Ep4 Burnout

Dr Amanda Potter shares her research and personal experience of Burnout - what are the causes, what is the relationship between stress, burnout and depression, and what actions could be taken to overcome the feelings and emotions associated with burning out. Amanda will also start to look at resilience and physical intelligence. These two topics will be explored further in later podcasts.

In this episode Amanda is being interviewed by her co-Director Tim Hepworth.

The Chief Psychology Officer website is now available https://www.thecpo.co.uk/

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Timestamps

Burnout

·       00:00 – Introduction to Burnout

·       00:56 – Sounds more like a metal breakdown to me…

·       01:57 – The rule of 3

·       03:01 – A Workplace Syndrome

·       03:42 – Work; the route of all evil

·       04:20 – AA don’t have it all to themselves

·       05:55 – It’s on the horizon!

Retrospective

·       07:06 – Is this for young people, or for all of us?

·       08:09 – A retrospective name

·       08:38 – Stress

·       09:14 – I’m not getting in that Ice Bath!!!

·       10:19 – Mind and body

·       11:03 – Neuroscience

·       12:01 – Subconscious Pessimism

·       12:48 – I think you should calm down…

The key to your health

·       13:26 – Physiological Sigh?

·       14:34 – 2 breaths in, 1 breath out

·       15:41 – Get a load of that Panorama (Not the BBC series)

·       17:37 – Sympathetic vs. Parasympathetic

·       18:00 – Walk before work

·       19:00 – I though you ought to know… I’m feeling very depressed

·       20:21 – Fancy a pill?

·       21:18 – AHA!

Touchstones

·       22:39 – Would you care to share with us?

·       23:48 – Falling down

·       25:39 – You’ve got a friend in me

·       27:04 – So close, yet so far

·       28:39 – Resilience; a sneak peak

·       30:01 – From 12 steps, to 3… now 9

·       31:27 – Final thoughts?

33:00 – The end. 

Talk it all out 

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Transcript

Tim Hepworth: 0:04

Hello, and welcome to the fourth episode of the Chief Psychology Officer with Dr. Amanda Potter. Today we're going to be looking at burnout. So, Amanda, burnout's our topic. Should we start off by you telling us uh what exactly is burnout?

Dr Amanda Potter: 0:17

Thank you, Tim. I'm delighted to be sharing our podcast on burnout because it's a particularly pertinent topic for me because I personally have experienced burnout and it wasn't a great part and stage of my life. But to answer the question, burnout is when you feel completely depleted, when you have a total state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion. When you feel like you've got nothing left to give, you feel like nothing really matters. And this can very often come as a result of prolonged stress or a number of periods of long stress.

Tim Hepworth: 0:56

So burnout seems a bit a bit of a modern term. Probably a term I'm more familiar with, it's something like a mental breakdown. Is burnout the same thing as a mental breakdown or is it something entirely different?

Dr Amanda Potter: 1:07

I would say that the two could be seen to be similar. We don't normally use the language of a mental breakdown. We would use the language of stress or burnout. Burnout is when you feel fatigued over things that you would normally find easily, that you would really enjoy, when you might get agitated or annoyed by the small things, when you start noticing that you're being irrational about very trifling things, or when your empathy is gone and you start to not care about things that you used to care about.

Tim Hepworth: 1:42

Yeah, I think some of those things might apply to me at the moment, but don't know if that's burnout or that it's just a bit of a cantankerous nature. That remains to be seen, I think.

Dr Amanda Potter: 1:50

Having worked with you for 10 years, Tim, I don't think that's true.

Tim Hepworth: 1:54

Oh well, thank you. Don't know about that, but uh burnout obviously has causes. Are there particular things that you see cropping up time and time again as being causes? Or are there specific things that each person has that applies to them and them alone?

