09 - Burnout as Code Blue: Navigating Mental Health in Healthcare

Burnout is a pressing concern for healthcare professionals, and understanding its psychological roots can lead to healing. This episode highlights the importance of recognizing burnout signals and engaging in personal reflection to navigate the complexities of mental health work.

• Exploring the definition and symptoms of burnout 
• Personal narratives illustrating the impact of workplace stress 
• The significance of recognizing cumulative stress over time 
• Understanding the limitations of tunnel vision in crisis situations 
• Analyzing the role of support groups and misconceptions 
• The connection between thought patterns and mental health 
• Advocating for self-awareness and inner wisdom in coping strategies 
• Emphasizing the need for an inside-out understanding of burnout 

Let us know what insights you had, if any, and what questions you might have. There's a spot below to leave a comment or reach out to any of us, individually or collectively. We'd love to hear from you and further the conversation.

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Burnout in Healthcare Settings
• 13:27 The Power of Thought in Healthcare
• 21:50 Empowerment Through Understanding Healthcare Systems

Transcript

Tyson: 0:00

Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today. I'm Tyson, with two nurses and a therapist. I'm one of the nurses and I'm here with my friends and colleagues Wendy, she's also a nurse and Lori, she is the therapist of the group. Today we are going to be talking about burnout. I know this is a big topic in the healthcare field. I've come close to experiencing burnout, as have many of my colleagues, and I'm sure that you have either experienced burnout yourself or have come close to it or have seen your colleagues burning out, burning out. So the three principles and this inside out understanding we look at burnout a little bit differently than traditional ways of looking at it, and I think I'm going to have Wendy talk about that first.

Wendy: 1:02

Yeah, thanks, tyson. Right, you know. Yeah, the inside out, this new psychological paradigm, which I am so appreciative of the fact that there's tons of evidence-based data out there to support I mean, you know we can make that available on the um, the website that hosts our podcast, definitely is a big list of all the evidence base that shows this inside out understanding of how our psychological functioning works. And so you know, it feeds into the notion of burnout and we'll talk more about it. In terms of burnout is mental and physical exhaustion, like I can't take another minute of what's going on here and I have to change things before I, you know, roll up in a and, as I'm saying this right now, yay, burnout. It is a huge warning sign that you need to take care of yourself. Huge. Now it feels awful and no one would want it.

Wendy: 2:18

And one of the things that we were come to understand in this understanding is sometimes pain and discomfort and anxiety whispers. Sometimes it whispers a little louder, sometimes it talks quite clearly to you and sometimes it shouts. And I think burnout is kind of like the, the, the, like the, the, the, all. All sirens are going off at once, all the red lights I mean it's code blue around the bedside. You know it's code blue Like this, this, this is do or die and and thank God, code blues happen. Why? Because the troops come in Right and we start thumping the chest, so we start hanging the IV and we start, and we start, you know, pushing drugs and and and we start taking notes and we start doing our observations and the patient revives many times not always, but revived. So burnout is just like code blue.

Wendy: 3:17

So yeah, and so I've got my own personal story of a burnout situation way before I knew the principles, way before I knew this inside out understanding. I'm happy to share that. But, tyson, I know that recently you are working in two different clinical fields in one as a labor and delivery nurse and one in psych nursing, and you and I are friends and we're all friends. The three of us and you shared, right from the heart, a tough weekend you had. I'm kind of curious about that.

Tyson: 3:51

Yeah, thanks, wendy. So this this past weekend at my mental health job, which is a big hospital in the city I work in a locked mental health unit three of my coworkers were assaulted three different patients, three different incidents and it it really hit home for me and my coworkers. And you know my I just remember my immediate reaction was I'm out of here, like this is this is ridiculous. I shouldn't is ridiculous, I shouldn't have to put up with this. And there was some fear there, absolutely.

Tyson: 4:32

And things over the last two months have been getting more intense Patient loads, patient acuity and, yeah, patient acuity especially has been a little bit higher and things that we're not used to seeing on our unit more medical related incidents with patients that as a psych nurse, we're just not used to seeing and not very well prepared as far as supplies that we'll need on the unit for these patients. So there's been a lot of pushback from the nurses that, especially the ones that have really been in psych most of their careers long term, to not take these patients and, of course, the the medical floors. They don't necessarily want psych patients, they're not always prepared to handle them and so they want to pass them off to the psych units right away. So there's been a little bit of animosity with that, um, a little bit of tension, I suppose, and then this culmination of these, these three people getting assaulted totally unprovoked it was, it was not by patients that we would have predicted to act this way and, um, again, the tensions have been high and this was kind of like that last straw. And so for me, when I had that reaction, I had to, you know, call myself down, um and and look at the bigger picture of it. You know and realize that, yeah, this ebbs and flows. You know, not every day is going to be. You know the days where you can really feel like you're helping patients and, you know, making a difference in someone's lives. And that's, I think, why we all get into healthcare, into helping people. We want to make a difference for people.

