 Coming up on this edition of Abledon and On Air, we talk about burnout and defined burnout. What is burnout? With us to discuss this is a former doctor OPMY Parham. She was on the show before, she's on the show again. All that and much more when Abledon On Air starts right now. Major sponsors for Abledon On Air include Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support come together. Media sponsors for Abledon On Air include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, WWW, this is the Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Editors, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International, Anchor FM and Spotify. Partners for Abledon On Air include Yachad of New York and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity, Montefere Medical Center of the Bronx, Rose of Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx. Abledon On Air has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, WWW, this is the Bronx.com, New York Parrot Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, WWW.H.com and the Montpelier Bridge. Abledon On Air is part of the following organizations, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter and the Society of Professional Journalists. Welcome to this edition of Abledon On Air, the one and only program that focuses on the needs, concerns and achievements of many people with many abilities despite their disability. I'm Lauren Seiler, Arlene is recuperating in rehab and we wish her well. We would like to thank Dr, a former doctor, Dr. Opiemi Parham who is gonna talk about burnout, what are the signs of burnout and what are the tips around burnout? Welcome to Abledon On Air. Thank you, I'm happy to be back again. And so let's start, for those that don't know, you were a former doctor. What are the signs of burnout when it comes to mental health? Okay, so burnout with respect to mental health by the legal definition was the occupational safety people thinking that if people start- Oh, sure, I mean. Occupational health and safety, yes. Starting to, if people start to exhibit some of these signs, it might be a sign that they're going to have essentially a breakdown and not be able to come to work at all. So it's very much work related and it was mental health related, but related to work. Nowadays when we talk about burnout, we are opposed to very traumatic events. The COVID epidemic and all of our civil unrest and political change. So those two things ongoing keep us in a state that a lot of people are calling burnout. Now you mentioned breakdown. So burnout can lead to breakdown. What is the breakdown? Let's just start with burnout. Is technically feelings of depletion or exhaustion increase mental distance from one's job, feelings of negativity or cynicism relating to one's job and reduce professional efficacy. So it was very much just related to work, work, work, work. So if you take those four and you generalize it, how are you feeling in your life? Are you feeling a loss of energy and exhaustion? Are you feeling increased distance from your day to day? Okay, cause we don't have jobs just day to day. Are you not feeling like you really wanna be here? That is definitely an issue. Are you feeling negative or cynical about the state of the world right now, right? And do you have reduced efficacy? Are you just not getting things done? So that would be taking the burnout definition from the legal definition and moving it forward to how many of us are feeling and trying to get a handle on what can we do about those feelings? Is it because people are overwhelmed with what they got going on that causes burnout? In this particular state, it's probably gonna be more important for us to just look around, brush ourselves off and assess where we are. We just came out of the equivalent of a plague. We just came out of the equivalent of the Spanish flu. It was worse than the Spanish flu. That's what the numbers are showing us now. That was 2020 to 2023. This is just 2024. So if people are feeling exhausted, not like they're really in their space and in their environment and present, if they're feeling like they're cynical and there's no point going on, it feels like that's a very real thing having gone through how much stress we've gone through recently. So if burnout is caused, like what are the causes of burnout, right? If it's caused by too much stress in our lives, then we've been through a lot of stress. And that's just the state of the world. We here in Vermont had the additional state of flooding over the summer, less than seven months ago. This very place, this very town. Now, okay, we mentioned burnout. Let's go to mental health services. I'm just gonna put it out there. Because we all have different opinions and this is free speech TV. What is the status of, when we talk about burnout, we need to have appropriate services in terms of mental health. Does Vermont lack the appropriate resources? How can we change it in terms of helping people? Do we lack resources? Yes, human resources. We lack human resources. We are talking out of both sides of our mouths. We don't want people who don't look like the Vermonter who's been here for five generations. We don't want people who look different, but who's taking care of our elders right now. And who's taking care of our people who have had mental health collapse or breakdown and are hospitalized. They tend to be lower paid workers who look brown or black or come from other countries. Let's get really honest, even here in Vermont and around the nation. Tell us how it is. And around the nation, that's certainly true. But even here in such a white state, that is what you'll see. So as far as who is burning out and who is coming in to fill in, we've got all kinds of issues with a whole industry of people who nobody wants to work the jobs that everybody's being asked to work. Nobody wants to work the hours. We just survived