HOW TO DO MORE WITH THE PRECIOUS ENERGY YOU DO HAVE

Health professionals are living with chronic levels of fatigue that are hard even for us to recognise. So it’s important to learn to manage your energy, not your fatigue. In this episode, Jo shares how you can recognise the difference between fatigue and tiredness, the impact of fatigue on your health and life as well as how you can do more with the precious energy you do have. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Why You Need to Learn About Energy Management – Episode 6, The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast
• Energy Activators Workshop
• Future-Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group
• The Entrepreneurial Clinician book

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, hey, entrepreneurial clinicians. It’s me. It’s Jo Muirhead, coming to you again with another edition of The Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast.

Let me just set my time ahead to make sure that I don’t speak forever, because, you know, when I get passionate about things, I can talk about them for a long time. There we go. All set, ready to go. I also have a little bit more of my coffee left, so we’ve got some fun times to be had in this episode.

Today, I wanna talk to you some more about your fatigue. My fatigue, the fatigue that turns up in the world, and why fatigue management is becoming increasingly important.

So, I have been working with people living with debilitating fatigue now since about 2014. And I will admit in the beginning when I was asked to meet with people living with things like chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia, or undifferentiated connective tissue disorder or rheumatoid arthritis, I, would struggle and this be very vulnerable here, I would struggle to believe the severity of their symptoms.

Rheumatoid arthritis was a little bit easier to understand, because, you know, there was a thing that could be seen in your blood. So it was real. But I had always thought, and <laugh> had quite incorrectly judged that things like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia was just depression by another name. Now, please don’t shoot me. That was a long time ago and I no longer have that opinion.

Why that opinion got changed or how did that opinion get changed? Well, I was asked to go and meet with a young lady. Well, she was young at the time. She wasn’t even 30. She was in her twenties. And she was really, really engaged in her career. And for reasons that nobody could explain, she started developing really debilitating fatigue symptoms. And she was struggling to get out of bed and stay out of bed.

She was struggling to eat and, and keep food down, and keep food in. She was listless. She was just struggling and, and the fatigue was the thing that kept coming up for her. And she lived in the west of Sydney where we didn’t have great resources for people to be able to attend energy management or lifestyle clinic. So she lived about 90 minutes drive away from the nearest lifestyle clinic. There was a six month wait for her to get into it. And I just looked at her and went, if you genuinely need something like a lifestyle clinic asking you to drive there for 90 minutes one way, 90 minutes the other way, three times a week, and you are living with your reported levels of fatigue, that’s insane. Like that just defeats the purpose of you going there. Public transport would’ve been worse. So I went to assess her and, and work with her and find out what was really going on. Now, I met with this woman for 45 minutes. We sat on the floor because she was finding, sitting in a chair too uncomfortable. So I sat on the floor with her. I watched her fall asleep. She fell asleep during a sentence. And as we were talking and as she was talking to me, I would watch her disappear from the conversation. She was that fatigued. I watched the skin tone on her face changed, the cadence of her voice, changed her movements, although they were very small changed. And I went, you can’t fake what I’m seeing here.

And that was what woke me up to the fact that fatigue is incredibly disabling. So fast forward to where we are now, and I have had to live with my own fatigue. Debilitating fatigue, somebody who lives with chronic pain. It is very fatiguing, but the work we do is incredibly fatiguing. So I’ve worked with an occupational therapist, her name is Suzanne Richards. She outta Canada. And we created what we call a fatigue management program. And it has been instrumental in helping people take back control of their life from a debilitating experience of fatigue.

But what I know about health professionals in today’s society is that we are living with levels of fatigue that we don’t even recognise. And it often masks other things that are going on it. We often mask it. We get addicted to adrenaline and cortisol and caffeine and sugar and dopamine.

And we’ve found ways of being able to cope. Now, I know for me, when the fatigue started to become a real thing in my life, I didn’t wanna admit it. I did cause I was scared of what it was gonna tell me. I was terrified that it was gonna tell me that I couldn’t keep doing my work. And for me, that is very much tied up into having a sense of significance in this world. And the opposite of significance for me is irrelevance. And if I don’t feel relevant or significant, then I’m scared that I will cease to exist, which is not the truth, but that’s just me. So for me, not being told I wouldn’t be able to work or couldn’t work, or this belief that my fatigue had become a disabling factor that wouldn’t allow me to work was horrifying.

