Summary
Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler explore the burnout cycle from three angles: the nervous system (adrenal depletion from sustained adrenaline output), the psychological (living in constant fight-or-flight from “should” and “have to” thinking), and the emotional (running from unfelt emotions that generate chronic adrenaline). Joe draws from his experience as a venture capitalist and coach, noting how CEOs who sell their companies often spend years in pajamas recovering from sustained adrenaline-driven work.
The conversation covers the traps that keep people stuck in the cycle — using urgency as motivation, confusing adrenaline with aliveness, and beating yourself up during recovery (which prolongs it from months to years). They discuss how the same dynamic plays out at societal and organizational levels, where fear-based messaging and urgency culture reinforce individual burnout patterns.
Joe offers practical approaches: significant time off, physical practices that de-stress the system, shifting from “shoulds” to “wants,” and energy management over time management. He describes helping CEOs identify energy-draining tasks and find ways to do them that are energizing instead. The episode closes with the importance of allowing rest without self-attack, extending rest beyond the “ready to work again” point into deeper states of peace, and the role of gratitude as a natural byproduct of genuine rest.
Key Concepts
- Burnout is sustained adrenaline depletion across body, mind, and emotion
- Self-attack during rest prolongs recovery from months to years
- Using urgency as motivation is an adrenaline trap
- Energy management matters more than time management
- Extending rest beyond readiness unlocks deeper effectiveness
- Finding enjoyment in work is more efficient than pushing through
Key Quotes
“If you go through life that way that’s going to be all those psychological things are going to create the burnout and then on the last piece of it and the emotional system it’s typically not wanting to feel something.”
“I have noticed when a CEO that I’m working with is done with a big project and they’re not beating themselves up their recovery time is like three four months. Similarly if somebody is beating themselves up it can be two three four five years.”
“The best athletes that he knows know how to recover really well. They work really really hard and then they do absolutely nothing absolutely nothing to recover.”
“Every one of those CEOs who had the issue there was literally infinite solutions at least 20 inside of five minutes from the other CEOs who had all figured out some way to do that thing in a way that they enjoyed it.”
“If I actually prolong that rest period, if I actually sit with all that excitement and exuberance and I move through that into deeper states of peace and joy and slowness, I am so much more effective.”
Transcript
[Music] we’ve been getting a lot of questions about burnout and given that I just got back from a long Festival weekend with no sleep and 120 degree daytime temperatures and during your final week before your month-long time off to uh to rest and recover I figured this might be a perfect time for both of us to to go into this yeah absolutely absolutely this is definitely the time of year where I am most likely to be a little burnt out a little tired yeah it’s great great timing yeah okay so exactly exactly so so from this from this grounded centered place that you must be in 100 of the time tell me what is what is it that you refer to when you talk about the burnout cycle just so I can get people on the same page yeah so I would think about it in three different ways so let’s talk about the nervous system way first so I remember when I was running my first company and I went to an acupuncturist I lived in a place and this one was like go see this acupuncturist and this is a while back and I was like acupuncture what the hell is that and so went and this doctor was amazing and he you know basically gave me something called adaptogens to help my adrenals uh recover and he didn’t say he just said take these and I said if you are a western doctor what would you do and he said oh what would happen is you would uh drink a lot of coffee and then eventually you get depressed and then I’d put you on antidepressants and this was before people in the western people would put um would give anti-anxiety medication to depressed people and so in his world the way it worked was that you get anxious your adrenals expand expand expand and when they start drying up you go to coffee and if you drop even more you’re depressed and so that’s what I would say on a physiological system that’s how it works is that the lack of adrenaline leads to this like burnout and so that that’s how I’d describe it there if I was describing it from like the psychological or the the human brain or the prefrontal cortex brain I think about it as um for whatever reason you’re constantly in a fight or flight situation you’ve created things where you have to do things instead of you get to do things you should do things instead of you want to do things it has to be at a certain time has to be perfect whatever it is which constantly feels like a like you’re under attack like you’re under pressure and uh and so if you go through life that way that’s going