Victoria: Welcome to season Two of Hello CoachCast, I’m Victoria Mills and in today’s episode we are going to explore a topic that’s more important than ever: preventing burnout. With the rise of remote work and always an always-on culture. The lines between work and personal time have very much become blurred, and it has become all too easy to fall into the trap of overworking and under-resting. But by optimizing your approach to recovery, you can prevent burnout and achieve greater success in all areas of your life, which is a topic that is of deep personal interest to myself. And our guest coach today is Susie, who’s going to share signs of burnout and provide practical tools and insights to help you optimize your self-care.

By the end of this episode, you’ll have absolutely everything you need to achieve peak productivity without sacrificing your wellbeing. So here with me today is Coach Susie. Welcome.

Susy: Thank you so much for having me today. I’m really excited to be talking about this.

Victoria: I think the topic of wellbeing, and I know we started to touch on a conversation before we started recording around the seven areas of rest – I would love you to unpack a little bit more about that because it’s something that I think rest, wellbeing, we are clearly not getting enough of pre-COVID, during COVID, post-COVID, people’s stress levels are very much on the rise and signs of depression, anxiety… all the rest of it, I think often can be that we are not getting enough, what I call, ‘device detox’ as well as good quality sleep.

So I would love to hear you unpack more around the different types of rest.

Susy: Absolutely. And with that as well comes that divide that you were talking about before as well, where that idea that we have the ‘comfort’ of being able to work from home does have many privileges that come with it, but it is a little bit of a knife’s edge in that you can very easily slip into this space where work can also creep into everything else just because it’s always there if you don’t set some good boundaries.

This is a place where when people talk about boundaries, they usually think about other people, but boundaries with your work is one of the key features of the work that I do with my clients around this space. Because you’re right, sensory rest is one of the seven types of rest and devices are the cornerstone of that because they’re everywhere unless we set ourselves up in ways other than how they’re designed to implore us to always keep coming back to them.

Victoria: So quick question before we start to unpack further the seven types of rest, what are the signs and symptoms of your body or your behaviours that you have had direct experience in with your clients who are on the path to burnout – what I’d love for you just to be able to share your insights and the most common signs that people come to you with that are saying, Hey, I need some help here.

Susy: Absolutely, and it’s really interesting because it doesn’t always present exactly the same way. There are usually two ways in which I’ll see it, and one is where people just suddenly start to gradually feel the physical sensations. First, and they’re like I’m tired even when I have slept enough. Just don’t ever feel like I can peel myself out of bed.

That just general sort of the body’s instinctively trying to wind you down all the time and being in touch with that. That’s one of the ways in which people can present with burnout, and usually, they’re pretty good at telling you straight off the bat, “I think I might be burning out,” but there’s a second way.

And this is where devices can come into it in that you get this wired form of burnout where a person might be actually presenting quite differently in that they’re always on, always putting pressure on themselves. They want to achieve more. On face value, they can actually appear quite motivated until you start to see how the pendulum – that I like to call it – can sway quite aggressively back and forth between “I have to achieve everything” and “Oh my God, I’ve just gained for three days straight and didn’t even talk to my significant other.”

And you get these weird disconnects between desires and outcomes. And sometimes if you see this with people where they have quite good strategies to get things done, and they’re motivated, they have strategies, they still can’t get it to happen.

That’s where my alarm bells go. This person would probably be burnt out, but they’re usually quite wired. And these are the people who are typically quite hooked into devices because they have a very stimulating response to us where we, where we will be like ‘on’ thinking always just wanting to keep going.

This feeling of falling behind this feeling of I should be listening to podcasts at every waking moment, which has, its good ways to a degree, but we also require unplugging… because we’re not machines. And even machines sometimes off and on again, and away it goes. We’re exactly the same way, but we require it. And so usually with both, a really big part of it comes with that shift of seeing rest as necessary rather than this sort of “ugh, I guess I should.” But yeah, they’re the two, they’re the two main ways in which they present, and the second one’s the really insidious one because people may not always realize or want to accept that’s what’s happening.

