so this video is going to be a little bit longer and it's going to be both a kind of a pragmatic guide as well as my personal Journey so uh for a little bit of background I hit I've been in a state of uh burnout not Perpetual burnout but off andon burnout kind of a roller coaster since about 2015 2016 um with some periods of respit and some periods of uh being in worse shape um I last hit burnout uh pretty hardcore just over a year ago so that was uh early 2023 and so I wanted to do was get a uh video together that was just my whole journey in to end all the lessons learned and a pragmatic guide now the reason I'm making this is because when I hit burnout I I I did what a lot of people do I went to YouTube and I looked for videos and resources there are a lot of you know there's some TED Talks out there but there wasn't one resource that was super comprehensive and also I just found the best book for it it's this book uh adrenal transformation protocol by uh Isabella Wentz um so don't take my word for it a lot of what I'm going to tell you is in this book as well and that's the reason that I decided to make this video um is just because of all the resources that I've scraped together over the last year or so this is like the single best uh best book that kind of has it all together I do have another stack of books here that I can recommend but if you if you do only one book it should be uh the adrenal transformation protocol because what we call burnout is generally uh adrenal fatigue syndrome which of course if you go and Google that it there's debate as to whether or not that's even a thing but she explains the the pharmacology of it and the Endocrinology of it and here's another thing that I'll I'll say before I get into the video is um the stories in this book mirror my journey very very closely um namely you know constantly having stomach issues fatigue um all kinds of just this nebula of issues and I go to a doctor and the doctor does a blood draw and they say you there's no disease um you're fine it's all in your head um I even asked my endocrinologist my last endocrinologist um you know what does he know about burnout because after I learned that burnout is you know mainly a hormonal imbalance it's about cortisol and adrenaline and those sorts of things he's like it he just Shrugged he's like it's not really a thing I don't really know anything about it um now to be fair that endocrinologist was kind of an idiot because he also thought that um complex carbs like you know whole grains were simple carbs and he told me that repeatedly he said you should stop eating whole grains because those are simple carbs um so I don't see him anymore but anyways that is illustrative of just how little information there is out there of any medical provider out there an endocrinologist should be educated on what burnout is but they often aren't at least not here in America and I'll tell you um some providers who are so anyways that's the Preamble let's get into it so first and foremost everything here is needs to be disclaimed I am not a medical provider of any stripe or color in any Nation um what I'm here to do is to share my story my personal narrative I will also be sharing some of the resources that I have had um and also the things that work for me but what I will also say is that the more you learn about diet and nutrition and endocrinology and burnout and all of this stuff you realize that there is a lot of variability on an individual basis your personal medical history your family history all of those things so what worked for me and the advice that I would give to someone else is very very much like this is my experience and so basically what I'm saying is take everything with a grain of salt and consult uh professionals specifically and I've got the kind of professionals that I would recommend first a dietitian um Integrative Medicine specialist and Functional Medicine Specialists um my dietitian um and and oh by the way there is a difference between a dietitian and a nutritionist um here in America anyone can call themselves a nutritionist as far as I know but dietitians must be licensed so go to a licensed dietitian and I think that it's called different things in like UK and Germany and stuff I'm not sure what the licensing structure is there um but uh you could also see uh a licensed pharmacologist I think um one of my friends is a pharmacologist here in the states and he knows a lot about this kind of stuff too um in fact the lady who wrote This Book is a pharmacist he's a phad d so a doctorate of pharmacology um but yeah so dietitian um particularly those with an um in an integrative medicine setting or a functional medicine setting and so the difference between those is integrative medicine is holistic it looks at the entire body the entire lifestyle um top to bottom front to back side to side and functional medicine is a different form of medicine that rather than looking at the body and Medicine through a disease model which is diagnose disease cure the disease you're on your way um it's saying let's look at the actual functional uh uh aspects of all of your organs and stuff and let's actually make sure that you're at the functional level that you want to be rather than just curing a disease um so that's kind of the the biggest thing and there are a lot of people who are are like