[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. . Welcome to the show everyone. I’m Lisa Lewis, your host. Good to have you here for another episode of the Am I Ok? Podcast. So I have a question for all my listeners as we begin today’s episode, have you ever try to combat or reduce burnout, like burnout from work, from doing chores, from being a highly sensitive person, from being a parent? Well, my guest today is going to talk to us about how to prevent burnout and steps you can take to recover, especially as a highly sensitive person. Today my guest is Dr. Holly Sturgeon. Holly is an Orlando-based clinical pharmacist and author with over a decade of helping patients and colleagues overcome symptoms of burnout. She uses a combination of self-discovery and the science of play to guide people from burnout to baseline and beyond one quest at a time. When she’s not working or mentoring newly minted pharmacist, you will most likely find her at the lake with her two dogs. Welcome to the show, Holly. [DR. HOLLY STURGEON] Oh, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. [LISA] I’m excited to have you here too. As I like to begin my episodes just with the question, do you consider yourself a highly sensitive person or not? [DR. HOLLY] I am not a highly sensitive person, although I work with quite a few of them. My talents tend to be more along the line of what you might consider opposite, but complimentary, so if you looked at a highly sensitive person as say a cell tower that was constantly receiving, you would look at me as more like a repeater where I amplify and rebroadcast. [LISA] I love that that image I have in my mind, like as the highly sensitive person, the receiver, and you’re like the amplifier. So what would that look like in terms of, let’s say a highly sensitive person is taking on too much of other people’s energy? How do you reflect that back or what do you do with that? [DR. HOLLY] Well, when I’m working with a highly sensitive person the first thing we start to do is look at setting boundaries for them so they don’t have quite so much intake coming. Then for me, it’s a pass off situation where if we’re looking at energy work they pass that energy onto me and I broadcast it out the other direction. So it’s a pull away and release for an empath or a highly sensitive person to get rid of that excess that’s constantly coming in. [LISA] Oh, wow. Now I’m curious like how do you do that? How do you, wow, like that sounds amazing. How do you release that, so you take it and then you release it? [DR. HOLLY] Yes, because that falls within what I do. That’s my skillset. [LISA] Oh wow. That sounds so interesting. I know we just jumped right in there. I’ll back up a little bit and ask some questions that will lead us into probably where we’re going. how do you, like, how do you prevent burnout or, well, like what are, first of all, what are the signs of burnout? [DR. HOLLY] There are three key dimensions to burnout. The first is this sense of overwhelming exhaustion. It’s not just I need some rest, it is bone deep weariness. It might be physical, it might be mental or emotional or even spiritual. Wherever your friction is coming from and it’s constantly rubbing and rubbing and wearing away at you, that’s where you start to get exhausted at. The second dimension is a sense of ineffectiveness or a sense of a lack of accomplishment so you feel like you’re not getting anywhere. I’m not making any headway. I’m not doing the best that I could. Then when those two things combine, the brain starts to try to protect you by disengaging and so you’ve got detachment or sometimes even cynicism as a sense of protection mechanism for yourself. Those three are the key elements to actual burnout. If you’ve only got two or even one, you’re in a preclinical stage or a pre-burnout stage and that’s better because we can treat that a lot easier. If you’ve got all three, we can definitely get you out of it, but there is some work involved. [LISA] Does it, and just going back to what you said right in the beginning, it can be spiritual, mental, emotional and did you say physical? [DR. HOLLY] It can. People get absolutely physically worn out to the point that either they can’t sleep or they can’t get out of bed. [LISA] I’m just going to pause that there and just ask you, how did you even get into this, like helping people with burnout? [DR. HOLLY] it was never my goal to be a burnout recovery guide. When I was a newly minted pharmacist, I wasn’t really thinking beyond paying off my student loans and zip ahead just a smidge and I was in a truly toxic work environment. That led to some serious burnout for me to the point that at one point I was sitting in a Walmart parking lot, just sobbing my eyes out, late one night and this very sweet little Betty White lookalike Walmart girl knocked on my window and asked if I was okay. At that point I was so low, I had no pride left. I just said, no, I’m not okay. She looked at me with such certainty and said, “But you will be.” She was so certain that I was like, “Yes, I guess I will be.” I wasn’t sure how that was going to happen, but I believed her that I was going to be, and back then there really weren’t burnout coaches so I had to figure it out on my own. So I started researching a bunch of paths, I