Victoria: You’ve actually raised some really good points there. I mean, So much of our culture I think has shifted because of obviously what we’ve gone through. Yeah. The epidemic, post-epidemic around the work-from-home Zoom’s now permeating into our bedrooms and lounge rooms, and unless you have those very strict switch-off, disconnect boundaries in place, it is as though your physical body and your brain is literally on 24/7 because the ease of just jumping onto a laptop at nine o’clock at night to get that last email out. In an office environment, you would not be at work at nine o’clock at night.

So, I think most of the journey, half the journey is, I’m sure, helping people really understand where their stresses are coming from to help them build awareness to why they may need to change. Because having the concept, yes, change is good, yes, I need to be on the devices less, or whatever it is. Sometimes there’s an opportunity to be able to really take people on a journey of the behaviours that they become so conditioned to that they become normal to you, what you were saying before. Whereas in fact, even though they think that they can do X, Y, Z late at night or early morning, slowly those behaviours creep into areas that do have a definite impact on who you are and how you’re operating in the day.

And that whether it’s manic, whether it’s anxiety, if you don’t have rest – and I would love to hear more around the different components of rest – is so critical to how we function and how we think and how we interact and being present. I mean, there are so many segues that we can go into if you have a lack of rest in your world.

So I’d love to understand with your experience, the seven different types of rest.

Susy: Ooh I’ve actually got the initial article up here that I found it from.

But there was one other thing that I wanted to quickly cover as well, which is the concept of polluted time. Because one of the biggest reasons why people will offer resistance to this change often in that second category, is that they’ve overcommitted to what they believe to be the benefit of having that polluted time.

The people who go, oh, but I can always do my shopping at lunchtime, I can go pick up the kids. And again, these things to a degree are great, but this concept that the more that your personal life creeps into your work hours, the more that your work life will creep into your personal hours until the two things just become one.

And sometimes, there are really reasonable reasons to take advantage of that. But when that is left unchecked, that is where this creep can just continue to come in. Now with the seven types of rest, one of the things that I find really interesting is that in terms of what we know as rest, when we think rest, we think sleep, which is part of it, but it’s a very small component of the seven types of rest.

Sleep is just part of the passive form of physical rest. Even physical rest contains other things. It contains active parts to it, such as getting a massage, doing some yoga, in more athletic terms would be considered ‘active recovery’. Those are forms of physical rest as well.

Salt baths, ice baths, all of that falls under the category of physical rest and that’s one of the seven types of rest of which we all require all seven. And when people go, oh, but I sleep eight hours, and suddenly that you look at it under that lens, suddenly you go, Ooh, I thought I was very well rested but if that’s only half of a seventh of the picture, then maybe there’s a little bit more to it.

The next one is considered mental rest, and I like to mention these two together. Sensory rest. Mental rest is mind going, always thinking, always planning. It’s part of where I like to point the finger a little bit to toxic ‘hustle culture’, and I think it’s a really valuable thing to be talking about as coaches because we are in the space of positive psychology.

Our goal is to work with people who want to better themselves, and it’s this really interesting fine line where we want to assist people to achieve the things that they want, to get the most of everything that they could possibly have. But I always like to look at everything as a trade. Anything that you’re willing to put in if you cannot identify what it’s going to cost you, then don’t act yet because you’re missing information.

Anything that we add into our lives by necessity is going to take something away. And if you’re not taking that equation into account, this is where you can end up in a severe rest deficit across all seven types, particularly with the mental rest.

When you suddenly find yourself in a stressful situation, “Oh my God, I’ve over committed, I, I’m now in under financial duress. I’m now halfway through a project that is, is not working.” Your mind is going, going, going, going mental rest Is that capacity to be able to calm your mind down and to just give up moments of quiet.

This is where that capacity to also step away from the work that you’re doing and take a scheduled break. Create some structure and to tolerate the discomfort of honouring those boundaries. Because one of the most difficult things in this space is that sometimes when you feel that you’re on a roll, it is the right thing to keep going.

But sometimes if you also just get attached to this idea of, I just have to keep going, because there’s that desperation urge coming up, it takes a lot of discipline to be able to step away and to honour the rest because it’s not as easy to measure as the doing. We can always measure an outcome in the doing side of things because you are going to complete a project, you’re gonna complete a paper, you’re going to get a pay rise.

