From Exhaustion to Recovery - Our Burnout Stories, with guest Franka van Essen

Burnout isn’t just “being tired.” For many musicians, singers, and creatives, it creeps in quietly until suddenly you can’t think clearly, you can’t create, and you feel stuck in cycles of exhaustion.

In Season 12 Episode 1 of This Is A Voice, Jeremy Fisher and Dr. Gillyanne Kayes open up about their own experience with burnout, how it affected their work and creativity, and what they did to recover. 

They’re joined by singer and coach Franka van Essen, who explains burnout through the lens of Polyvagal Theory - and why creatives often toggle between burnout, boredom and overdrive.

We talk about:

The real signs of burnout (that you might be ignoring)

Why freelancing makes burnout more likely

How Polyvagal Theory can help you recognise the “zones” you live in

Practical ways to step back into rest, creativity, and connection

If you’ve ever felt exhausted, disconnected, or wondered “is this burnout?”, this episode will help you recognise it - and give you hope that you can recover.
#burnout #singerburnout #polyvagaltheory  #musicianmentalhealth #vocalcoach  #singingteacher 
 
00:00 Mood swings and despair

01:19 What burnout looks like

02:56 Measuring burnout

05:21 Jeremy’s change of behaviour

07:12 Franka on how burnout can start

09:19 Singing teachers and burnout

12:16 Musicians and task switching

13:49 Polyvagal theory and the zones

17:10 Toggling between the zones

19:01 Compassion fatigue

22:25 Household boundaries

25:08 A plate of raspberry puddings

25:44 Getting back in the green zone

28:44 Learning to say no

You can contact Franka van Essen on 
http://www.voice2blossom.nl/
Instagram and Facebook voice2blossom
LinkedIn Franka van Essen

And Franka’s short course on Polyvagal Theory for singers, teachers and coaches is included in our monthly Learning Lounge membership here 
https://vocalprocess.co.uk/learning-lounge/learning-lounge-level-2-deep-dive/