tried time management because I figured, well, at least part of this is business-related and I tried looking into the existing scientific research on burnout. Then I, from there I went into mental health improvement therapies and I was really pretty disheartened by the whole thing until I stumbled across a concept from addiction recovery program of all places, the concept was that you cannot recover until you know what you’re recovering from. That became a light bulb moment for me. It was clarity that once I figured out the root of exactly what was going on, then I could map a pathway forward. So I found my own way through. Then fast forward to 2020 when all of my fellow hospital workers, because again, I’m a clinical pharmacist, all of my fellow hospital workers are basically living at the hospital with me just by virtue of all the patients we had and because we didn’t want to take Covid home to our family and we never really got to step away from the hospital, from the things that were creating burnout. We were all just fighting to get through it to the best of our ability. One of my coworkers came into the pharmacy and asked me for a recommendation for a sleep medication because he wasn’t sleeping, but he didn’t want to be too groggy if an emergency came into the ER. Again, pharmacist. So I start asking questions, what medicines are you taking? Do you have any medical conditions, what are your allergies, question, question, question. The more we talked, the more we came to the understanding that what was driving this lack of sleep was that he was burned out, he was exhausted, he was cynical about his whole role in healthcare. I talked to him about my experience and how I had dealt with it and we started talking through his experiences, what was working for him that we could really draw on for support and what was really creating friction that we could start to work on and we spent most of his downtime really just mapping out a plan for him to manage his burnout. Then after he left the following day a couple more people came and said, “Hey, Mark said what you did and we want to hear too.” Then a couple more the day after that and a couple more the day after that and it slowly dawned on me that this was really something I wanted to do with the rest of my life. That’s how I got into it. But it was not where I started. It was just a pivot. [LISA] Wow. Going back to that time in your car when that woman knocked on your door and said, you will be okay. [DR. HOLLY] Exactly, people come in and out of your life when you need them most. [LISA] Yes. As I’m a mental health professional and have done a lot of interviews on my podcast, what I hear and even including for myself, it seems like at our lowest point where we feel like, I’ll just speak for myself when we feel like how can life get any lower? Then like someone comes in at the right time that says a sentence or word or gives us some hope in that. I feel like that’s like the turning point. [DR. HOLLY] I agree with you and you see it over and over that same story repeating that when you are at your lowest, somebody is going to be there. It may be a stranger, it may be a family member, but somebody always somehow shows up. [LISA] How did you know that? Or when did you know that you were going to be okay, even after that, the Betty White lookalike said those words? What point along your journey did you see or did you feel a shift inside you? [DR. HOLLY] I think my biggest shift for me was when I started feeling some change, some improvement in my situation. Part of what was so toxic for me was we had a situation where there was some serious discrimination against one, some one of my coworkers. It was really eating at me seeing her suffer that way and feeling like I couldn’t say anything because I’m relatively new pharmacist and it’s my director that’s causing this problem and do I really want to step into that? But once I finally for me made a change, I went into HR, I said, look, this is going on and my coworker isn’t complaining but I find it difficult to deal with. What can we do? We started seeing that change because I started making a change. I started seeing things start to shift and it made all the difference. [LISA] So once you started making the change, it was like a domino effect and then other things started to change as well? [DR. HOLLY] Exactly. [LISA] Wow. Do you see that with your clients that you work with? [DR. HOLLY] I do. That’s part of what we do. The very first step that I take anybody through is we deep dive into every little thing that might possibly be a friction point. Then we have a conversation, do we want a quick win by getting something small or do we want a big win by going after something big? Once that decision’s made, we map out exactly how are we going to do it, steps forward, what are we going to do as far as when we get to the end of it, do we get a reward? What do we get? I’ve gamified a lot of it to the point that we actually send out stickers, all sorts of fun things now as a reward but the idea is to pick one thing, make one change, get one win under your belt and then you’ve got momentum. [LISA] Then does that encourage the person to do more changes in their life or do the other changes just unfold on their own? [DR. HOLLY] Well, the work that I