Like something will obviously happen. Others see it, they’ll praise it. There’s a lot of reward in the act of just continuing going. Whereas honouring rest is very much of a self-discipline piece, because other people don’t see it. Other people won’t reward it. They probably don’t even know what’s going. People who live with you might, and they might be like, thank you, you’ve been intolerable.

But outside of that, people don’t see it. People don’t reward it. We don’t have a structured reward system for honouring rest, and that’s where the hustle culture creeps in. We get over-rewarded for burning ourselves out and under-rewarded for taking care of ourselves.

Victoria: You’ve raised some amazing points there, Susie. This is a topic that I know we could sit here for the next five hours or five days and talk about, because when you were referring to yes, the hustle culture and you don’t necessarily get rewarded for giving yourself rest time. I was listening to that and with my own experience with clients for two decades now, so much of our behaviour is linked to our ability to be kind.

And this has been coming up in lots of conversations recently. It’s not even, I mean, it’s linked to yes — self-esteem, self-worth. But it’s having the graciousness towards yourself to be able to honor those boundaries and stick to those structures and of recent conversations is that I’ve said over the years, if it’s something that you are wanting to work towards, such as a new shift, or a boundary, or wanting to increase your self-care, when things come in, and I love the term that you used, ‘hustle culture’ or the

‘polluted time’, that was a good one. Often to be able to stop, reflect, pause, and ask yourself if you continue down that track on completing a task, or should you do a task just to take a moment and ask yourself, am I actually being kind in this moment to myself?

Just to have a single question, sometimes as a pause point, can actually have a profound impact on helping just shift some of your awareness into more positive behaviours. And I love the concepts of polluted time and the hustle culture, because it’s systemic and we have to be incredibly vigilant and it becomes a daily commitment.

For the person that’s wanting to bring in new boundaries and self-care just to be very, it just comes down to having a deep sense of kindness towards yourself, and I think if you are missing that, you are not… there’s an opportunity here for you to be able to link the two together.

Susy: Yeah, and it’s a space where a lot of people do struggle because again, who is particularly susceptible to burnout? High-achievers. What do high achievers get a lot of, a lot of praise. They get so rewarded for their struggle that maybe no one else knows about. Why do some high achievers happen? Just because they are.

That’s fine. Some high achievement happens through a sense of lack though. It’s not uncommon in our line of work to come across people who are doing tremendously well in their life. And that’s not necessarily problematic until you realise that if they start to pull back, they start beating themselves up.

There’s this belief of needing to earn your keep, needing to justify your existence at every waking moment. And that comes from a deep lack of self-compassion, you know, and that’s where one of the easiest perspective shifts to provide to anybody with this struggle is to go, “Hey, you you know, if this was your friend telling you that they have this, would you tell ’em, nah stuff, it just go in on a Saturday until nine o’clock at night.”

Would you really tell someone that you care about to do that? Would you actually be pushing them to, to do that? Or would you be more likely to go, “Maybe have a think about it?” Like, Sure, I’ll support you if that’s what you really identify is what’s necessary. And that it’s, the cost isn’t going to be too great, but is that, do you really need that?

You know, we all love you anyway because it’s that tricky piece where, and another five hours that we don’t have time for… but at the crux of some of the biggest struggles of the human condition is that struggle to provide ourselves with the same compassion that we usually don’t struggle that much to provide to others.

Victoria: I agree with that. I was actually gonna go there and I thought, oh, do we touch on that area? Around, around it can, particularly high achievers, yes, can fill that space or want to keep obsessing around filling that space to avoid the void that sits within them. And that is, I believe, a magical space that offers deep opportunity to really get to the crux of the issue, to therefore have more compassion and more kindness.

And we can all do it. We are all guilty of it. And it’s being very vigilant on, again, what is right for me versus what is right for others. And to be able to take yourself on that journey of what am I trying to avoid by loading up my day and my tasks every day? What am I actually getting out of doing a 10, 12-hour day?

And where in that am I actually taking care of self? And I would love to hear the other – cause I think we’ve, touched on physical rest and mental rest – what the other five rest areas are.

