What If Burnout Is Surviving Too Long

LEARN MORE about Burnout & Stay In Touch with The Trauma Doc 

Join Dr. Watson in a live (or recorded if you prefer) for Burnout 101. A webinar to help you understand all forms of burnout (occupational, caregiver, academic) and be supported by a community of survivors. scholarships are available! 

Learn More 

Burnout isn’t proof you failed, it’s often proof you’ve been surviving for too long. I connect trauma, nervous system survival skills, and the real research-backed signs of burnout so you can replace shame with clarity and start moving toward recovery. 
• survival mode as a powerful teacher that was never meant to be permanent 
• why naps, vacations, and days off may stop working 
• my story of foster care, trauma, and becoming an overachiever 
• the cost of carrying other people’s hardest stories in behavioral health 
• values mismatch and lack of choice as a core burnout driver 
• burnout myths, including the idea it only happens when you hate your job 
• Christina Maslach’s three hallmarks: exhaustion, cynicism, reduced efficacy 
• trauma-linked protective behaviors like perfectionism, people pleasing, and overgiving 
• how to build compassion, boundaries, and nervous system safety over time 
• details on my Burnout 101 live group and upcoming recorded option 

So please click that link in the show notes, which is just nothing more than a contact form, and then I will reach out to you and see how I can support.

You ARE:
SEEN KNOWN HEARD LOVED VALUED

Transcript

Burnout Is Not Your Failure

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If you are feeling burned out, or if you are burned out, it is not because you have failed. If you're listening to this, you likely have a history of trauma, and survival mode will oftentimes morph into burnout. Because you see survival has its time and its place, but it was never meant to be a classroom where you stayed for the rest of your life. If you can find your way out of surviving, you can grow into thriving. And that includes addressing issues like burnout. When you're tired, is tired, a vacation or a nap doesn't help. When the values that you are being forced to prolificate every day violate your boundaries. Maybe you're feeling like your work just isn't as good as it has been. Maybe if you're a creative, you can't find the creation. This is likely an occupational syndrome that we refer to as burnout. My name is Dr. Amy Watson. I am your trauma doc, and we are going to get into burnout today. I'll tell you a little bit of my story and help you understand why you may be feeling some of the ways you are. And of course, we're always going to give you resources to grow and move out of the extreme exhaustion and ineffectiveness you may be feeling right now. Let's step into this episode where we are going to teach you how to graduate from survival 101 and morph and to addressing the needs of your body, your mind, and your soul, often referred to as burnout. Survival is a great teacher, guys, but it was never meant to be your permanent classroom. Today we're going to help you graduate from Survival 101 and let's morph that into Burnout 101, where you can effectively and through knowledge address how tired you're feeling right now, how empty you are, how broken you might feel. Because you see, survival, if you have a history of trauma, taught you what you need to know. And so those skills have served you well. They may act like a best friend in a way where it's you and those survival skills because that's what got you to where you are now. It is likely those survival skills are the exact reason why you are feeling burned out. But again, I say survival is a great teacher, but it was never ever meant to become your identity. It is time to graduate from survival 101, and this is something that I had to do myself because you see, those of us with a history of trauma wear survival like a badge of honor. Look at me, look at what I've survived, when in fact some of those survival strategies serve to disconnect us and potentially burn us out. As I mentioned, welcome to the Wednesdays with Watson podcast. I am Dr. Amy Watson, and today I want to talk to the people who have become really, really good at surviving. My people. The problem is that surviving and thriving, guys, not the same thing. Surviving