But fortunately, I’ve got really good people in my world. And being able to create this fatigue management program has given me so much insight into how I can manage my energy. Because we actually don’t manage fatigue. We manage our energy, right? So in managing our energy, we become more effective in managing our energy. We can actually make informed decisions about what it is we wanna do and why we wanna do it. In managing our energy, we will have sufficient space in our mind, in our body, in our world. So our physiology, our psychology, our sociology, to allow us to go and get the types of intervention that we need to address vicarious trauma or burnout or the other medical conditions you might be living with. So this is not a cure. <laugh>, by no means is this a cure, this fatigue management, which is energy management.

But what I have learned, what I have trained people to do, what I, what I have seen for years and years and years and doing this work now with clients, is that when you can function better, when you feel like you have more control over your energy, then you start to feel like you can cope with more treatment or more intervention, or go do an exercise program or change your diet. But it’s not until we get you functioning better that these things start to take place. So I’m very, very passionate about this, hence why I’m, I’m running an energy activated workshop, which is not about turning you into an energiser bunny, it’s actually teaching you how to manage your energy because I know the importance of this. And I’m gonna take you through some of the key principles that are really, really important. Now, I teach principles. I need you to understand that I don’t give you scripts, I don’t give you prescriptions, I don’t give you step by step. I teach you principles because you’re smart. And if I can teach you a principle, then you can generalise those principles. So you don’t need to keep coming back to the person who taught you the thing in the first place. You can actually move on, you can grow, you can integrate that, you can iterate that information for yourself. So that is really cool. So I’m titling this podcast today; how to do more with the precious energy you have without having to learn anything new.

So I’m gonna talk a little bit into why we’re actually so fatigued. I’m gonna talk about the impact of fatigue, on us, our families, our workplaces, and I’m gonna hopefully give you some insights in how to do more with the precious energy that you have. Woo. But what we’re not gonna be discussing, what I won’t be talking about today, is the things you should do, things you ought to do, and the things that you’re doing wrong. There won’t be a prescription for you to stop drinking coffee at the end of this episode. Cause have we met? I won’t tell anyone to do that. So the first thing we need to understand is that there is a big difference between being tired and fatigued. Tiredness is caused by a lack of sleep. Fatigue involves difficulty concentrating. It increases anxiety, it decreases our stamina. It causes different fatigue, causes difficulty sleeping. And it also creates an increased sensitivity to light. Who knew? If you so tired at the end of the day when you’ve done a big workout or you’ve seen clients all day as appropriate fatigue at the end of the day where you can’t sleep. Uhuh not so good.

So I just wanted to run through a couple of things about you. What does fatigue feel like for you? What is it? So yeah, spend a minute. Go, Jo, it feels like this. So for me, fatigue feels like I am walking through mud or walking through quicksand or walking through honey. Everything feels hard for me when, when I am fatigued I stop being able to think. I’m not in the room. I’ve got people in my world who can see it happening. When they look in my eyes, they look in my face. My body hurts. There’s actual physical sensation of pain.

When I am fatigued now, I get super hungry and I want all the carbs. Well, all of them, all of the carbs. I will eat a lot of Vegemite on toast when I am fatigued. Yes, I love my Vegemite on toast. It is a comfort food and I don’t like it. I actually don’t like feeling fatigued. Well it causes me to feel outta control. And what it actually does is it sets up, sets me up for a boom bust cycle, which is one of the cycles we need to break where I am so scared of my energy running out and I’m not gonna be able to do anything that I try and get all the things done before the energy runs out. Which is not energy management, that is panic <laugh>.

So if you can relate to any of this, then please know you’re not alone. Please know there’s nothing wrong with you. Please understand that there are things that we can be doing to actually help each other and ourselves manager energy more effectively. So I would prefer when I’m getting fatigued, I would prefer to feel like I’m in control of the situation and can recognise and it’s taken me years to recognize when fatigue is coming.

