Ep 169: Beneath the Surface: Unearthing the Roots of Male Burnout and One Small Mindful Solution with Guest Laney Jones

Hola y bienvenidos to the One Small Bite show! 
Burnout in men is a chronic problem, and the worst part is how it hides beneath the surface of masculine norms. In this episode, I bring on to the show my amazing dietetic intern Laney Jones to uproot the various culprits that lead to burnout in men, how they show up in men's mental and physical health, and of course the One Small Bite that leads to a more nourished life. 

You won't want to miss this in depth analysis of the effects of burnout, and the one small mindful solution one client took that changed his health. 

The fun stuff in this episode... 

• Hear about Allen's story and his challenges with burnout 
• Understand what burnout really is and means 
• Learn about the three main culprits of burnout in men 
• What the evidence shows and doesn't about burnout in men
• Find out what the opposite of burnout is a how it's important
• One small mindful solution that helped Allen, and can help you

Where do I go from here?
For all the details and more about this episode, feel free to visit my website. 

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Chop the diet mentality; Fuel Your Body; and Nourish Your Soul!

Transcript

David: 0:05

Hola y beinvenido to the one small bites show where we chopped diet mentality, fuel your body and nourish your soul. In every episode, you'll get a one small bite approach you can implement to live a more nourished life. This show is for educational and informational purposes only. So please make sure to connect with the professional support. You need at your own discretion. Oh, and we don't bleep out curse words. So just a heads up in case you're with little ones. Okay. Let's do this. Hola, welcome to the one small bite show. I'm your host, David Orozco registered dietitian nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counselor. And, my practice is Orozco Nutrition. Go check it out. OrozcoNutrition.com. And today I've got a fantastic show for you. I am interviewing my intern Laney Jones. She is an intern at Morrisons healthcare, and Laney is going to talk to us about unmasking, the culprits of mail burnout. And folks one small solution that will definitely help. Just to give you a broad overview, we're going to talk about the three components that really contribute to burnout. They include emotional exhaustion, depersonalization. Personal achievement. And we'll also talk about the opposite of burnout, which is engagement, listen in, so you can understand what that's about. And also, I just want to let you know, w we like always, we'll bring you one small bite solution. That'll help you unravel the burnout problems in our lives. Okay, well, with that all said, let's get the show on the road. Let's go to the interview. Hey, everybody. I am really excited. I have Laney Jones, the amazing Morrison intern, and you'll hear what that all means in just a minute. So, Laney, how are you? I'm great. How are you, David? I'm doing great. Thank you so much. Yeah,

Laney: 2:13

I'm so excited to

David: 2:13

be here. Yeah, I'm so excited to have you on. This is so cool.

Laney: 2:17

you said I'm a dietetic intern with Morrison Healthcare. So that means I'm on my last step before becoming a dietitian. And so I'm here rotating right now with Orozco Nutrition for my outpatient rotation. So learning all the ins and outs of, of You know what he, what you do every day and getting that experience. And so in about two weeks, I'll be able to possibly soon call myself a dietitian. So very exciting.

David: 2:44

You're discovering that I don't do much in my own practice, huh?

Laney: 2:48

No, I can say that this has probably been the most exhausting two weeks. So I'm excited for my future here.

David: 2:56

So yeah, most of my interns are with me for two weeks. And one of the things that I do is I grill them to, no, I don't, yes. So Laney, the first week you got to do what with me, do you remember?

Laney: 3:09

So the first week I was shadowing, so I was attending sessions and getting to see the process of what we call motivational interviewing and the process of helping patients in a long term way and in a sustainable and productive way. So I got to watch you do all those things and I got to see kind of the back end of Insurance and all that stuff. I

David: 3:32

should have prompted you to say to see all the magic you create.

Laney: 3:36

You're right. You're right. Okay. I got to see for the first week all the incredible magic that is the partnership between the dietician and the client. The absolute. Stroke it. Yep.

David: 3:51

Stroke it. It's like I tell my wife. Stroke my ego. Come on. Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. So speaking of which, what are we talking about today?

Laney: 3:59

So today we're going to be doing a presentation on how to navigate burnout and what that means in men.

David: 4:06

And so for background thank you, Laney. I asked Laney to do some research on a specific topic. And as many of you know, I do a lot of work with men, of course, especially men in midlife. Now I have a variety of clients, but that is my specialty area and I wanted her to look into the research behind burnout, especially in men. And I said to her, Hey, why don't you do this? And as part of her competencies for this rotation, one of the things she has to do is present it to an audience now. I luckily have an audience, an amazing audience, an amazing audience, of course. And so I said, Hey, why don't you come on my podcast? And why don't we present this to our audience? Cause this is really what people need to know. Let's get started.