to be all those psychological things are going to create the burnout and then on the last piece of it and the emotional system it’s typically not wanting to feel something meaning that you’re there’s some emotion that you’re not wanting to feel and therefore you’re running from it and it is that running from the emotion that like creates a certain amount of adrenaline in your system so so I would say the burnout cycle is if you’ve been running on adrenaline for your anxiety for an extended period of time then typically eventually you’re going to burn out and so you see this all the time yeah you see this all the time especially in Corporate America yeah I noticed a distinction here worth exploring between running on and burning out from fear and anxiety or just there being fear and anxiety present in your life and I think often often people have the perception that the that what’s happening external around them is the cause and if you actually look across a population there’s some people who can be living a lifestyle where others will be burned out in and they are not and there’s some people who are living a lifestyle where you’re like how is this person burned out from looking from the outside but not without the view of what their internal state is and how they’re psychologically relating to their life into themselves yeah the other way to think about this is you know having been a venture capitalist and a coach I’ve worked with a lot of CEOs a lot of pressure run off of a lot of adrenaline typically and when their business they sell their business or they leave their business I often see them stay in their pajamas for two years you know so they they they just get they’re so burnt out from that running so hard for so long that they just basically are in a burnout the other thing that’s interesting is that we do this assessment for folks and one of the things it shows is and and I’m a little bit that worked this way which is the way that I recover is long it like extended breaks of doing nothing so I work really hard and then I recover with these long extended breaks of doing nothing which is what I’m about to do for a month where I focus fully on just physical well-being and and mental well-being and so some people run like that and some people are far more like on a daily basis do the things that they need I I do daily practices obviously but I definitely need these long things to be able to get back into a place where I feel completely resourced and ready and fresh yeah and so that so I do that and some people they just work their butt off for 10 years and then take two years and sit on a couch and typically beat themselves up but yeah or or an opposite direction from the taking time off my coping mechanism for a long time was going into a very scary situation so that the adrenaline made sense you know people would call me an adrenaline junkie but really I found out if I didn’t get out into the mountains if I wasn’t jumping if I wasn’t doing something that was scaring me on a regular basis then the accumulated background fear underneath my psyche would become debilitating unless I had an opportunity to burn some of that off and I noticed that after after jumping I’d be like wow I feel so grounded nothing scares me right now because nothing’s quite as intense as what I just experienced so I can get back to my email and get some work done and things are great until it started to build back up again and the blow off yeah needed to occur oh wow yeah that totally makes sense the other I remember something similar where I went to Alaska and you know threw fish in Alaska or butchered fish in Alaska for a summer and we would work 100 and something hours a week physical it was draining like you were definitely running off of adrenaline just because it it took so much energy to do it and I remember when we got out first thing I did was like sleep for 20 something hours but then I remember we went to Oregon and and one of my favorite things to do was jump off of uh things into water at the time and I remember like jumping off of a bridge and like no adrenaline I was like what what just happened there’s no adrenaline from it and so we just kept on going bigger and finally I did something so big that I was like and I could feel the whole adrenaline like you know suck the last little adrenaline out of me so yeah yeah totally understand that and and because that felt like refreshed in some way so yeah so that that’s what it is I would say that’s what I’d say the burnout cycle is and and the reason I I it’s really important to me to talk about is because so many Executives that I know are in that place of burnout or about to be burnt out and then when it happens the the brain kind of caves in on itself you don’t see opportunities clearly you don’t take enjoyment in your work it’s just very hard to see things with the optimism that’s necessary often and so how to think about it I think it’s really important for any kind of sustained productivity yeah I think that makes our self-reinforcing cycle like to the extent that you have some unprocessed unfelt fear in your system as you start to get more and more burned out then you’re going to start seeing things even more in that in that kind of scary or pessimistic catastrophizing light which will increase the level of fear and yes