transitioning into functional medicine so for instance my wife's opthalmologist is getting her functional medicine certification um and so there is a growing recognition that we need to take a more holistic and functional and integrative view of Health Care rather than just a disease model um so those are really important things for you to know but again huge medical disclaimer everything in this video um up until this point and everything that follows is again my personal experience and what has worked for me um I'm I hope that that what I have works for you as well but again um there's no substitute for professional help um diet is way more complex and even as someone who has studied diet for many many years talking to a professional dietitian lo and behold she knows infinitely more about it than even I do and there's a lot of nuance and subtlety um and so yeah there's no substitute for professional help and uh and personal experience and finding those resources but I wanted to share those resources okay on with the show so one thing to know and actually this this slide is not even correct as I'm reading this book about cortisol cortisol is actually an anti-inflammatory um we we demonize cortisol because it is provoked as in response to inflammation it is actually anti-inflammatory and part of the healing process and what I'm now just learning is that burnout is actually your body becomes insensitive to cortisol because it downregulates the amount of cortisol that it's producing because if you're in a constant state of stress and upregulation and recovery and lack of sleep and all that fun stuff um your body has to tone down the amount of cortisol that it's making because cortisol is a hormone just like any other in the endocrine system and if you make too much all the time you run out you you run out of raw materials to make it naming cholesterol DHEA and other things and so uh kind of the model that I have adopted is is uh kind of following a low cortisol lifestyle and what I mean by that is tracking the things that that increase cortisol so for me exercise was the big one um ever since quitting my corporate job and taking more control over my career and I'll talk about that in a later slide um but you know my my Daily Grind is much different but I was still exercising too much and I didn't realize this but exercise is highly inflammatory and so when I say low cortisol lifestyle really what I mean is an anti-inflammatory lifestyle because as we all know inflammation is the enemy this is what causes disease and cancer and aging and all that fun stuff um but it's very closely related with cortisol and burnout and all that other all those other fun things um learning more about what provokes inflammation or a cortisol response stress response is everything from uh PTSD flashbacks to eating the wrong things alcohol as a big inflammatory agent certain foods um I had to and this is why I also recommend working with a dietitian is because I realized that I had histamine sensitivity and I'll talk about that in a future slide and so histamine sensitivity is basically my body was producing too much histamine all the time as part of the inflammation response so you have histamine and cortisol as two sides of the same coin of this inflammatory uh response the stress response and so there's um all kind there's emotional stress there's physical stress and so on and so forth but then also sleep is the number one thing the number one cure on top of fixing hundreds and hundreds of other things and so one thing that I'll point out so that you can be paying attention to is that burnout recovery for me has been hundreds of small changes and about three or four big changes um and that's one thing that I actually learned from watching other uh YouTube videos on burnout is that if you hit burnout it means that it is time to overhaul your entire life and that sounds daunting and that and overwhelming and believe me it is um but making dozens of little changes one at a time it adds up but then also uh it does take a little bit of effort to make those bigger changes I'll talk about the big changes too during the course of this video but really the number one thing and and this is an oversimplification because it's not just a cortisol problem cortisol is just one of the symptoms um of the problem and cortisol is actually your friend you actually want more cortisol in your system because it is anti-inflammatory but you need to get rid of the other inflammation and stuff because your body can't keep going putting out fires all the time okay so what are the key drivers of getting into the state in the first place for me perfectionism was one of them I remember when I figured it out a couple months ago I was I was going to uh lunch with a friend of mine and I was like I and this is someone I've known for like 15 years I was like man I just figured out that like a big part of my problem is perfectionism and he like laughed he's like you just figured that out I was like thanks man um anyways so perfectionism for me stems from a lot of stuff namely having high expectations put on me during my childhood and then uh because I was a gifted kid and people are like oh you know the world is your oyster and there's nothing you aren't incapable of but then I was also not given any support which is actually a really common experience for