Laney: 4:59

I'm going to start with setting up kind of a a client, a potential client with you. His name is Mr. Allen. He has a pretty typical job. He works as a manager at a warehouse in Atlanta, but he lives outside of Atlanta. He's got a commute. He's married with two children and we're seeing him because he has some elevated glucose levels, some elevated cholesterol, high blood pressure, those kinds of things. His doctor's a little concerned about his overall health. condition and is considering starting a statin, considering weight loss for him and through our interview with Mr. Allen, we find he is describing his life a lot as feeling really dull. Very lonely. He's not feeling connected with his family. He's feeling really quick to anger. Like he doesn't have a lot of control over his emotions. And he's He's also rarely feeling satisfied after meals. He's finding himself snacking a lot. He's finding himself, you know, he finishes a meal and it's like it never happened and he's, he wants, he wants that to change. So he comes to us, he's talking to us and we go through what maybe a day in the life might look like for him. And so you can see he wakes up pretty early, 6am and he immediately is on his phone. He drives to work, he eats his food. His breakfast in the car and then he works, you know, eight to five in his office, door closed. He's eating lunch in there, he's eating snacks in there, and he's having all of his meetings in there. Very little interaction with the office. He gets home. And he has to feed his kids. He puts his kids to bed. And then maybe him and his partner have dinner and watch TV, scroll on their phones and have more snacks. So from a kind of a nutrition perspective, a dietitian perspective, we're looking at this and we're saying, what is going on? What is happening with Mr. Allen that is making him feel dull, that's not leaving him satisfied from his meals? What, what could be possibly going on there? And the answer is... He could possibly be experiencing burnout. And I know prior to really delving into this research, I had a kind of basic idea of what burnout is, how it's discussed but not a, not a real solid understanding of what it is or how to identify it. And so basically what burnout is, is it's a psychological syndrome that's in response to prolonged exposure to job stress. And so when we talk about burnout, this is in the context of working. So we're thinking of working individuals, like David said, our target population, this middle aged group of people, specifically men. And really there's three recognized components that really contribute to burnout development over time. And these are emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal achievement. And these all play into each other, but are succinct, separate components to this development. And so emotional exhaustion is kind of how it sounds. It's wearing out, it's feeling loss of energy, fatigue, irritability those kinds of things. And then depersonalization is Also called cynicism in the literature, and it's about withdrawing from working, from emotions, from community, and having more of a negative attitude towards work, towards patients, clients. projects, anything like that. And then personal achievement is that feeling of satisfaction through work, the feeling that you're being productive and also the ability to cope with failure. And so these are all affected by burnout in different ways. And one of the things that really came up is this discussion around kind of how is engagement involved in burnout? Is it the opposite or are they separate? Ideas. And what really came out is that engagement is the opposite of burnout. Like you might think I'm burnt out. I'm feeling exhausted. Let me remove the stress. Let me remove myself from work more. Let me undo any of the connections I have and make myself a clean slate. But that's really not what it is. What they're looking at is actually engaging with the stress engaging with work is where burnout starts to have a little bit of, of success with with helping with this. So how is burnout developing? Where is that coming from? And the literature, this, this image that you might see on the screen, it's a, it's a overview of three theoretical models about burnout. And it's really just demonstrating that there are different ways that burnout can develop. Especially that this, this article that was titled development of burnout over time in causal order of these three dimensions among male and female GPs. So it was looking at doctors and the development really had a gendered aspect to it. It had. What they found is that this depersonalization was kind of the trigger most frequently for men in this study. So they're looking at this Golembiewski et al. kind of model where depersonalization leads to decreased Personal achievement leading to increased emotional exhaustion, that that is kind of the typical pathway for men. Although that doesn't mean that's always the way, obviously, but it tends towards depersonalization being the trigger for burnout. And what they see is this is like a coping mechanism. This is what they call a maladaptive coping mechanism, which means it's a Kind of an inefficient or ineffectual coping mechanism in response to work stress.

David: 10:41

when you were saying this, it reminded me of when I had a guest on my podcast, I think it was last year, Dr. Ronald Levant, and he wrote the ideas of the hyper masculinity. And we talked a little bit of some of these Yeah. situations like Alexithymia. Alexithymia is a condition especially common in men or people who identify as male. And what he says is that Alexithymia is the inability or the difficulty of both understanding or recognizing your emotions. And so if you think about little kids and the way little boys or again, people who are gender specific about identifying as male, they are raised with this idea of sayings like, Oh, if it ain't broke. You're okay. Or if it's not bleeding, don't cry or don't be a sissy. Don't be a pussy. Get a backbone shit like that. It says it happens quite often. And so I see this as a way of people of men or people who identify as male retreating. Absolutely. From their emotions and then retreating from individuals. So I have a question for you. Absolutely. How does depersonalization function as a coping mechanism then? And in relation to Mr. Allen, how is this affecting him?