Susy: Yeah. So, we indirectly touched on the next one, which is sensory rest. And that is part of what really ties into device usage. We’ve got bright lights, we’ve got loud music, we’ve got so much, especially big city living go-getters are surrounded by this all the time, just because of the nature of, if you still go into an office, you probably go into a CBD – sensory overload.

And again, all of these things are healthy to a degree. But it’s only when it’s a chronic overload that it starts to become problematic and it starts to create a difficulty around things such as maintaining focus, remembering stuff when your brain is overloaded constantly. it does reach a point where it’s at capacity.

It’s not an infinite thing. It does have its limits. There is this sort of feeling of like we should push it to its limits and then back off just a little bit and then push it to its limits and then back it off a bit, that’s like kind of always trying to run your car with absolutely no fuel on it, never take it to the mechanic until it breaks.

We don’t do that with cars, but we do it with ourselves all the time.

Victoria: But then we run ourselves back into the ground again, refuel for a moment, and then we’re back on the treadmill again.

Susy: And it’s so interesting because it’s a cultural shift, right? But I’m digressing. But so the sensory one, I feel that everyone can pretty easily fill in the blanks of what it means. The ones that come after this are the really interesting ones because these are the ones that start to nourish the more, more esoteric parts of ourselves, the parts that make us different to other animals. The next one is creative rest. Things like just going to sit inside an art gallery and just wander or make your own art or go sit in nature. It’s that ‘awe’ feeling that awareness of like, whoa, there is some really cool stuff out there.

And that feeling, it trips the gears in your brain and it pulls you out of mouse on the wheel mode and it just, it can not only connect you with everything else but also just give you that moment to just sit in that vastness and just absorb. It can make you incredibly present and that can be very grounding as well. So that’s creative rest.

The next few are really interesting in that they look more into how you are dealing with other people. So the next two are quite interlinked as well, and they are emotional rest and social rest. So emotional rest is more around the courage of authenticity. How are you today? Particularly in Australia, you know, “Hello, how are you?”

Is pretty much just, it just means hello, really. Because if you, because a lot of people, if you hit them with the truth, they’re like, “Whoa, I didn’t wanna hear that.” And it’s like, well, why did you ask? So, a person who feels a lack of emotional rest would struggle when it’s socially appropriate, because there are situations where it is appropriate to just go, “I’m fine, thank you.”

In a business meeting you probably just want to do the the polite thing because all of these things are, they have context, but if you’re with your best friend and you don’t feel like you can go, “You know what, I’m really struggling.” That person is going to start to recruit an emotional rest deficit because they just hold it within them and they. That sack of feelings with them everywhere they go and they just cannot be authentic. They have to hold that mask up all the time. That’s exhausting.

Victoria: This is another point, and Susie, I’ll have to get you back to talk about.

But it, it begs the question around the ways that people are emotionally oversharing on social media.

Susy: Trauma dumping.

Victoria: Exactly, and again, it’s just being mindful of what’s appropriate and making sure that for those that do use that forum, I’m suspecting if I put my coaching hat on, that they actually don’t have the appropriate environment for them to unpack and create the space for emotional rest.

And you’ve raised, I love this. I love the fact of compartmentalizing just the different variations of rest. I think it helps people understand that traditionally, To your point at the beginning of our conversation rest was, traditionally just sleep.

That it’s actually so much more when you’re talking about creative rest that you know, evokes for me, such a nurturing of the soul when you are in that environment that it gets you out of your head into being.

Nourished, inspired, present, grounded, and it could just be sitting under a big, beautiful tree for half an hour in your day to make sure that you get out and have that grounding experience. So we’ve touched on physical rest, mental rest, sensory rest, creative rest, emotional and social rest. What’s the seventh?

Susy: Clear because I didn’t actually get around to say. So, the difference of social and mental. So social is people-pleasing where you don’t necessarily know how to prioritize the people that are good for you and to set comfortable boundaries with the people who may not be so good for you. Or sometimes you may not even know how to identify who is good to prioritize or not.

And it’s funny with what you said about um, nope, I’ve completely lost it. But where I was going with that is that boundaries and rest are kind of intertwined. Boundaries have become very fashionable to talk about. Boundaries only really get spoken about a lot in terms of other people. No, you can’t say that.