Dr Amanda Potter: 2:10

So we've done some research on burnout, as have the Harvard Business Review, and there is an American social psychologist called Christina Maslatch. She's also done quite a lot of work looking at the indications or signs of burnout and the causes of burnout. From our research, we have identified that there are three main causes of burnout. They are the relationship with the line manager, particularly if that relationship is toxic or very parent-child, the volume of work and the capacity to get that work completed within a reasonable amount of time each day, and the complexity and the clarity that's provided, and whether that individual has clear purpose and understanding about their role and the value that they're bringing to their organization. But I wanted to just point out that the World Health Organization talks about burnout as a workplace syndrome. And I think that's pretty fundamental language actually, that the World Health Organization believes that burnout happens as a result of work and the dynamics at work. HBR, when they do their research, they have also looked at the causes, and their causes are very similar to ours, but they also add on top of it a lack of community or social isolation, a lack of fairness or values mismatch when somebody doesn't feel like they fit into an organization.

Tim Hepworth: 3:40

So uh work is indeed the root of all evil, is it?

Dr Amanda Potter: 3:43

And can be the root of all success. We derive such joy from work when we work with people who enable us to be creative. And I'm a great example of that. I work with my best friend who I met at Sixth Form College back in Colchester 30 years ago. So, oh my goodness, over 30 years ago. And so I get a lot of joy from my work, but I still experience burnout.

Tim Hepworth: 4:09

I think that's the important thing, isn't it? I mean, you you spend an awful lot of time at work, so it shouldn't really come as a surprise that some of the main causes and drivers of burnout are going to be work-related things. So they're the causes of burnout, but how do we actually spot those things? Are there any particular signs that we can watch out for so that we can head it off at the pass? Or does it come at us all of a clatter and there's nothing we can do about it?

Dr Amanda Potter: 4:35

So it doesn't happen all at once. There are stages, and according to psychologists, there are 12 stages of burnout, and it very often starts with perfectionism or a desire to prove oneself. It then leads into not being able to switch off and wanting to do the very best job you can for your line manager, for your client, for your team, which then means that people start to neglect their basic needs. They may skip a meal, they may not sleep as long, they may avoid doing some of those social things with family that are so important for replenishing ourselves. But if I look at the American Social Psychologist's research from the University of California, so her name is Christina Maslach, she talks about the three main signs of burnout. They are emotional exhaustion, which is much more than physical exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, that's when you get irritated or impatient or irrational and you just can't see the good in things, and reduced effectiveness. So that's when you constantly criticize yourself and don't believe yourself to be worthy or adding anything positive in a conversation or a piece of work, and you always feel like you're not doing a good job.

Tim Hepworth: 5:54

So, what sort of a time period are we talking about here when we're looking for these things? Are we looking at uh something that happens over a matter of days, weeks, months? How long does it take to manifest?

Dr Amanda Potter: 6:06

So burnout can creep up on you over a period of weeks and months. It's not something that you would usually experience in a few days. Over hours and days, what you're experiencing probably is acute stress rather than prolonged stress. And it's prolonged stress that really causes burnout. Acute stress, interestingly, can be good for you as long as it's the right type of stress. They talk about ice cold baths and very cold showers are very good in terms of creating a stress response and helps you to create adrenaline that helps you the immune system to strengthen. So that type of acute stress can be really good, but it's that prolonged stress over a number of weeks or a number of months that really is not good.

Tim Hepworth: 6:56

Um, I don't disagree with you very often, Amanda, but uh I don't think you're gonna get me into an ice cold bath very quickly or very soon.

Dr Amanda Potter: 7:04

I don't either.

Tim Hepworth: 7:05

Uh one thing I'm interested to know is that does burnout sort of favour particular ages? Like is it particularly more prevalent in the middle age, those of us a certain age, or is there a a golden age at which we need to look out for burnout symptoms more than another?

Dr Amanda Potter: 7:20

In the US, they've researched and identified that most people experience burnout by the age of 32, which is a shocking statistic.

Tim Hepworth: 7:29

Wow, that is shocking.

