Today we're gonna talk about a flavor of burnout that isn't named very often. It's not this dramatic collapse. It's not the, I can't get out of bed. It's this really quiet one. The one that you push through on. It's the one that looks like you meeting deadlines, knowing what's required, but inside just feeling really, really flat.

By the end of the episode, you'll know what the key drive, one of the key drivers of what I call tolerable burnout. The burnout your nervous system can compensate for until it can't. Why your usual approach of resilience training or stress management doesn't work. But also where it will and what to focus on building or advocating for in your work to support yourself and your team.

After interviewing 40 professionals across different sectors, tech, design, healthcare, education, leadership, in my. Report. What if you're not the problem? You can grab that link down below. Um, it was very clear pattern. A lot of people were not tired because of work overload, but because of uncertainty. When I asked people what was challenging or stretching or draining about their work, so many people had very similar answers.

This one really stood out. It was, they said it was like the ground keeps shifting. Or every week or every couple of days, new priorities change. I never know which is the correct decision because the way that I made the last decisions either weren't right, or things have changed since then. Or I feel like I am working in the blind, in, in working blind, like I'm in a dark room and I'm just taking one step forward, but not in the beautiful, intuitive, trusting way, and I think it's really important.

To look at a little bit of the science behind understanding why those phrases and that feelings are so important and impactful, and actually where our power lies within them, and how much control we do have, even when it feels like we don't have control. There's your nervous system, which is. Creating the way that you perceive reality.

And it is designed to kind of create predictions. Actually, as I say that, I'm like, it's kind of like a lush language model. Like it just predicts but not the same. But it is designed to create a prediction. It's designed to say, um, I can predict what might happen next, and if I've navigated that thing before successfully, then that would equal safety.

But if it feels like it can't predict what will happen next, then we have a lot of ambiguity. We have a lot of uncertainty. And if you think way back to the very primal understanding of us uncertainty. Means we don't know if we can survive it. It's like you're jumping off into the dark off of a cliff, like we don't know what's there.

Therefore we don't know if we can survive it. We don't know what will happen, and that's why so much change. Um, whether that is a change in your daily routine that you feel like you don't have control over, not flexibility that you do feel like you have control over, um, better changing your daily routine.

Or like you that you feel like you don't have control over, even just rescheduling the day a lot. Um, or really unclear expectations about what success looks like or what you're supposed to do. Um, or unstable leadership. So maybe like, um, a like emotional or, um, communicating communication is inconsistent.

These things impact people so, so deeply and. It's not a psychological weakness. It's not something that like mountains and mountains of self-improvement will stop you from experiencing self-improvement, personal development, therapy, stress management, stress, resilience, all incredibly, incredibly helpful.

Um, but we can't get rid of your body's really. Natural reaction to uncertainty, but there are things that we can do to kind of mitigate that and make that land a bit softer and not as difficult.

 So wherever you are, you are gonna have a different flavor of uncertainty. At the moment, maybe you are looking for a new job, but you're not sure if you can find one. Maybe you are an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, and everything feels like everything is constantly changing. You don't know how to do marketing anymore, and you're just like, what?

Maybe you are not even sure what you want anymore. And if I was to ask you, you wouldn't know how to answer. What do you want? Maybe you feel like you're at a career crossroads and you kind of wanna pivot and do something different. Maybe you are not even sure what the next couple of years come, or maybe you're just feeling the weight of having everything pulled out from under your feet a couple of years ago, and you're still trying to kind of figure out what is predictable.

But whatever it is, what is important for you to know is that. This is one of the biggest, um, drivers of this quiet burnout. There's a really kind of, I guess, famous or like cornerstone study by Masac and leader. It's from 2016, and they named lack of control and unclear workout as two core drivers of burnout.

Unclear, unclear workload, sorry, as two core drives of burnout. Now, whether or not you're working for yourself or whether you're working for someone else, I know a lot of people who are experiencing this, they feel like I don't have control over what will be needed of me. Um, what will be asked of me, what will be expected of me, of how people will perceive me.

Um, I don't know what my workload is gonna look like this. This week, next week, today, in a couple of months. Or what is expected of me and how I can succeed? Something that's been hitting with me lately, um, as I've been actually doing like different kind of consulting on how to be successful, sorry, um, on how to like drive engagement in communities is this understanding of like, how do we all know when we're successful in this community that goes for work.

If it's not clear to you how. To be successful and how to be successful doesn't the way that they want you to be successful. If that's not particularly satisfying to you and doesn't feel good to you, then you're gonna be in this constant place that's really primal of like, what's next? Can I handle it?

