The Science Behind Resilience and Combating Burnout

The Science Behind Resilience and Combating Burnout

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Erin Cahill: Hi Anne.

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Anne Grady: Hi! How are you?

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Erin Cahill: Welcome to CareSmartz360 On Air, a home care podcast. I’m Erin Cahill, an Account executive at Caresmartz.

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Erin Cahill: Today. We’re thrilled to have Anne Grady, a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and expert in building resilient teams, leaders, and organizations, and is a two-time Tedx speaker known for her ability to seamlessly blend storytelling neuroscience and psychology with wit, humor, and authenticity

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Erin Cahill: in this episode, and will share her insights on the science behind resilience and practical strategies for combating burnout, particularly in the high-stress field of home care.

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Erin Cahill: As the author of several books, including her latest Mind Over Moment, earnest the power of resilience and will outline a research-based approach to cultivating a resilient mindset and skill set empowering us to better navigate the challenges we face.

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Erin Cahill: Whether you’re a home care, professional or leader, looking to build greater resilience. This conversation is sure to provide valuable takeaways. Let’s dive in and learn from Anne’s wealth of experience and expertise welcome to the podcast Anne.

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Anne Grady: Thank you so much for having me, Erin.

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Erin Cahill: Thank you for being here. So I’ll jump right in home care. Professionals often face high stress, emotionally demanding work environments. What are some of the unique challenges that they may encounter when it comes to maintaining resilience and avoiding burnout.

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Anne Grady: Well, you know, as someone who my journey started a little bit differently than I think. Most so. I was a speaker and a trainer before. But it wasn’t until I had my son Evan that I really started digging into resilience. So evan struggles with

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Anne Grady: severe mental illness and autism and raising him was really my resilience building breathing ground after multiple psychiatric hospitalizations. I was then diagnosed with a tumor in my salivary gland that resulted in facial paralysis, and a whole string of other events, including falling down a stairs set of stairs and breaking my foot in 4 places while going through 6 weeks radiation.

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Anne Grady: So I’m no stranger to stress and burnout. And I think part of the challenge when you’re a caregiver, whether it’s your own family or you’re in someone’s home. Caring for them is compassion, fatigue, and vicarious traumatization.

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Anne Grady: So it’s really hard when you’re an empathetic person to not take on the weight

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Anne Grady: of everything that you’re dealing with, and it just leads to exhaustion. You know, Burnout isn’t just because you’re working so many hours burnout stems from our emotional needs not being met. And so it’s learning to empathize without internalizing. And it’s learning from mindset tricks and skill, set tools and the ability to reset and take control of your nervous system so that you’re able to navigate it more effectively.

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Erin Cahill: Right and your latest book, mind over moment harness. The power of resilience focuses on developing this resilient mindset. Can you share some of the science based strategies you outlined for cultivating this type of mindset.

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Anne Grady: So your brain is wonderful if you’re only trying to survive and stay alive. That’s what it was designed to do. It wasn’t designed to make you happy, or fall in love or feel peace, and your brain wasn’t designed to keep you from stress. Your brain was designed to use stress to keep you alive. But as you’ve evolved, your brain can’t differentiate between real stress and perceived stress

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Anne Grady: it can’t differentiate between real threat and perceived threat, so, for example, if a car is reading at you and you see it in your rear view mirror, think about what happens to you physiologically, before you even have time to think about it. You tense up your shoulders, get tense, your stomach tightens. You’re bracing for impact. Well, the same thing happens when you get a snarky email, right? So

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Anne Grady: what we can do is train our brain to interpret those things differently, and it starts with both the mind, the brain, and using it for us rather than against us. So everything we do, virtually over half of everything we do, I should say, is a habit. It’s just a cognitive shortcut, so that our brain doesn’t have to work as hard. So it takes any repeated thought or behavior, and it converts it into this shortcut.

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Anne Grady: but your brain doesn’t know the habits that are helping you, or those that are hurting you.

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Anne Grady: So your brain can’t tell the difference. If you come home at the end of a long day, and have a glass of wine, or a kind of Haagen dazs, or go for a jog. It just takes all of these things and creates these short.

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Anne Grady: So one way to use your brain to work for you is to understand that we have something called a negativity bias meaning. We are much more hyper over to negative experiences than positive.

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Anne Grady: and that is our brain’s protection mechanism.

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Anne Grady: But if we’re not careful, we start to see the world through that lens, and we tell ourselves stories about our life. Now this isn’t when somebody else asks you how you’re doing, and you’re like, Oh, I’m gonna fake it probably make it. And say, I’m fine. I’m talking about the stories we tell ourselves. So, for example, I told myself for years. How unfair my life! Why do my friends have coffee kids that they can take to the grocery store and the police end up getting called when I take my

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Anne Grady: and so the thing is, that story’s true.

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Anne Grady: Right? It’s not fair.

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Anne Grady: But the question that you have to ask yourself is, is the story you’re telling yourself about your life helping.

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Anne Grady: Because if it’s not, it’s becoming this negative feedback loop that is reinforcing the biology of stress.

