Karina's Top 5 Anti-Burnout Resources

Hello and welcome back to the show. Today's episode is probably a little bit different than what you've been used to.I thought it would be interesting to use this time to share some of my favorite resources, what I call my anti burnout resources that I tend to lean on over and over again. If you've been following me for a while, you know that I care a lot about sustainable recovery after burnout.How do we take what we've learned from our burnout experiences and ensuring that we maintain that momentum and not fall back to old patterns? I've come across a number of resources. Some of them are directly linked to burnout, others are not at all.But they do help remind us of some of the important foundations that help us keep to an optimal state of well being overall.And when I find myself struggling or feeling challenged in different ways, I tend to go back to these resources to just help me get reminded about what's really important, to help me remember the skills that I've learned to help me tackle some of these challenges and stressful situations. These recommendations are purely mine. I've based these on, like I said, things that I've personally benefited from.I don't gain anything from making these recommendations. It's just really me passing along what has helped me over the years.And I will link the resources in the show notes so if you are interested, you can easily find your way to them as well. So let's get started. The first one is actually a series of books under the title Designing youg Life.These books are written by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.Both of them built their professional careers as product designers for reputable organizations until they transitioned to applying their expertise in design thinking for products and services to our lives. How to live a Meaningful life.I first came across them as a recommendation from a friend who knew I was struggling with the prospect of staying at my job just after I recovered from burnout. And I remember that she talked about this chapter in a book about how to design your exit.And I was struck by that because I'm like, don't you just hand in a resignation letter? But not according to Bill and Dave.What I love most about their work is their ability to take these grand visions that we tend to have for life like meaning and success and fulfillment, which can sometimes feel so unattainable, and their ability to take those existential questions to something we can actually create for ourselves. They don't prescribe a solution. Instead, they teach us skills and frameworks that are really accessible and easy to use.So we can handle these and face these big life questions and put them into perspective. There are a couple of things that I go back to over and over again.Like learning how to reframe a belief that's not helpful, learning how to make decisions beyond just doing a pros and cons list, understanding how to live a coherent life that's aligned to our values, ways to redesign a job instead of quitting or how to quit well, if that's the path you choose, and even things like how to experiment in your life to find what actually works for you. These are just some examples of things I've gained from reading their books.If you want a little exposure to their work before actually diving into them, you will find tons of material on YouTube speaking about their work. Or you can also sign up to their newsletter through their website. The second resource that I also really love is called the Resentment Journal.It comes from the work of Kate Donovan. She is most known for hosting the Burnout podcast.Just for full transparency, I did guest on her show a couple of years ago and it's one of the podcasts that I continue to follow up to now.And also never hesitate recommending to others but going back to the Resentment Journal so I never understood resentment as an emotion until I heard Kate talk about it.If you think about it, resentment is often linked to other emotions like anger, irritability, frustration that many of us who've been through burnout can recognize. And when we're resentful, we tend to feel unfairly treated, we tend to blame others, and we tend to stay in victim mode.And sometimes when we find ourselves in that situation, we might be hearing others say things like, well, just be grateful or accept your situation and just really unhelpful advice. And so Kate talks about resentment as the counter argument to the default be grateful advice when it's really no longer possible.As we're so deep in our state of chronic stress, gratitude can be a pretty high bar when we're so deep in our own struggles, right? What I love most about the Resentment Journal is just how accepting and non judgmental Kate's take is about this particular emotion.I don't know about you, but in all honesty, this is an emotion I never felt comfortable expressing. And when I did or when I felt it, I often felt guilty about feeling it.So in this exercise, just being given permission to acknowledge that it exists is already really helpful. But more than that, Kate also walks us through several practical strategies we can take to address what's causing the resentment.It is a simple exercise but it's not simple, right? So anything that we feel resentful or angry about is probably linked to a more complex issue.But she takes us through the experience in a really straightforward, pragmatic, accessible way, something you can surely do on your