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Transcript

0:22

There may be mood swings, tearfulness anxiety, irrational fears, melancholy, sadness, and despair. Hello and welcome to This is a Voice Season 12, episode one, the podcast where we get Vocal about voice. I'm Jeremy Fisher. And I'm Dr. Gillyanne Kayes. We have a story to tell you. We were on holiday last year. Somebody very kindly lent us their lodge that we stayed in for two weeks. Yeah. And we discovered that we were in burnout and had been for some time. And Jeremy I think it was only after the holiday that we realized something wasn't right. We still weren't rested, were we? No. Even after two weeks of doing nothing, not at all. And it's a, it was a beautiful venue and all the rest of it. And we, we did do some nice things. We did not come away refreshed. We did not come away with new creative ideas and it, to be honest, I think in some ways certainly what you were going through was, I love this description of burnout, feeling fatigued in every cell of your being. Absolutely. I remember you just sitting up in bed most of the day before you could be levered out to go, to go and enjoy the sunshine. Yeah. And then by the way, I was just levered out onto the bench in the garden. Yeah. To read a book. That was it. And you weren't even reading, and neither of us even had the energy to watch the amazing solar events that were going on at that time of year. It was like, no, let's go to bed. It's 11 o'clock not getting up at midnight to watch the skies at night. Yes. So we're wondering whether, this sounds familiar to people listening because we think burnout is really underrated, undervalued. It's just not very well known. I don't think it's seen enough in our profession. I don't think it's recognized. I think a lot of people live with it. I went, running down various rabbit holes this morning, having a look at burnout scales and articles about burnout and there's a huge amount of material, surprise, in the medical and caring professions about burnout in certain burnout scales. And there's also a lot of material in the business world and there's some material in the teaching world, but I think in particular for those of us who are more freelance voice professionals and small business owners, we really need to know some of the markers of burnout and just to begin to care for ourselves and each other more. We have a couple of guests that we've asked to talk about burnout, but just before we get onto there, I want to bring up two measuring formats. One is the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and this is going back to nine, the 1970s, I think. Christina Maslach, Susan E Jackson and Richard Schwab. This is one of the leading measures of burnout, there's a special version, which they started with one version and then they created about four or five for different professions, and there is one for educators. And it focuses on three things. Emotional exhaustion measures feelings of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one's work. Depersonalization measures an unfeeling and impersonal response towards recipients of one's instructions. And personal accomplishment measures, feelings of competence and successful achievement in one's work. Now anybody who has been even close to burnout will recognize those three, and we might talk a bit more about them later. But you found the professional quality of life scale. Yes, I did. By Beth Stamm. Yeah. And this is really interesting because she focuses on the emotional fatigue, compassion fatigue um, burnout subscale, measuring, exhaustion, frustration and helplessness in one's work. And that helplessness thing is really. It's a very strong part of burnout. And I think one of the things that is gonna come up from, the guests in our podcast is being driven. I just wanna read a bit of this because I certainly related to it and I think you do too. The person becomes more task and less emotion focused and may increasingly pull away from others becoming socially isolated. Yeah. The other classic symptom is profound physical and emotional exhaustion. And oh, and this is the thing is fatigue can significantly alter thinking, feeling, and behavior. Yes, yes. Mood swings, tearfulness, as you said earlier. Yeah. Changes in cognitive functioning. I know for me and also for you thinking, what's going on? What's going on with my brain? Yeah. And then when you've allowed yourself to decompress, when you've actually recognized the symptoms and changed the way you are running your life and your business and your commitments. Yep. You begin to realize, no, you haven't lost that creativity. No, it's okay. You are not losing your marbles. You do still have a short and a midterm memory. Yes. there was one particular sign that I, for me, that I really noticed, and that's, I got a lot more argumentative. I started to bicker a lot more. You did. And I, my, my fuse got shorter and shorter. And I normally don't have a short fuse. So it was really fascinating going, this is a major change of behavior. I don't understand where this is coming from. And this is lowers your tolerance level, isn't it? Oh, hugely, yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. I become totally intolerant. And this is also interesting. This is again from the Beth Stamm version. As well as changes in emotional balance, there may be changes in cognitive functioning. The ability to think clearly, use good judgment, make decisions, may decline. Yes, it becomes difficult to concentrate on tasks. There may be lapses in memory or forgetfulness. Over time, a person may develop a negative self-image and feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. And