Laney: 12:10

Yeah. So absolutely, exactly as you're saying. So what we kind of said is depersonalization, you can kind of think it as detachment. And that's exactly what you're saying. A lot of. Like the theory of gendered socialization is kind of a similar topic as like you're saying in that we tend to socialize men or boys or people that we identify as men or boys in this importance of assertiveness and independence and. We deny them the vulnerability, the openness of expressing emotions in that way. And so depersonalization and the withdrawal from work environments can act as like a wall to prevent Having to engage in those emotions which as we can see further is just going to make those emotions more exhausted, but it might feel like you're protecting yourself from having to feel those emotions. And for Mr. Allen, this is looking like. He's not engaging at work. He's not talking to people outside of, you know, his meetings. He's keeping his door closed. He's coming home and he's, he's on his phone. He's withdrawing from interacting with people. He's, he's lessening his, the, the need for him to feel maybe the stress that he's experiencing because he's not coming face to face with it. And so that's kind of how Mr. Allen might be dealing with this depersonalization. And, and how it's manifesting in his routine, Yeah. So just that vulnerability portion. That's really what we want to kind of a thread. We want to follow through on this whole presentation that vulnerability is, is a, is a big, you know, theme throughout the burnout. So just looking forward at kind of what, now that we kind of understand what burnout is and how it develops. What does it do? And we talked about depersonalization a lot, so the emotional exhaustion part of it is also a factor for men, although it may not be the trigger. And so this study, specifically called Work Stress and Coronary Heart Disease; Looking at the Mechanisms this used data from a study called the Whitehall 2 study. That was a 20 year long study over multiple phases that was looking at 10, over 10, 000 men and women in the UK that were aged 35 to 55 in the first phase. So they aged with them 20 years and saw how heart disease developed over time. And what they found is that. The mechanism between the connection of burnout slash work stress and heart conditions or other health conditions possibly is this Over activation of what's called the HBA axis or the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, lots of words, but boils down to this connection between our central nervous system and our endocrine system. And the endocrine system is in charge of hormones. So basically what this is, is the connection that leads to the release of hormones.

David: 15:22

Yeah, I've actually talked a lot about the HPA axis and I actually repeat it quite often. So when I saw that you had this, this study, I was like, Holy cow. Yes. Yeah.

Laney: 15:33

This was in most studies about this. So I think that that really draws to the importance of kind of recognizing that a lot of the stress is physiological. It is not emotional. It is, I mean, a lot of it is, but it's a lot of the emotions. Physical reaction, things we can't really control, right? So we can't control really how our HPA axis is, is existing. We can control our stress, but our body's reaction to it is not really under our control. And so this, in addition to the ANS, which is the autonomic nervous system. If these are, are activated constantly and chronically through this work stress, what they find is that these actually become exhausted and stop functioning appropriately. And so what we can see specifically from this is disturbances in our circadian rhythm and disturbances in our cortisol level. And I mean, I'm sure you've talked about cortisol as well, but Just a quick refresh. It is our, like, stress hormone that obviously is released following stress. It's the fight or flight and it can put a lot, when it's in really high levels or really low levels, it can really affect our body's ability to stay healthy, to handle everything that's being thrown at it thrown at it. And our circadian rhythms also I know when I think of it, I usually just think of sleep, but we have circadian rhythms for everything. It's just our physical, behavioral, and emotional changes that happen over 24 hours. And so affecting those is not just affecting, you know, the six to eight hours you're sleeping. You affect your circadian rhythm, you're affecting your whole day. So this is just showing or demonstrating that stress has a major Impact on our health, and it's something we really need to be considering in looking at and what this can do specifically to nutrition is what they see is like this high level of work stress is correlated with decreased fruit and vegetable intake, increased high fat food intake, decreased physical activity, and Possibly, there's a little bit of debate about this one, but significant elevation in morning rises in cortisol. And so if you can think about, like, you're initially feeling stressed, your cortisol levels are rising immediately upon waking. And that's just gonna throw off your, your flow throughout the day, right? Like, That is going to high levels of stress in the morning. You might not, you might not wake up and feel immediately exhausted. You know, you might wake up and feel immediately nervous, anxious, not excited for the day. Lots of effects.