Because one of the first principles of effective fatigue management is to stop before it happens. Which means you actually need to catch yourself in a state of fatigue before it becomes debilitating. And we, the masters of the push through, don’t know how to read those signals in our body. It literally has taken me years to get back in touch with what those fatigue symptoms are. My husband and my son could pick it up before I could. They used to ask me if I was wearing my cranky pants because if my cranky pants were on and I was overreacting to them or snarky in my comments or everything felt like a burden and a problem to them, or I was huffing and puffing in the kitchen because nobody could read my mind and see that dinner needed cooking, the dishes needed cleaning up, they would know that I had reached a state of fatigue. Because that type of attitude is not normal for me. I am not a cranky pants person. So when they felt like my cranky pants were on cranky pants <laugh>, if they felt like they had been put on, they would actually learn to be able to come to me and go, Hey, hey, you need to go sit down. Do you need to go to sleep? Do you need to have a bath? Could you get out of our face you’re starting to annoy us? If I was really struggling to recognize what was going on.

Okay, so there’s lots of things that could be contributing to fatigue. Okay? Lots of things like the work that we’re doing, the type of work that we’re doing, the type of clients, just, just the lifestyle that we lead. Push, push, push, hustle, hustle, hustle. Busy, busy, busy. I’m not here to diagnose, I’m not here to tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing, but it doesn’t matter because your experience of fatigue is based on your experience of fatigue. My experience of fatigue is based on my experience of fatigue. I often compare myself to my great colleague and friend Kylie Warry because, you know, she and I have similar life histories. And I go, my god, Kylie can get so much done in the day I am terrible. And then she’ll turn around and she goes, God, Jo, how do you get so much done in a day? I feel like I can’t do anything when I look at you. But Kylie’s experience is Kylie’s experience. My experience is my experience. Your experience is your experience. This is one of the challenges of learning how to manage your energy is there are no rules, there’s principles, but there are no rules. And you are not going to find some diagnostic criteria somewhere with a treatment plan. If you do, it’s probably wrong. There we go. I have said it. Haha. There we go.

Okay, so I now wanna talk to you about why this matters. So how many people maybe seen it, maybe you’ve done this yourself, that you can actually turn up to work, but it’s not necessarily the same as working. We used to call it presenteeism. We now call it quiet quitting. But turning up to work and not working are two different things, okay? So we’re often leading incredibly busy lives outside of our workplaces. So if you’re an owner of a business or a private practice or a manager and a leader, you need to listen to this because this is affecting your people and the busyness of the life outside comes to work. Cause we can’t divorce ourselves when we turn up to work, right? So then they’re bringing that level of fatigue into the workplace. And you need to be mindful of that because I have a feeling that what a lot of people are misrepresenting as burnout is actually fatigue. Now don’t quote, well you could quote me on that, but again, I have no empirical data because the world is moving so fast. Who can actually organize a randomized control trial, let alone find somebody to fund it in the space of six months? Doesn’t happen unless you’re into big pharma. Ooh, I said that too.

The other thing that we need to understand and why this matters is we are asking ourselves to do incredible things with our bodies, our brains, our emotions, our psychology, our physiology. Every single day. Every single day. And I’ve talked about this in a previous episode where I’ve talked about being fit for purpose and how what we need to be fit for has changed. So to get through our days now we rely on coffee addictions, adrenaline. We strive to do more than less, more with less. As health professionals, we’re constantly being told there’s not enough money, there’s not enough time, but here’s a more complicated person and you need to get the same result as you would. But you can have six sessions of C B T to deal with 40 years of complex trauma. We take extra supplements, we cram more and more and more into every second. We don’t multitask anymore, but we do leverage. And I’m noticing that people are just transposing the word leverage for multitasking. And seriously people stop doing that and actually learn what leverage means. Ah, woo opinionated of Jo. So asking people to do more with less. This is quite simply not the answer. It’s not gonna help you and it’s not gonna help me <laugh>.

So now I wanna talk to you about three fatigues. Now if you go and research different types of fatigues on the interwebs, you are gonna come up with somebody who has written about eight fatigues. Somebody else has written about 12 of them. I’m sorry, my brain can’t handle that. I’m just gonna bring it back to three. I’m gonna talk about physical fatigue, cognitive fatigue, and emotional fatigue. And once I start unpacking this with clients in both the fatigue management program and in my burnout recovery program, people are like, oh my god, that is so useful.