do you know what that happened to both of us? Yeah. Didn't it? Both in a business sense, which is. Are we as good as we think we are? Are we are? Is this actually working? I really hope this helps people, listening to that. Are we as good as we thought we are? What is going wrong? Yeah. And I can see that you're wanting to talk a little bit more about compassion fatigue there. Are you wanting to Yeah, there's this, a lovely quote. Compassion fatigue is insidious. As a person's way of thinking, feeling and behaving change, and these changes impact physical and mental health, the person's ability to carry him or herself well through each day, including within the workplace, deteriorates. Yeah, and what I want to say from, the little bit of internet searching I did today is a lot of compassion fatigue measures are used for people in caring professions and in relation to how they are responding to the people to whom they're caregiving. But actually we need to care ourselves. Yes. So I think we then lose compassion with ourselves, and I think that's gonna be a theme that comes up in some of our interviews. We have, i'm going to play something from Franka van Essen. Franka is a singer and singing teacher, and she's been very interested in the Polyvagal Theory and she's in fact written a course for us that's now in the Learning Lounge. And we thought we'd ask Franka what her opinion of burnout is. So here's a couple of minutes on different types of burnout. A burnout could start in different ways. You have people like me who are very much coming from that fight flight zone. There are also people who are more prone to that immobilization part where they feel like they're being overridden by a truck and can't get out of bed anymore, and that's the start of their burnout. Usually it's one of those two types. The way in which it started, and for me it was that more fight, flight start of, of having a very restless body and very tired at the same time. So, being in a burnout as creative is very challenging because at the same time, actually I was in a bore out. Now this may sound really weird, but the time when I started following your, actually this podcast, this very podcast and starting to follow your courses was actually the time that I was in this burnout. And at the same time, I desperate, desperately needed something new to, to have my mind, have my head, um, do. And I see this a lot with neurodivergent people that they, on the one hand need to be very careful with their energy and their sensitive system to not get into overload. But on the other hand, they need a lot of challenge for the same system to keep them going and to feed their endless curiosity for new knowledge and new ex exploration, really. Now thinking about being a singing teacher and a creative, there are a few more things are going on that are specific for our kind of professions. I think most of us have portfolio careers, so we do different things alongside each other, partly because we love to do it, but partly also because the business is, is shaped like this, that we have small contracts or small jobs next to each other. This also means that we have to be very flexible and jump from one thing to another all the time, and this can be very tiring. It's, it takes a lot of our flexibility. Another thing that could be going on is the starving artist mode. I personally am still struggling with it, the idea that art is not meant to be paid for in, uh, a, in a good way. So I see friends of mine who work in completely different areas of, of profession, and they just bring home these amounts of money every month, and I'm like. What the FI mean, I, it's weird in a way that I can do something that not many people can do and still get paid for it. So lousy. Another thing that I've noticed is that a lot of singing teachers are. People who love to help as coaches and therapists often are, but there is this thing that's called the helper syndrome where we in a way overstep being that helper so that we don't honor our own boundaries anymore. And actually also not the boundaries of our clients because if we help them too much, they might feel that they can't do it themselves, which is actually not what we want. So I think stepping back sometimes and acknowledging that might feel a bit awkward is a good thing to do because it prevents us from overstepping our own boundaries and overstepping our own energy. Very nice. Oh. I just love the way that Franka frames things. And do you remember the whole thing about the fine line between burnout and boredom, which is something she often talks about. Her business name by the way is Voice 2 Blossom, which is a wonderful way to encapsulate the work that she does, which is not just about singing voice, it's about the voice and the self. And we're gonna hear more from Franka later on. Yeah. I want to say the thing about leaping from contract to contract is really quite profound because obviously that is often what our profession is like. And it made me think about, we all already know that for the brain task switching, we used to talk a lot about, oh, we multitask, as voice professionals, no brain does not multitask. Brain can task switch, task switching is challenging. We find it challenging, don't we? Yeah. Moving from coaching clients, doing a podcast to doing the admin. Yeah. Yeah. So now what we're doing is we're job switching and that is costly. And because of the kind of, the way that we're often paid, I'm going to refer just for a moment to households where there is a regular salary, perhaps one of the partners. What's that? And households where there is not. What's a regular salary? Neither of us have had a regular salary. No. I did once