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Anne Grady: So many people think about this kind of toxically positive culture that we live in, which is, like, you know, frown upside down. So much to be grateful. I’m not talking about that. Your brain doesn’t make the leap from this stage. So this is awesome.

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Anne Grady: But your brain can make the leap from this isn’t fair to it is what it is.

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Anne Grady: or I can’t do this, too. I’ll figure it out.

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Anne Grady: or I’m so exhausted too. My life is full

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Anne Grady: right? And so we can shift the story that we tell ourselves going from a negative to a neutral. And when that happens, our brain realizes it’s safe.

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Anne Grady: So just like your brain can’t tell the difference between a real threat and a perceived threat. It also can’t tell the difference between real and perceived safety.

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Anne Grady: So when we shift our story intentionally or change our narrative. It signals safety to our brain, and one really quick mindset app that anybody can use is to be very deliberate about the way you start your day.

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Anne Grady: So most of us are guilty of sleeping with our phone next to our bed because of our alarm clock. Well, guess what they still make those. Your world is the smallest slot machine, or your phone is the most smallest slot machine. And it’s like this dopamine hit, but it also releases cortisol in your body every time you get an incoming message email asked to do

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Anne Grady: so, instead of waking up and checking social or checking email or watching the news with all of 3. All those things. Basically, it’s like flipping on your negativity by a slight switch when you expose your brain to negative stimulus within that 30-minute window, like email, social or news.

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Anne Grady: You’re training your brain to look for everything that’s wrong.

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Anne Grady: Throughout the course of the day.

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Anne Grady: whereas if you give your brain 30 minutes in the morning

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Anne Grady: to wake up without negative stimulus, so it could be watering your plants or snuggling a dog, or getting your kids ready for school, or staring out a window.

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Anne Grady: or even better, practicing gratitude or mindfulness. Right? Those are things that shift the way your brain. And then there are skills to offset that. So, for example.

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Anne Grady: anytime, you cultivate positive emotions intentionally, like gratitude, humor, optimism, connection, volunteerism, self-care. Anytime you’re doing anything that your brain sees as safe.

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Anne Grady: It’s basically offsetting your stress response, lowering cortisol, lowering blood pressure, giving you a hit of dopamine and serotonin to feel good, happy hormones and antidepressants. Anytime you spend with other people, you get a sort of oxytocin, which is the total hormone, but it’s really a stress hormone causing us to see connection. So we can do things intentionally to let our brain know it’s safe, and to build this buffer zone.

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Anne Grady: so that when we are tired and we are exhausted, we have the resources we need available to do.

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Erin Cahill: That’s really powerful.

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Erin Cahill: In addition to mindset, what are some practical, actionable steps home care workers can take to build their resilience and better manage stress on the job.

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Anne Grady: So

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Anne Grady: probably the simplest and most important is to get sunlight within the 1st 30 min of waking, if at all possible. It resets your Circadian clock improves mood, focus, energy, sleep. The research is very clear. Sunlight is really really powerful, especially within that 30 min window of waking up.

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Anne Grady: Our mind is

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Anne Grady: so completely over, stimulated and over-saturated with the world that we live in. You know our mind wasn’t designed to sit under fluorescent lights and memorize 6,000 usernames. And

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Anne Grady: our mind silence so like something as small as just taking 2 min

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Anne Grady: in your day when you’re starting to feel that stress

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Anne Grady: and just taking 2 min. Go to the bathroom

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Anne Grady: and just take a deep breath. I mean, it’s not the ideal place to breathe deeply. But you do what you gotta do, and simply extending the exhale longer than you inhale, relaxes your entire nervous system. So

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Anne Grady: mindfulness, right? We think of meditation as the ability to just focus. It’s really not. It’s brain training. It’s attention training.

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Anne Grady: So even 5 min of meditation every day helps restore gray matter. Density damaged by stress repairs neurons damaged by stress. And the goal of meditation is to refocus after you’ve been distressed.

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Anne Grady: So a lot of people are like, Oh, I’m screwing it up because I can’t just focus on my breath. Nobody can. That’s the way your mind is designed.

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Anne Grady: But you can grow your attention muscle, which is one of the only things you can control where you direct your attention, and where you direct your effort

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Anne Grady: and training your brain that you’re in control of it rather than it’s in control of you is a quick way to do that.

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Anne Grady: making time for things that fill your cup. You know they’re usually the 1st things that fall off our lips when we’re busy.

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Anne Grady: Our connections with others. We’re wired for movement, even, you know, sitting for long periods during day increases your risk of heart disease.

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Anne Grady: and a whole slew of other health challenges. Even standing up once an hour

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Anne Grady: just standing creates a whole cascade of physiological and biological changes. So
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Anne Grady: there are tons of little things, you know. One of the simplest things is a gratitude practice. And when I was struggling with facial paralysis. People told me, you know, practice gratitude. And I kind of

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Anne Grady: smirk at it a little bit. Almost. Okay, yeah, right? But

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Anne Grady: there are over 11,000 studies that have documented the physical and mental health benefits of practicing gratitude. Because what it’s doing is training your brain to offset your built in negativity bias. It trains your brain to look for what’s right instead of what’s wrong, even just looking for something to be grateful for. You don’t have to find me just looking

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Anne Grady: reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23.