going back to that distinction of not just that there’s anxiety fear adrenaline present in your life it’s that you’re driven by it and it becomes the driving force that eventually brings you to the to the brink yeah that’s one of the many traps that are available in in a meaning like there’s a sense of feeling alive that comes with it and it can be exhilarating and so you can do this thing that brings that thrill and then at first it feels really great like a cup of coffee like the first time you drink a cup of coffee it’s like oh this feels really good and then if you’re drinking like three cups every day then you notice the jittery’s things happening and then and then pretty soon it’s just you just need it and so I think it’s the same way that that’s one of the traps of it the other trap is that a lot of people use it for motivation I had a really famous investor that I worked with for a while and and he just wouldn’t do anything until it became urgent and and then then he would use the urgency to motivate him and then the whole team realized like urgency is what motivates this person and so they would create these urgencies and then they’d be motivated but all it did was make him more and more and more burnt out and so so that’s another thing is people will use it as a form of motivation rather than say enjoyment or inspiration or um or or Vision or any of those things to find their motivation Yeah Tim Urban of Waypoint y has this really beautiful Ted Talk um basically the the metaphor is that there’s like a monkey on your shoulder and that monkey is the thing that like motivates like so you find yourself just very distracted up until the moment of the deadline and then you use that deadline to motivate yourself and yeah it just seems like a very common very common cycle I relate to it so much through much of my life and the the languaging around ADD ADHD very much fits that pattern as well as many other like depression anxiety yeah I I would say that that those are some of the things that keep you in that side of the cycle the other thing that happens is what keeps you in the other side of the cycle so then you’re burnt out then you’re in your pajamas then you’re not doing anything and what happens is that your mind keeps on attacking you you should really get up you should really do this you should really do that and it starts beating you up which continues to create the adrenaline because you’re under attack and so you’re you’re what you need is just to rest and instead what you’re doing is sitting on the couch beating yourself up and so I have noticed when a CEO that I’m working with is done with a big project and they’re not beating themselves up their recovery time is like three four months um similarly if somebody is beating themselves up it can be two three four five years so that’s a that’s a pretty tremendous difference just in in how it keeps you stuck on the other side through self-abuse yeah yeah especially if you have if you have a conflation between relaxing and resting and laziness or some kind of judgmental description of it then yeah anytime your body wants to recover you’re going to go into self-attack and self-threat which is just gonna stymie any attempts that your body wants to recover leading you straight into burnout yeah yeah that’s right yeah I was I was talking to this Olympic train olympically trained athlete and he was saying that the best athletes that he knows know how to recover really well that they work really really hard and then they do absolutely nothing absolutely nothing to recover and and and that it’s this unknown secret that the Olympic athletes will train really really hard but the recovery is really important so I thought that was fascinating what is what are some other traps around this that people fall into that get them stuck in the cycle uh I think the other thing the other trap that isn’t particularly like what keeps you in it but there is this idea that people have which is um but if I don’t beat myself up if I don’t have a sense of urgency how will I ever get anything done and that is an amazing thought process because you look at little kids and all they do is do stuff and you look at mice and all they do is do stuff and and it’s not like they’re you know under this idea of urgency it’s just they’re just doing stuff and it’s our nature to do stuff but somehow or another in our brain we get this idea that without this motivation of urgency or without this beating self up that we won’t get anything done which is which is interestingly true and not true so what I mean to say there is that it’s not true at all however if you’re burnt out then there is some truth to it because you’re just kind of creating more of that adrenaline High to get to to something and so they see this with kids who are who do this thing called unschooling so if a kid burns out in school they go to school and they’re just burnt out maybe because they feel attacked by their teachers or maybe because they feel attacked by the kids or maybe because they’re just under this crazy stress and they’ll drop out and if they go into this idea of unschooling one of the things that they say to a kid is okay you don’t get to use any screen time but you can do whatever else you want and tell us when you want to start learning again and they will maybe read