Is this what I want? Is this is good for me? You might be in kind of this tolerable burnout. This low level, ugh, that over time has really, really catastrophic, um, mental, emotional and physical outcomes. It might be decision fatigue. You might be experiencing irritability. You're just annoyed. Um, you feel really scattered.

You've lost your creative spark. You're just like, I'm so over this. Or you're waking up tired where you used to be a morning person. You are a sympathetic system, so the part of your body that mobilizes energy so you can do things, stays half switched on to track uncertainty in moments when it should actually just be resting and you should be resting and kind of either just doing the work or just.

Resting your parasympathetic nervous system, the part that where your body repairs cells and DNAs and rests and digests and processes, experiences, never fully gets to restore you even if you're sleeping, even if you take weeks off. So you live in this like continuous energy leak that depletes your adrenals, that depletes your mind, that depletes your energy.

There was one quote in one of the interviews, um. Well, actually it came in many different forms, but it was just like, I can do hard work and I like hard work and I wanna do hard work, but I do not wanna do instability. I can't deal with all of this instability. And I think that that's a really human truth.

Like we like challenges, we're excited. We don't shy away from hard things, but we're not wired for chaos. We're not wired. Um. For this like jumping around unpredictability, even if, you know, places are like, it's a dynamic workplace, it's, it's like it's an opportunity. Well, yeah, but like, is that good for my nervous system?

No, it's not. And sometimes workplaces and the internet tell you that you should do resilience training and you should just like think about it differently and change your mindset or you should like do stress management. Um, and those are super, super helpful. Like I am a big advocate of all of these things and.

I'm teaching you resilience training in so many different ways, and I'm teaching you stress management when you download the nervous system, PDF, and when you join one of my programs. But it's not the only thing that I'm teaching you because I. That we're never gonna get rid of our physiology of uncertainty.

We don't want to, and we don't wanna be putting so much of the responsibility on you as the individual to have to figure that out every single day to recover from this tolerable burnout to set yourself up for success so you have more energy, more creativity, more innovation, better thinking you're, you can go and do work you love.

You need. Clear signals of direction. You need rhythm. You need things that are cornerstone in your day. You need things that you can commit to. You need structure, and if you have some pain around structure, you feel controlled or um. You have like, you know, a bit of defiance around that, you need to look into that so that you can provide your body with structure.

This is about what your body needs. Um, we need clarity. We need honest communication. We need, um, consistency. We need predict. We need cues of completion. I need to know when something is complete. I need to be able to finish that stress cycle and I need to celebrate. And there needs to be, um, a, a celebration element of like, yes, we did that.

We achieved a hard thing together. There needs to be like a, an achievement place. This is really important, I think as well, when you're working by yourself. It could feel like one thing after the other, after the other, after the other. You need to. Can finish you need, and then you need space to process all of that ambiguity.

So instead of thinking about like, how can I regulate my system better? How can I regulate it faster? Think more about like, how can I make it really clear to my body that I've completed something? How can I be clear in my communication and my expectations to myself and other people? How can I recognize myself for the things that are going well?

How can I recognize the things that are going well? How can I create rhythm inside of my day and rhythm inside of my month? Um. And how can I connect? Like how can I connect to myself? Not how can I change myself? Not how can I be better, but how can I see who I am and, and, and, and notice what is here and how can I connect to other people?

Not like how can I, um, show them that I'm good at something or how can I, um, like create this relationship into something, but just how can I connect? Like what would it mean to connect. Which means kind of to see what is here in this present moment, inside of that person, these little strategies are going to regulate your system so much more than pushing harder or doing better.

And then over time, as you consistently implement them, you're going to be able to. Come back to that feeling of like creativity. You're gonna be up to that, like problem solving, that aliveness. You're gonna be able to figure out all of these hard things and all of these transitions that you're navigating, all of those will suddenly have more solutions and they feel like they do right now because you're able to look at it with different parts of your brain firing up, giving you access to different thought patterns.

This is the foundation of the five week energy management pilot that I have. It's about helping create, helping you create safety in your biology so that you can figure out all of this uncertainty without burning out and so that you can. Make less, kind of like decrease the uncertainty in your life if it resonates.

There's a link down below in the show notes. Um, you can send me a message to join. And sometimes it's really just like these small little things that bring all of the energy that you've felt is being kind of left behind or you lost at some point, or you know that it's there but you just can't quite seem to access.

Um, it can bring it all back. Thanks for listening.