How Do I Know If I Am Burning Out?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see you’re on the path to burning out?

What are the signs?

How do you know so you can actually stop it happening?

In this post I am going to go through the one thing that shows that you may actually be well on your way to potentially burning out.

Again, scrap the ‘potential’ part.

You are definitely going to be on the way to burning out if you continue on the stressful road that you’ve been on.

Now, that one thing amongst all the things that could be signs as well, but when I’ve worked with entrepreneurs and professional athletes, since 2000, – geez, I feel old 2006 /7 sort of time- when I’ve worked for people since then, I’ve noticed this recurring thing over and over again. 

Now we’ve seen loads of people have issues which potentially could be showing that they may be leading to burnout.

They can’t lose weight.

They struggle with focus.

They literally zone out, struggle with ADHD.

They struggle with bloatedness, water retention and all these different things.

But the number one thing is that you do not sleep all the way through the night.

Now, I also see people that say, “I hit the pillow and I’m off like a light”. Well, again, that is showing you are not getting enough sleep as well, should take 10 to 15 minutes for us to fall asleep. And then you should be able to sleep seven/ eight hours and wake up feeling refreshed, feeling recharged, ready to take on the day. 

People don’t sleep through the night, why is this? Now, as I said, your body should be able to go to sleep, ideally between 10 and 11:00 PM and wake up between six and 7:00 AM feeling recharged, feeling refreshed. The problem that we have is that it’s become so… so ‘common’ that people think it is normal.

For us to wake up once, twice, three times during the night, maybe more.

I know certainly myself in the past, I’ve probably had a record of waking up every single hour for eight hours. And sometimes where I can’t get back to sleep. Literally felt like my mind was racing until I dived into what was going on for about 15 years since I had the trauma of losing my dad when I was 15.

Him having a stressful background having a stressful job, having migraines. He went into hospital on the Wednesday he had a stroke, on the Saturday he passed away. He wasn’t overweight. Didn’t seem to be unhealthy. Didn’t have loads of alcohol just was stressed. Now as of that time, can’t really remember before that, but I knew that my sleep suffered as a result.

I just thought it was normal given a year or two of suffering from waking during the night. I remember being around girlfriend’s houses at the time.

And I would then get/ wake up, creep past their parents’ bedroom to go to the toilet, hoping I didn’t wake their parents up they’re siblings up or anything like that, but it became normal for me to wake up during the night and almost to the point of when 2008 came, I started competing in bodybuilding and lost over a hundred pounds.

Thought I was really healthy, but the closer and closer I got to the show, the leaner and leaner I got, the worse this sleep problem became.

To the point of when I was 26 years old, the sleep was causing a lot of stress and then impacted my sex drive. I went to the doctors at 26 years old and said, I cannot sleep. And I’ve got no sex drive. 

And notice there as I said ‘sex drive’, not that I can’t get it up. I’ve got no sex drive. What they did (And this is where the broken health system comes into place) they prescribed Viagra and they prescribed a sleeping tablet called Zopiclone for a 26 year old.

Rather than looking into the causes, the anxiety that was coming up from not being able to sleep, the poor stress management that was coming up from not being able to sleep, the stress from overtraining and all these different things.

And that went on for a while. I didn’t have all those medications and still to this day, I haven’t had those medications. 

I have thought about trying that because you know, there’s some stories that it can be quite good, but anyway, that’s another story probably for a rainy day, but what happened was this sleep problem didn’t go away until I started looking deeper.

Rather than looking at the body as certain systems that are going to be looked at individually, rather than looking at fitness on its own and health on their own looking to fix things with medication, I looked deeper into what was going on.

How my brain was functioning and how the signalling was coming to my gut or the signalling was getting to the other systems in my body while I was constantly in the fight or flight mode, not the rest and digest mode.

Was I getting the right nutrients in there. And as I’ve worked for more and more clients over the years, I knew that this sleep thing was a true epidemic because so many people awakened during the night. And so many people as I put a post on earlier, it’s easier to push it to the side.

I ‘ve spoken to people recently that had, before lockdown started, they had a certain routine and they thought sleep problems were because of their routine. But as a result, furlough happened and people got pushed out of their routine into a time where they could actually have a normal routine.

And they’ve realized that this sleep problem that has been happening is not down to their routine they had before, it’s down to the stress that’s been caused in their lives.

And when we look deeper into what is actually causing this, the people that say, oh, well, I can get by on four hours of sleep, I’ll probably see you in a few years’ time.

But if you are one of these people that can’t sleep through the night, or you simply go to fall asleep, your head hits the pillow and suddenly you wake up with all these great ideas.

That’s another recurring thing for a lot of entrepreneurs going out there and also people that wake up between three and 5:00 AM and then they shout about being part of the 5:00 AM club. No, you could say you’re part of the 5:00 AM club. AKA. ‘You’re about to burn out club’, but all these people are suffering from potentially something called blood glucose mismanagement.

In fact, I don’t know if the blood glucose mismanagement is actually a term, poor blood glucose management. Basically no management of their blood glucose, insulin levels, sugar in their blood is going up and down all the time, causing imbalances with their hormones, imbalances with their adrenals.

This is taking a lot of science out of it. And I can go into a little bit more depth if you do want me to simply drop a message and we can go from there. So that’s what’s happening and poor blood glucose management caused by a lot of stress.

Other things could be going on. And what I do with clients is we look at a thing called a brain screening questionnaire that I’ve developed from the courses that have been going on, I hear Susie, I could have guessed to Susie.