something called the great resignation. Do you remember that term? No, I do not. Okay, when everybody came out of that extreme middle class response to COVID, I can work from home. I can just be on my computer, okay? People didn't want to go back into the office. Those middle class workers did not want to go back into the office. And what were essential workers, the bus drivers, right? The personal care attendants in the nursing homes. They never got off. And of course they're burnt out. Of course we're all burnt out. We have not had enough resources, acknowledged and treated with respect. Essential workers and paid not even the minimal wage. What's wrong with that picture? So that's very political, but it's also very wellness oriented. How can we expect to be a nation of healthy human beings when we don't take care of the least of us and the people that we expect? When you don't pay nurses or you don't pay essential people, they're gonna get burned out. And who's you, exactly? When we, you know, when we don't pay. It's always somebody else. I'm sorry. Yeah. We don't pay. You know, we do say this. It's always somebody else. And right now it is a bit of a big question of ethics right now. Because as you said, we just survived looking at a very, very terrible issue. Many, many people in nursing homes died. Many, many people around the world. But let's just stick to the United States. So that's the second. An issue with burned out. People who have been of service to other people have had a lot of moral injury. That means you were put to too much stress and it's just too much. And you can't even imagine continuing that line of work anymore. Now, in terms of, let's go to from healthcare. Well, you got nursing homes and then you have caregivers. Husbands, wives. Family can become caregivers, but how does burnout affect this population or this part of the life? We're in a system that feels like it's in free fall collapse. So how do you catch your tribe? I always think of the image of a picture of people parachuting out of a plane and getting into snowflake formation where they're holding hands as they fall, but they're still falling. So I'm thinking families need to take care of families. Intentional families need to be subbed in when there isn't biological family. But to wait for the system to fix itself right now is to wait with possibly no cavalry coming over the hill at all to help. So- Cavalry in terms of what or who? Cavalry in terms of in the last physical disaster, first we had FEMA, right? We had FEMA for flooding, but looks like a lot of people are still waiting for their furnaces six months later. So reality check, yes, that causes burnout, that level of stress, that level of it causes burnout to all involved. There's somebody behind that bureaucracy trying to get the services to the people, I imagine they're gonna feel burnt out. There's the person waiting for the forms to be filled out or the loan to come through or the money to be okayed. They're gonna feel burnout with the waiting. So- And burnout in terms of lack of, you know, when people are on also public programs such as Social Security, Snap and other and they need, oh, we need more, we need more, we need more, they get burned out from that as well. The whole system- Burnout from life. Yeah, burnout from life. The whole system right now feels depleted. So the big issue is we identify burnout. How do you replenish if you are depleted or if somebody is experiencing burnout in your life? And the website I'm gonna get to here, it says I'm gonna just give a piece of information. Comes from the Nomads Foundation. There's a blog and it says, for burnout, respect your time or people's time. Communicate with the people around you. Take time to talk to family and friends and other things because again, like you said, even off camera to me, and you wanna put it out there, if you don't take time for yourself, you're no good to that relative who really needs you later on. Right, so when we're talking about caregivers getting enough care themselves. Enough sleep. The image I always see as the person in the airplane when the oxygen masks come down and there's a kid next to you. You gotta put the oxygen mask on you before you can help the kid get the oxygen mask on them. That just common sense. Repeat that again. You have to take care of yourself before you can help anybody else around you in a situation of crisis with limited oxygen, right? You put it on yourself so you can look around and then you can take care of others. If you can, in their misterms, define crisis. Dangerous opportunity. I love that that's the Japanese calligraphy two images put together, dangerous opportunity. So I'm choosing not to define crisis. I'm choosing to give a very broad definition of whatever is going on in your life that is causing you to have been like that for six months and now you're burnout, okay? You mean anxiety. It could be anything. It could be fear related. It could have been anxiety. It could have been you curled up in fetal position through the whole thing, put your phones over your ears and we're depressed. We're just now recognizing that we've had a lot of cultural stress. It's our mental health system ratcheted up to recognize that even the healthiest people aren't feeling very well right now. The healthiest people with the best lives and the best childhoods and the least trauma, they're not doing so good right now. So then you fold all of the of rest of us in. And by rest of us, I wanna say, we're talking to people who have been labeled differently abled for whatever reasons. We all know that everybody's got some hidden disability, right? We who are in the forefront of this know that. But how do we move forward when you're gonna have to take care of yourself and get that oxygen mask? And be of service to other people, not just run away in a corner and hide. So. Do you think the majority of America does