for about six months when I was doing a research job. Oh, congratulations. Yeah, that was quite nice. We could eat. No, you're making it sound worse than it is. That's not good. That's not good. There's a massive difference between a household where there is one or even two regular income streams coming in and where you are much more of a freelance because inevitably when the next job comes along, you take it, you don't give yourself that brain space to task switch and you get exhausted. Yes. I'm gonna bring Franka back in. Yeah. And put her on to Polyvagal Theory and how this works and how this is relevant. Mm-hmm. I think if we look at burnout from a polyvagal perspective, so polyvagal theory is about the science of safety and how that's ingrained in our nervous system, our autonomic nervous system. So basically in our biology, and we have three zones that we human beings, and mammals, live in. We have that green ventral zone where it's very safe and connected. It's a lovely place to be where we can think clearly because our neocortex is online, we are good at problem solving. We can work and flow together with other folks. Even when we get, even when we get into an argument, we're able to solve that in a mature way. Then there must, there can be a trigger, which makes us go into the next zone, which is the yellow zone of fight and flight. And this zone is meant as the word says, to flee away from situation or to actually face that tiger and attack it. And it's meant to be there for a short period of time because it's a survival mode. It's not meant to spend hours, weeks, months in because it's metabolically very costly. It asks a lot from the energy of the body. Now, what often happens, especially in this society that glorifies being busy, working and doing all the time, is that most of us spend way more time into that yellow zone than we should. And then when our body starts to, to hamper and say, I can't sustain this any longer, there is a third zone that we can reside to, which is the purple zone of immobilization. It's that zone of collapse where you feel like, I just want to lay in my bed with my blankets all over my head. That's basically the feeling of being in that dorsal place as we call it. People in burnout tend to toggle between those two zones. So first they are for a very long time in that yellow zone until the body says, I can't do it anymore. And then there they go to that purple zone of immobilization. And then the toggling between those two start. So what you often see when people first have a burnout, that as soon as they're, they have a bit of energy, they go straight from the purple zone back into the fight flight zone, and they start doing their things and cleaning their house or painting the house or all these things that you think of as an outsider thinking, but you are in a burnout. That's not the right thing to do right now. Actually, if you look at the neurobiology, it is, because that's what the body is doing. The real problem is that we don't get to visit our green zone anymore once we're in that loop of fight, flight and immobilization, and that's the real problem. Because a system of resilience is able to move through these three zones from one place to another without getting stuck somewhere. So the problem with the burnout is that we get stuck into the yellow and the purple zone. Wow, that's so, so clearly explained. Do you remember when we ran the course with Franka Creating a Safe Space where she was walking, singing teachers through how to apply principles of polyvagal theory. I wrote down and underlined it three times and put it in a circle box and coloured it, staying in the yellow zone is metabolically costly. Yes. And I absolutely recognize, and I'm sure you do, toggling between the yellow zone and the, the purple zone and the thing is. We don't notice. I think that's really interesting because that was a new concept for me. Toggling between, I could now recognize burnout, I can recognize the yellow zone. But I didn't know that we, once you are in burnout, you then toggle backwards and forwards and it's so accurate because it takes so long to get yourself back into the green zone if you've actually ended up in purple. Yeah. And that really explains it that you go, oh, thank goodness, it is over. My body isn't, has got energy again. I better go and paint the house while I've got the energy. And all you're doing is you're still in fight and flight, you're just expressing it in a different way. Or you could be in excitement. I'm gonna say, personally, this is something that I find that you get a little bit of rest and you go, oh, thank goodness, and now I'm bouncing around with 10 different ideas and then, I have to write 'em down. I have to do something with them. In your case, you will be really annoyed if you can't act on one of them immediately. Yeah, and it is exciting and I think, if you do the Creating a Safe Space course, you'll hear that Franka also talks about the Yellow Zone being one of the places we go when we're preparing for performance so it can be an excitement zone. So we can get that excitement, but we haven't gone into the green zone. Can I just read something about compassion fatigue? Yes. And what can happen. Yes. From a physiological point of view, yeah. We will tend to have high circulating cortisol that increases our susceptibility to illness. Over longer term compassion fatigue. Remember, that's one of the symptoms of burnout. It can increase the incidence of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes, as well as various gastrointestinal conditions and immune dysfunction. And I think this is something that is experienced very much in our society across the