David: 18:18

Yeah, it's really interesting that you're talking about this again, because just the previous episode to this, I actually talk about the rhythm of eating and the effects on the circadian rhythm. And what you're talking about here is when we end up waking up too early in the morning and don't go back to sleep, we don't realize that. Cortisol levels are highest in the morning to begin with. Mm-Hmm, And so if we're having this constant or chronic strain on our HPA axis, on our autonomic nervous system, on our bodies in general, what we end up doing is we have a hormone that's stimulating the release of glucose when the body is needing to relax and, and the simulation of glucose is a phase in the sleep cycle that. Ends the sleep cycle. And so therefore, when there's glucose in the blood, it stimulates us to be ready to be prepared for something dangerous, right? Is it goes back to our primal DNA, our primal response to a threat or danger. And so we still have that in our bodies to this day. So I love that you're bringing this in. And I think it's really smart to talk a lot about this, but anyway, go on. This is your show.

Laney: 19:31

No, but I love that point. Like, we are built to react quickly to stressors. We're built to react quickly to dangers. And obviously, the dangers we're facing today look differently. And so we might, you know, be like, Oh gosh, why can't I handle this? Yeah. Perfect. And because our bodies are reacting like they're biologically supposed to, it's activating the same thing. So we have to treat it the same way. It's dangerous.

David: 19:57

Right. Right. Well, you know, what's interesting is that I read a book by Dr. Anna Lembke. She is a professor of psychiatry. And so she's a physician and professor at Stanford university. And one of the things that she talks about is This idea of running away with the chronic demons of dopamine. So when you have these high levels of dopamine, which is in response to an incredible amount of stimuli that's in our environment, our bodies were not designed to have this level of stimuli. We got smartphones, access to information notifications, emails. We're so. Open and on all the time that our bodies are just getting dumped enormous amounts of dopamine and to come off of the high, we get those gremlins that's called the withdrawal. So again, something else that's important to take into consideration in today's presentation because withdrawal is closely tied into the burnout phenomenon

Laney: 20:57

here. Absolutely. And that emotional withdrawal too. I mean, we're withdrawing everything stress less likely to connect. And so that's something we're actually going to talk about a little more, so I'm excited that you're, you're introducing that now, but on the same topic of this study, I just want to look at some of the reasons why we need to take our research with a little bit of a grain of, of salt, because a lot of this specific study was a cross sectional analysis, So it looked at points of time in their data and utilizing this data from another study. So they really didn't have a lot of control over looking at specifics other than what the original scientists collected. So there's a little bit of difficulty there with controlling for confounding variables for like diet, because there's lots of things that affect diet and it's hard to control for all of them. Additionally, this was a. Self reported mail in questionnaire they used and so there's a lot of room for like bias and a lot of room for self selection into or out of this study and so that can affect the results. Additionally, As I stated, this was a phased study and they only did a clinical evaluation of these, of these individuals at phases 3, 5, and 7. And so they only collected the data about heart rate and blood pressure and cortisol levels at these distinct phases. So it's not a

David: 22:27

and what were the phases? Were they three years? Five years? Is that what that means? They were

Laney: 22:31

all dependent. It was, it was really like two years and then like a couple of years in between the phases starting in 85 or 88 and ending in 2005 or 2008. Okay. I think it was the eight. So over 20 years, okay. Every couple of years but not they obviously they didn't take the same data at every,

David: 22:53

Oh, that's interesting. That's a big limitation.

Laney: 22:55

It's a huge limitation because there's and like you see three, five and seven, there were nine total phases. So there were a lot where they missed that amount of data. So this is, that's just something to absolutely keep in, keep in mind as well. And they, they assess their health behaviors on a binary. You either do these things or you don't do these things. And, and that is a, that is a limitation as well, because we know health behaviors. are not existent on a binary. Just because you do something once doesn't mean you do it all the time, but you've done it once, so you no longer don't do it. So that's difficulty as well. And then it's not exclusively in men. There were women included, like I said, 10, 000 men and women. And it was in the UK. So, some serious limitations here as well, but it's important to give ourselves a little bit of context of the, you know, the research that's happening. But this

David: 23:46

gives us a good context, a good level of understanding of where more research is needed and what more we can do, right?

Laney: 23:53

100%. And that's one thing I'll say about this. There is very, there is almost no data on burnout in U. S. men specifically. A lot of it is kind of interpreted from other studies that were about stress. And maybe not necessarily about burnout specifically, lots of times obviously women are included in these studies and things like that. And so we just have to think about, you know, how cultures may differ, how gendered responses may differ how socialization affects these things. So that's just something to think about when you're looking at data from research

David: 24:28

papers.