Survival Mode Versus Thriving

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is more than many of us thought that we would ever do, but thriving is beyond what we could ever comprehend. Because if you have experienced trauma, and remember the Watson working definition of trauma is trauma is when you or someone else's safety was taken from you, and there's there was no choice in that. And as we begin to talk about burnout, the lack of choice is a hallmark with this. And so we want to talk a little bit more about exactly what burnout is, what it isn't, and how you might be able to work through it. So let's talk about first why this matters to me. As some of you know, if you've been following my journey at all, this podcast has been going since April of 2020. It was a pandemic thing, and it carried me and I carried it through graduate school, receiving my doctorate degree as a subject matter expert in trauma and community care. Today, this burnout subject is deeply personal to me because if you've followed me for any length of time, you know parts of my story. I grew up in foster care. I survived significant childhood trauma to include every type of abuse that you can imagine. And those experiences definitely shaped me in ways that I sometimes still don't fully understand, but sometimes I can capture the lightning in the bottle that it's given me a superpower to talk to people in all kinds of ways and help them know the hope of healing from trauma. But like many trauma survivors, I became incredibly good at achieving. I learned to work hard, I learned to take care of everyone else, I learned to be dependable, I learned that values seem to be connected to my performance. And this world, unfortunately, does reinforce that behavior. The more performative you are, the more, quote, valuable you are. And that's not true. We know that. But these strategies help me survive. But because I know surviving and thriving is not the same thing, I'm grateful that I am moving into a world of thriving and welcome to what it looks like to thrive as the trauma doc because you are my mission. Several years ago, I uh actually right after COVID, I stepped into behavioral health as I journeyed on my mission to receive my doctorate degree. I went to work at a local hospital system. I loved it. Uh, it was meaningful work, very meaningful work. I had the privilege, uh so much privilege, to walk alongside people during maybe the worst day of their lives as I worked on an inpatient psychiatric unit where the majority of those patients were there against their will. Here's the thing: I loved that work. There were times when I would walk into that hospital and the little Amy that wanted to be the doctor, that wanted to work in a hospital, that wanted to hear the pages over overhead, that wanted access to uh the innards of the hospital. This was my dream. And there were times early on that I would walk into that hospital and say, I can't believe that I get to do this. I loved the patients. And while I didn't have very many success stories because of the nature of the work, I can remember a handful of people that is somewhere out there in the world moving through the world differently than they would have had I not had the opportunity to help them. There are probably many, many more that I don't know. For the most part, I loved the people I work with. But here's the

My Trauma Story And Overachieving

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problem. Every day I carried those stories. And as a survivor of trauma myself, it became a little bit more painful to carry those stories as an empath. I would carry stories of abuse, addiction, loss, stories of failed attempts to die by suicide, stories of hopelessness. And so often those people would come to our hospital and not have anybody on their side. They had literally moved into parts of their lives where no one really was there for them because probably of some of their burnout behaviors. But day after day, week after week, month after month, I stood on the other side of patients who were having the worst days of their lives. And if you know anything about healthcare right now, there is uh no little to no resources for these people without insurance, without family. And so oftentimes I was having to create discharge scenarios for these patients that were in direct violation of what I knew in my heart they needed, which was to be seen and known and heard and loved and valued. And day after day I was asked to do things that were against my personal values, which is a hallmark of burnout. I slowly began experiencing something that I hadn't fully appreciated: burnout. I thought I was only as tired as I was with naps and vacations and days off and days by the pool and days at the ocean not helping. I thought, well, as soon as I get done writing my dissertation, this will get better. But it never got better. I didn't recognize it though, because my body is deaf to those signals. I just knew that I was tired. I would literally come home, take a shower, and doomsday scroll until I fell asleep that night. I didn't burn out because I didn't love what I was doing. I burned out because I absolutely loved what I was doing. I didn't burn out because I wasn't resilient. I am fairly resilient. I know that. I burned out because I was resilient and my body said no more. I didn't burn out because I was weak. I burned out because I was human. Because you see, one of the greatest myth myths about burnout is that it only happens when you hate your job. One of the biggest myths about burnout is that it's only being tired. None of that is true. Some of the most burned out people I know are healthcare workers. They absolutely love what they do, but they are burned out. I know teachers, other healthcare professionals, therapists, first responders, pastors, can we get a hallelujah, amen? Pastors' wives, parents, business owners. People that move through this world acting as though they care about the human race. And because they care deeply, they keep giving and giving and giving and giving. And while you guys know I hate a good cliche, you can't pour from an empty cup. And I'd like to take that analogy a little bit long a little bit further. You can't put anything in a shattered vessel, which is what we do when we don't address what our body and our mind and our spirit is trying to tell us by way of being burned out. Here's something that completely changed the way I think about burnout when I understood that it wasn't it was more than just being tired. I went and I began to learn and to research, and the main researcher on burnout is Dr. Christina Masluck. And uh she defines burnout as having three hallmark characteristics. What are those characteristics? If you're taking notes. Exhaustion, that is the first one. And this is when the workload, emotional, physical, whatever you want to call it, exceeds your ability to rest it out. I knew that one of my issues, I knew I didn't know what it was, even though I was classically trained, being classically trained, I didn't understand. But I knew that something was up when right after Thanksgiving last year, right after I defended my dissertation, I went on a week vacation to one of my favorite places on the planet, the mountains of North Carolina. And I didn't do anything that week besides sit by the fireplace, read a book, lay out in a hammock, the occasional low-key walk. I didn't do anything that week except

