A: Hey guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amanda.
L: I'm Laura.
K: And I'm Kendra.
A: And today we're gonna continue our homage to Brene Brown's fabulous book, “Atlas of the Heart.” And, but we're doing this for a purpose. Not just because I love Brene Brown. But the reason why is because in her surveys of over 7,000 individuals over five years, the average number of emotions that people could correctly identify and label in themselves was three: happy, sad, and angry. And that might not seem like a problem except for being able to name what is happening to you is the key to taking ownership of what's going on in your emotional life. The term emotional granularity is the ability to accurately recognize and label emotions, and that's what this series is about. The previous one was envy, jealousy, and resentment, which turns out I was using those wrong.
Today's focus is gonna be on stress and overwhelm. So being able to label your emotions leads to greater emotional regulation and psychosocial wellbeing. And then the other idea that we want to put forward is that emotions get labeled good and bad. They're not. They're just sensations in your body. They're vibrations in your body. They're physical expressions of the messages that your thoughts are creating in your brain. Feelings and emotions are experienced in our bodies. We've said this before, if you need a refresher on how to feel your feelings, check out our episode #17, it's specifically on that. So we want to be able to accurately name what we're feeling, but also if feelings can be useful, we wanna look at what they're trying to tell us. Okay? So emotions are messages for us. So let's dig into stress and overwhelm.
First Brene talks about when she worked for many years in a very high pressure, high expectation restaurant. I think when she was in college, cuz she talks about paying her tuition. There's two terms that I wanna talk about. The first one is in the weeds. Whenever a waiter would come into the kitchen and say, “I'm in the weeds,” what would happen was another waiter would walk up and say, “what do you need?” At that point, they would delegate things like, “it would be great if you could go refill the drinks on tables three and five, and if you could give bread service to tables, you know, 10 and nine.” Okay, so that's in the weeds, right? Kind of a delegation sort of thing.
When a waiter would walk into the kitchen and say, “I'm blown,” she says the kitchen would go quiet. Someone would go to the hostess stand and figure out which tables that waiter had. The kitchen manager would pull tickets, figure out what was going on, and immediately sign the other wait staff to her tables. She says, “when you're blown, you can either step outside or into the cooler or go to the bathroom to cry, whatever you need. You're expected back in 10 minutes, ready to go, but for 10 minutes there's a complete takeover.” And she says in her six years, it only happened to her twice, both times at the end of triple shifts when she was trying to pay her tuition.
Stress is like being in the weeds, right? Overwhelm is when you're blown. Okay?
L: I love that. Analogy. You guys waited tables, didn't you?
A: No.
L: You didn't? Oh my goodness.
A: No, but our bestie, Steph, Kendra, she is like, it's the exact same job. Working in the ER.
L: It is.
A: It's same job as a high pressure restaurant situation.
L: It exactly is. Except life and death is on the line.
A: Oh, perfect. Just add a little more.
K: Just add a little more onto that overwhelm.
A: No biggie.
K: So yeah, as we go into talking about stress, everyone can identify with stress. Whether you're working in a high pressure environment like the ER or, high pressure environment like, the floor at the stock market exchange or restaurant. Everybody has been in a stressful situation. The environmental demand as beyond our ability to cope successfully. So that's where stress is. It's basically, we still have a conscious thought that right now things are overwhelming. My ability to not only attempt to accomplish every task in front of me, but my mind's saying I really don't have that ability right now. So it usually leads to kind of these elements of unpredictability. Uncontrollability, you feel like you've lost your grip, and you're feeling just basically overloaded. It causes a stress reaction, and we talked about the stress reactions in our episodes, 39 and 40. So go back and check out those. That was tons of fun.
But regardless of how strongly our body responds to the stress, it’s the cognitive assessment of whether we can cope. It's what you think you can actually do, or what the situation is looking like in the moment, is really what's determining whether we're gonna be able to cope or not. It's actually what you think about this. Not whether or not you're strong enough, you’re, you know, fit enough or whatever. It's actually up there. That's supratentorial. So your thoughts about if you can handle the stress create the emotional difference. So high levels of perceived stress, so even just thinking that you're stressed out, is what leads to the bad health outcomes that everyone likes to talk about in prolonged high levels of stress.
Regardless of if you are in that stressful situation, we know that our shifts end at some point, right? We know that we're gonna be stressed. And when we get to our shift, not all the time, sometimes when you get to the shift, hopefully you're not already at mach 10. But sometimes you walk into a dumpster fire. We all can relate to that. But sometimes you walk into just your shift. And you haven't quite got to, you know, mach 10, but as you know, things can spiral out of control rather quickly. Busses, choppers, whatever's coming in the back door, twice as much as coming in the front door. And so you're already perceiving in your mind, “oh my gosh, I'm losing control,” regardless if you have five active patients or 15.
And so you just start to kind of work yourself up, ramp yourself up, all due to the thoughts you're having about that current circumstance. So even just perceiving that high level of stress is what can, you know, do the rapid aging, lower your immune response, increase inflammation, poor sleep, poor health behaviors, coping with alcohol or drugs, whatever. Even just that comes from high levels of continuous perceived stress, which I thought is quite amazing actually.
L: Yeah, well, I mean that's so much of what we work with our clients on is, maybe not even specifically about that stress of so much volume at work. But so much of what we perceive, based on our thoughts, just makes us miserable or makes us content and happy. And it really all starts in our brains. So I…
A: Yeah. I can't tell you how much stress I gave myself dreading shifts and imagining all the things that could happen, but by the way, never happened. I mean, I don't know how much I aged myself, but a lot.