Dr Amanda Potter: 7:31

We've conducted research in the UK with global clients and found that with working professionals, nearly 50% of all the participants that we surveyed have experienced burnout at some point in their careers. And amazingly, we worked with one large consulting organization. When we surveyed their employees and we had 150 people within that survey, 75% of those individuals said that they had in their careers experienced burnout at one point or another.

Tim Hepworth: 8:02

So it's not surprising then that we're hearing more and more about it. Has it always been around, do you think, or is it a thoroughly modern phenomenon?

Dr Amanda Potter: 8:10

I think it's always been around. People who work hard, who live to work rather than work to live, who are perfectionists, who don't want to say no and have a desire to be their very best personally and in to achieve in life, are at risk of pushing themselves. Unless they look after themselves and are resilient and are very mindful of the stress that they're experiencing, they could be at risk of burnout.

Tim Hepworth: 8:38

There's that word stress creeping into our conversation. I think we're all familiar with the varying levels of stress. Is there a link then between stress and burnout? It seems as though there might be.

Dr Amanda Potter: 8:50

Stress is definitely one of the major causes of burnout. It's also one of the major predictors and causes of depression. And so we should spend some time talking about stress and the different types of stress. Because some stress can be good and some stress is most definitely not good. And it's the prolonged stress that really is not good when we're thinking and talking about burnout.

Tim Hepworth: 9:14

Oh no. Sounds like we're uh back at the ice cold bath again to induce good stress. There must be some other ways of doing it, surely.

Dr Amanda Potter: 9:22

There are other types of stress. So we talk about positive stress as 'you' stress. 'You' stress is when we are increasing our level of attention and arousal in order to perform at our best. But we don't want to be too stressed that it turns into feelings of anxiety or impacting our self-belief. But we need some type of pressure in order to perform. So stress can be good, but actually it's that prolonged stress that can be bad. Now, what's interesting is that all species experience stress, and stressors can be either psychological or physical. So a psychological stress might be that the feeling that we have too much on, too many pressures, too many competing priorities, whereas a physical threat might be the presence of someone who we find threatening. Our response though doesn't differentiate between the two.

Tim Hepworth: 10:19

When you say our response, is that a physical response or the psychological one?

Dr Amanda Potter: 10:24

It's both. So it's actually the physiological response. When we feel stressed, we don't just experience it in our brains, we experience it in our bodies too, because of the nervous system. Stress has a purpose. It has a purpose of making us want to move away from that difficulty. And so what happens is we get the feeling of agitation. Stress is the emotional or physical or physiological reaction to a stressor that we need to remove ourselves from. So if we want to control the stress, we need to control the agitation. But the stress is designed to mobilize us.

Tim Hepworth: 11:03

How does that actually manifest itself? You know, what actually happens when I feel stress?

Dr Amanda Potter: 11:08

What happens is that when we're stressed, we release epinephrine, which can make our muscles twitch and helps us to prepare and get ready for action. Our blood vessels dilate, our heart rate increases. We are preparing the body and the mind for the fight or flight response. Now, our brains are wired to be aware of safety risks. And we heard in our previous podcast on resilience that this is driven by the amygdala, which is responsible for fight or flight response. The amygdala is extremely efficient and attentive and scans the environment for threats. This results in a negativity bias where we unconsciously look out for threat and danger more than anything else when we're feeling stressed.

Tim Hepworth: 12:00

Is that what we term catastrophizing? Is that what we're doing there?

Dr Amanda Potter: 12:05

You absolutely could be because our brains are on autopilot because we deal with 11 million pieces of information per second, and 99% of this is automatic and below consciousness. When we're catastrophizing, what we're doing is we are allowing that negativity bias to run amok, to focus on the potentially bad things to the detriment of looking at the good. And what's actually happening from a physiological perspective is the amygdala is getting stronger and faster, and the prefrontal cortex, which is the rational part of the brain, which helps to rationalize the extent to the risk and put a stop to the emotional response, that gets smaller and less strong.