do, we’ve usually got a pretty solid map, what they do at home, some of this stuff is surprising. We had one mom, I can ask her if I can use her name, so I’m going to give you a fake one, let’s call her Kim. She was really dealing with givers burnout driven by parenting because she had one neuro-norm kid and one kid with ADHD and she was really struggling with inconsistency, how do I handle the kids appropriately, but samely or fairly? Then sometimes she’d get so frustrated by it that she’d get what we call mom Jekyll syndrome. Sometimes you’d get Dr. Jekyll, sometimes you’d get Mr. Hyde and she wanted consistency. So we set up rules for her game, for lack of a better term, where we sat down and actually mapped out choices and effects, so not punishment, but if this choice is made, then this is the effect negative or positive. So if you finish your homework on time, you always get this specific reward. Even if you’ve been naughty all day and I’m frustrated with, you finish your homework game says you get this reward. We mapped out rules that even if you’ve been wonderful all day, if you throw toys down the hall, you end up in timeout for a specific amount of time. Then it wasn’t about inconsistency, how does mom feel that way? It was the rules say you did this, this is what you get every single time. Here’s what was surprising. We thought it would just be a cheat sheet to help her be consistent but about the fourth or fifth time that she referred to it, the kids are like, what are you doing mom? She’s like, these are the rules for mom’s game. That was something they could wrap their heads around. There was this whole, well we want to play the game and it turned out they loved it because it gave them a sense of power over what was going on in their day. So mom could do something off and they got to send mom the timeout, which was awesome because we’re sending mom the time out and — [LISA] I’m laughing because I’m a mom too, and I could see my kids doing that when they were younger. [DR. HOLLY] It actually evolved into a situation where they would sit down together and negotiate the choices and effects so that everybody felt like the consequence that you got based on the choice that you made was fair. When we were talking the shift over time in the dynamics became mom and the kids versus the game instead of mom versus the kids. When we really realized how much of a change it made, it was her oldest was eating an ice cream cone. The youngest came in and he’s like, how come Jake gets an ice cream cone? Why can’t I have an ice cream cone? She was able to say, with no guilt, like none of that crappy mom guilt or spiraling over what if it’s not fair, what do I what am I teaching, she just said, “Well Jake got a win. If you want an ice cream cone, go get a win.” [LISA] Oh wow. I love that. It seems so simple. But I also understand too, when you’re in it and you’re like at that place at low point in your life, it’s really hard to see your way out of it and you needing some extra help, some support either with a professional or a friend or someone that you can figure this out for yourself so you don’t have to feel or want or need to feel burnt out. [DR. HOLLY] Exactly. [LISA] If we were to look at a highly sensitive person or empath, how is the science of play, how does, how is that relevant or effective in reducing or even reversing burnout? [DR. HOLLY] I am super glad you asked that and I’m going to apologize because I’m going to geek out a little bit. It’s just because I find it super exciting, all the brain chemistry stuff. So when you are stressed out, your body dumps a bunch of chemicals into your system. So you get adrenaline and you get cortisol, which is that fight or flight hormone and then your body dumps a ton of glucose into the system so that you have the fuel you need to fight or run away. So you’ve got all this going on and with burnout instead of just swerving out of the path of whatever was dangerous and then reducing burnout, you just keep holding onto those stress hormones. You never release them and they start to build and build and build and it starts to do damage on your body on the actual physical systems in your body. Now when you play, your body reduces what we call dose chemicals and that’s dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Those chemicals cannot exist in the same place with the cortisol and the adrenaline and all of that. You get one or the other, you can’t have both at the same time. So when you start dumping those dose chemicals into your system during play, it forces your body to flush those stress hormones out. So the more we can get those play hormones in, the more we can start flushing the other stuff out. I know it sounds just way too simple to be real, but the proof is there, the scientific proof is there. There’s a growing body of research that’s showing that even something as simple as playing Solitaire or Candy Crush on your phone, on your lunch break is giving people actual improvement in their stress levels and burnout symptoms. [LISA] Oh wow, that is amazing. I’m thinking, I’m glad you put in there play as simple as just playing a game on your phone because I was thinking of play, going outside, being silly, running around, being active, playing a sport. Sometimes that’s really