L: Yep. Yep. Same. So feeling overwhelmed is that extreme level of stress, emotional, and or cognitive intensity to the point of feeling unable to function. This is where you wanna go in your closet and curl up in a ball and rock back and forth and pretend that nothing else is happening. But allowing ourselves to get in that state leaves us completely unsure of what to do next. And I love this quote. “If I had the wherewithal to figure out what comes next, I wouldn't be walking around in circles crying and talking to myself.” So getting there, really, is a place of feeling stuck to the point of paralysis.
So Jon Kabat Zinn, founder of the highly studied Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, suggests that the cure for overwhelm is mindful play or no agenda, non-doing time. It's why when she said, “I'm blown” at work, the solution was a 10 minute break engaging in non-doing, likely from experience. So just not have anything that you have to do for that short period of time, just kind of disengage from all the stress mind drama that you're having.
A: You know what's crazy is like, so it sounds like restaurants have had this happen enough where there's a solution, like kind of a backup plan in place. But yet I'm certain this happens to us at work a lot, but it's just like, just figure it out.
L: Well, I think when I thought of her saying, “I'm blown” and then going to the bathroom, I think of all the photos I've seen of docs going out on the back deck and sitting down and crying. And usually it's after something really traumatic happens.
A: Well, that's what I'm saying. We're obviously blown a lot, but we don't have a code word. You know, there's not a system in place, or at least not that I've ever been aware of. And I've needed moments before, but I didn't know how to ask for it. I love that they just have a code, you know?
L: I do too. I love that.
K: I have heard once or twice or, and maybe I've said this or I've just heard this, I can't remember. But, you know, like, I feel like this is almost, maybe I didn’t know what to do with it. But I've heard, “I've checked out.” Like, like you're so overwhelmed that you don't even know to do, and so you check out. And I guess I thought that was just like, “I'm done, like finished with processing cognitive knowledge.” But really it means I've checked out cuz I literally have no emotional inventory to even deal.
L: I just can't, is the one that I might hear every once in a while. So when we are overwhelmed, we're just not making the best decisions. We're not using the best part of our brain. We're just not our best self. And, as you can imagine, that probably is not the best for our patients. So, taking that moment is probably a good idea when we feel like that to kind of reset and come back. Overwhelm, in coaching, we will sometimes talk to you about overwhelming being an indulgent emotion. And it is in the sense that if we can learn to recognize the thoughts that we're having that are not helpful and learn to manage them, that overwhelm really isn't something we have to experience. We can get ahead of it and recognize when we need to stop the runaway train before it gets to this point. And do the things we need to do to take care of ourselves appropriately. And when we get in those moments, when so much is going on, we learn how to coach ourselves through it in a way that we don't feel that overwhelm. And we have a little toolbox of thoughts that we might use to help ourselves in those situations. I know I use them with some regularity. The staying in overwhelmed keeps us stuck and gets us nowhere. So it's definitely something we wanna know. When we're feeling overwhelmed, what to do. So take that break.
A: I, like, have compassion that probably overwhelm is gonna happen to all of us at some point. It's just the staying in overwhelm that is the problem. Like 10 minutes is fine, you know, whatever.
L: Yes, absolutely. And that's where it's better said staying in overwhelm is indulgent. But you're right, especially, when we are doing so much high-stakes stuff in our career,, and in our home lives, just in general. But when life and death literally is on the line, overwhelm- it's gonna happen at some point. Just like a mass casualty incident, there's gonna be a moment of that, but just like in a mass casualty incident, we start running down a checklist of how to manage it, And overwhelm our personal lives, we can do that as well.
K: Well, and I love, cause you know at The Whole Physician, one of our favorite things is memes, if you didn't know us or followed us for any amount of time. But stress is the dumpster fire. Overwhelm is the love child of a train wreck and a dumpster fire. Just to put that out there for the visual.
L: Or the dumpster fire floating down the flood waters. That's what I feel, right?
K: Yes. The dumpster in the running water.
A: I still have that little loop on there, of the dumpster fire floating down. I don't know what happened that day, but I kind of wish I had been there to watch.
L: Oh, I love that. So after you take your break, your little 10 minute time out, whatever, it's go time. So this Best Health Magazine article, well, we love how it breaks it down. It says Capture it. Write down every task you can think of. So when you're feeling overwhelmed, write down everything you have to do.
And then chunk it. Put your tasks in different groups and all your to-dos into larger chunks, and it will help you see more clearly. And then choose it. So capture it, chunk it, choose it. Start with activities that strengthen you, things that you can look forward to. Just pick something to start with, and then take action. Just begin. And if you feel super frozen, you can say, “okay, I can do this. I'm gonna do something for five minutes.” Just start.
Action is the antidote to overwhelm. Just starting is gonna reduce anxiety, and you'll actually get some dopamine flowing if you do just a little bit. And then you can hijack that dopamine to help you do the next thing on that list. And keep going in a positive direction, and get that positive momentum to get ourselves out of overwhelm.
K: So to recap, what we've presented here is we are going to feel stressed and at times feel overwhelmed. But feeling stressed and overwhelmed is about our story of emotional and mental depletion. So we've presented a few things to make you aware and then some hacks in order to take action. So when you are stressed, when you're overwhelmed, take a timeout. Go in timeout, take a non-doing break. Five minutes, ten minutes, whatever it takes. Then tell yourself “I can do this,” and just start somewhere. You got this. There's nothing that you weren't made to do that you don't already have the tools that you are equipped to get it done.
So thanks for joining us today. We are so grateful you found us. We want you to stay connected. So go to our website www.thewholephysician.com to sign up for a Weekly Well Check. It's delivered right to your inbox, and it's free. We have a CME course there where you can sign up for 12 weeks of great content and one-on-one coaching. So head over there and check it out. Until next time: you are whole; you are a gift to medicine; and the work you do matters.