Healthcare Values Mismatch And Cost

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for rest, but I came back just as tired as I left. And I remember thinking, what's wrong with me? I remember thinking I needed to go to the doctor and get some blood work to see if maybe I had mono or something like that. But I remember it being a huge red flag. If your workload, or if you're a caretaker at home, if you're an author writing, if your workload exceeds your ability to recover physically, this is our first red flag. And as Dr. Maslock says, our first hallmark of burnout. And again, burnout is not a medical condition. Burnout is defined by the World Health Organization as an occupational syndrome that occurs when work stress is not properly managed. Now, it will, can, and probably will turn into a medical issue, but it is not in RDSM. It is in the international uh classification as diseases as this occupational phenomenon. And Dr. Maslock says the first part is that you're extremely exhausted and your workload exceeds your ability to rest it out. The second one is cynicism or emotional detachment. I remember when I first got into healthcare and after having been in the business world for 30 years, I remember coming in contact with nurses and techs and people that worked there that were extremely just detached and they would make fun of patients and they would be hardened on the outside and their response to patients. And I remember thinking, man, let me never get that way. And towards the end, there I was all of those things. And I came upon an unhoused client, and I remember thinking in my mind, man, you've been here four times. I I gave you some things last time you left here. Why are you back? And I remember that being my second red flag was when I was getting cynical and detached and even judgy of the people that I worked with, patients that I worked with. So the second hallmark for Dr. Maslock of burnout is you're extremely cynical or you're emotionally detached. And I now know that I was separating myself from those patients because I was on empathy overload and I couldn't bear that anymore. The third one is a reduced sense of professional efficacy, that feeling that no matter how hard you're working, that you're no longer making a difference. Right before I went out on family medical leave, which is ultimately what I started doing when I uh realized that I was experiencing burnout, I was called into a room with my boss and one of my coworkers. And to make a long story short, they were nitpicking some clerical errors that I had. And I remember uh just kind of staring at them and I remember crying, and it was just a disproportionate response to this, hey, can you pay attention to detail a little bit more, Amy? But I remember my boss at that time saying, This is not like you. We just want to make sure you're okay. And I didn't know that I wasn't okay, but I did know that it didn't matter what I did, it didn't seem to matter, it didn't seem to make a difference. I was still discharging patients to homeless shelters, I was still discharging people to the street, sometimes in a wheelchair. And so I that had that third hallmark of burnout. So I was exhausted, I was cynical, and I was uh had reduced efficacy at work. I wasn't making a difference, I wasn't doing much right at all. About a week later is when I ended up at my doctor's office, and she told me I could not go back. So I started started to really think of some things, and and here's some important points for you. As someone who is a subject matter expert, a traumacist, if you will, I began noticing that many people that were struggling with burnout have other things in common with me. And this is especially true if you're listening to me with a history of trauma, more specifically, if you have a history of childhood trauma. Those protective behaviors, to include perfectionism, is a it feeds into burnout,

Burnout Defined With Three Hallmarks

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right? Because it has to be perfect. You make the star employee people pleasing, same thing. The inability to say no, overgiving, doing your job and somebody else's job. Uh, some of these sometimes people have difficulty resting. Either their body physically won't rest, or they feel guilty for doing so. People that have difficulty saying no, not remembering that no is a complete sentence. Feeling responsible for everybody else's emotions, always proving, always producing, always striving. Those lead to burnout. They're not character flaws. As I open the podcast with, many of them are brilliant survival adaptations. Congratulations to you, my sweet listener. You have made it to today. And you have survived 100% of your hard days. And all of those things that I just read to you from pure exhaustion, the protective behaviors of perfectionism, over giving people pleasing, boundary violations, always proving, always producing, always striving. Thank you for taking care of yourself and introducing those survival skills. But it's time to graduate from survival 101. Because these brilliant survival adaptations are not needed anymore. They started long before you got that job that's probably burning you out. They began in childhood. Because perfectionism probably kept you safe, becoming responsible in a group of people reduced the chaos and the things that blindsided you. People pleasing maybe prevented conflict, and dare I even say abuse. That's a hard one. That's my story. People pleasing prevented abuse. Maybe overachieving helped you believe that you were finally enough. These strategies protected you once, but what protects us in one season may quietly exhaust you in another. As my friend Lauren Starne says, those things that serve to protect you in childhood now harm you in adulthood, and it leads to burnout. That's one of the reasons when I talk about trauma, because so much of burnout is your choice is not there. So not only do you have these survival instincts that overgiving people pleasing, all of that, you're used to your choice being taken from you. And so oftentimes in burnout is that mismatch of values where you don't get a choice in how you show up in that space. And so when you have trauma, it means that your safety has been violated or somebody else's safety has been violated, and your choice was compromised. So when that happens, when safety and choice are repeatedly disrupted, our nervous system adapts to that. Sometimes beautifully, sometimes expensively. The problem isn't that our nervous system learned to survive, it's that it forgets that the danger has now passed. And that's why we don't graduate from survival 101 because the danger is still real to you. And so you go to work, you go to that place where you're potentially burning out with so many rocks in your backpack already from life, and then you're asked to be carrying more. And so that's why burnout isn't about just working too much. Sometimes it's about surviving too long. I'm gonna say that again. Burnout is not about working too much, it's potentially about surviving too long. Are you ready to graduate from survival 101 and go into a new area of learning that I call burnout 101? Because the beautiful news, and there is beautiful news, is that our brains are capable of change. I don't care how old you are, your brain is capable of change. Your nervous system can learn safety, you can learn healthier boundaries. You can rediscover rest without feeling guilty. You can learn that you are the precious son or daughter of the Most High God, and that you are seen and known and heard and loved and valued, and that you can learn that your worth has nothing to do with your productivity. We can stop confusing exhaustion with faithfulness, and that's really big in my world, in the church world. We just want to put our head down because the the harvest is plentiful, but the worker needs rest. We can stop confusing exhaustion with faithfulness even in ministry. We can stop connecting busyness with significance in this world or overfunctioning with how much we're loved. Recovery is possible, not overnight, not perfectly, but genuinely. And that's why one of the first things I did out of grad school was create a webinar psychoeducational group called Burnout 101. Burnout 101 is held once a month live, meaning you come and learn about burnout and recovery from burnout and prevention of burnout with other people. It's a big uh group component where you learn from each other, and we spend about 90 minutes together uh once a month. And I will leave that in the show notes show notes, but we also will. Be rolling out in the next couple weeks a recorded version of that so that if you're not interested in the live version, you could go to the recorded version.