Tim Hepworth: 12:48

So it kind of gets pushed out by the negative response.

Dr Amanda Potter: 12:52

Absolutely. And what's so interesting is because of this, it really doesn't work to tell someone to calm down when they're stressed. What will happen is almost you have the opposite reaction. Actually, we need to understand and recognize the reason for the agitation, and we need to find a way to cognitively calm ourselves, and we need to be physically intelligent about the stress and the reasons for the stress and take action ourselves rather than being told everything's fine and everything's alright.

Tim Hepworth: 13:26

So when you say take action to calm yourself, are we talking the usual suspects here? Are we talking the take a deep breath, go for a walk, think happy thoughts, or are we thinking about other things here?

Dr Amanda Potter: 13:39

You're very close, actually. One of the ways you can calm stress is something called a physiological sigh, which is taking a deep breath, but it's actually taking two deep breaths. The physiological sigh is a double inhale and one exhale. What it does is it helps to rid the body of carbon dioxide that builds up in the bloodstream when you're stressed and helps to remove the feeling of agitation. If you do three of these in a row, it can be very successful in bringing the heart rate down, removing the carbon dioxide, and removing that feeling of agitation. And that's because the extra inhale fills all the little vessels in the lower part of the lungs with air and helps to remove carbon dioxide that builds up both in the lungs and in the bloodstream.

Tim Hepworth: 14:32

So that's two breaths in, one breath out.

Dr Amanda Potter: 14:35

Absolutely. And it's that second breath in that really helps to fill.

Tim Hepworth: 14:39

So let me practice.

Dr Amanda Potter: 14:44

Exactly. Fill the lower part of the lung, which really helps to reduce the feeling of anxiety, feeling of stress, and really calm the mind. Now, I use this a lot when I'm feeling agitated, and I won't say why, but I do use this quite a lot.

Tim Hepworth: 15:02

Yes, I'll uh look out for that in the future. It can be my sign to see whether Amanda is stressed or not. Yeah, it's interesting before when you mentioned that other creatures undergo symptoms of stress. I know with dogs, for example, that uh watching this on the TV the other day, that a dog is when it's stressed, its ears get hot, which I found quite uh interesting. And also, not only dogs but other animals, horses and things, when they're not stressed, when they're happy, they do very much similar to what you were talking about with the sighing before. They'll let out a nice big long breath, and that apparently is a sign that they're nice and happy and calm.

Dr Amanda Potter: 15:39

I didn't know that.

Tim Hepworth: 15:40

So you've told us about the uh physiological sigh. Have you got any more tips or tricks for us about dealing with stress?

Dr Amanda Potter: 15:48

Another great tip that I also use when I'm feeling anxious or stressed is to focus on the panorama rather than being too blinkered. To remove the feeling of agitation, we need to relax the eyes. When we're stressed, we have tunnel vision and we're extremely blinkered. What happens is because our vision is tethered to our autonomic nervous system, what we're doing is we are increasing our attention, increasing our focus, and increasing our level of anxiety. We need to calm the mind when we're stressed, and we can do this by removing the tunnel vision, by dilating our gaze to the visual panorama and just taking in the whole of the perspective rather than what's immediately in front of us.

Tim Hepworth: 16:41

Okay, so uh it's actually important to really look at things then. Have I got that right? It's the act of looking at things that actually invokes this response?

Dr Amanda Potter: 16:50

Absolutely, because what we're talking about now is the difference between the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the body's response to threat and is responsible for the fight or flight. And sorry to be technical, but the parasympathetic nervous system, which is usually activated when people are relaxed or when they're calm. If we focus on the panorama rather than having this very tunnel or blinkered vision, what we're doing is we are calming the sympathetic nervous system, which is connected to the eyes and to the cranial nerves, and we're enabling us to feel calm, which is related to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is activated when we're relaxed and chilled.

