Burnout Is Getting Stuck in the Stress Cycle

Are you working harder and harder with less and less feeling of accomplishing anything?

Did you know that this is so common it is officially called decreased personal accomplishment and it’s one of the three core components of burnout?

This doesn’t mean that you are doing something wrong or that you are somehow broken. It doesn’t mean that the career, the vocation, that you have put so much into, is now too much. It doesn’t mean that what you feel now is how you'll feel for the rest of your life.

It means that you are experiencing what up to 80% of nurses experience at some point in their career, whether they work in the ED or private practice, bedside or home care. It’s an unfortunate indication that you are “normal”.

And while there are multiple approaches to stave off burnout, many of us need help just breaking free from the overwhelm that we are in now. To do this, a rudimentary reminder of the stress cycle can be helpful

The stress cycle has a beginning, middle, and end:

1. Perceive the stress

2. Do something focused and intense with your body to escape the stress (using cortisol and stress hormones)

3. Create a signal to the body that you are safe from danger.

Alert. Activate. Recover.

Burnout is getting stuck in the middle. This is easy to do when the stressors are chronic, like they often are for nurses, i.e., higher expectations combined with fewer resources at work, personal health issues or pain, significant family stressors outside of work. If there isn’t an end to the stressor, how do we complete the cycle? How do we become safe? How do we get out of this funk?!?!

We can address each part of the stress cycle, but let’s start at the end since 80% of us find ourselves not able to get there.

We must do something physical to signal to our nervous system that we are ok.

I resisted this part of healing for a long time, preferring to focus on cognitive and academic approaches (thinking my way out of things). And this approach is a fantastic way to reframe stressors and prevent the cortisol cycle from getting out of control. But despite my preference, you can’t always think your way out of things in real time when you find yourself triggered and emotional. Sometimes our responses are so fast that our only option is to deal with the aftermath.

So how do we signal safety when we know full well tomorrow will bring more of the same? This is easy.

You move, intentionally. It doesn’t have to take long. Sure, a hike or a yoga class would be great, but much smaller movements can result in the necessary completion of the stress cycle.

“But Megan, I have bad knees, and IBS, and I’m soooooo tired.”

Then this is definitely for you. When you get out of your car after your long commute, stretch your arms in big circles before going into the house, swing your arms back and forth, do some jumping jacks (ok, you can skip the last one if you have bad knees).

When you are making dinner, take 3 minutes to dance to your favorite song in the kitchen or sing at the top of your lungs.

Going right to your kid’s activities or into a board meeting? Practice some slow deep breaths, do isometric exercises on the sidelines, tense and release each muscle group,

Hum while waiting for your elderly parent to finish a treatment. Yes, even just humming can activate the relaxation response.

It is the equivalent of jumping up and down when you escape the tiger,

And if you can work in a class or walk a few times a week, know that this is a valuable way to not only stay healthy but to cope at work. Yoga on Friday, or kickboxing or tap dancing, can resolve the stress from Monday.

Yes, you can time-step away from burnout.

We have a lot of resilience; it just gets harder to use when we ignore the physical impacts of stress on our nervous systems. We get tired. We feel like tuning out is the answer, as it will give us a break.

The opposite is true: tuning in and moving

restores our energy.

Make sure to check in next week when we talk about how to make stressors not stressful- how we can backtrack our way out of the stress cycle. We will approach this from all angles so we can keep loving the work we want to do.

In the meantime, tell me, what do YOU do to manage your stress? And yes, rage gardening counts.

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