Laney: 24:28

Looking at health consequences of burnout. So other than heart disease, what do we see? Well this study, we, it was a systematic review of 61 prospective epidemiological studies. So this means looking forward and looking at disease development. And they found that burnout is a risk factor for sleep disorders, including insomnia, depression, depression Musculoskeletal pain like neck pain, back pain knee pain, things like that, type 2 diabetes high LDL levels, and low HDL cholesterol levels and then also what I found really interesting about this, this particular paper is that they talked about absenteeism and sick leave, and how burnout Is correlated with an increased risk of not going to work going to work and being sick called presenteeism, and then increasing in sick leave. And you can see how all three of these, these would affect your ability to be efficient and effective at work. And lead into that personal satisfaction side of things.

David: 25:31

Yeah, especially, especially that presenteeism where people aren't taking their... paid time off. Absolutely. Yeah. That's, that's a condition I see with not just men, but with all clients that I work with, or most clients that I work with, they got weeks of vacation that they just don't end up using. And there is, there's also an expectation of what they should or how they should be working. It's almost as if they're expected to give up that part time or that. Paid time off in order, in order to be more productive and to kind of almost be like everybody else. I call it the new keeping up with the Elon Musks. Meaning instead of keeping up with the Joneses, it's keeping up with working 80 hour weeks or 100 hour weeks. And we just don't have the time in the week to do

Laney: 26:20

all that. No, and we don't have the emotional bandwidth either that, you know, that plays into the burnout absolutely plays into the burnout and the burnout plays into it, vicious cycle. And so what this study is really looking at is, is exactly that identifying those risks, those symptoms, those feelings of like, I must go to work, but I really don't want to. And then how to. intervene early so that we're not getting to the point where they have insomnia, they have neck pain, they have diabetes, they are uncomfortable and they hate their job. Really can snowball. And so again, just looking at kind of scrutinizing this paper, I am not criticizing you scientists, but that's okay. This paper was not on men specifically, although a lot of them were men. It was majority in Nordic countries, so culturally different. The timeframe was shorter, hard to see that development. Of these diseases in a short period of time. And then because it is a systematic review of different papers across the papers. The criteria for participants was different. The number of participants was different in the measurement techniques were different. And although they control for these, for the most part, when they're analyzing their data they can still have some effects on how that data is interpreted and analyzed. So I do think the study is, is extremely relevant to the development of these diseases. So we just want to look at like community and food choices and how those are influenced by loneliness and burnout in general. And this study was a scoping review of 29 studies. I mean, what it showed was up to 24 percent. of U. S. Adults report feeling lonely, and that is a huge proportion of adults that are reporting this loneliness feeling. So this is something we really need to approach, and we really need to think about and talk about. And especially because they find that this loneliness is associated With lower cardiovascular health and mental health. So kind of going back to how not only loneliness and emotional exhaustion both play into this decrease in, in overall health. And it also talked about how there are many determinants to food choices, including like your social pressure and emotional stressors, like we've been talking about. So approaching food choices from my. Comprehensive view is so important because there are so many things that affect it. But one thing that can affect it in a positive way is community. Eating together has benefits to the nutrient content and the food choices people make. When you eat with people, you may tend to have higher diversity in your food choices, meaning more fruits and vegetables, different... Types of food cultures of food, things like that. And also these people have a higher probability of eating three meals. And this goes back to kind of what you're talking about that eating pattern that that rhythm that you have and helping establish that rhythm and how community can affect that and that it's bi directional. So that's one of the big things I wanted to pull out of this, that it's not just loneliness or lack of community affecting eating. It's eating also can affect it. Your experience community, your socialization. Exactly. So you can address it and it will work in this cycle, right? Like, it's not a one way street. And that's awesome. I think that's really helpful to remember. And again, in this study. Women were included often in the majority, so that's something to really consider. UK based, and again, the participant numbers were smaller, and there wasn't as much long term data used, so just consider that. Yeah, but

David: 30:07

And I just want to circle back to that depersonalization that I think was so critical at the very beginning that Mr. Allen too was also feeling. And that is that That ties into the alexithymia, which is the inability or the difficulty understanding or recognizing your emotions. And therefore, when there are these exasperations in your mental health or your physical health, I mean, it's just time after time after doing it over and over and over again. And this chronic condition is what leads to this burnout. And that burnout is so tied into. All of those hormonal fluctuations that occur at both the physiological level and then that emotional burnout as well. So tying it all together, I love what you're doing here, especially talking about the importance of community. So