Tim Hepworth: 17:35

So uh in a nutshell, parasympathetic good, sympathetic bad.

Dr Amanda Potter: 17:39

So if we put both of those together, then going for a walk before work is one of the things that has been found to be fantastic for reducing cortisol. If you combine that with a few physiological size as you're walking round and taking in the panorama, you'll do a great job in reducing your level of stress.

Tim Hepworth: 18:00

So me taking my dog Alfie out for a walk every morning then is working wonders, is it? It's keeping me calm and stress-free.

Dr Amanda Potter: 18:07

It really is. There's fantastic research to show that a walk before work each day, because of the panorama and because of the breathing and because of the light that you're getting in, is incredibly good for reducing the amount of cortisol you produce at the beginning of the day.

Tim Hepworth: 18:26

So it sounds like the uh the old adage is true, then, is it, like the doctor keeps telling me, exercise, exercise, exercise?

Dr Amanda Potter: 18:32

It really is. And one of the things I love researching now and have been doing quite a lot of thinking about is the concept of physical intelligence, which is where we can, through our choices and through our actions, be happier and be more resilient because of exercise, what we eat, and our activity and our relationships.

Tim Hepworth: 18:56

So we've got burnout, we've got stress. Another word that keeps rearing its head when these things are being discussed is depression. Is depression the same thing as burnout, or is it linked with it in some way?

Dr Amanda Potter: 19:09

They do connect, absolutely. If we experience stress, we are more likely to suffer from depression. And stress is also one of the main causes of burnout. So they are most definitely linked. The depression research shows that when we are experiencing the feelings of depression, what's happening is that very often people have low levels of the neurotransmitters serotonin, and the experience is that they have feelings of guilt or grief. They might have low levels of dopamine, which means they have that feeling of not being able to experience pleasure. It's called anhedonia, when you're unable to experience pleasure or positive activities and you don't just enjoy things, and low levels of epinephrine or adrenaline and the feeling of lethargy. The impact is that people who feel depressed, if they have low levels of each of these transmitters, may have the feelings of guilt or grief, or unable to be positive or to enjoy the things that they normally enjoy, or lethargy and a lack of energy.

Tim Hepworth: 20:21

So you mentioned three specific chemicals there, and they seem to be associated with distinct emotions and feelings. Does that mean then that if we want to assist with these things, that all we have to do is pop a pill?

Dr Amanda Potter: 20:33

Definitely no, we need to find ways to overcome this. We need to find healthy ways, physical ways to increase our levels of dopamine, serotonin, and epinephrine. So, for example, dopamine, we can increase our dopamine when we successfully complete a task or have a little win or complete a self-care activity. We can increase our serotonin through spending time with people who matter deeply to us, eating dark chocolate or bananas. How fabulous. Yes. Or walking in the sun or running. And finally, we can release greater levels of adrenaline through physical, either resistance activity or vigorous activity. But I had an aha moment. I was driving to Essex at the weekend, and the aha moment was that when I realized that people who suffer from depression have a depletion of serotonin, dopamine, and epinephrine, and therefore experience this guilt or grief or anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy things that they would normally enjoy, and the feeling of lethargy. It made me think about my personal experience of burnout, which is I push myself so hard to try to find the things I would enjoy that would make me happy, that would make me feel fulfilled, that would make me feel whole. And so I wondered whether for some people burnout happens because people persist and push themselves to work harder to achieve that sense of success that comes with dopamine, to remove the feeling of guilt or grief that comes from low serotonin, or to get away from the feeling of lethargy and create a sense of being positive and energetic that comes from low epinephrine. And so I wondered whether the low levels of neurotransmitters that people experience, people drive themselves even harder to try and feel good.

Tim Hepworth: 22:38

So, Amanda, you uh touched on your own experiences with burnout. Do you want to share a little bit more about that and tell us what your experiences were and how you dealt with it and what you did?