board. And I think it's experienced, again, by people working in our profession. Because if we don't have a regular salary and we don't work, we don't pay the mortgage. So we keep going. I also want to say a little bit about the boredom thing, which is for me, what I found is, 'cause, we have a, a weekend in the middle of the week now, don't we? That was one of the big changes we made. I can't tell you how much that took Gillyanne to get me to do that. Oh, it was very funny. What was fast? Can I just digress for a moment? What was fascinating about this is it's never bothered me whether I have two days off in the middle of the week or the end of the week because I've, so I've worked on a Saturday and traveled on a Sunday doing touring for years. And so the idea of having a weekend off is just a luxury, whereas I would much rather have, two days in the middle of the week off which Gillyanne started doing, and then I refused to do it. It was so funny. It's like I have so much work to do. I've got to work every day of the week. And um, I'm now doing it. Yeah. Sort of. And we're enjoying it. Yes. It's challenging because we very often deliver a training on a Sunday. So that's a two hour training. Yeah. And there will be preparation beforehand, and then there's paperwork to do afterwards. And then we work on a Monday. Yep. Try not to start until Monday afternoon. That's not always possible. And then we work on a Tuesday and you've got some tasks done, and then it's no, you're not, we're not working on Wednesday and Thursday. And it's a discipline for me as well. And then we have Friday and sometimes we have Saturday as well where we're doing things. So it is a challenge, it's a discipline in itself. And of course these are boundaries that we need. And what I wanted to share as well is that what I personally have found is that on a Wednesday, you know, if I've been overdoing it, I can be grumpy, I'll be bored. I'll feel like I'm not really relaxing. And I have to say to myself, give yourself some space. Your brain needs some space. It's okay. You don't need to do anything. Do not go into the office. And by the time I've slept over on that Wednesday night and I wake up in on the Thursday morning and I feel. Hmm. Be really nice now, shall we go out for a walk? Should we, should we have lunch somewhere? Going into nature really helps me. And of course, because we work from home and we work together a lot of the time. Yeah. Going out, going away. Even just walking up to the local coffee shop and sitting and having a coffee, a coffee in a conversation. And cake, And cake of course is different. Yeah it's, the boundaries are really interesting and you can make those boundaries as strong or as weak as you want to. I think that's very useful. I think the boundaries within a household where there are two freelancers can be very challenging if you're doing what we're doing. And, quite a lot of people that we work with on our, our teacher training courses aren't doing this. They're running their own businesses. They might be running their own theatre schools or a coaching business. If you're running your own business, the demands on you are intense. And also never ending. And so you, I think you actually have to make the decision that parts of the business can run without you for 24 hours. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's a major decision. If you are doing something that's highly organized, if you're doing something that involves other people, if you're doing something that involves timetables, you have to make that decision to go, it can run without me, just for this moment. Yeah. And as a business partnership in the same household, you have to agree between you that there's switch off time. Can we share that? Yes. Can we share that fun story about when we were on the cruise and Yeah. You checked into our emails when we dropped into port, we made the decision and it was the best decision ever for us, we were not going to pay for broadband access on the ship. Yes. It was a week. We went for a week. Yeah. Day one, Gillyanne looked at her phone. Hmm. There's nothing on my phone, Jeremy. Yeah. And uh, he said yes, that's because we're at sea and there's no internet connection. Okay. I found myself looking at my phone about eight times that day. Yeah. Day two, there's nothing on my phone. Day three was port. So of course we get wifi in port and we get phone signal in port. So of course I went straight on my phone eight o'clock in the morning. It's like I have 120 emails. you know how many, I actually had to deal with? Four. That was it, 116. And we run a successful business. 116 completely unnecessary emails. And it was such an eye opener because you just thought, yeah. And I deal with those 116 emails every day. Maybe I should start unsubscribing from things and just not dealing with them or putting them away. Mm-hmm. Or just deleting stuff. Very interesting. When you are, you live your life on the phone or on the computer. Yeah. And then you don't have access to it, and you go, how important is this? It was a real lesson for me because I thought that I didn't use my phone that much, but. I did and still do. And do you know what while we were away, I didn't even watch any of the Netflix movies that I downloaded. All I did was read. And enjoy the incredible scenery and enjoy being with Jeremy and all the lovely food, all those things that, that, happen on a a good cruise. It was a real pleasure. It was. I just, it's just reminded me, we have a. We have a key sentence that we say to each other if we think that the other person just is not, is off with the fairies somewhere, is just not paying attention. And that is, you'll talk and talk and