gifted kids it's like oh well you're smart enough to figure it out but don't do that yes gifted kids can figure it out um but all children need support um and so I was very lost for a long time um and so then I had this this this weird dichotomy of high expectations and zero guidance and that uh like I kind of gave up for a long time but then once I entered adulthood and I began my career I actually uh learned that I actually had a really good work ethic once I was properly rewarded um school is not rewarding school is for creating Factory automaton drones um with no sense of self uh at least American school was at the time so anyways combination of culture and family and everything else and uh and I lo and behold once I realized oh if I work hard I can actually get re rewarded for that um and that ultimately created a sense of perfectionism and honestly I don't remember what it was it wasn't it wasn't like one final aha moment and I'm no longer a perfectionist it took a few months of work of just sitting with that and saying okay what what is my perfectionism doing today and I still have a tendency to fall into it um but not nearly as bad and I'm just like uh whatever good enough um just let good enough be good enough uh now what I will say is you might be wondering okay how does this contribute to burnout um because uh if you are never satisfied with good enough um in any capacity whether it's work or you know making a YouTube video or writing a book or or whatever um you're going to get bogged down in wasting a lot of cognitive Cycles on stuff that doesn't really matter uh empirically speaking in the long run um but also just the just being a perfectionist is itself high stress and so like what I mean is your your your sympathetic nervous system will be activated when your perfectionism is activated and so part of the big part of uh curing burnout or recovering from burnout is parasympathetic activation which is being a little bit more chill a little bit more laidback which I don't know if you can tell from my body language but I'm like actually I'm actively as I'm talking trying to monitor my level of activation and um my heart rate's so it's in the 70s right now um but after getting that like in monitoring is really important um because if you're sitting in the 80s because you're thinking too hard that is that for me that is that represents a level of activation I should be in the 60s at any given moment um even if I'm you know working or thinking or or reading or whatever um but if I get upregulated that means that I am in a stress State and perfectionism is a big contributor to getting into that stress State um now a uh other side of the same coin is workaholism now workaholism is a little bit uh different because perfectionism can be like a personality type but workaholism is something that we are uh basically indoctrinated to do here particularly in America and there's uh one of the most interesting things about workaholism that I realized is that um working harder is actually we are taught that that is how you self soothe here in America um and pretty much any busy holoc culture I'm pretty sure that they do the same thing in Japan um where they still work more than we do um as well as India and China that have you know their legendary 610 you know 60 hours a week um basically 10 hours a day six days a week uh and so basically what happens in a capitalist Society in a neoliberal society you are encouraged to work more um you the the idea is the Protestant work eth or whatever is you should always be trying to hustle and make more money etc etc etc and oh by the way anything that you want anything that you need whether it's a sense of safety or Better Health Care or whatever the way that you get it is by making more money and so that's what I mean by workaholism is actually a a conditioned self- soothing response and also it's about control and so what I mean is not controlling others it's about how you get control of your own life and so part of the corporate propaganda and political propaganda and economic propaganda that we're all completely saturated with is the best way to get control of your life is to make more money and while there is that is a very logically sound argument it is definitely true the more money you have the more control you have um by however by putting people on that spiritual treadmill of chasing money you're chasing the dragon forever um you're basically saying hey that sense of insecurity you have that sense of fear that you have the best way to control that is by working harder which actually exacerbates all of the underlying problems in the first place um and then of course it becomes a habit it becomes a compulsion and so for at at my worst I was like waking up at 4 in the morning to immediately begin making YouTube videos and stuff like that um and uh that's no way to live um CU body comes first um and sleep is the number one thing uh sleep diet exercise hydration and then of course down regulating I think those are probably the five top things I wish I had added that as a slide uh boredom so even when I started relaxing more uh boredom was was and still is one of my bigger challenges um that's why I have a stack of books around me um and instead of playing video games because actually one thing that I found is that playing video games because video games are