Dr Amanda Potter: 22:50

Interestingly, my situation was that I have alopecia. So I'm fortunate in that I don't have alopecia totalis where you lose all of your hair, but I get alopecia where you have circles of hair missing over a period of time. And it's happened three times now in my life where I've lost significant parts of my hair and have had some really pretty terrible comb overs trying to cover up the fact that I'm bold in places. Now that's been a result of acute stress and prolonged stress. When I burnt out, mine was most definitely as a result of work, but I could see a number of signs that were moving me towards the feeling of burnout.

Tim Hepworth: 23:40

So did you spot it coming or was it a case of the cobbler not fixing his own shoes?

Dr Amanda Potter: 23:46

I knew I was unhappy. I knew that I was struggling. I'd fallen out of love with psychology. I would say things like, if I could leave, I would, I'd leave the company if I could, but I can't because I'm the CEO, which is shocking actually, because I love psychology. I love working in this industry. I'm completely committed and completely engaged, but I stopped caring. And so I definitely experienced that lack of positivity, and I no longer got joy from my work. I just wanted to get away. I wanted to run away. So that was one of the signs that I stopped getting joy from doing the job I did, and I wanted to avoid it as much as possible. But I also got a deep sense of guilt and did not believe myself to be good enough. So it massively impacted my self-confidence, my belief, and how I would show up as a leader and my weight. So I put on eight stone. I've struggled with my weight for many years. So to add insult to injury, when I got alopecia and I lost the whole of the top of my hair from my fringe all the way to the back of my head, the whole of that top was completely bald and I had to do a comb over. I was also my biggest, I was at the biggest point of my life in terms of my weight. So I just felt the most ugly I could possibly feel on the outside, but also felt like an imposter on the inside that I just wasn't good enough. My co-director, Sarah, at that point stepped in and managed a number of the critical projects and most definitely was the gatekeeper for anything that was a problem. They never even passed my desk.

Tim Hepworth: 25:39

So it appears that friends and family and mixing with other people is obviously a good thing. Is that true? And are there any other things that we can do?

Dr Amanda Potter: 25:47

The point you're making about social connection is a really good one because social connection is definitely one of the ways you can help to recover from burnout. But actually, social isolation is one of the triggers of burnout as well. When we are socially isolated, we release a molecule called tachykinin. And tachykinin is like the punisher, it almost attacks our feelings of confidence, our feelings of belief, and it undermines our positivity and overwhelms us with a feeling of paranoia. When we are socially isolated too long, in addition to working hard or lacking purpose or clarity, then that could be a real risk in terms of causing burnout. If we want to minimize the impact of stress, what we need to do is we need to make sure we invest and spend time with the people that really matter, because that helps us to release serotonin, which is that feel-good neurotransmitter.

Tim Hepworth: 26:54

So social isolation is obviously a bit of an issue, and the company of other people is something that you and I'm sure many other people found to be of great comfort. These days, though, more and more people are working from home. Zoom has become just part of our lives, part of our vocabulary, and it's becoming more and more difficult in some cases to maintain the uh levels of contact that you maybe once enjoyed. How do you see that impacting? Are we going to see more or more burnout because of this? Or are there things that we can do differently that maybe can help ourselves a bit?

Dr Amanda Potter: 27:26

I think it's a very good point you're making, which is with remote working and hybrid working, people who have a high need for social connection are struggling and are continuing to struggle. The good news is many of our clients, many organizations are now going back to two days or three days a week in the office. So people are reconnecting, which is fantastic. But people who have more extroverted tendencies have a higher need for that interaction and most definitely are being impacted. And in particular, it can be a trigger for burnout.

Tim Hepworth: 28:03

Can we do anything about it?

Dr Amanda Potter: 28:04

We can. We need to make sure that we very much down the lines of physical intelligence, that we take the steps to manage those feelings of stress. We make sure that we get outside and literally just going to the shops and talking to a cashier, or if you're on public transport, having a conversation with a person next to you on the bus or on the train can make a big difference in feeling like you're part of something, part of society, and that there are real humans out there, not just behind a screen.