Laney: 30:53

you can really see how it's a draw picture. Our lives are not happening in isolation. There are so many things being thrown at us and that's something we all need to think about. But I'm the same in the same vein as that. Kind of the same vein. The data from the UK shows that men, and also in the US, but this specifically was in the UK, men have lower health literacy when compared to women. And so what health literacy is, is the ability to really find, understand, and utilize health information. And so what they're finding is that men are twice as likely as women to have inadequate health literacy. So an inadequate understanding of how to, how medicine. how their medicines work, when they need help, and all of those kinds of things that play into medical care. And women, you know, are, are shown to attend their primary care physicians at rates twice as often as men. So you can see how that can affect these, this early intervention that I'm talking about earlier. If we're not seeking help, we're not able to get help. And, and men are, are typically, are often delaying seeking help until they meet this higher threshold of pain. Of discomfort, of unhappiness, exactly. I mean, I'm just guilty, just as guilty. Yeah, so I think that this all really comes to this kind of masculinity we were kind of discussing earlier. This idea of preserving masculinity and avoiding the feminine considered topics. And health is one of those. Again, there's that perceived threshold, the downplaying of symptoms because concern for your health can be seen as a feminine characteristic. In a lot of cultures and in a lot of men. And so this kind of. It is, again, with that depersonalization, that avoiding openness, that maintenance of control and of stoicism that's preventing this help seeking behavior in men. And, and just to kind of reinforce this idea of the importance of community in the, in Culture and in men in general. And there's this amazing association called the Australian Men's Shed Association. It's an international across multiple countries. And it's This tagline is that men don't talk face to face, they talk shoulder to shoulder. And what they utilize, is this idea of men working on things together and talking while they're doing that. This problem focused approach to community, this this side by side working forward versus looking at each other working together. And so I think that that kind of just demonstrates the difference in approach we need to be taking with this community forming. We need to be with Looking at ways to make this as accessible as possible, as easy as, as, yeah, as easy as possible for men to form these communities. And that's to look at how do we, how do we add in these times where they can be shoulder to shoulder, right?

David: 33:45

So how can low health literacy be addressed then?

Laney: 33:50

Yeah. So, I mean, it's a very complex idea and an issue. But the first step. That everyone kind of recommends is this idea of being your own advocate, asking questions and listening to the professionals Being a participant in your health care, right? And not sitting back. Like participating, being part of it is the first step. And in that way, you can start gathering the knowledge. That's how knowledge is gathered, right? Asking questions and listening. So that's the first step. Go to your, go to your doctor.

David: 34:24

Awesome. Well, I do want to add that one of the ways that I think I help with that health literacy is. in a lot of the things that I do in my life, one of the things that I notice is that this masculinity, this role that I'm trying to fill, it does create that isolation in my life. It creates greater loneliness and it gets harder and harder and harder as we age, especially for us men to cultivate relationships. So I made it a point to have a biking group. My friend and I decided to set up a biking group. And we have now 12 guys that bike with us. And every Sunday, we ask, Hey, who's going on a ride? Who's going on a ride? And what happens is so fun. When we're riding and we're not these, you know, super spandex cat one type cyclists that do 20 miles an hour of the Tour de France kind of style. I'm talking about, we're a ragtag group of guys that wear whatever we want on bikes that we pick up off the street kind of thing. But. Putting that aside, we have these great conversations when we're riding, and then we stop for coffee or something to eat after our ride, and we're just shooting the breeze and having a good time, and we've gone out on these dates, these guy nights where we all hang out at restaurants, we've done plays, we've gone to each other's houses, we've had these great Guy nights of the neighborhood kind of thing happening. So it's really turned into this incredible camaraderie. We even have these events where we go up to the mountains and a friend of ours has a mountain house and we've done a guy's weekend with this big hike. It was really, it's been really fantastic. So I just wanted to add that that is probably another way of not only getting at the health literacy, but also getting at a lot of the other problems too, because a lot of times We can say to the guys, Hey, you know, you should definitely see a doctor about that, man. Don't, don't be afraid. And that vulnerability is big. That's community sharing

Laney: 36:18

of information. Yeah. That's

David: 36:19

the shoulder to

Laney: 36:19

shoulder stuff, right? I was just about to say, and you're, and I mean, it went past shoulder to shoulder. You guys were getting dinner. You guys are sitting face to face, continuing that conversation, but it was ignited by utilizing this idea. So yeah, awesome. But like onto the like, we understand what burnout is and kind of what it does. What can we do? What's the positive side of this? Right? And the positive side is that there's a lot of avenues that we can explore to help. Nutrition strategies. Specifically this comes from a paper on nutrition strategies for reducing risk of burnout in physicians again. So another idea is that this is specifically for physicians, but does not mean that it can only be applied to physicians. And so what this study found is that individuals that included more fruits and vegetables in their diet had lower risk of burnout. Individuals that had adequate protein intakes, specifically of certain amino acids that are involved in sleep like ornithine and tyrosine, that are involved in, in the, the production of sleep hormones, and then also adding complex carbohydrates into your diet when you can. And this was specifically talking about how that can help feed the gut microbiome, and play a part in the brain gut axis affecting mental health. So, diet and mental health, again, coming back into the, into the picture. On the lifestyle side of things, I mean, this is so ambiguous, but getting adequate sleep, whatever that means for people