Tyson: 6:43

And when something like this happens, you kind of ask, well, what's the point? And when you're in it and so hyper-focused on what is happening in the moment, of course you're going to have more thinking about it and of course there's going to be some fear and you have to look at your own situation, your own safety, your own goals, your own priorities and why you got into the helping field and you know, maybe this is a signal for you that you don't want to be in this field, but maybe it's just a signal that you know what it has been tough for a while and thinking these, these thoughts of I'm done, this is too much, I can't handle this. These patients are not. I'm not doing this. You know, maybe that's a in the moment reaction and taking a step back. And is this a signal to move on? Is this a signal to stay? And it kind of fueled my passion for sharing this inside out, understanding and knowing that you know the answers lie within us and and our thinking is going to create more turmoil and if we can settle that down and come back to our, our purpose and our passions and and what we want to do, it just it feels so much lighter and better.

Tyson: 8:24

And, um, and I was able to be the calming, the calming one in in in my unit that day too. I had the day before off and so I got to go kayaking all day and, honestly, I related the kayaking trip to to work. You know, you don't know what that river is going to bring you. It can get, it can assault you literally. You know you can get thrown up against rocks and that trip I didn't, but I have in the past and you know when it's when that has happened to me in the past, I wasn't like, oh my gosh, I'm, I'm done.

Tyson: 9:03

The river salted me. How horrible is this river? So, um, you know, life ebbs and flows, just like the rivers do, and it's sometimes we have more turmoil in our jobs, we have more turmoil in our personal lives and, again, stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of what's important to you is is the key. So, um, that's that's my story for, for, for burnout. Right now I'm going to pass it on to either Wendy or Lori and see if they have anything to add to that or see anything in that.

Wendy: 9:39

Yeah, thanks Tyson, yeah I that. That sounds really intense. What you and your staff had to go through over the weekend, your colleagues and what I found interesting is that if we get caught up in the moment of like there have been three assaults within the last 24 hours this is a dangerous place. I should not come back here. My life is in danger. I'm going to leave, but most of us, like you say, take stock and widen the lens a little bit. You know we all learned.

Wendy: 10:18

Probably I don't know Lori, you can tell us if you learned this in therapy school, but in nursing school we learned a lot about tunnel vision, like, really like, like under duress, when fight or flight, hormones are racing, our scope of vision gets very, very narrow and we try to. We deal with the problem at hand, which is wonderful Again, think of burnout. Okay, assault on the third floor, assault on the fourth floor. Everybody you know take, get a little bit more vigilant in case that. You know everybody. You do what you need to do to take care of the thing in front of you, but making a decision, a lifelong decision, like nursing, isn't for me. I'm going to quit this.

Wendy: 10:58

You may feel all those feelings of the mood or the level of awareness that you have, and your awareness is very small and very tight and very focused on taking care of oneself. So you know, if you were to kind of scale up and go well, over the past month, how many assaults have there been Well over the past six months? How many assaults have there been Well over the past year? How many assaults have there been Well over the past year? How many times have I been assaulted?

Wendy: 11:31

You know, when our perspective is wider which can happen when our mood or our awareness level is such that we can do that but if you've got these cortisol and all these stress hormones telling you to get out of danger, you can't really think in that wider scope of awareness or understanding. And a lot of times what I find in our language about burnout is that the burnout is the problem and it needs to be combated. How do you combat it? With good self-care, with building up your resilience and, Lori, you sent us a really, really interesting email recently about your colleagues in therapy. Did you remember that email?

Lori: 12:25

I do. The reason I sent it to both of you was because it was a call for therapists to get together in a support group and the title was Combat Burnout with Support. Now that's really a misunderstanding about the feeling of burnout. So I mean, you know my own profession has well. We all have misunderstandings about life. So it's really great for those of you who are listening, whether you're, whatever role you play in care, the fact that burnout, the feeling of being burned out, is exactly what you need to wake you up to the fact that you have to calm your head down. You have to calm your own feelings, your own mental space down.

Lori: 13:27

What happens when people get into support groups? This idea of the support group is really talking about how awful things are, which. What does that do? That's going to compound the feeling of awfulness. So I mean we're so fortunate to have this inside-out understanding that it's our own experience, coming from our own thinking, our personal thinking and Tyson's response to all those incidents that happened in one lump weekend, in one lump time period. Her response was a lot different than the other nurses on the unit dealing with this because she knew that thinking about how awful it is is not going to benefit her or anybody else, certainly not the patients on the unit, certainly not the other patients, certainly not the other staff that the secret is being aware of the feeling letting us know, like a feeling tapping us on the shoulder, letting us know that it's time to take a break in our own mental, in our own mentality yeah, you know you bring up an interesting point too and that the support group is is kind of something where people get together and complain about what happened.