I swear you you’re living on Facebook, watching my videos, watching Josh’s videos and the other videos. Guys if you want to know someone, that’s going to connect you with some awesome individuals, go and see Susie. And she’s definitely connected me with some epic people, but anyway, what, what can can we do about this?

And the first thing we can do is look at what’s causing us the stress. What is it? Is it your job? Is it your relationships? Is it finances or anything like this? And is it something which you can deal with today? Because I’ve spoken to a couple of people and they’ve had problems in their relationship.

And these things have been going on for a couple of years and we know we need to change them, but unfortunately, these things cause more and more stress the longer we leave them to go on. But most of the times there is something you can do with your health. And when it comes to blood glucose management, the composition of your food is something that is definitely going to help you with  moving forward.

Unfortunately, in a world I was just doing a mastermind with, the mastermind  it’s called the Phoenix mastermind. And I’m doing a six week health reboot in there and we’ve done the first one. And we spoke about some of the entrepreneurial mindset is that we’re just going to push, push, push, push. We are driven individuals.

We want to get to that next step and get to that next step and get to that next step. And we think about optimizing. So we want to optimize, we want to go into biohacking. We want to go into all these different things, and then we’re fed these ego driven diets. These ego-driven protocols of training, which potentially are going to cause you a lot more stress rather than looking at the foundations.

And I spoken about them multiple times, but my goal is to climb Mount Everest.

I have the base camp picture right behind me.

I have a big picture of Everest right there, and I’ve written a chapter in my book, -the best selling ‘One Day Body Upgrade’ called moving mountains- and your health, along with sleeping through the night, all these different things.

Your health is similar to climbing a mountain.

Unfortunately, you climb a mountain you are going to get cold. Especially the world’s tallest the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest. And what happens is that too many people want to climb the mountain without getting cold. They want to go over these optimization side of things.

They want to go straight for the summit without acclimatizing at base camp, without doing rotations to a cclimatize at different parts of the mountain. And this is what happens with our health.

We go, as Susie has said, we go for these high street detoxes because we’ve been marketed to that we’re going to have this detox, the seven day juice fast or something like that, and we’re gonna end up 20 pounds lighter or something.

And then we end up putting it back on. We cause more problems with our body or we get thrown do this carnivore diet go vegan, go, plant-based go and detox, go and do a fast go and do keto go and fit your macros or whatever it is rather than looking at what actually is going on for us as an individual, what is going to work for us as an individual?

Someone that likes carbs, probably isn’t going to do well on the ketogenic diet straight away.

But if you’ve got problems with brain fog, if you’ve got problems with ADHD, ADD, if you’ve got problems with memory and things like this, maybe we need to take aspects of that ketogenic diet and then put them towards you because that’s scientifically been shown that it can improve your brain health.

One of the only diets to do that. So we start on this route, knowing that we’re going to start adding carbohydrates in.

The same thing when we go for training methods, is that too many people don’t like doing the easy stuff because the easy stuff is not sexy. The easy stuff is not the thing, which you can brag about.

The things that people brag about is running 50 miles or dead lifting 250 kilos or something like that. I know that one because I was that guy that would brag about that stuff.

Now I couldn’t care less about what I dead lift because some days I’m too stressed to dead lift and I have to adapt my sessions to make sure that I’m not over-training.

And this is something that a lot of us struggle to do. I say a lot of us purely because I was the person that struggled to do this, take our ego out.

Find the bits that work in the ketogenic diet. Find the bits that work in the intermittent fasting side of things find the bits that potentially could help you with detoxing.

Find the bits that might, maybe, just a little bit, help you with the 75 hard challenges and stuff like that. Find what is going to help you with strength training, find what was going to help you cardiovascular cardio vascularly with endurance training and piece these things together.

It sounds overwhelming, but really isn’t because what it boils down to, especially with exercise is that there were millions of ways that we can train and get exercise, find what you like doing.

I had this discussion with my mum the other day, and that I’m super, super grateful that the gyms are open again here in the UK.

But I had this discussion with my mum the other day that. She said, oh, you liked running. You liked doing all this stuff and running and everything.

You liked doing running? No, Mum, I hate running.

I absolutely hate running. And one of the reasons it’s like, okay, if I was built for running, I’ve trained a lot of runners.

I’ve trained a lot of people that do strength and endurance and all these different things all at once. But I do not like running. I like it when it’s done, but I haven’t put the time into it.

I could be good at running. I haven’t put the time into it. And I found myself literally scrolling through Facebook for 45 minutes. Procrastinating about going for a run. I like cycling.

It allows me to go and listen to podcasts. Listen to audio books, get education in. That is a better form of cardio for me than running is.

But the weather is pissing it down sometimes, or really windy, not the most aerodynamic. Well, what I do love is the weight training.

And I do love that go into the gym, lifting weights, not training as hard as I used to. So that is my means to getting this release and allow myself to move forward with that stuff.

Now, what you can do is find what works for you. It goes for nutrition, it goes for training, but honestly, if you are waking during the night, if you’re in a position where you, you get frustrated with that, you know it’s impacting your energy or you’re waking in the morning and you see your partner there and you get frustrated.

You want to slap them on the face cause they can get to sleep and you can’t, then drop me a message.

Let’s chat about that. Let’s go through some questions that I can see wherever I can help you.

And I will let you know if I can help you with this stuff.