David: 37:49

well, I did, I did talk about adequate sleep in the last episode and I've had various sleep specialists and experts on my show, but I keep talking a lot about sleep because you can't have enough conversation about this. So

Laney: 38:02

don't worry about it. Exactly again, because it's so complex. So involved, so many things involved in adequate sleep. So that's what I'm saying. Blow ambiguous, but and then also the importance of nutrition, education and nutrition counseling, seeing people like you, like us, like, yeah, my gosh. Right. Like and, and getting that. Increased health literacy there, that education, that help, that community, that counseling. And then the third one that this one kind of talked about mostly is mindful eating and what that is. So just a quick look into what it is. It is about making conscious choices when you're eating. Feeling aware of hunger cues and fullness cues. And through that, cultivating awareness to internal, external triggers to hunger and fullness. So internal meaning like, feeling hungry feeling angry, things like that. And external triggers that might be like, an emotion, or maybe your schedule, or things like that. Being aware of all of these things that play into our eating and then noting the physical or emotional responses that comes from those foods. If you note it, you're aware of it, you might, you know, choose foods that make you feel more energetic. You might choose foods that make you feel happy. And that's intentional and that's what we're looking for. And what does it do? Well, it can increase the ability to relax. When distressed, not only just in eating feeding situations, but in regular life as well and help prevent automatic or emotional eating through being present. That is the biggest thing is, is eliminating distractions to the best of your ability while eating the ability to focus, which is a difficult one. I will not lie.

David: 39:49

So I got a question. Can you go into how mindful eating may be beneficial during depersonalization?

Laney: 39:55

Yeah. So one of the things that we've been talking about throughout is that depersonalization as this removal, this withdrawal from existing as part of a community. And mindful eating in and of itself maybe isn't exactly supportive of re involvement into community, but what it can do is re involve you in personal emotions, re involve you in how your body is feeling, and allow you to then notice outside of yourself. Because if you can't notice what's happening here, it is going to be way harder to notice what is happening with other people. So it's a really good way, a first step, into realigning with your emotions. Re engaging.

David: 40:38

Very good. I, I also want to say that it's this idea of mindful eating is being present. It's the ability to interceptively aware and then be aware and that's very, very beneficial. And I, I just want to tie it in again to the last episode that I did about sleep and what we can do and their circadian rhythm, I'm sorry, and eating rhythm and what we can do. And that is the ability to slow down the importance of slowing down and how. Taking time for yourself, giving yourself that me time back, and therefore giving that opportunity for you to be mindful with your eating. So I'm glad that you're saying this. Go on. 100%.

Laney: 41:19

We're going to look right into that, because we're going to go ahead and go back and talk about our Mr. Allen, if we can all... Pulling back up in our brain, and he went through a version of what we just talked about, and he said yes, I love this idea of mindful eating, I feel like I can apply that in my life, I'm excited about applying that in my life, and we say where, where's the easiest for you? What is going to be the best? For you. And he says, I'm going to try it at lunch and he devises this plan that he's going to turn his phone and computer off and he's going to open his office door. That is it. While he eats his lunch. Okay. Yeah. So he's going to eat his lunch without technology and with his door open. And what he's finding after him, you know, including this in his day, he is feeling way more satisfied after his meals. He is eating every bite of that and he is noticing every bite of his meal. He's tasting the food, which he wasn't before. So he finds himself snacking less because he's feeling satisfied.

David: 42:16

I like that. He's savoring.

