Hello, and welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about how burnout happens in the margins.

More to come on what that means in a moment, first let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so the idea that burnout happens in the margins is really a plug for taking care of the seemingly insubstantial and inconsequential moments.

I think a lot of times when we're assessing how we're doing and our overall mental health and emotional wellbeing, we're looking for significant indicators of something being off.

And as human beings, we have a pretty big window of tolerance for stress, emotions, chaotic thoughts, and even dealing with difficult people and difficult circumstances.

And so in many momentary reflections, while we might feel a bit overwhelmed, it's not to the point where we go, I can't handle this.

And so what happens? We continue on with things as usual, and then it's often months later, sometimes years later,

that we're paralyzed with anxiety, stress, or we're depressed, or we're worn down, or we've lost a sense of meaning in life, or we're extremely edgy, and we're not ourselves anymore, or we feel empty inside, you know, fill in the blank.

And I think a lot of us have had that experience of just being completely worn thin.

But that didn't happen in a single moment, for the most case, with the exception of sometimes significant traumas, which can be a momentary experience with long-term implications.

So that will put in a different category. But most of this being completely worn down didn't happen in a single moment, and didn't even happen in a few moments.

It happened over a long period of time, taking on a little more than you could handle, or we could say taking on a lot that you perceived you could handle, but was actually a bit beyond what you should have been handling.

And this is why I say burnout happens in the margins, because it's not happening on the main page where you're fully assessing your life and how you're doing.

It's that extra five to seven percent that is a little outside what would feel okay, or comfortable within your growth zone.

That you feel like I can do this, and then we do it, and we get through, we get through another day, but whoo, it was tiring, and then another day goes by stretching ourselves five to seven percent, five to seven percent, five to seven percent.

Eventually, that rubber band that we're stretching beyond where it should be stretched over time, snaps, and that's when we have our breakdown.

And so, what information can we take from this, or what practical actionable information can we take from this?

I want this to serve as a reframing for how you look at the moment-to-moment experience of your life, whether it's your personal life and your relationship, your parenting life with your kids, your work life, your relationship to politics, to media, whatever it is that you're interacting with and consuming on a regular basis that you have some sort of energetic relationship to.

To start to see, especially the things that you're consistently interacting with, how are you doing with these things really?

What's your relationship to them right now? Are they giving you energy, or are they stretching you? And how long have they been stretching you?

Are you relating to these things with an attitude of, yeah, it's tough, but I can get through it. I can get through it.

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