What If It's Not Burnout? The Three Diagnoses That Actually Explain How You're Feeling

We struggle to process it.

And I think this is something that's pretty ubiquitous in all people.

And that's what I really want to get into today.

I don't think anybody listening to this is thinking, how do I get rid of stress? But rather, how do I better manage it? And you said something when we talked last week, and it really...

Got me to think, I think we were talking about burnout.

And I gave you a couple statistics I had heard and you sort of stopped me and you said, we have to be careful with the term burnout because a lot of times what we're experiencing as burnout is actually what you described bored out.

But they feel very much the same.

Can you elaborate on that? Because when you said that, I went, hmm.

And I'll share my story with you and why that connected with me.

But I'm interested if you could elaborate on that term, bored out.

Yeah, it probably goes back to a little bit of that top of the mountain syndrome.

That sort of life is a sort of series of steps.

And every now and then you end up on a certain step and it was a step you wanted to get to.

You really wanted to get that business or you really wanted to get into that school or you really wanted that job.

But then once you've been there for a while, things like hedonic adaption and stuff like that can make you feel a little bit agitated.

And I call that an agitated squiggle.

So when you're agitated but everything's okay but you're just not quite sure why something's wrong, And I think as optometrists sitting in the three by three room for eight hours a day asking which one's clearer, number one or number two, there's an element of that that after you've done it for quite a few years, it's very hard to find a challenge in it.

And we need that challenge stress.

We need to have the stress of a challenge.

So I think there's three ways that that burnout you know what we call burnout i think there's actually three different things that you need to get the diagnosis right to work out what the treatment is and burnout is real don't get me wrong there are people that are burned out and burned out is when i have way too much to do not enough support and not enough time all right so burnout's real i haven't got enough time to do all the things i need to get done and you you meet a lot of ods around the place do you find that that's a real thing for quite a few of them

Yeah.

And I'll continue, but I want to share with you my story quickly on why I felt both sides of that, the burnout and the bored out.

But continue with where you were going.

Well, the bored out and when you're burned out, you need rest.

All right.