So physical fatigue is what most of us are used to feeling, right? We know what it feels like when, when our body is tired, we usually go and flop on the couch and we engage in this thing called global rest. Global rest. It is the rest that we do when we’re not doing anything else except maybe dooms scrolling because apparently that adds to our rest. Now, tongue in cheek, Jo, being cheeky. So physical fatigue, we’re incredibly familiar with.

Cognitive fatigue. Well, we’re getting more and more familiar with that. We often hear of it called as confusion or brain fog. It’s not the same as chemo brain fog or <laugh> Covid brain fog, I can assure you. But we have a cognitive fatigue where it’s, it’s hard to think. For me it feels like the synaps are struggling to make a connection. That there’s one part of my brain trying to talk to another part of my brain and it just won’t work. I make a lot more mistakes. It takes me a lot longer to do anything. Concentrating becomes hard. My eyes hurt. There’s usually some sort of dull ache across the front of my head because my frontal lobe is trying so hard to do a thing and it doesn’t wanna do a thing. It’s tired.

So there’s cognitive fatigue and then there’s what I call emotional fatigue. Now, some of you, you listening might have another label for this, but this is something that I think affects health professionals a lot more than we’re likely to wanna acknowledge. So emotional fatigue or social fatigue, it’s the fatigue that we feel when we just don’t wanna people anymore. I just can’t listen to another story. I can’t handle another sad story. I can’t handle another person. If one more person asks me to do one more thing seriously, I’m gonna stab them with something sharp. Yeah. Emotional fatigue is something that I don’t think we spend enough time dealing with. And it could be vicarious trauma, it could be burnout, it could be you’re not fit for the purpose of the work that you’re doing, but if I put it under the collective of emotional fatigue right now, it’s gonna make more sense to you.

Okay? So the good news is you can actually still function with physical fatigue, cognitive fatigue, and emotional fatigue. You might not be functioning very well all of the time, but you actually can still do it, which is really cool. And as you learn what your fatigue signals are, you can get better at apprehending the patterns so that you can actually start to make more informed choices about what you wanna do with the precious energy you have left for the day. Which does not necessarily mean stop working. I know many health professionals are terrified of having to address burnout, vicarious trauma or fatigue or any of those things because they’re scared that they’re gonna be told that they can’t work anymore and then they’re gonna lose their only source of revenue. I wanna help you understand that yes, you do need to address things like burnout, vicarious trauma, being unwell, but there are some things that we can do, I can teach you that you can learn to put into place so that you can use the precious energy you have and not decrease your ability to earn and not give up your private practice. Doesn’t mean you’ve failed, just means what has worked for you until today is not working for you ongoing. It’s about capacity building. And that’s something that I spoke about in the last episode. So if you wanna hear about my opinions on capacity, go listen to that one. Learning how to manage your energy is a key component for capacity building. It’s gonna give you more battery power, and you have to listen to that episode to get that analogy. Okay?

So outta these three fatigues, I wanna help you understand what you can do when, okay, so when you are physically fatigued, you can rest the body part. So you know, if you’ve been handwriting or typing, your hands might get sore and you might need to shake them out. Might need to go for a walk. If you’ve been driving a lot of us do a lot of driving, shoulder shrugs, get out, stop driving for a while, pull over safely somewhere, get out and go for a walk in the paddock in the field. For me, I always try and find a cafe with a toilet. That’s just what I do. Because I know that driving contributes to incredible fatigue for me. It just does. It hurts my body, it hurts my head, hurts my neck. So I have to really break up the amount of driving that I’m doing traveling exhausts me. Yeah. And you wonder how I do so much traveling. So when you’re physically fatigued, rest the body part, just rest it. If you’ve been standing or walking, sit down <laugh>. But I do have a whole thing about why we need to stop sitting down.

But anyhow, so when you are cognitively fatigued, do something physical, do something mindful. Engage your sensors. So it might be a 10 minute walk for me, it’s a walk around my backyard. If you’ve seen any of my online videos, you know, I have a beautiful backyard. I live somewhere glorious. I often walk around there, pull a few weeds, talk to the birds in the trees, plan my next gardening activity, play with my dog. Maybe you could clean the kitchen or a drawer or a shelf. Just go and do something that’s not engaging cognition. Stand in the sunlight, take your shoes off and walk in the grass. Or just become mindful of what’s under your feet. Yes, I am talking about grounding. Okay? When you are cognitively fatigued, do something physical. Do something mindful.