that? We're fear monger. Monger is. Yeah, they, no, no, I'm asking, do they, are they so afraid or is their anxiety so pent up that they find a corner and hide? I am really believe in that we're animals being. So we fight, flight, freeze or fawn in one system of how our hormones react, right? If we are in crisis, our bodies respond with fighting the problem, fleeing from the pop problem, fawning, yes boss, no boss, I'll do anything you say or freezing. Like fainting. Or getting afraid. Those are the responses that are labeled. There's a whole different system called tending and befriending. And that's what I think will help with burnout. That as a culture, the more we go to places that feed us and help us soothe our wounds or our traumas, not just loop them over and over again, but actually get some healing from our stories and move forward, the better we're gonna be at resiliency. That's the other word you hear all the time, right? Okay, we've been down, we've been traumatized, but we are resilient or I'm not resilient. Hear that a lot. Do you think our culture sometimes is too prideful to ask for help when it comes to burnout and other things related? Yes, and it's a circular, ironic argument. Like the people who are most prideful that I see around me, who are least likely to ask for help and are stoic, are people who would be considered Yankee culture for New England. Explain Yankee. People who would source from coming over on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims and the Puritans, very straight and very shame on you oriented people. So the shame on you has rebounded to a, I feel ashamed of everything I do all the time and I can't ask for help because it's too embarrassing. It makes me feel too bad inside to ask for help. That's one group of people, okay? The other group are the people who work so hard all the time and get no recognition. That's kind of like the bottom of the totem pole and that's the indigenous women, okay? Like if you're talking about a real pyramid of messiness, indigenous women, indigenous people, more melanated people, less melanated people and then you get to those stoic, very, I don't cry, I don't ask for help people. So that's a whole group of people who aren't dealing honestly with feelings. And some are because they don't know how and some have been oppressed and haven't been allowed to have any feelings, okay? And in your audience, you know that there's so many stories of people being humiliated or being harmed and having to, no, no, that didn't happen to you or I don't wanna hear that. I don't wanna hear about your life. So some of our burnout has to do with not even being able to tell our own stories. Now, Mr. Rogers, who was a minister and he did a children's program on PBS, he even talked about burnout one time with children because he had that rapport with kids. How does burnout in your set, in your nine, does children deal with it, adults deal with it? I know it doesn't stop, but how can it be? Yeah, I was surprised when I was actually looking this up that you do see in academic worlds, children described as having burnout. I was surprised to see that. So it's expanded from what we used to talk about your job to children being in situations where they feel about their schools. Yelling, screaming. The way people feel about their jobs and they are feeling burnt out about being at school. They're feeling cynical about being there. They're not engaging and they're certainly not gonna go on to the next grade happy. So they're not moving forward professionally the way the burnout definition was at first. But with that as a sort of known fact of American academic life in schools right now, how heartbreaking and how sad, because what are we gonna do with that information? That's just a terrible statistic to know that children are experiencing burnout. I wanna have people glimmering. So when I said there's this adrenaline cortisol model of how tense we get, how do we refuel? How do we nourish ourselves? We tend and befriend each other. It produces oxytocin. Oxytocin's the pleasure hormone, okay? Yeah, there's all those artificial things you can do. You can self-medicate with various substances, drugs, screens, you know, there's all kinds of things. Think of what you do when you're stressed before you get to the crisis of overwhelm and pack a toolkit, right? Wellness recovery action planning helps you know how to pack a toolkit, right? There are organizations that will help you sit down and just make a little list of here the top three things I'm gonna do when I feel overwhelmed. So I don't burp out. You know, take a walk, drink a cup of tea, things like that. All of those kinds of things, yeah. I also wanna say that let's remember there is a community of people that may be labeled having had burnout that are actually suffering from chronic illnesses that leave them with disabilities, leave them under acknowledged by conventional medicine. Long COVID is one of those things that's coming forward as very worrisome because the doctors were not knowing enough to give the right advice. So somebody with long COVID for the first three years of this was advised to kind of just push through pain and you know, that's not the right treatment for it. There's actually damage to the muscles, it turns out. So a case where burnout, as we call it, we often add in those physical issues and consider them burnout when they have an emotional overlay and the physical and the emotional and the mental health, all of those need to be considered together. How has the media past, present or future, how they dealt with the topic of burnout or dealing with stress? Good question and like many things, I would say we have commodified it. We have made it, if you have enough money, you can pay for services that will help with these identified problems. So that's not a really good cultural solution, but that's how the media has responded