Do you feel like you’re hanging by a thread?
You’re probably experiencing a sense of burnout.
This feeling has been slowly building in the background, silently making you increasingly emotionally exhausted and cynical, and searching for an energy source in your work.
Jess Spendlove explains how to recognise burnout, the questions you need to ask yourself and how to treat burnout within yourself.
In this episode I share:
- Why burnout doesn’t happen overnight
- The hidden cost of continually deprioritising yourself
- Why putting yourself first benefits everyone around you
- The difference between operating on push energy versus rhythm
- My personal experience with burnout and the warning signs I ignored
- Common early indicators that your current way of operating isn’t sustainable
- How energy, appetite and cravings can provide important feedback
- Why hydration and meal timing matter more than most people realise
- The Life Audit exercise I use with coaching clients
- A client case study on creating consistency in a busy life
- How to identify your own burnout warning signs
- Practical ways to take stock and create a more sustainable way of operating
Key Quotes
“Burnout doesn’t just arrive. It is a series of decisions that accumulate.”
“When you put everyone and everything ahead of yourself, you are deprioritising yourself.”
“You can’t expect consistent output if you have inconsistent input.”
Episode Resources
PRE-ORDER For the Long Run by Jess Spendlove 👉 https://amzn.to/4t33BPh
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess Spendlove (00:00.192)
If you’re feeling tired, run down, or nearing burnout, then today’s episode is for you. I cover the early warning signs of burnout and how it doesn’t just happen overnight. I also share some of my own story, including the early warning signs, which I ignored. And then I take you through an exercise that I do with all of my clients that you can apply to your life to take stock of where you’re at and more importantly, what you can do about it. Hi, I’m Jess Spendlove, and welcome to Stay at the Top.
Jess Spendlove (00:30.348)
It’s getting to that time of the year, the middle of the year, it’s cold, we’re run down, we’re getting sick, we’re tired, we’re exhausted, we’re a bit more stressed out. And everything from this front half of the year is just accumulating. And this is where a lot of people start running the risk of getting sick, run down, or even burnt out. The thing with burnout is it doesn’t just arrive, it is a series of decisions that accumulate.
For that to happen. And one of the main contributors to this, which I don’t think gets spoken about enough, is continually deprioritizing yourself. Now nobody sits there going, okay, I’m deprioritizing myself today. But how that happens is in the decisions that you make. When you put everyone and everything ahead of yourself, you are deprioritizing yourself. The more this goes on, the more our energy erodes. We are exhausted, we’re running on push energy.
Rather than rhythm. And all of this can increase your risk of burning yourself out. This switch to prioritizing your own needs starts with a mindset shift. What I hear from a lot of people, men and women, is that they feel guilty putting their own needs first. But here’s the thing: when you prioritize yourself, everybody around you benefits. It’s called the contagion effect. You’re doing this because you think you’re actually helping them.
And I’m sure you are. If you actually put yourself first, you would not only help yourself more, but you would help all of these other people further as well. A great place for you to check in is how do I feel in my own body? Because when you actually tune in, when you tune out the noise, and don’t get me wrong, we’ve got so many competing demands that we don’t actually give ourselves that moment to check in. But when we do, we can identify how we’re operating. At the moment,
We’re so busy with all of our commitments and all of our things that we only hear our body and our brain communicating to us when it is screaming at us. Whereas what I want to teach you is how to tune in to those signs and signals, how you can identify when your energy levels start to dip, when you start to enter the red zone. Because what we want to do is put strategies in place to prevent that rather than get to absolute rock bottom.
Jess Spendlove (02:49.58)
And then have to rebuild. And I say this with absolutely zero judgment because I know rock bottom and being in the red zone very, very well. And I often think, gosh, what a hypocrite. Like I’ve spent my whole life helping people improve their health and their performance. And yet, what I teach, there was a period of time where I wasn’t taking my own advice. There I was helping hundreds of elite athletes, seven professional teams.
I had my own staff consulting to the special forces, running around working seven days a week, traveling around the country 10, 12, 14 hour days, operating on adrenaline, cortisol, and probably way too much caffeine, and thinking I was the exception to the rule. Here’s the thing: nobody is the exception to the rule. If you are operating unsustainably, the question is not if, but when.
Things will come crashing down. And I don’t say that to freak you out. I say that from a place of me not wanting that to happen to you. Because when you really run yourself into the ground, it can take weeks, months, or years for you to get back up. We need to stop accepting that running on empty and feeling exhausted and running on fumes, being stressed, not able to sleep, feeling wired but tired is normal. That is not normal. And it also doesn’t take that much to shift.