Tyson: 15:03

It's that misery lives company thing. And I was very aware of that as I was going through this on Sunday and the thoughts that I was having, and then and then also seeing my co-workers and their reactions to this, I was very careful not to talk about it with them, you know, and and fuel that fire that was burning inside of them. And I was also very careful when I left not to talk about it with certain people too, because it would be, oh how awful. That's terrible. You shouldn't have to work like that, you know, um, I shared with you and Wendy what happened because I knew that would be a supportive, healthy space to share that in. You know I shared with you and Wendy what happened because I knew that would be a supportive, healthy space to share that in. And that also makes me want to create a space for other nurses and helpers and therapists that do have those intense feelings and those intense situations where we can get together and support each other in a healthy, positive way.

Wendy: 16:07

Yeah, everything about this new paradigm of psychological functioning is all about a healthier day-to-day life. Everything about it reveals that everything that we go through in life, every person, every timeframe, et cetera, is all individually made meaning of inside of this girl's brain. You know, the three of us, could you know? I don't know why the word hurricane? If, if we all lived in the same neighborhood and somebody said a hurricane was coming in, batten down the hatches. It's going to be really bad. Some people can't get, can't wait to get out and storm chase.

Tyson: 17:04

Some people are going to be cowering in their bathtub I didn't think that I needed to run and do qigong, I didn't need to go sit in a massage chair. I knew that once I noticed that, thinking about the situation, no-transcript, you need to go to Qigong, you need to go do some yoga, you need to go for a walk, you need to do X, y and Z, and maybe that would have been appropriate. But it wasn't in my case, because I just noticed all the thinking that was going on and I just simply let that settle down.

Lori: 17:52

So you know what I love, Tyson? To that our wisdom, everybody is tapped into a wisdom that lets us know time for a walk, oh way to calm down. We all intrinsically know how to settle our thinking down. It's automatic and we can depend upon that, which is a really calming thing to know that we have this internal wisdom to depend upon.

Wendy: 18:42

Yeah, just the interesting thing of Lori the therapist, Wendy the chronic pain nurse, Tyson the psychiatric nurse. The education to date predominantly has been about find what the problem is and go address the problem and what the inside out understanding basically is saying the problems are the human beings unique ability to try to cope with thinking. That's off balance. You know, we're going to say, I'm going to say something radical right now. The radical radical statement is this: There is only one mental illness - the misuse of the power of thought. That's it.

Wendy: 19:26

Because if we understood the power of thought and how it works in our lives, then when we get anxious, when we get depressed, when we get burnt out, when we get suicidal, when we get homicidal, when we get any of a bipolar, all those things, our, our, our bodies and our minds attempts to get to feel better. I would never think I'm anxious because I'm, I'm scared and I want to feel better. And maybe if I try to whack all the moles in life I'll feel better, but it looks like anxiety. Maybe if I quit my job I'll feel better, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's the kind of a radical statement and we'll talk more about it as we go on, but do we have anything else we want to wrap up on burnout with today?

Tyson: 20:18

Go ahead, Tyson? No, I don't think so. I think we kind of hit everything and you made a really good point with that with the problems aren't there to be fixed, they are the solution, and we have to look backwards from there.

Wendy: 20:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah and someday I'll talk to you all about my where I learned that, those those solutions. I learned about that in Alcoholics Anonymous. They said alcohol is not your problem, that's your solution. You're trying to feel better, but that's for another day perhaps. But it all speaks to this inside out stinking thinking that we believe, we believe, and that's what can kind of get us into trouble and we just really want to raise a flag, raise the awareness that we are created to experience life from the inside out and not from the outside in, and that there's such relief and such joy to be had hour to hour, day to day, when we know how things actually work and we stop fighting the system.

Lori: 21:31

So now let's just say one, one final um remark about that. That um, isn't it great to know that we don't have to believe everything we think. Yeah, it just really wow, it really changes yeah, yeah.

Wendy: 21:50

We love this subject, the three of us. We love what we're talking about. We know what we're talking about. We know what we're talking about from personal experience. It works. When you understand how the system works, life becomes so much easier. So that's our hope for all of you.

Wendy: 22:05

Right, Tyson, it is yes. Thank you for joining us today. Let us know what insights you had, if any, and what questions you might have. There's a spot below to leave a comment or reach out to any of us, individually or collectively. We'd love to hear from you and further the conversation. Thanks again for joining us.