No, you can’t come here, blah, blah, blah. But boundaries with ourselves are so much more challenging. And if we don’t have good boundaries with ourselves, we will not have good rest, because usually no one else is there to hold you accountable unless you are working with a coach. And that is a fantastic opportunity to have a space to work with a coach to teach you that skill.

But ultimately it is also very empowering to be able to take ownership of that at some point. So, the final one is spiritual rest. And this is an interesting one because, anyone who’s of a secular nature would be like uh, I don’t identify with that. But I look at the particular article that I have here and talks about that capacity to connect beyond the physical and mental, it’s about that feeling of purpose, a feeling of belonging to something larger than yourself.

So you don’t necessarily have to be religious or spiritual. In the traditional sense of the word in order to understand that, it ties in a little bit with that whoa feeling that you can get from nature in the creative rest side. A lot of things that can give you creative rest can also give you spiritual rest, but it’s just that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself.

And that doesn’t necessarily have to include a God or a deity or anything like that. It can be looking up at the sky, like that’s my own personal favourite way to connect with the vastness of everything. It’s just like, I love stargazing. I love seeing where Orion is at any point in time. You know, it’s just that feeling of wow, there is just so much out there and there is so much peace in being able to sit with that moment and just go, “I don’t need to worry about my bills, because that thing is several million years old. Wow.”

Victoria: you’ve raised some really great differences between the varying strengths of how rest plays a huge part in our life. Susie, when clients have come to you, how do you strategically coach them through the process of which rest is more of a priority? Which rest area do you start with?

Susy: I actually don’t have any set rules around that. But what I do is that I usually will give clients the opportunity to go off and, I’ll give them some resources to sort of learn a little bit about what all of the seven types of rest are and to grade themselves – how they think they’re doing, but with the very specific instruction that a 10 out of 10 is their definition of a 10 out of 10, because it gives them that extra opportunity to check in on that people pleasing and or social norms pleasing the illusive… what does a 10 out of 10 look like for you? And that’s a necessary component of this exercise when I do it.

Victoria: It is, I’m sure that part of the coaching journey, what one’s perception is being challenged by a coach. I’m sure that those results, that self-assessment would change in terms of the dial may come down a little bit or increase a little more in some areas once you start to poke a little bit deeper in what I call the truth serum, when we ask ourselves the tough questions going honestly, let’s be honest around this. You know how often. Pleasing others and putting myself at the bottom of the pile versus when was the last time that I connected in and really did a check on my energy drains.

And when you’re talking about the emotional rest from others, I’ve often used over the years being aware of the energy vampires in our life and being able to have strong boundaries to say, it doesn’t serve me anymore. It doesn’t nurture me anymore. And then to be able to have the relevant conversations, to be able to put yourself first, to know that it actually doesn’t work in your world, to where your energies actually getting drained from others.

And ask the questions why, why do you allow that into your life? And then it comes back to boundaries and self-kindness and compassion of self and all of that. What I’d love to hear, just one or two examples. Clients that you work with, ‘cause I love this whole rest topic of what have been some of the really profound results that you have seen when you have brought this topic of rest and the different dimensions of rest into their lives.

Susy: Ooh, wow. That’s a, very big question. I feel like this is gonna be a fairly conceptual response because the obvious thing is that people’s overall health does go up. But it becomes an identity piece. Very often, people who are unrested across the board, they tend to be very disconnected from themself and so it reaches a point where they kind of start realising, oh my God, I’ve just been doing for the sake of doing it almost becomes an addiction.

It almost becomes a self-soothing technique. And as they start to sort of pull their hands open to allow themselves to release the grip on that. They start to reconnect with themselves and you can end up with like career changes, new relationships, old relationships breaking down. It’s not always pretty because, really, what ends up happening is that there’s more space in that person’s life where they just have the opportunity to go, hang on, now that I actually have two moments to actually think, and my brain is working again, because before it was just running on a few quick loops that I’d been running on repeat because it becomes a frantic space. You know, who am I when I’m not afraid? Because an incapacity to allow yourself to rest usually is a fear. You’re running away from something, what are you doing when you’re running away? You’re afraid, you know, so you get people reconnecting with their non-fearful selves which is really quite, yeah, mind-boggling.