cartoons or Comics or they’ll you know maybe just hang out or go off into the woods they’ll do all this stuff what they won’t do is screen time what they won’t do is is video games because those aren’t allowed because those increase your adrenal fatigue and and it turns out that eventually usually like four months six months later the kids just totally want to learn again and so there is this short-term thing of not being motivated if you’ve been under this sense of urgency now that doesn’t mean as an adult we might not be able to take six months off and we might be burnt out and so then our other option is how do we do things without the adrenaline and so you have to start thinking about okay here are the things I’m going to do but I have to figure out ways to do them without the adrenaline rush which is one of the ways I help CEOs out all the time is we look at the things that that drain them and we figure out ways that they could do them that are to feed to them directly makes them feel better about their day yeah and so we’ve been talking about this in terms of burnout on an individual level but you can also see a lot of the same Dynamics play out in society or in a company or in a movement for example there’s so much around marketing or you know Grassroots movements where yeah the the prevailing wisdom is to hook into people’s sense of urgency yes like we need this is a problem we need to fix this problem if we don’t fix it the world is going to hell and yeah like that there’s that that kind of message is prevailing everywhere yeah and so you we we all find ourselves walking through life kind of being hit by a bunch of these messages these arrows like the environment this you know social whatever that politics this religion that yeah right and that would tend to reinforce those cycles that we have individually when our media is that way but also if you are a CEO of a company how do you bring that energy into your product or not how do you how do you create meaningful change in the world from a place of you know whoever’s with me on this needs to buy into this fear and urgency place and use that as a tool to hook other people into our mission with us and what is the alternative yeah so I’m curious if you have any reflection on that before I lead into the the next section on what we can do about it yeah that’s a great great question there’s a couple things too I I’ve also seen it somewhat on a societal level where I notice that like if a society is like all run up on an idea you know like make as much money as you can and cocaine fueled kind of caffeine fueled expansion of on a societal level then like you can just wait for that downturn to happen in the economy um so yeah I think it happens and I see it happen in companies too and and what’s a fascinating thing is I’ve literally watched somebody go from just being free of uh several ideas and then be inspired again like a CEO who’s like I’m done this sucks and then it’s like well do you have to deal with it this way in this way are these constraints real what if we take them away and then oh wow I’m excited to do this again which is really a fascinating thing to watch it’s rare but I’ve seen it several times where what was actually the thing that was taking all their adrenaline was some false idea some limiting belief that they have right same in a relationship as well yeah and I I just worked with a group of CEOs and we did this exercise where I said tell me the thing that takes the most adrenaline that takes the most out of you and we’ll all ask them how what questions about Alternatives alternative ways of doing it that actually feed you and every single one of them saw this breakthrough of like oh I’m doing it in a way that takes my energy I could be doing it in a way that gives me energy and I think that is the way you handle it inside of a company and if a CEO knows that if the CEO thinks I have to push myself through to get through then their company is going to feel the same way if a CEO says oh it’s more efficient for me to figure out how to enjoy it it’s more efficient for me to to get energy from everything that I do then they’ll start looking around seeing how powerful that is and they’ll they’ll organize their company that same way so that the people in their company have that same experience it’ll be part of the questions that are asked how do you do your job how do you get these same results but enjoy it twice as much and it’s funny because I will ask that question when I go into to work with teams one of the questions I ask is how do you what could we do that would double the results and what could we do that would double the enjoyment yeah and that also feels very relevant for uh business negotiations as well ultimately if you’re if you want to work with somebody and you guys are just drilling into how how we’re going to get our senses of urgency met rather than how we’re going to get our like deeper spiritual and psychological needs and that of our companies and our organizations served by what we’re doing then you’re missing some of the some of the puzzle yeah as a matter of fact this is like a little golden thing for any anybody negotiating um when I talk to people about negotiating for a position or for a job I say there’s three stages of the negotiation the first is how do you want to work