deliberately stressful um they're they're meant to get you excited and engaged and get the adrenaline flowing and get the blood pumping and that sort of stuff well that's keep that was even even though I was even though I was not physically exercising playing video games as a way of of resting was actually no good because it was keeping me in that uh sympathetic activation State whereas instead laying on the couch and reading a good book with some Ambiance playing that gets you down into a parasympathetic uh you know down regulation and that is a signal to your body hey it's time to rest and so on now obviously not everyone is going to get upregulated when they play video games um but you know I play cyber Punk and Mass Effect effect and those sorts of things they are meant to be challenging and if it's if it's if it's challenging then it's more likely to get you into an upregulated State um so that meant I had to find a whole bunch of other stuff to do other than exercising because I'm super active because again exercising is inflammatory and yes exercise is good but and I'll talk about this in a in a minute when I talk about exercise but I the kind of person who needs a lot of exercise and my body can't keep up with it until I heal more um but yeah so reacting to boredom by either exercis or doing something that's too stimulating um that was a big problem that I was facing on a regular basis all right so exercise um you know they say the dose makes the poison and we are completely inculcated with this idea that like oh everyone just needs more exercise and yes it's true that that most Americans and most westerners I think need more exercise that is not me um I have always been incredibly active and so I was like okay well the the conventional wisdom is just exercise more just exercise more just exercise more why am I tired all the time and it turns out there is such a thing as too much exercise too much of a good thing is just as bad if not worse than to little and so in this respect I was I am so accustomed to pushing myself so hard that in my mind what constitutes a medium workout is actually a rather intense workout to to most people and so I had to learn that and and renegotiate my relationship with exercise um and that is being more aware of overexertion and the importance of recovery and rest is for me I had to basically kind of flip the whole Paradigm on its head and say okay for me just my natural state is going to be getting plenty of exercise what I really need to work at it is rest and recovery and so sometimes that means spending all day doing nothing what I would constitute nothing and just focusing on rest and Recovery because again if you're in a state of burnout Your Capacity is much lower because you don't have enough cortisol and other things are out of whack in your body yeah so that's about it for exercise I think um now one thing I will say is that uh kind of one of the turning points for me in the last few weeks was going back to Zen meditation so everyone has talked about like mindfulness mindfulness mindfulness I'm not going to dump on mindfulness because it is super useful and and it has a lot of uh a lot of scientific evidence behind it but for me because my brain is so active um Zen meditation was actually much better for me so this is shunyata or sunata uh meditation or what you can just call Zen meditation and this is kind of the the more like mystical sounding one where you empty your mind um this is about bringing your mind to a standstill uh it's about it's about approaching the void or emptiness um and but it's it's basically practicing using your prefrontal cortex to Marshall the rest of your brain and saying stop no more no more internal chatter no more internal feelings um all of that fun stuff and what happens is one that is practicing the executive control muscle so of course the more you use executive function the better it gets but also it creates a a huge amounts of of clarity so this is a bit of a joke but you know on the internet there's that whole like post-nut Clarity right like after you orgasm like everything feels calm and clear Zen meditation does that but it for hours uh and it's actually better when you get it and it's very very interesting because even the texture of your own thoughts changes drastically before and after uh Zen meditation what does this do other than feeling better one you will feel a much I will feel much better when I do this um but also you make better decisions and you have much better impulse control and emotional self-regulation which again it's like oh instead of I'm bored now I need to do something it's like one I just don't feel bored as often um after doing meditation and then two when I do make a decision it is a much better decision that is more thoughtful and more uh controlled rather than reacting to a sensation or a short-term need or an Impulse uh now another thing that I that I learned and when I was reading about burnout is that a big cause of burnout is doing things that you don't care about um doing things that you're checked out on like if there's a job that you hate and you do it every day um or inter acting with people that you don't really like and so what I realized is that um because of my upbringing because of the way I've been treated by Society because of Any number of factors I have learned to tolerate