From that way of operating into a way, into a rhythm, into a system that works for you. And so a great place for you to start is by creating space or even just checking in on how you feel, what your physiology is telling you. And the anchor points, the way that you can do that is by checking in on a few subjective metrics. The first is energy. This is both overall energy as well as consistency of energy across the day.
The second is appetite. This is about how do you move across the day. Do you have a pretty consistent appetite? You get to each meal ready to eat, or do you swing from feeling starving to feeling overful? And do you experience cravings? Regular cravings are a signal from your body and your brain that, hey, hello, you are not giving me enough of what I need. Therefore, give me that really tasty thing to pick me up.
Jess Spendlove (05:13.72)
We’ve all got our own individual cravings, whether you’re sweet, whether you’re savory, whatever that is. But if you are having consistent regular cravings, that is a sign and signal from your brain and your body that you are not giving it what it needs. And a lot of that is what you’re doing at the front half of the day. So that might be you haven’t eaten enough food. Maybe you’ve skipped a meal. Maybe you’re eating erratically. Maybe you’re eating based on what your calendar allows you to, rather than setting predictable rhythms.
Which your body actually prefers. Maybe it’s hydration. That is a really common one. Similarly to food, a lot of people backend their day with their hydration. They get up and they get going, they have a coffee or two. And water isn’t something that people even think about until lunchtime. Similarly, you want to start at the front half of your day. Because every single night, you are losing half a liter to a liter. And so your body and your brain are waking up.
Slightly dehydrated. And so if you don’t then get on that front foot, you are only making yourself more dehydrated and that can show up later in the day in the form of cravings, believe it or not. Talking about this is something that I really feel passionately about. And as I said, this isn’t just coming from a place of dedicating my entire career to helping people prioritize their health and sustain or optimize their performance, but it’s also coming from this person.
Personal experience of being so driven, so motivated, so committed to everybody else’s goals and putting them ahead of my own, that it came at the cost of my most important value, my health. And this wasn’t just it happened once and I learned my lesson. This went on for years and years and years. Every time it got worse.
And I really do believe the universe was saying, when are you gonna get the message? Okay, you still haven’t received it. Things are getting worse. So you might be thinking, what are the warning signs? If I think back to my burnout experience, which wasn’t just a one and done situation, it went on for a number of years. And every year it got progressively worse. But when I think back to that period of time now, there were so many warning signs. I don’t know how I miss them.
Jess Spendlove (07:33.516)
The first one was I would get sick often. I would get a cold or a flu or I’d just be picking up a lot of things. In the episode I did with Dr. Cecilia Kiddick, we spoke about this quite a bit, but getting sick often is a really clear telltale sign that the way that you’re operating isn’t sustainable. The other one can be you’re forgetful or you’re not as motivated or you’re not finding as much joy in things that you would typically do.
You might be making mistakes. You might feel emotionally empty or a little bit disconnected. Again, when I think back to that period of time, there were so many signals. One that comes, well, there’s a few that come to mind, but one is I forgot my laptop was on the roof of my car. I’d finished with one of the sports teams and I was rushing off across Sydney to another sports team, put my laptop on the car, drove back, goodbye laptop.
Very expensive mistake. Another example, and I can’t even believe I’m sharing this because honestly, it happened 10 years ago and I’m still embarrassed. I’m not gonna say the sports team, but I had had a consult with the CEO of one of the sports teams that I worked with. Now, a lot of it was around how to make healthier choices, with a very social lifestyle, some
Conversation around food choices and alcohol, and it was a pretty personal question. I should also preface this that it was towards the end of the year. So the festive season, there are a lot more social commitments. A few days after this, all of the staff across football and the corporate side of the business received an end-of-season email. It was the day of the Christmas party, and it was reflect on the wins from the year and you know, share your kind of personal experiences, etc.
And the person I sat next to said, I wonder what idiot is gonna hit reply all to the entire staff. Well, that idiot was me. And I didn’t just share my wins and respond to that email. I hadn’t gotten around to sending the CEO his summary from our consult. So I thought I’ll just reply to him and share my wins and also give him my recommendations from our one-on-one. But because I was a hot mess, because I was burnt out.
Jess Spendlove (09:52.236)
I quickly hit reply and I sent it off. But that email did not just go to him. It went to the entire staff. I sit here thinking about this now, like so embarrassed. So I say all of this, not as an extreme example, but to say that I definitely had warning signs. And I’m sure if you think back, there’s probably been signs as well. So if this is speaking to you and you’re thinking, what do I do? I thought I might share a client example and how we worked through this.
