don't know if your kid becomes a dentist maybe.
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This all contributes to even more burnout, making it not just a professional issue, but a personal one.
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It's affecting your overall, life as a whole.
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And part of that with technology as well is that we did get used to being home a lot.
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We did learn that we can do our laundry, and then everybody around us says, but you got it done before, what's going on now?
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And so it's hard because we're like, we have to do all of this stuff.
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And so when you're trying to work, are you really working?
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Are you worrying about this?
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And so it's hard to prioritize or compartmentalize when you are working, because that is so blurred between the two, whether you're in an office or at home.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And this is why occupational burnout is so heavily impacting women's mental health.
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Because all of this combined leads to additional anxiety, depression, feeling, hopelessness, feeling like you're drowning.
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Then you lead into feeling disconnected from your work, from your kids, from your family, and that leads into then feeling unmotivated or cynical about your life, your job, your relationships, your colleagues, like everything just gets like this, hazy tint to it because You're just like meh over everything.
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that toll that we're talking about, it does spill over into your personal life.
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It affects so much of your relationships, your self esteem, the overall quality of your life, and physically, the burnout.
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It can manifest as, what, headaches you can have sleep problems.
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Yeah,
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insomnia.
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Oh,
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the ones where you wake up at three in the morning and you're like, I gotta go check my email.
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Or, there's other, like a weakened immune system.
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So many people get so sick when they're burnt out.
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And as women, we don't take care of ourselves physically either.
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We also push it down.
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There's so many other things to do.
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So then you're not doing any type of self care.
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You're not, taking yourself to the doctor and then you can get worse and worse and worse.
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And a lot of times we have good intentions.
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I'm going to set aside this time so I can do this.
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But then what ends up happening is, little Joey now has to go to urgent care, right?
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And something else pops up.
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There's a project over for, the other kids thing.
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And so we end up.
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saying okay and putting ourselves last because we have to, I'm doing air quotes, have to take care of whatever is going on.
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So it's hard.
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And that also leads to compassion fatigue, especially when you are in a caregiver role or a caregiving profession and you are already giving a lot emotionally like a therapist or a nurse or something like that.
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You can feel numb or indifferent to what's happening to the person around you.
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Yeah, you're just like, oh, whatever and that can be distressing because as women, we're naturally caregivers.
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So when we feel like so emotionally shut down that we don't care about anything, that's worrisome.
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It is.
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And it's not that we're putting a boundary in place is why we don't care.
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It's just literally, you're like, you're just like, yeah, exactly.
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And if you are a caregiver in your profession, it's really hard.
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it's good to recognize when you are having compassion fatigue
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so how can women.
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step forward and take control of this and really cope with burnout that they're having.
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The one thing I teach, and you and I always talk about, is set clear boundaries.
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Set the boundaries at work.
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Set the boundaries at home.
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And if it is, I'm done at four o'clock, be done at four o'clock.
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Do something for you that you need to.
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You got to go pick your kid at six, but you're done at four.
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Go do something for you that you need to go on a walk, go do something that's going to help heal you not run home and go hit the grocery store and do all of those other things that have to be done in the