situations that I don't really like um and this is actually really really common for gifted kids it's common for people with ADHD and it's very common for people with Autism and guess what like I got all of them um and so we are basically just conditioned and kind of bludgeoned into uh accepting hey this is not uh a lifestyle that we want but people say oh well you just have to put up or shut up and that is a very ableist response and so what I mean by that is for a for someone who is neurotypical for them the the the the unhappiness of going to a regular job is relatively mild um because they are living in a world that was built for them by people like them but imagine taking a neurotypical person who works at their pace and their level of sens input and putting them in an environment that is way too hot for them or way too cold for them and way too loud for them um with like music blasting all the time and lots of people coming and going so that they can't ever uh regulate their nervous system that's what life is like for those of us who are uh a little bit different and I I was I was just doing some stretching and I remember um many many years ago someone said oh well stretching should never hurt and I'm like what are you talking about stretching always hurts like when you're an HSP when you're highly sensitive everything hurts all the time and it's like well that's not how life is supposed to be if you're doing if if it hurts then then you're doing something wrong it's like no when you're in HSP everything hurts and so because nobody else had that experience nobody understands how pain how literally physically painful the world is for people like myself to them something that feels neutral or good actually hurts other people and so then they normal it they force you to normalize that and say oh well life is just pain and like but when when a neurotypical person says that it's kind of tongue and cheek it's kind of a joke and what they're talking about life is pain it's just mild discomfort it's not actual pain um but for people like us it is actually physically painful um it means that we we eat things that hurt us because people tell us we're supposed to it means that we exercise in a way that that people tell us to because we think we're supposed to it means that we put ourselves in social situations and work situations that are agonizing for us because we're told that we're supposed to and so instead I kind of flipped that script and I said you know what I'm not going to do anything that I don't care about um if something doesn't feel good I'm not going to do it and I call this body first living um and I tried to I tried to explain body first living to like chat GPT and Claude and um I think they get it now but back back when I first tried to explain it to them they're like that sounds bad because then you're just going to give into all of your whims and desires I'm like so what you think I should keep doing doing things just because they hurt and it's like well that's not what I meant I said whatever anyways so for those of us that are more susceptible to burnout if you're more like me then you know this is a systematic approach a way of reversing your mentality of how you approach life all right so as promised some of the big changes one of the big changes was a career change so just about 15 months ago I quit my uh corporate job and I said uh I'm leaving this place and I'm never coming back and yeah so that was uh that was what I call a burn the ships moment um so for for some historical reference Alexander the G um Alexander the Great when he got to Persia he burned the ships now this was symbolic as well as practical um the idea was we've landed and we're not turning around burn the ships we're marching forward um and I really like that as a metaphor for kind of what I did which was I left my I left corporatism I left a you know stable salary job to strike out on my own oh and by the way many gifted people many ADHD people and many autistic people end up self-employed for the same reasons that I was self that I ended up self-employed and oh by the way my dad and my my dad's dad all ended up being self-employed for more or less the same reasons um so it kind of runs in my blood uh but yeah so this uh reduced the toxic workload um that I had in terms of dealing with people because here's the thing is when you're different you get targeted and this is another thing that neurotypicals do not understand is because uh it only takes out of an organization of a 100 people one vicious person who is on the lookout for people that they perceive as vulnerable and they'll Target you and then particularly narcissists are really good at hiding their abuse and so the neurotypicals will be like I don't know what you're talking about and so everyone will be gaslighting you including the narcissist and I've read a few books on this um healing from hidden abuse which I have on the bookshelf behind me is a really good book that explains kind of that triangulation that happens um and so anyways I needed control um and this is why I've deleted pretty much all of my social media except YouTube and Discord um and you know I just need more control over my environment over my life and over who I interact with which is also why um I wrote a pretty strong social media policy which I'll talk about uh with boundaries