together that’s the first stage because that actually motivates everybody if there’s a match or or it pushes people away if it’s not a match which is perfect the second is what are the resources you need to actually do your job really really well and then the third is what’s the salary and I noticed that when it goes in that position it’s just Clarity the whole way and or you get to a no quicker rather than if what most people do is work on a salary which is really not what motivates us there’s great studies on this but we most people would take a little less money if they were three times as happy in their job right so let’s let’s kind of Zone this back into the the individual level of burnout and talk a little bit about what we can do to avoid it or how can we work with it or fall deep yeah in love with it this one I don’t know I mean if you’re in it then love it but the the I think there are ways to just not get there and I know there are ways to just not get there my one of my ways is to take significant time off I’m I’m able to do that now I wasn’t at some point so I had other methods making sure that you have physical Health like running or any kind of thing that de-stresses the system that works for you whether that’s meditation or yoga or massage or whatever I think that’s a huge huge benefit on a psychological level I would say you know we have that the whole all the podcasts from the master class and so each one of those is a reduction in Adrenaline so if you’re operating from your wants instead of your shoulds there’s less adrenaline that’s happening if you’re operating from how do I be authentic instead of how do I improve myself you are absolutely using less adrenaline so every one of those are tools to use less adrenaline and and then even on a more deep level like if you always have to be on time which is something that I have struggled with then usually that means there’s a parent who you got in trouble with if you weren’t on time and therefore you’re like running from meeting to meeting that’s a lot of adrenaline use how do you how do you undo those psychological components that constantly look at your adrenaline use so instead of I think there’s a huge amount of time and energy put towards time management but I think energy management is critical and you can spend a lot more time if you’re really managing your energy well and so that’s another thing is to just pay attention to when you’re running on adrenaline and what’s creating that and what’s a way to do it where you’re not running on adrenaline to get that same job done and if you problem solve there then you have so much more energy which is why I’ve done a lot of that work and it’s why I can work the way I work at the speed in which I work and not burn out that and taking a month off every year is really really important to get back to my physical wealth and well-being yeah yeah it also feels like a good dose of self-inquiry would be helpful here where if if I’m running to the meeting I was like okay what am I afraid of I’m afraid of being late to the meeting what does that mean does that mean that if I’m late to the meeting I feel like I’m unworthy I’m gonna be yelled at and not good enough but if I were to just a message and say I’m gonna be five minutes late and then show up much more prepared for the meeting and less burned out you know is that like what what is it that I’m actually concerned about when when we have our all these fear stories stress stress triggers what is the actual trigger that’s going on not just the surface level one but what’s the deeper one and what is it that we actually need underneath that that’s right yeah so that’s that’s where the head stuff comes in it’s in the shooting ourselves it’s in the what are the psychological things that make us rush and and the best way to go about that is just really look at where you’re spending that and how do you do it differently is the way to do it differently just to let people know I’m running late is the way to do it differently space give yourself 10 minutes between meetings what is it what is the way to do it differently and and that’s one of the things we sat with today where there’s folks who are like okay I have to have conflict with somebody what’s the way so I have to run the sales meeting and I hate it and I do it through adrenaline it’s like okay well how do we do this and there was infinite in each one of the CEOs who had the issue there was literally infinite solutions at least you know 20 inside of five minutes from the other CEOs who had all figured out some way to do that thing in a way that they enjoyed it so it’s really cool when you really see it when you’re like oh wow I can I can take anything that that takes energy from me and figure out a way to do it and that gives me energy or delegate it or whatever it is it’s pretty amazing to watch that yeah and how about also on the side of you you described earlier we we talked about allowing the rest to actually occur how about like welcoming the experience of being tired maybe not like burned out but just noticing like when you feel burned out what does that feel like I feel tired I feel like not doing anything I feel XYZ and then doing the emotional inquiry on those feelings including even just the physical sensation of tiredness okay yeah the sensation of