When you are emotionally fatigued, move away from the people. Now this will include face-to-face people, it will include social media people, and it will include email and text message. People stop your ability to be able to be connected to people for a while. Even hibernate, I call it hibernate. Some people call it cocooning. Do it for 10 minutes. Now, when you’re emotionally fatigued, you’re going to have heightened sensors.For me, I get overstimulated. My sight goes, my hearing, like I can hear all the things, all of the time light becomes problematic for me. So I have discovered, and I’ve tested this out with some clients, I get them to wear noise canceling headphones. They don’t listen to anything. They just block out a lot of the noise, just blocking it out.

Now, sometimes a 10 minute or a 15 minute break is enough to restock your energy for you to be able to continue to get through the rest of your day. This is not a cure for your fatigue by the way, but it is a way to help you start functioning better so that you can actually do the things you need to do to be able to get the types of treatment or the types of intervention or coaching or participate in that thing that you know is gonna help you get better at understanding how to use your best asset in your work. And your best asset in your work is actually you. Okay?

Now I’m gonna finish off right now with some everyday habits that actually improve our energy. And these have been researched, no, I don’t have the research data for you. You can go find this research. You are smart. You are a health professional. Drink two litres of water per day. I do not know what that means in gallons. So two litres of water a day because it’s good for you. Flushes out all the gunk in other parts of your body, but it’ll also make you walk to go to the bathroom a lot more. I have a great story that I can tell another day about how I’ve used this in the New South Wales Police service. I shut down toilets on a level. And anyway, it was, it was fun. But people started moving, going to the toilet, people got back on the street, and got back into public facing duties a lot quicker because I made them drink two litres of water a day.

You wanna move for 20 minutes. I’m not saying exercise. Move. You need to move your body. You just need to move it. Find something pleasant that you enjoy doing and move your body. Dance, yoga, walk, swim. Don’t make it difficult, just do it. If you have cognitively demanding tasks, do some sort of pomodore technique for yourself. 45 minutes on doing the task. 15 minutes off. Now when I am tired, I have to do 20 minutes on, 10 minutes off. But it works. Takes me a little bit longer to get things done, but I can actually get things done. So when you’ve got that, that’s an important thing to do.

And this is why I think people who go from session to session to session to session without a break in between that you’re creating something quite dangerous for yourself there.

Every hour, no screen time for five minutes. Set a timer. It’s incredibly important. Incredibly, there’s a lot of research being done about that now. Eat away from your desk. Get away from your desk. Sit outside or sit somewhere where you can see outside and eat nutritionally rich food. Now, I do not subscribe. I’m not a dietitian and I hate the word diet. And anyone who tells me diet makes me feel restrictive. So don’t do that. Start by adding something nutritious into your day and then just go, all right, today I’m gonna eat an apple, a banana, a probiotic, a smoothie, whatever it is. And then just go for berserk with anything else you wanna eat for the day, but start adding something nutritionally rich every day.

So this has been a little who done it, how you do it, what’s gonna happen next type of episode for you today. And, it’s my joy and privilege to be able to bring you this information. So if you’ve found this really interesting and you’d like to know more, please come and join the Energy Activator Workshop, which is happening at the end of March, 2023. The link will be in the show notes because I’m going to teach you in that session how you can actually start to map out your own energy levels and start teaching you how to get back in touch with those cues that you’ve forgotten about.

And not only will you be able to use it, you will then have a tool that you will be able to use with your clients. And if you’re in Australia, I’ve worked out how I can issue you with a certificate of completion so you can actually claim this as three hours of CPD.

If you are in the US, hopefully by the time of end of March comes around, I will have worked out how to do that for you. It is my goal. But golly gosh, your CEU thing, what a nightmare.

Anyhoo, as always, if you have enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, share in your social stories. Come join us in the Future Proofing Facebook group where we can talk about this and talk about other episodes and start extending the conversations that we as health professionals know that we need to have.

Until next episode, go be your awesome self.