in just a little bit so career change one of the big ones uh new city so so I sold my old house in the old city and I moved to a more rustic Countryside idyllic lifestyle I'm not way out in the country my my environment isn't quite like this but I'm much closer to that way of living um so lower cost of living slower pace of Life new house I'm renting I don't own the house because owning a house is very very stressful um if I can avoid owning a house ever again I'm going to and I'm going to just invest elsewhere um now what I will say is that a career change is very stressful as well as moving is also very stressful it took me about two full months to recover from that move um it probably would have been faster if I was not still recovering from burnout um but I am still recovering from burnout so it is what it is uh but but the job change and moving are kind of the two primary big life changes and this is what a lot of people talk about in when they say oh like if you hit burnout it is time to change your life that might mean changing career it might mean changing City so on and so forth um in this book they talked about how there was a health condition that they had that was uh created from living at high altitude so then they needed to move to a low altitude um that is an example of you know what like yes some people are machines and some people can just tolerate anything but not everyone can and if you ignore your body for long enough your body will fight back eventually uh and so moving moving to a place that is more familiar cuz I grew up out in the countryside so basically for me it's like going home it's saying I'm going to go to somewhere that nervous system is more um acclimated and more naturally regulated and also there's lots of health benefits from getting out outside of the city anyways it's quieter out here um you get a better uh mix of natural probiotics from you know being closer to the dirt and more time in nature uh that sort of stuff okay so Unapologetic boundaries um as someone who is who has been different my entire life who has been targeted since school and in my career and uh everywhere else in between um boundaries boundaries are critical and this is one thing that you'll see whenever people talk about burnout is you know make sure you have better work life boundaries matter make sure you have boundaries with your friends and family and so on and so forth and so you know part of what happens for people like us is we get gas lit into thinking that we're not allowed to have boundaries um in some cases it is rules for thee and not for me which is basically a thing where toxic people will very deliberately undermine your boundaries because they don't want you to have boundaries in other cases they will detect that someone is vulnerable and they'll just overload you um and so there's you know whether you call it codependent codependence or whatever else um yeah unap Unapologetic boundaries are the way to to fix this um and that's why again I deleted all my social media um because and it was it was really ironic after I announced that I was deleting my LinkedIn and I said hey if you want to connect here is the best ways to connect and I even said in my announcement one of the reasons that I'm deleting LinkedIn is because I get unsolicited offers and people don't understand boundaries and guess what happened narcissists take that as a challenge and so uh someone reached out to me with an unsolicited offer and when I said no thank you he tried to justify the offer and I said what you just did is exactly why I'm deleting this and of course way over his head I know that it wasn't over his head because basically this outed him as what he was which was manipulative um and a grifter uh but again what what some people say is like oh well if you put yourself out there on social media you're asking for it and that's victim blaming and gaslighting but on a certain on another level structurally speaking if you get rid of those people then they can't approach you uh so also part of unapologetic uh uh boundaries is getting rid of people who um are not aligned with you and so when I when I started reading um let's see where is it unmasking autism um one thing that I realized is that you know masking autism that's one thing but I was also masking my giftedness and so I decided to unmask my giftedness which is basically saying I know things my brain works a certain way I'm running a different version of software than other people I'm not going to hide that anymore well uh there's this phenomenon called changeback behavior and so a lot of my so-called friends at the time were like oh you're just you know stuck up and you know blah blah blah and I was like no actually I'm not going to apologize for the fact that my brain works differently I'm not going to apologize for the fact that I know things that you don't and that I can do things that you can't um and of course that rubs some people the wrong way got rid of all those people and guess what now my life is filled with people who are also gifted who appreciate the things that I can do and can do the same things that I can do as a friend of mine said if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room and of course nobody likes being told hey like you're intellectually inferior um but it's a fact and we're very uncomfortable with uh