My amazing client, Marnie, came to me. She’s a mother of two, a managing director. She’s always valued and prioritized her health. And despite thinking she was doing all of the things, she couldn’t understand why she was exhausted, she was gaining a little bit of weight, she was struggling to focus, she was tired but wired, and she wasn’t sleeping properly. At the start of working with a client, I get them to undertake a process called the life audit. What this involves is capturing a full week.
Seven days and it looks at a number of areas of their life. It looks at their nutrition, their sleep, their energy levels. It looks at what they do on weekdays, what they do on the weekend. It also captures information like are they in the office or are they at home? All of these little details really matter. And so while surface level, Mani was making good choices, she did value her health. She did try to make healthy food choices most of the time.
But what became really clear when she captured a full week was the amount of inconsistency. Some days she was at home, some days she was in the office. She would drop both her children to school. Some days she would go to the gym. And that’s all fine. This is not about again being a robot. But what you need to create around this inconsistency is your own level of consistency. And so Marnie’s day was dictated by everything else, where she was, what her children were doing if she went to the gym.
Rather than her setting the conditions for what she needed. One area in particular was the start of her day. As I mentioned, she had a few different things going on. And depending on what that was, meant whether she had breakfast at home, whether she skipped it, whether she just grabbed something on the go. Every morning was different. And when we saw that on paper, it was very obvious why in the afternoon she was tired, she was hungry, she couldn’t focus.
Jess Spendlove (12:15.022)
Here’s the thing: you can’t expect consistent output. So energy, focus, performance if you have inconsistent input. And so with Marnie, the first starting point, and this is her domino behavior, is stabilizing that morning. Not with all of the different variables, because that’s just her life, but is in how she starts and anchors her day. She has a number of different high-protein, high-fiber breakfasts.
That regardless of where she is and what she’s doing, she can have that. And so whether she has a smoothie or an oat bowl or an egg option, they all give her the same starting point for her day. And the outcome of that, she’s prioritizing herself, everyone around her benefits, and how she is moving through her day with more energy, more focus, feeling calm, making clearer decisions, the benefits are endless. So what you can take away from this is to zoom out.
And take stock of what your days and what your week looks like. Start by thinking about weekdays. Where are you? What are you doing? What commitments do you have? And how is that then affecting decisions that you need to make for yourself? Also think about the weekend. A lot of people forget about the weekend, but that’s still two out of seven days a week. And so if your weekends are chaotic or unplanned, and look, don’t get me wrong, it’s not about having a rigid structure.
But if you’ve got good rhythm through the week, and then the weekends you’re sleeping in, you’re skipping breakfast, you’re eating out, you’re eating less, all of this is going to impact how you start your week. So it’s really just about understanding what your life looks like, all of the moving pieces, and then thinking about how you can create a level of consistency and protect what is important for you. And so one thing I really wanted to reinforce from today’s episode is.
If you are putting everybody and everything else ahead of yourself, thinking you’re doing the right thing, well, you’re actually not. And when you put yourself first, when you protect what you need, not only do you benefit your energy, your health, your performance today, tomorrow, and for decades to come, not only does all that benefit, but everyone and everything else around you benefits more as well. The other thing is.
Jess Spendlove (14:35.864)
Create the space to check in. And that can be as simple as just taking a few seconds or a few minutes to think about how am I feeling? How am I showing up? What are my energy levels like? What are my appetite and my cravings doing? What is my performance like? And when I talk about performance, that might be cognitively. So how’s my focus? How’s my clarity? How’s my ability to do deep work and focus? Or it might also be physically. And that could just be how you move through your day.
Or how you’re showing up in your gym or if you’re running or doing Pilates or however that might be. It’s just a check-in. It’s subjective. There’s no right or wrong, but it’s just you taking stock. And then the other thing I’ll say is thinking about your warning signs. I shared some very embarrassing ones myself in this episode, but think about what yours might be. Do you get sick often? Do you struggle to sleep with but you feel tired and wired? Have you lost interest in things that you normally find joy in? What might that be? Just
Check in on that and see if these might be some little early warning signs that the way you’re operating might not be sustainable. Everything I’ve shared in today’s episode has really influenced me writing this book. Because I know I’m not alone. Because I know there are so many people out there who are going through their own experience of this. And I also know if I’m someone who knows better, who helps people prevent this, and I fell victim, that it can definitely help people.
So, this book is really from a lens of my professional experience, my 15 years doing all of the things. It’s also been shaped from my personal experience. And there’s also a bunch of case studies from different clients I’ve worked with helping them navigate this kind of thing as well. For the long run, it is now available for pre-order. You can find the link in the show notes and pre-order your copy today. Otherwise, that’s it from me this week. I’ll be back again next week with a special guest episode.
helping you not only reach the top, but sustainably stay there. I’ll see you all then.