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Anne Grady: So these are simple things that you can incorporate into your day. Taking a couple of minutes to just be

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Anne Grady: breathe deeply, extending the exhale focus on what’s right instead of what’s wrong.

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Anne Grady: you know, when you’re exhausted it is really hard to take care of yourself. So I recommend creating a list of things that fill your cup, so that

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Anne Grady: when you are starting to feel depleted you can proactively and intentionally add those things into your step.

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Anne Grady: We need time off. Our brain needs a break. And that doesn’t mean staring at our screen. It means taking a walk outside being in nature, or, you know, spending time with

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Anne Grady: when it’s hard. No one does this perfect. That’s why this is the fact.
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Erin Cahill: Yeah, absolutely. Resilience is often viewed as an individual trait. But how can leaders and agencies foster a culture of resilience within their home care? Teams.

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Anne Grady: So I work with leaders at companies like Google and Johnson and Johnson and Microsoft and Dell to focus on building design leaders because you’ve got a lot of tired people, and you have tired leaders that are tired of meeting tired people.

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Anne Grady: But you cannot promote what you don’t practice, so it’s not enough for a leader to measure Apis and strategic objectives. They have to start measuring health and well, and that means incorporating some of these practices like gratitude and mindfulness and connection into daily activities.

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Anne Grady: I’m launching for the 1st time ever an entire digital program that is a year full of resilient building skills, tips, tools and strategies for leaders to take and use with their communities, to have

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Anne Grady: to facilitate conversations, to create team activities, to build those connections because the happier people are at work, the happier they are experienced. And we know that the top 2 derailers of job satisfaction are, one, your immediate supervisor.

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Anne Grady: and 2, the number of positive interactions that you have at work.

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Anne Grady: So leaders have a huge responsibility not to be a therapist, you know, not not to have all of the answers, but to be willing to be vulnerable enough to have the tough conversation because psychological safety. This permission for standard is the number one determinant of high performance.

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Anne Grady: So things like cultivating their growth, mindset building connections and relationships team well, being creating shared values and expectation. All of these are things that leaders can learn to do not just for themselves, but so that they’re modeling.

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Erin Cahill: That’s great. And last question for you. What are some of the warning signs that someone may be heading towards Burnout? And how can they proactively address those issues before reaching that breaking point.

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Anne Grady: Well, I love that you asked that last part, which is, How do you do this before you’re at the breaking point, because it’s much easier to prevent burnout than it is to deal with it. Once you experience it, not say it’s impossible.

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Anne Grady: but if you

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Anne Grady: lost enjoyment of activities that used to bring you joy.

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Anne Grady: or you feel constantly tired, regardless of how much sleep you get.

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Anne Grady: or if you’re more cynical or critical or skeptical, of your coworkers or others, or if you feel like you know what I am there’s not enough hours in the day to get everything I need to get done, our work done. I’m just constantly overwhelmed.

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Anne Grady: All of those are signs of burnout, irritability, frustration, agitation, exhaustion, depression, anxiety.

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Anne Grady: The thing is your brain defaults to the place it spends the most time, and so does your nervous system.

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Anne Grady: So in order to combat Burnout, you have to train your brain and your nervous system

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Anne Grady: to go to a state of relaxation instead of being amped up.

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Anne Grady: and one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves is learning how to control our nervous system on demand.

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Anne Grady: So, for example.

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Anne Grady: anytime you yawn. If you’ve ever seen dogs who play together, they yawn well, it’s a signal of safety to their brain, and to the cat relaxing their nervous system. So a yawn relaxes your nervous system.

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Anne Grady: 3 diaphragmatic breaths breathing in through your belly, extending a long exhale resets your entire nervous system. So a deeply relaxed person takes 6 to 7 breaths a minute.

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Anne Grady: When we are starting to get stressed, we get less oxygen. We take more shallow breath, so you can shift your nervous system in real time by changing your breath, and when you do that often enough, your nervous system eventually defaults to that state.

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Anne Grady: You can do things like incorporating what I call lighthouses, things that we can swim forward and look forward to. You know, part of the struggle with Covid is that there was no end in sight, and you know all of our vacations were cancelled, and the things we look forward to spending time with friends and family. Everything stopped, and you saw

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Anne Grady: depression and anxiety completely Skyrocket. And that’s because when your brain has something to look forward to. It improves mood, energy, and motivation.

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Anne Grady: so scheduling intentionally things at the end of your week, or things that you can do once a month, or things that you can look forward to a couple of times a year. Those are really powerful and helping you stay the course without completely running.

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Erin Cahill: Thank you, Anne, for sparing your time and sharing those great insights. I’m sure the audience has found these useful. I know I did, and thank you all for tuning in until our next episode. This is Erin Cahill Signing off.