Victoria: And life-changing at the same time because. You can’t create the changes without really connecting back to self, and it’s being able to unpack that with your help. And this is what I love about the power of coaching, to have someone in your journey to help you ask the tough questions and help you lean into yourself.

And ultimately, I know this is my say, which has been my mantra, but ultimately it’s being able to have your head on the pillow at night and for your soul to be at rest. There are many paths to that outcome. However, what you’ve shared with us today, I think is a profound way for listeners to start to just have the dialogue with themselves to start to have some curiosity around their rest factors in their life in terms of what is the quality of their rest, whether it is.

Social, rest, emotional rest, physical rest, mental rest. Susie, what we have gone through today, it’s such, an important area of someone’s soul. Someone’s who they are and who they’re being in their world. And I think it’s a topic. Well, I don’t think, I know, it’s a topic that is going to continue to become the forefront of wellbeing, and I know that’s the space that you are very passionate about.

Susy: Absolutely can’t get enough of it. It’s, it’s changed my life. And I think that’s, know, one of the big drivers where I’m like, no, this can change lives and. The most wonderful part about being able to have found this space and be able to facilitate it for others is that you know that it doesn’t matter where they end up in terms of the choices that they make.

What’s really beautiful about it is that they get to make those choices and they get to find the path of what is going to move that individual forward into a space that honours them in every facet. In every facet. Not just as a worker, not just as the responsibility piece, which we’re over-connected to nowadays.

Victoria: We are over-connected to it. Also, there are other topics of mindfulness and I, what you’ve shared today around all these different dimensions of rest, ultimately, takes us back to an incredible place of being more mindful with who we are and being more grounded and being more present, and creating ultimately more space, Susy, in the busyness of our lives, to be able to shift that busyness and open up spaces to be more present and ultimately show kindness and love to who we are as human beings on the journey.

So, thank you very much for the conversation today. I’d love to have you back. This is a topic that there is just so much more around the factors that drive wellbeing and mental health, so I’d love to have you back for another conversation. So thank you very much for joining me here today. Is there any last one or two golden nuggets that you would like to share with our listeners if they were hearing this conversation, Susie, what would be the first step to help them be encouraged to explore this further?

Susy: Yeah. I’m so glad you asked that because I did have one little piece that I was holding onto that I was like, ‘Ooh, I hope I get to mention this’. And it’s, it takes things in a slightly different direction. And that is back to basics. I have a saying that have to honor the animal within. Yes, we’re clever. Yes, we have a cortex that other animals cannot even imagine because they don’t have the cortex to imagine it. We have opposable thumbs. It’s all very exciting, but we are ultimately mammals.

Mammals require rest. If you’ve got a dog or a cat, you’ve seen that they spend most of their time sleeping. In the same way that we have parts of us that are very different to them, we have parts of ourselves that are very similar.

And if we lose that part of ourselves that is part of the animal kingdom, that is part of the nature that we are surrounded with, then of course we’re not going to be well. We are unique, we have language. And that sort of brings me to the last little piece I would encourage everybody to get themselves comfortable with the language of rest because it’s how we think we don’t exist in our heads.

In pictures, we exist in our heads in words. We have that little voice in our heads. We are storytellers, and you can’t tell yourself a story if you don’t have the language for it. And so it’s really valuable that, this area has started to receive specific labelling to it. Yes, labels have places where they can be bad, but this is a place where labelling is good because if we know what it is that we’re aiming for, then we get that compass where we can move towards it.

And so yeah, honestly, honour the animal within, get well-rehearsed in the language of rest so that you can have those conversations with yourself.

Victoria: I couldn’t have summarized it better than what you just have. You’ve just heard from Coach Susie. I have to say she’s an absolute guru when it comes to rest. Should be the ‘rest coach’. Thank you very much for tuning into today’s episode of Hello Coach Cast with Coach Susie. If you’ve enjoyed the content, we would love you to subscribe like, share, or leave a review on your favourite podcast platform.

And also, if you’d love to discover, be curious, take the next on exploring more rest in our lives, then you can match and find Coach Susie on hello-coach.com. So thank you very much for listening and hope that you’ll join us again next week.