then at the end of the paragraph you'll add the sentence, which is, and my mother was a plate of raspberry puddings, just to see if they notice. And that that's another Terry Pratchett phrase. I'm a Terry Pratchett fan, but yes. And most of the time it works. Most of the time we catch it. It's very funny. So we're gonna go back to Franka and this is now about how you get in the green zone, how you get back into the green Zone. So how do we get little islands of green then? This has everything to do with our self-care, the self-care that we need, and the boundaries that we have to make sure that we have time and space to be in that zone of rest and digest and in that zone of connection. And actually the zone of being instead of doing all the time. Another point that I have, and actually my husband made this point to me, he always says, I see that you love what you do, but still it takes energy. So also, if you do something that you absolutely love, you still need time to rest because you have to do it with your body, and the body needs time to rest and recuperate. So it, I'm still learning in that, to be honest. And that's basically the best thing that this burnout has given me. For the first time in my life, I have started listening to my body instead of imposing on my body what it should be doing for me being a singer and a singing teacher and a coach nowadays. So I've learned to listen to my body. Even in, in ways that might be a bit weird, but for me, ever since my burnout, for instance, I've installed this siesta moment for myself because I am my own entrepreneur. So I can, I can decide how I want to my working hours to be. So I take a really long lunch break where I can actually lay down for half an hour and sometimes even sleep. And it works miracles for me because. I have this busy head that's coming up with ideas all the time. I'm a very deep feeler, so if I work one-to-one with people, I feel a lot of what they are feeling and that also takes up energy. Giving myself that moment of that long lunch break helps me to get through that day and not be depleted by the end of the day. Actually, I still have energy in the evenings, which is a lovely thing. Lots of people work during the week and have the free time, their relaxed time in weekends, whereas we as singing people often have to work during weekends. So then you've been doing your thing Saturday, Sunday, and then it's Monday and everybody goes back to work and you are like, yeah, now my weekend just started it. But there's nobody. To to do it with. I might as well go back to work. So that's what I usually do. Even when I've had a busy weekend, I just do some administration stuff, so I don't really take that Monday off and I know I should, and I've increasingly become. Better at doing it. And also since I'm declining more work in the weekends, just because I feel like I won't do it anymore. So choosing more of what I want to do and saying no to what I don't want to do because this is the thing, if you come to that point where you're not afraid to say no to somebody else. It means that you're actually saying yes to yourself, and that has made for me personally, a lot of difference. I want to talk about, she's so insightful. I want to talk about saying no. Um, This is a really interesting byproduct for several people who've been on the Accreditation Programme.'cause Franka has said this, Karin in Germany said this as well, which is they learned to say no, which meant they could say yes to the things that they really wanted to do and that matched them better. And when things match you better. Franka is right in that when you're doing things that you love, you are using energy. But there is also a sort of self-expression energy that feels good. And so the idea is that you get to find out what it is that you do the best, what you do really well, what you do really comfortably, and then to do more of that. And in order to do that, you have to say no to certain people and certain things. And for people who are freelancers particularly, you know, you daren't say no to things. Or you'll never be asked again, and then you'll starve to death. And that is the mentality. It takes a long time, sometimes to get rid of that mentality or you'll lose your reputation. Yes. Or you'll get a bad reputation. There's all sorts of things in there. But saying no to things is a very powerful way of finding out what it is that you do want to do and just put more of that into your timetable. I'm really pleased she brought that up. Can I give a loud hurrah for the nanny nap? Okay, so thank you Franka for mentioning that the Siesta. Um, One of the things that I put into place over the last three or four years was taking an afternoon nap for anything between 30 and 40 minutes. I lie down, I curl up under a blanket. I've set an alarm usually for 40 minutes, and sometimes I will fall asleep. Other times I'm just lying there. Again, allowing the system, to revisit. The rest and digest. And even if I didn't sleep, what's usually happened is I can feel my metabolic rate has changed. I start to get that warm feeling you get when you're in bed, where the body warms itself in a different way. And that is one of the ways that I manage and yeah. I think we should all do it, frankly. If you have stories of your own, we'd love to hear them. Please, I'm sure that there are people out there that have been affected by burnout or have, who have partners who have been affected by burnout, because that's also an issue. Yeah. This is part one. In fact we're coming to the end of this episode, but in the next episode we're gonna be listening to more personal stories and effects from burnout. Yeah. We'll see you then. Bye. Bye-Bye.