hard to do if you’re sad or depressed or have low energy or adults. I think as time goes on, as you age, sometimes we forget how to play. [DR. HOLLY] Exactly. And what they’ve found is the more you have like partnership play or cooperative play, the more you get the oxytocin that warm and fuzzy bonding hormone and the more that that really starts to kick in and ramp up those dose chemicals. So if you want a quick hit, a fast hit, play something cooperative, play with your kid, play an online game with somebody else. You don’t have to be in the same room. You just have to be cooperating. That’s going to give you your biggest bang for your buck every time. [LISA] That can just be with one person? [DR. HOLLY] Yes. [LISA] With one person, okay. Because I know that highly sensitive people being in a large crowd or sometimes the group thing is too much overstimulating, overwhelming and being more, maybe just with one friend or a couple friends feels more less stressful, may more safe. [DR. HOLLY] I know that some of our highly sensitive people that are clients tend to, like I said, do an online thing so that there’s not so much right in the room with me where I’m soaking up whatever you’re carrying around with you today [LISA] What if you’re in an environment that you’re working in an environment, living in an environment that’s not feeling so safe that it puts you on high alert and not, you’re not able to relax, be yourself? What do you recommend for that? [DR. HOLLY] Well, normally I don’t say go for your resilience measures. Those would be things like yoga, meditation, journaling gratitude practice, things like that. But the highly sensitive person needs those pretty much just to get through their day, in my opinion because especially if you work out in the world, you’re getting all of this external input coming at you. And then I have yet to meet a highly sensitive person that also doesn’t have sensory things going on. So maybe you’ve got the lights going zzz and you can’t turn it out, or you’ve got somebody eating a tuna fish sandwich right next to you and it’s making you absolutely crazy, but you get the sensory stuff and then you get the empathic stuff. Highly sensitive people are so prone to burnout that if you don’t put those pieces in place to at least teach yourself how to tolerate your existing situation better, then you’re going to burn out faster. If you can get those pieces in place, then you can at least buy yourself a little bit of time until you can find ways to step away from what’s creating the friction for you. [LISA] I love that as I hear you describing ways to do that. And what if the people you live with look at you and say like, wow, you’re spending so much time alone, you want to do these things by yourself, and how come you don’t want to do it with me or with us, what do you suggest for that? [DR. HOLLY] A lot of times it comes down to conversation, doing the best you can to explain to the people around you, honey, I love you with all my heart, but I have to be able to breathe. Boundaries are so vital for a highly sensitive person, particularly the ones that are surrounded by people who do not understand because they’re not going to get it. You can explain and explain and explain and they’re not going to get it, but you can set boundaries and continue to express, yes, I love you. Let me breathe [LISA] That is so key for a highly sensitive person and being okay with, I was going to add, just being okay with setting boundaries. It doesn’t make you any less than or less caring or less empath empathetic. It’s just really taking care of yourself as a form of self-care. [DR. HOLLY] Oh, I agree. I mean, some people look at boundaries and they look at them as walls shutting people out. But really it’s allowing you to be more available to the people around you more often. Little bits of, I’m here with you rather than, I’m here with you as much as I can, and then I got to go away for an extended period of time, actually adds up to more time and better time overall. [LISA] Yes, I agree. And Holly, why do you cringe every time someone brings up the idea of resilience as a cure for burnout? [DR. HOLLY] Okay, I’m going to give you a little bit of forewarning, this is actually going to get a little personal. Like a lot of people, my childhood was not ideal. My mother’s parenting philosophy, and she’s super proud of it to this day, is that first and foremost you make your child fear and respect you and then later you can add in some love. As a result of that parenting style, I did spend quite a bit of time in my imagination because it felt great to be there. The world could be anything I wanted. Now she was a pretty firm believer in physical punishment, and so we got spanked a lot so when it was punishment time, she would send us out in the backyard to pick our own stick. Looking back I can see that that was her version of counting to 10 or taking a break but at the time it just ramped up the tension for us. So I would spend my allotted time out in the backyard not looking for a stick, but trying to imagine myself into a cloud or hoping that ferries would turn me into a giant, pretty much anything that I could do to not get spanked. When I was, I don’t know, first or second grade-ish, it finally dawned on me that no amount of