How Trauma Fuels Burnout Patterns

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But I created this not because I have all the answers, not because I've arrived, but because I literally know what it's like to spend years of helping everyone else while forgetting to take care of myself. In this workshop, I explore what what burnout really is and also what it isn't. We talk about why it happens and certainly connect it with trauma. We discuss a little bit about trauma in the nervous system and how that influences burnout. Again, if you use that analogy of we all have a backpack full of rucks, those of us with a history of trauma start our day and our and we move through this world with a backpack already half-filled. How do we pay attention? How do we understand that curiosity cured the cat? How do we take care of our nervous system so that we are not operating in burnout? During Burnout 101 and even some subsequent connections that you'll have with me through there, we are going to learn practical tools that support recovery. Because here's the thing, I don't want you to listen to this podcast and leave it with more things to do. I want you to know that there's somebody in a part of the world that has the knowledge, both lived and by training, to help you navigate burnout, especially if you have a history of trauma. If you graduate from survival 101 into burnout 101, my hope is that you will leave understanding yourself and you have some compassion for yourself because healing doesn't begin with you telling yourself the shoulds, coulds, whys. Healing begins with I am doing the best I can. I did the best I can. I my survival skills kept me alive, but I don't need them anymore. I can let them rest. Healing begins with understanding and knowledge. I will never forget, and I have often been quoted as saying it, the one of the biggest moments of my life was when I myself presented to an ER, so I was very much like those patients that I treated at the hospital after having tried to die by suicide. And I remember just unloading on the doctor in the emergency room, and she looked at me and said, Has anybody ever told you that you have post-traumatic stress disorder? And I remember crying and understanding the relief that came with a name being given to what I was feeling inside. And I don't want to get stuck on labels, but man, if we understand why we're feeling the ways we're feeling, especially as it relates to our trauma, we can heal. So regardless of where you are in the world or what you do for a living, whether you're a healthcare professional, a therapist, a first responder, an educator, business owner, caregiver, ministry leader, or just somebody who's tired of feeling tired. This workshop was created with you in mind. You do not have to keep running on empty, and you don't have to figure it out alone. So I will leave a link in the show notes. Our next Burnout 101 Live is going to be Saturday, July 25th, 2026. Also be looking at the traumadoc.org developing website. We will have these burnout webinars every month and also provide a recording for you. And so please click that link in the show notes, which is just nothing more than a contact form, and then I will reach out to you and see how I can support. This is important stuff, guys. And honestly, my recovery from burnout is the reason I can be behind this microphone today. Because you matter, I matter, and I got my graduation, I got my degree for survival 101, and I am now learning what it means to take care of myself and not operate in burnout. Because remember, sometimes it's about surviving for too long. And so if you are still in survival mode with a history of trauma, you are likely feeling exhausted, cynical, and ineffective at your job. I would love to help. This is your trauma doc, and until two weeks from now, remember you are seen,

Recovery Tools And Burnout 101

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you are known, you are heard, you are loved, and you are so so valued. Because you, your healing, and your recovery matter. And I would be honored to be part of that recovery. Again, no matter where you are in the world, we have something that can help you. So click on that contact us, shoot me your contact information. I will reach out to you to see if I can help you and if you would like to be part of one of the live Burnout One Ones or the recorded. We are here to help because you matter. See you guys in two weeks.