is to promote, here's some things you can do, but the subtext is if you have enough money for most of those. For example. For burnout, let's say you could go and do a retreat. You could take care of yourself and learn how to meditate. If you learned how to meditate, you'd be able to sit quietly and that would benefit your job. Let's say that's a weekend retreat, do you have the money for that weekend retreat? So that's one example of something you could do. Yeah. Other things that you can do for a retreat that don't cost money to deal with burnout? Yes, and one of those things I was saying is we talk about triggers a lot these days and most people know that when I say something was triggering, what I'm saying is that I've recognized that I've got things in my body that aren't healed from things that happened a long time ago and I have to take care of myself making sure that I don't have those things sort of pop up in my face unexpectedly because it's not good for my emotional health and it's not good for my cortisol levels. I get triggered, that's what we say. There's something else that we're cultivating which is to be able to savor things and to really appreciate things that are awesome and beautiful and miraculous and lovely and we're calling those glimmering. Like you can have triggers, but you can also have glimmerings. So I want to put forward, go to the internet and search glimmerings and you'll see all kinds of ideas for what you can do to just be more appreciative in your present day that will help you have more resiliency when you're in crisis. We have a couple of minutes left. What is the future of United States and even the world right now where in things, there's wars going on, people are dealing with so much anxiety and people sometimes are at war with themselves if I say it right. Do you think people can get over burnout in a better way than they are now? I'm gonna go for that. Those terms I said I wasn't gonna use on this show. I am a black witch doctor and which doctor I am right now? W-H-I-C-H is the Reverend Doctor. So I really do have hope for us and by us, let's start small. I live in Montpelier. I have hope for Montpelier. We just flooded. That's a lot of miracle to have hope for Montpelier. I have hope for Vermont. Vermont has struck me as overly white. It just gunned down three Palestinian youth. That was really unexpected and horrible, but that happened in my state. I still have hope for Vermont. Do I have hope for the United States? I have to be very honest. Right now I have hope for my region, my region and I have bio-regionalities. So I really think of the Connecticut River Valley where my water is from as my region. All the way through Vermont and down into Massachusetts. I'm not sure if the country is going to stabilize in a way that will relieve the level of stress. Many of us are experiencing. Consequently, I would advise all of us to get much better at how we hold our stress, how we tend and befriend each other, how we share our stories, how we recognize when one of us in crisis, what are your backups? Do you have two people you can contact? If you're in crisis one or two, I'm going to be frank. Larry and I had an interesting moment where I was at my limit on managing Larry's acute crisis and I handed Larry off to somebody else. I called up and said to somebody in the building, Larry's coming in upset. Make sure you take care of him when he walks by. So that's what we want to be able to have with each other, I believe. Through a very complicated year, at least, everybody's going to agree that 2024 feels like a big year. And with that said, any further tips on burnout before we... Yes, yes, yes. This is going to sound such a platitude. We have to learn to love each other. And I have to say, this is so hard for me. So I'm speaking from myself. When I get a message of, is any of this going to work? The only way out feels spiritual, it does not feel rational. So as a reverend doctor speaking, I'd say spiritually, that will relieve a lot of anxiety and stress if you find either your relationship to a higher power, to spirit, or to trusting that humans can get through this. You know, human secularist out there, okay, you gotta believe right now. So that's my ending. Well, okay. With that said, I would like to thank you for joining me on this edition of Abledon On Air. If you are dealing with crisis, I'm going to give you a resource. If you're dealing with crisis and need assistance for burnout or any other situation you're dealing with, please contact Washington County Mental Health at www.wcmhs.org. That is www.wcmhs.org, Washington County Mental Health Services in Vermont. Again, thank you for joining me on this edition of Abledon On Air. I'm Lauren Seiler, see you next time. Major sponsors for Abledon On Air include Washington County Mental Health, where hope and support come together. Media sponsors for Abledon On Air include Park Chester Times, Muslim Community Report, www, this is the Bronx.info, Associated Press Media Additors, New York Power Online Newspaper, U.S. Press Corps Domestic and International, Anchor FM and Spotify. Partners for Abledon On Air include Yechad of New York and New England, where everyone belongs, the Orthodox Union, the Division for the Blind and Visually Impaired of Vermont, the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Center Vermont Habitat for Humanity, Montefiore Medical Center of the Bronx, Rose of Kennedy Center of Bronx, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of the Bronx, Abledon On Air has been seen in the following publications, Park Chester Times, www, this is the Bronx.com, New York Power Online Newspaper, Muslim Community Report, www.h.com, and the Montpelier Bridge. Abledon On Air is part of the following organizations, the National Academy of Television, Arts and Sciences, Boston, New England Chapter, and the Society of Professional Journalists.