meritocracy in this nation right now because of imaginary narratives around equality um and equality before the law sure but not equality of uh in all other ways people are different and meritocracy requires us to recognize that people have different capabilities and some people are really triggered by that I'm sure there will be comments in this video of people that are triggered by the assertion that not everyone is the same not everyone has the same capabilities and oh by the way trying to enforce equal treatment at all times for all people is actually itself problematic because again I have different needs than others and different uh capabilities and treating me like a neurotypical person is Injustice so anyways uh yeah I prioritize protecting my well-being Above All Else uh sleep as promised sleep is one of the core pillars of recovery um so this book recommends 10 to 12 hours sleep uh during your recovery um so it's there's the three pillars of quality quantity and consistency um you need lots of sleep um I've done all kinds of stuff I've I've had good sleep hygiene for a long time um but because of that hyperfixation and because the workaholism and all that other fun stuff my brain will automatically wake me up pretty early I'm still working on deprogramming that uh but at the same time there are other things that you can do to help get better sleep um namely there's supplementation out there that you can try um and so on and so forth uh I'm not going to recommend anything specific because again that's probably something talk to a dietitian about oh and something that I forgot to mention is I don't know if all insurance policies are like this but our my dietician is 100% covered um I get like up to 26 visits per year and it's 100% covered and we don't even have that good of of insurance we have a middle-grade insurance policy I don't need to see a dietitian every other week um I go every six weeks um but it's 100% covered um and again licensed dietitian able mine is able to help talk about all of these things ranging from sleep hygiene to other sleep strategies uh so on and so forth but again this is one of the most important things and I'm still not quite where I need to be but I'm getting getting there and here's one of the biggest tragedies is that burnout and depression and anxiety one of the one of the Curative things for these is better sleep but all of these things inter with sleep and so it's kind of a vicious cycle where hey you're in bad shape and what you need is more sleep and you need better sleep but these the these the cause of your problem is also the barrier and it there's there's kind of no easy way around it and again this is why I said like getting over burnout is about a few really big changes and then hundreds of little changes namely adding stuff like meditation to downregulate and that sort of thing um anti-inflammatory diet so uh there are several B books that I have to recommend for this the main book the adrenal transformation protocol will talk about this all of these books recommend that you cut out caffeine and gluten which I have done um but then I will say that uh the science-based anti-inflammatory diet this is a good book to get a it's for beginners um so it's the science science-backed anti-inflammatory diet for beginners by Yasmin alamir and William Grist if you want that one um diet is absolutely critical to the recovery cuz um what you eat and what you don't eat actually has a really really big influence on your recovery cycle and everything else um and then specifically if you suspect that you have histamine as well I found this book this was recommended by my dietitian as well the four-phase histamine reset plan um so again histamine and cortisol very closely related in the uh stress cycle um and the reason why I say this is the the main book is because she covers most of this um very quickly uh and so if like I said if you do just one book the adrenal transformation protocol um but the idea is that your diet affects all of your organs it affects all of your Chemistry um and getting your fixing your diet is something that you have immediate control over now what I will also say is that changing diet is very difficult and slow because diet is wrapped up in your family history your culture uh many habits that you have the time that you do or don't have and so like finding stuff that is um that is convenient enough that is healthy enough that is Affordable enough it is one of the hardest things to do but you also have immediate control over it and so like one of the Cardinal rules that I have is um high fiber so very high fiber diet which is just I feel my my body feels better um so that sells itself but then also eating leafy greens I try and make sure that I eat leafy greens every day um if not twice a day I don't get I don't get leafy greens every single day but uh most days I do and since I made that decision like it has had noticeable impacts on my gut health um even my hair like I feel like it grows twice as fast uh but yeah so you know diet exercise sleep those are the three pillars of recovery again this is nothing new um we've known this for decades but putting it together in this format um is is kind of the key now recovery timeline so this is where my functional medicine specialist gave me a rule of thumb and that is um expect about one month