pretending, no amount of hanging in my imagination where I could feel good was going to fix the situation. So at the time that all of this dawned, my older sister was in the backyard looking for her own stick, and I noticed that she had two of them, and she’s weighing her options. It occurred to me that what, I’m going to have to get practical too. So instead of looking for fairies to take me away from the backyard, I started looking for a stick that would only take about two swats before it broke, and then it couldn’t be used anymore. That actually worked. After that, it only took about three or four times of the same thing happening before my mom decided that she wasn’t going to do that anymore. It wasn’t working for her. So by getting practical in my approach, I was able to immediately change my situation for the better and then ultimately resolve that particular one at least. So when you look at that and you apply it to resilience methods, they make you feel better. They help you tolerate the situation that you’re in, but at some point you have to look and say, is this making a change? Is this making my situation less toxic? Is it decreasing my workload? Is it going to increase my paycheck? Is it going to stop the discrimination? Whatever it is that’s creating this friction, are these resilience measures going to help that or are they just going to make it more tolerable to exist where I currently am? At some point, if you got to make a change in your situation, well then you’ve got to make a change in you. You can’t just sit and tolerate happily in the resilience land. That doesn’t mean resilience isn’t helpful, and I strongly recommend it, but if you are relying in it or relying on it to fix your situation, you’re never going to get anywhere. [LISA] I hear you loud and clear on that, and thank you for defining really resilience and also I hear practicality to make the change. [DR. HOLLY] Yes. [LISA] And that takes a different mindset. As you said, I hear you, you woke up to what was happening at that time, like, oh, I need to find a smaller stick or one that’s not as heavy. How smart was that for that age and to have those skills to figure that out on your own. I’m so sorry that that happened. [DR. HOLLY] Yes. [LISA] Yes, yes. Thank you for sharing that that personal story with us. [DR. HOLLY] Oh, you’re welcome. I mean, I don’t tell it because I want to call my mom out, it’s just, it’s the way it is, at some point you have to get practical [LISA] Yes. That could be a whole other story, just being okay with your life history and being able to talk about it. [DR. HOLLY] Yes, also very healing in itself. Took some time [LISA] Holly, what would you like listeners to take away from our conversation today? [DR. HOLLY] Well, as far as topics, the biggest topic of conversation that I would like for them to take away is that you are not stuck. No matter how burned out you feel, you are not stuck. There is always a way around it. I do want them to have something practical though that they can hold in their hands and if they need some steps forward or some guidance getting forwarded because they’re feeling burnout at the moment, I do have a quiz that they can take that will help them determine which of their personality traits is making the most vulnerable to burnout. That takes about a minute to complete. The computer calculates the responses and spits out a roughly nine- or 10-page report, so a big one. With that particular attribute, it covers the positive aspects of the trait plus some potential pitfalls, and most importantly, the first couple steps to take to recover if you need it right now. That can be found on my website, burnoutdrholly.com. Then of course, social media like everybody else, if you look under Burnout Dr Holly.com, you’re going to find me. [LISA] You just answered three of my questions in one answer there. Thank you so much for offering that free gift to my listeners. That sounds amazing. That’s like a comprehensive report too. [DR. HOLLY] It is, and it’s important that your listeners have it. I wanted to make sure it was available to them. [LISA] Can you tell us again where they can get in touch with you and all this information will also be in the show notes? [DR. HOLLY] Absolutely. It is burnoutdrholly, that’s all one word, burnoutdrholly.com. [LISA] Great. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Holly. It’s been a pleasure to have you here and to talk to us about burnout, how to get out of burnout, the steps to take and where to find you. [DR. HOLLY] Oh, thanks for having me. It was great. [LISA] Thank you, listeners, for listening today. Please let me know what you thought of the episode. Send me an email to lisa@amiokpodcast.com. Remember to subscribe, rate and review wherever you get your podcast. To find out more about Highly Sensitive Persons, please go to my website at amiokpodcast.com and subscribe to my free eight-week email course to help you navigate your own sensitivities and to show you that it’s okay not to take on everyone else’s problems. This is Lisa Lewis reminding each and every one of you that you are okay. Until next time, be well. Thank you for listening today at Am I Ok? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. 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