Laney: 42:18

Exactly. He's feeling he's actually involved in the process of eating. It is not an automatic part of his life that just he has to get through, right? It's exciting. It's fun. And, and in this way, he's able to start talking to coworkers during lunch, which he never did before. This allowed him to start being involved in more of these after work events, building a community through one small thing. He did interesting. Right? And so he says, I love how this is working. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this more of my day. I think I can apply this elsewhere. And so he decides to, and this is in molar meetings with us. And so he devises this new routine where he, you know, he's going to eat his breakfast with his partner. They're going to eat together. They're going to sit down, even involving the children in this. And that's great for the kids. He's going to add a snack, an intentional snack where he takes a break from his work for three to five minutes. It's a granola bar, eats whatever he wants, right? And then he's gonna have dinner with his partner and they're still gonna have their snack, but they're going to do it intentionally. They're going to do it mindfully. They're going to turn the TV off and eat and talk about what they're feeling. Right. And so that's going to help develop more of an emotional connection as well. And so. He continues on with this. What does he find? Well, all of these projects and after work things he's getting involved with. He's maybe up for promotion, right? Like he's feeling accomplished. He's feeling satisfied at work. So he's coming home and he's Not feeling like he needs to unplug from the day by going on his phone. He is more patient. He is kinder. He feels closer to his family than he has in the past because he's spending more quality time with them. You know, he's involved in the cooking. He's involved in their eating. They're involved. And he starts feeling more energized in the morning. You can see maybe his bedtime starts creeping up because he's not feeling like he needs to be on his phone that long anymore at night. Like, he's feeling good. He's feeling really good. So, so what does this look like moving forward? He says, I've implemented all these things. What do I do now? Well, then we start approaching other things, right? Maybe he's able to start adding more fiber into his diet. Maybe he's able to start removing some of that saturated fat that he's eating. Making, you know, more diverse choices in fruits and vegetables. Exploring things he might like. And he's sticking with a, with a regular eating schedule. So what we see is that he's getting improvements in all these things that originally brought him in. And... Improvements in his burnout symptoms. He's feeling engaged at work. He's feeling like he's got a community at work. He is not coming home drained. Right? So major improvements in aspects of his life through one small thing. One small bite. And so what I kind of want to just encompass here is that his one choice. Could lead to so many of applications this choice to try mindful eating can be applied in his eating and then in the rest of his life as well through my just mindfulness in general. So while burnout is complex and everything we talked about is incredibly complex, you can make one choice. And find a way out.

David: 45:24

That's very nice. I like that. This is really, really good. He sounds like many of my clients.

Laney: 45:28

That's crazy. It's almost like I got to sit in and gather some data. I

David: 45:35

wonder where you got that from. I appreciate you for doing this. And there was some really good information. I mean, I think it really touches on, on so many different areas that we have talked about both you being in the rotations with me and the sessions with me, the research that you've done. And a lot of the podcast episodes and blogs that I've written in the past, it's just, Really, really, really interesting how important this is, especially for men. Now, granted, I did obviously note that there are a lot of similarities between burnout with men and with women. Absolutely. I think that it is. Something that is important to understand that it doesn't matter your gender identity. However, it is interesting to see the nuanced differences on how men end up creating the burnout in areas where women may not or vice versa too, which is really good.

Laney: 46:33

Absolutely. And I mean, that's a good point in that maybe depersonalization doesn't sound like something that happens. To every man, right? Like anyone listening to this might be like, that doesn't sound like something I do. Maybe it isn't. Maybe your trigger is emotional exhaustion. Maybe your trigger is that personal, like, it's ambiguous and complex, but hopefully this gives a little bit for each of those aspects to help address moving forward.

David: 46:56

Very good. Very good. Well, Laney, thank you so much for doing this. This was fantastic. Do you have anything else that you want to leave everybody with?

Laney: 47:04

Just thank you to you for allowing me, you know, to speak to your listeners. It's amazing and I'm hopefully someone Catch is one thing that they can start applying.

David: 47:14

Yeah, folks. And this is, this is really important what Lainey's saying here. I think if you understand the context of this podcast, One Small Bite, it's really about one small thing that we do on a regular basis that builds over time and has domino effects in other areas in our lives. And so we can then grow from there instead of trying to make something big. Like a big change or massive change or overhaul of your entire dietary system. So thank you so much, Laney. I appreciate you for being here with me. I appreciate you for being my intern and helping me out for with so many other things. So great job with this great presentation. And I look forward to hearing wonderful things about you and your career in the future. All right. Thank you very much, Laney for an excellent presentation. I hope you all got some great information here. I know I did. I am definitely going to relax a lot more and take it easy, especially. During the holiday season, things are so crazy. So busy burnout is so rampant in this time of year. So I hope you do the same taken maybe a little bit of mindful eating connect with some of the guys or people in your lives so that you can start engaging. I just want to say thank you once again to Laney. She's amazing. The level of intellect of rigor, the initiative and the hard work that was put into this presentation. Is amazing. And you know, so many of my interns provided me with the research and the background for a lot of these shows as well. I want to thank Laney once again for doing a great job. I just want to say thank you very much for listening in. Please remember to rate and review the show. And if you've got one or two friends that would benefit from listening to this, please share it on. You know, these shows can really help people that need this kind of information. And, uh, stay tuned because next week. I'm going to talk about the connection of the eating rhythm and the digestive system. I'm continuing with my eating rhythm series, so listen in because the information is going to be awesome. All right, folks. Thanks again. Remember chop that diet mentality fuel your body and nourish your soul until next time. Ciao.