How to heal yourself from burnout | Sophie Scott | TEDxKatoomba

foreigner I'll take a break once this busy period is over, but you won't. It used to be like this. I used to think I was invincible, but then I found out the hard way. I found out the hard way that it was. Maybe you think having a great job could help you or keep you from becoming burned out and overwhelmed, but like I said, I learned the hard way that wasn't the case and I want to share my story with you so that, hopefully, you can't go through what that I went through since I was a child.

I wanted to share people's stories to help make sense of the world and understand how much more we have in common than we realize and I had my dream job. Television reporter specializing in

heal

th, so I was able to tell patient stories. I was able to give them a voice they otherwise wouldn't have had and met some amazing people along the way. I met a beautiful cancer patient named Carol and I sat with Carol as we waited for her cancer scans to come back and held our breath and then cried with relief when her scans came back clear.

I met a young couple called Rachel and Johnny and they had just lost their daughter Mackenzie to a genetic disease when she was seven months old and we sat in McKenzie's bedroom next to her empty crib and they fought back tears telling me their heartbreaking story and how they wanted to fight for changes so that other parents couldn't go through what they had gone through, but there are also stories of great hope. I met Andrea, a mother with multiple sclerosis and she was facing life in a wheelchair but she had a stem cell transplant through a clinical trial that radically transformed her

heal

th so I loved telling stories but what happened was when the camera is off I found it very difficult to do the same thing my mind was always racing but my body was tired I was busy but I was exhausted I was tired but I was connected and, like many of us, I would start the day with a few caffeinated coffees to get me going then I would drink a few glasses of wine at the end of the night to relax, but that began to affect my health.

The wake-up call came when I was handing out some awards at a gala dinner for health workers and I felt very good. I stood on the podium to present the first prize. She was wearing a sparkly dress with high heels. I was feeling great, but then this wave of dizziness hit me out of nowhere. holding on to the podium so as not to fall and I didn't understand what was happening with my health. I didn't understand why my nervous system was no longer working properly and the dizziness was added to some other symptoms. I had been having what I discovered that chronic stress takes its toll on the body no matter how good your job is.

He had heard the phrase before that the body keeps score, but now he really believed it and didn't want to do it. Feeling this way, I didn't want to continue feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by my family, so I knew I had to take action. I knew that I wanted to be a better version of myself than that exhausted person telling stories it really was a privilege and I and I never thought that job would lead to

burnout

, but

burnout

doesn't just happen if you have a shitty job or a boss. shitty; can happen in a fulfilling job, plus the pace of my work really increased, the demands intensified and the commitments I didn't say or couldn't say no to things were piling up around me.

Journalism is not a nine-to-five profession, but I was working or thinking about work from the moment I woke up until my head hit the pillow and that's it. a recipe for burnout Now you may have heard the term burnout and wondered exactly what it means, so it's not just about being a little tired or stressed, you feel physically and emotionally exhausted, you feel disillusioned and disconnected, you You feel isolated and wonder if other people feel the same as you and research shows that 50% of the workforce feels some degree of burnout right now and we know, for example, that teachers, healthcare workers and First responders have higher burnout rates and high performers who love their jobs are actually more susceptible. to burnout and this might surprise you, research shows that people who tend to overwork are not necessarily more productive or even happier, in fact, research from Georgia shows that people scored lower on their individual well-being scores , as well as your family's scores.

Was that really our intention when we decided to work long hours? I don't believe it. I remember that in 10 years the only people who will remember those long hours you worked will be your children, so for me the most painful realization was how Oprah says no one is coming to save you and that's the same for Burnout. Plus, your manager just wants you to do a good job, so I had to ask myself some tough questions and look at the things she could control and I had to ask. Why had I equated being productive and super busy with a sense of self-worth?

The core of perfectionism is the feeling of not being worthy of not being enough. Now I'm not here to tell you that recovering from burnout is necessarily easy, but you can recover with support and incorporating those daily practices that will make the difference in regulating your nervous system and getting it out of that fight or flight survival mode and into a relaxed mode. and I was lucky in some ways because I knew what I would do. a difference and it doesn't mean you have to leave a job that you would love, but I had to lean into reality, the self-compassionate concept of feeling like you are enough, as Brene Brown says, and I had an epiphany there.

There were so many physical symptoms due to burnout that I realized that you think that to get out of it, the body really holds the key and that meant looking at those practices that were going to make the difference in getting me out of survival mode and into a more relaxed and regulated day and that meant allowing myself a daily meditation practice before I even got out of bed, it meant committing to daily movements even though all I could do when I first recovered from exhaustion was five minutes of Tai Chi, that's all I did. You could handle it and it meant committing to connecting with people who truly bring you joy.

I think of recovering from exhaustion as a bit like heading toward a destination. Imagine if you changed that destiny one percent every day and stuck with it. You will end up in a completely different destination and the same goes for burnout recovery. I want to leave you with this last thought: how do you want to be remembered? What do you want your legacy to be as someone who worked really hard or as someone who really lived life according to their values ​​and who cared about the people who cared about them listen to what your body is telling you, it really does hold the key and remember that we only have this precious life that we have been given, so think. of

yourself

as that eight-year-old child in that rocking chair, what did it matter to that person and you are living that life right now, thank you very much