Why burnout isn’t something to ignore - and how to treat it: The Little Things podcast

Jude Walter never put her health problems down to being overworked and burnout - until she found herself in hospital. Photo / File

Eleven years ago, Jude Walter was doing her best to make it all work. Juggling a transtasman corporate role and competitive netball alongside raising two pre-school age children and various community projects, she thought she was doing the right thing and managing her workload.

When she started to feel sick - at one point convinced she had a brain tumour because of how “fuzzy” her head felt - Walter never once attributed it to all the things she was squeezing into her day.

It wasn’t until she returned from a five-day roadshow that she finally hit a wall. Driving to a family dinner, Walter told her husband to turn around as she knew she was about to be sick.

“The next morning, I honestly felt like my body had been injected with concrete, and I literally had to crawl to the bathroom. My husband took me to the doctor and then the few days beyond that is still actually a bit of a blur to me, but I went to hospital, underwent a whole lot of tests. They couldn’t find anything actually medically wrong with me, which is a huge relief, but they said to me, you are burnt out. And that was my defining day.”

Speaking to The Little Things, the Herald’s lifestyle podcast from Francesca Rudkin and Louise Ayrey, Walter said after the diagnosis, it became clear that the warning signs had been there all along.

“By the time I was actually diagnosed with the burnout and told to take some time and rest, I actually printed out nine double-sided A4 sheets of paper, which were all of the various tests that I had had leading up in the year to my actual final demise.”

Since then, Walter has dedicated herself to helping others avoid the same fate as her, becoming an accredited coach at Brainfit World to share her story, and using her own experience to contextualise the struggles many of us face with information overload.

“There was a stat that I saw recently that suggested that the average adult living and urban Western civilization is exposed to 34 gigabytes of information every day. That’s enough to fill half the storage on my iPhone every day,” she said.

“A lot of those warning signs that I was having 11 and a bit years ago, they were my body’s way of telling me ‘your storage is nearly full’, but I didn’t try and cull some stuff out.”

In the episode, she shares a number of tips for managing burnout. One important thing Walter stresses to people is to avoid comparisons to others, as trying to live up to the standards and expectations of others is a major driving factor in burnout.

“You often look around and go, ‘oh, well, but she can do it and, and he can do it, so I should be able to do it’. Actually, we’re all different. And we actually also have no idea how they’re feeling on the inside and what they’re doing in their downtime, et cetera. So we really do have to stop trying to kind of judge ourselves on other people. And we have to listen to our bodies. We have to listen to ourselves, and become familiar with our own limitations.

“And it’s okay to have limitations. It’s impossible in life to do everything. So you have to put your time and energy into the stuff that’s really going to make a difference.”

Listen to the full episode of The Little Things for Jude’s top five tips for brain and memory health to avoid burnout

The Little Things is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are available every Saturday.