Tim Hepworth: 28:34

So the old adage, it's good to talk, comes true yet again. It really is. So, Mandra, I'm going to put you on the spot now. What are your recommendations for uh dealing with burnout? What things people can do and what can they take away from this?

Dr Amanda Potter: 28:48

I wanted to end this podcast with looking at resilience and our next podcast, where we have a guest coming on who I'm going to be interviewing. We're going to be focusing on resilience in that podcast. The way out of this is to be aware of our emotions and our feelings and how we categorize those feelings. Are we categorizing these feelings in a negative way and thinking to ourselves, oh no, I'm doomed. This is not working. I'm never going to be able to do it. I'm tired, I'm stressed, annoyed, I'm frustrated, and so on. Or are we categorizing our feelings positively? That's it. Let's do it. I'm ready. I know it's difficult, but I can do this. It's going to be tough, but I have it in me. This is all within my capacity. The harder it is, the better I am. How am I going to approach stress? And how do I feel about the challenge ahead of me? Am I categorizing my feelings in that very negative way or in that very positive way? That's really the essence behind our research around resilience. And we have built a model of resilience that helps people to understand. And their feelings.

Tim Hepworth: 30:01

Oh, tell me more.

Dr Amanda Potter: 30:02

We have identified the nine aspects of emotional or mental resilience that help us to categorize stress in a positive way. And on the other side of the coin, the negative emotions that would undermine our ability to be resilient. And so what the model does is it helps us to understand our feelings on a good day. Are we feeling carefree, optimistic, calm, composed, considered, for example? And on a bad day, are we worried, pessimistic, annoyed, impatient, impulsive, or self-indulgent? And it helps us understand the likelihood of experiencing those emotions when we're facing challenge. And what do we do about it? How do we face up to that challenge in a more constructive way so that we can bring forward those more positive feelings of I'm ready, let's do this, rather than the really? You really think I can do that? I'm not sure. And so for me, understanding emotions and understanding our feelings is the first step to building resilience.

Tim Hepworth: 31:16

So, like you say, resilience is the topic for our next podcast, but we uh we don't want to steal our own thunder. So, have you got any final thoughts to leave us with, Amanda?

Dr Amanda Potter: 31:27

I wanted to end this podcast with a final tip. This tip is about how to overcome the feeling of being overwhelmed or stressed. One of the things that's really good is to have a coach and to work with a coach. But if that's not something that's possible for you, what you could do is work with a trusted colleague or friend or family member instead. And what you could do is ask them to listen to you. So ask them to listen and attentively and to focus on you but not interrupt for five minutes. And during those five minutes, just share everything that you're prepared to share and just be open. Tell them everything that's in your mind and that might be bothering you. At the end of those five minutes, ask them to reflect back to you what they have heard. Once you've done that, do it again and spend another five minutes just sharing again how you're feeling and ask them to repeat that process. Encourage them not to comment or give you advice or give you answers, but just to reflect back what they've heard. This is incredibly soothing in helping you understand and sort and categorize how you feel about the problem and also start to solve your own problems or start to solve some of the questions that you might have and find the answers that you need.

Tim Hepworth: 32:50

That's really interesting. I think I uh I might give that a go myself. Find a willing or not so willing compatriot to be my partner. I'm sure somebody will give it a go with me. So that brings us to the end of our time. Thanks again, Amanda, once more. I hope everybody's found it uh enjoyable and informative. I know I have. I always managed to learn a bit doing these podcasts. Uh I'll look forward to our next one, which should be out in a couple of weeks. As we said, the next topic that we're going to be discussing is resilience, and we'll be featuring a special guest. So make sure you don't miss it.

Dr Amanda Potter: 33:24

Thank you, Tim, and thank you everyone for listening. I've really enjoyed recording today's podcast. If you have any questions or any comments, please do not hesitate to contact either of us on LinkedIn.