own. Kate often refers to resentment as a superpower and I just love the perspective she takes with this.And I've learned that if we are willing to sit with it and get curious, it can provide us with so much insight about what really matters to us. And it gives us back a sense of empowerment to make tweaks in our own routines and interactions with others.Again, you will find the link to their resentment journal in the show notes below. The next two resources that I will share are books that kind of narrate the author's own experience with their mental health and well being.The first one is called Easily youy by Elodie Kosig, who I met some years ago as part of a well being peer group in Switzerland. So in this book she talks about her own experience finding her way to well being.But she does it in a really special, almost poetic kind of way between narratives and poems and streams of thought. It's like being right there with her as she navigates her way through her big life, questions that we all can relate to at one point or the other.You can also pick any page and you will gain something from it. It's not the type of book that you have to read from the first page to the last to get meaning out of it, so it's just a very special read.And her style of talking about her story is not something I've encountered before. And so I think it's really just worth picking up if that's of interest to you.The second book is Nothing Left to Give, written by Shannon Swales, a psychologist based in Australia. She chronicles her burnout experience through journal entries. Imagine that.It's a contemporaneous account of what it was like for her as she found herself facing her situation with her health and also decisions about her work and her life. But her book also includes practices that she suggests to her readers.It could be a tip, it could be a set of reflective questions, could be an action to take if you are relating to her experiences as well.Now the thing about Elodie and Shannon's books, they don't preach, they're not academic, they don't talk to you about what burnout is and what it isn't. Of course, academic resources are also helpful, but for many of us who have experienced burnout or are worried that we might be in the middle of it.Reading it from the lens of others who've been through it can help us find language to speak about our own experiences. It can help us find ways to make meaning out of it.It releases us from shame or guilt or isolation when we think no one understands us or that we are just not allowed to feel what we feel.There's something special about other people's stories that can offer us hope, comfort, relief, and most importantly, a path of what's possible on the other side if we do the work. So two books, two additional books apart from Bill's and Dave's that I highly recommend. The last one is not a book, I promise.This one is a shorter resource. It's an interview by the TED team with Emily and Amelia Nagoski called the Cure for Burnout isn't Self Care.So I don't know about you, but I never really learned about stress growing up. I mean, the biology behind it. Stress just came into my understanding of the world as the word that you use to describe when things got difficult.And we use it as an adjective to describe a situation or how we might be feeling in a given time when we feel overwhelmed or if there are too many demands than what we're able to achieve. But the mechanics behind it, objectively speaking, was something I learned pretty much after my own burnout experience.In this talk, Emily and Amelia break down the stress experience in a way that's really easy for anyone to understand. So no, it does not bring you back to biology class and school.In the talk, they're able to help us differentiate between what is causing the stress or the stressor and how we respond to the stress. So what happens in our bodies when we're faced with such stressors? And they also introduce the concept of the stress cycle.I didn't even know that there was such a thing as a stress cycle.But they do make an important point about paying attention to our bodies, that it's normal for us to feel stressed because that's a normal biological response, but that it's also on us to complete the stress cycle by taking simple actions to let our bodies know we are safe. I find that understanding the stress cycle has become such a fundamental topic that everyone needs to understand.So whether it's through this particular resource or some other credible source, I highly recommend you to start here. If you are feeling overwhelmed by the stress in your life, whether you are in burnout or not, that's it for now with my favorite resources.I probably will come back with another round at some point in the future as there was a lot more where these came from and it was actually hard to trim it down to five. But for now, I hope you find comfort, compassion, courage in hope in some of these.If you've had a resource that you love and would like to recommend to others, please do share it in the comments or send me a message.Sharing is caring, as my son likes to say, and there is nothing like supporting the community with ideas of what different kinds of support can exist out there.Some probably really creative, some probably out of the box, some we might not expect, but can be really impactful as we continue to work towards health and meaning and fulfillment in the way that is important to us. Thank you for joining me today and I'll see you next time.