of cover one month of recovery for every year of neglect and um and what she pointed out is that depending on how you have been raised that neglect could be the first 30 to 40 Years of your life um and so in that respect um and and this this also jives with what I've learned and so um typically speaking burnout recovery takes every anywhere from 6 months to 3 years sometimes longer it seems like the med is around 2 years um so like 18 months to to 2 2 and a half years is the is the length of time that it takes to recover from burnout um there's some other autistic YouTubers and they say like two to three years minimum um for Burnout recovery which really sucks now what I will say is that yes it's like oh man what am I going to do for the next two to three years um just because you're in a state of burnout doesn't mean that you are nonfunctional and also it's a slow increase and so like one month after another you're in better shape than you were the previous month unless you make a bad decision or something bad happens in your life like you know you're forced to move um any number of things can happen that can be a setback and another thing is that a burnout recovery is not linear um this is one thing I don't yet understand why but like last weekend I had a great weekend I was social all weekend um I'm not sure what I did differently to get that much energy but then all this week I've been really tired um and that's just the nature of it and accepting that but understanding that you're on a slow slow gradual Improvement plan and also being equipped with the resources and continuing to make small changes will make sure that you stay on the right path um but yeah that one month of recovery per year of neglect that was uh that was a very profound kind of insight um and and it it it checks out now you know you might say like okay well but you said you hit burnout you know about six or seven years ago so therefore if you've been in recovery for over a year now you should be recovered and I'll say yes but remember how I've also been talking about how as an autistic person as someone with HSP as someone with um with ADHD actually my entire life has been one of neglect and I don't mean like you know I was left alone for weeks on end and raised as a feral child what I mean is that my needs were never fully met um my sensory needs my intellectual needs my emotional needs my physical needs have never been really met um by my family or by my societ or by culture and so I am having to learn the hard way how to meet all of my needs as an adult approaching midlife so that means I have 30 plus years of neglect to uh figure out and recover from and that really sucks and that's part of why I'm making this video is to drive home the point that this is not um just because it's common doesn't mean that it's good it has been normalized um but but common does not mean you know that this is the way that it should be um in fact this is the way that it should not be and it's actually bad that it is this normalized anyways that's my Soap Box uh I think this is the last slide uh but one of the things that really helped was my functional medicine specialist she said oh like after our initial consult she said like oh you're you're not just a type A personality you're like a type A Plus+ plus plus personality um super achiever highly highly motivated highly driven and um this framing helped me realize like I'm not lazy LA and I have never been lazy I still characterize myself as lazy um but from an objective standpoint from an outside perspective I am not lazy and that means that it's okay for me to rest um this is something that I still have to manually check myself on and here's an example of uh a few years ago back during the pandemic when I had some friends living with me um this was the kind of the first time that I had a reflection from the outside where I had people say Dave like you say you're going to do something and then you just do it and I'm like yeah isn't that way you're supposed to do but most people don't operate that way it's actually weird that when I say I'm going to do something I just go do it um and that is what my functional medicine specialist says me means by when she says I'm a type A++ plus personality it's like hey I'm just going to go do something um unfortunately if you live that way for a long time uh eventually your body gives up and so I picked this image because um a few years ago before burnout I just decided I wanted to get good at running and and so like after work I would start running and within a couple weeks I was running 3 miles a day and my resting heart rate was down to 45 I am not nearly that healthy and that's what I'm trying to get back to um but if I were to try and do that right now I would I would honestly probably hospitalize myself um but yeah and so just recognizing oh it is my personality to just be try hard right that is like the quintessential what my wife calls true Gryffindor energy of being ADHD which is just go go go go 120% all day every day unfortunately even though my mind is ready my body is not ready to do that okay so thanks for watching I hope you got a lot out of this like I said number one book if you want a deeper dive absolutely pick this book up adrenal transformation protocol by Isabella Wentz yeah this will change your life so thanks for watching cheers