tiredness is my body signaling that it needs to recover in fact it may actually be a direct signal for recovery yeah is that yeah yeah sleeping is a feeling of tiredness essentially that is an actual recovery so yeah if we if we kind of flip the script on how we see those signals and recognize that they’re actually reparative and not necessarily a sign that we’re doing it wrong then that that can allow the deeper restfulness to arise when it’s needed yeah there’s definitely some people just resist feeling tired oftentimes also we’ve been running really hard we’ve been compartmentalizing feelings we’ve been like not paying attention to the sadness and the fear and so there’s a lot of that backlog that just needs to move and if you resist moving it you’re gonna take a longer time to recover the other thing that I a little trick I’ll play on folks is um see as I’ll be like okay how do we measure how well you’re resting um like I I are you going to be the best at resting are you going to be kind of a half asset like what’s going on here and I will literally like flip the script on them in such a way that like to rest well is an accomplishment because it is it is not an easy thing to do is to rest well like we we think it is but most folks don’t and it’s some some combination of taking care of a physical body taking care of the nutrition taking care of the the self-talk it’s like a very aesthetic thing to really rest well and and to support yourself in it and so if we start like looking at those metrics and then we say okay well let’s see how well you meet your goal of resting well it can totally change the whole dynamic in the head I mean it’s a shortcut but it works you know it gives them some way of being able to feel like they’ve done something meaningful yeah and to kind of flip that to the other side of the spectrum if you can rest well what would it mean to fear well for example if you find yourself in that elevated State how much resistance is there in it and you know fear can become excitement like fear is excitement without the breath and so if yeah when you are finding yourself in the elevated State and everyone’s at the board meeting and they’re doing whatever and politicking or like trying to get their thing met and you’re running out of time and you’re elevated how do you how do you allow that to move through to a really clean energetic flow of excitement and determination and fully showing up yeah and how much how much more energy efficient is that yeah and the other way which is one of the things that people have a problem with resting is they start feeling good and then they’re like oh that scares me that level of exuberance or excitement or peace scares me so I have to so same thing on the rest cycle how do you really allow yourself to feel great in um and not just immediately rush back to to the work at hand yeah which is why I have this I have this because like in this month in about a week and a half into the month I’ll be I’ll 100 ideas and a whole bunch of stuff that I want to do and I’ll have the energy to do it and I know that if I actually prolong that rest period if I actually sit with all that excitement and exuberance and I and I move through that into like deeper states of peace and joy and slowness I am so much more effective so I actually extend my rest time once a year so that I can go beyond the state of oh I’m ready to do work again and go into states of much deeper peace and joy because from that place I I do so much my work is so much better what I do in the world how I do it how quickly I do it all improve remarkably yeah yeah I’ve noticed myself too if I take if I take like a week backpacking halfway through I’ve got a million ideas and I’m ready to go with them and then the second half of the week is where a lot of the magic really happens and I think a lot of that comes from the the celebration and the gratitude all right yeah there’s there’s time to just sit with how good it feels to a feel this way B continue to reflect on my mission my purpose my my enjoyment and then third just to to be with it without in a Wilderness it’s not possible to do anything with my email or whatever um and just have the gratitude for all that is actually present right now without it needing to be contingent upon my actual execution and so I think gratitude I’m curious how how you would bring gratitude into this as well I can totally see how the Gratitude would be helpful and what I notice is that when I’m rested and I’m resource gratitude is Wellspring it’s just what happens continually like that’s the most common thought when I’m rested nor one of the most common thoughts when I’m rested is just oh wow I’m so grateful I’m so lucky I feel so privileged wow cool I’m really grateful for this conversation um too what a great one yeah I’m grateful to all of our listeners yeah thank you all for just showing up yeah if you enjoyed this episode please share it just pick one person uh that’s my invitation pick one person you think would love it and send it to them only if you only if you would enjoy that and uh you can find us on Twitter at Art of a comp or hit us up at Art of accomplishment.com find a contact form shoot us a question uh come take a course awesome thanks Brett see you next time yeah thanks see you next time thanks everybody all right bye foreign