229: Burn Out Proof Your Life with Dr. Camilla Moore

Dr. Camilla: 0:00

So that's where our imposter syndrome can lead to a lot of stress, and that's one of the things that I realized where a lot of my stress was coming from, when I really started breaking this down and taking a look at it and I realized it wasn't that I wasn't exercising enough or it wasn't that I wasn't meditating enough or sleeping enough. No, it was because this inner critic in my mind was taking over and creating so much turmoil in my mind that it was becoming a physical stress.

Camille: 0:35

So you want to make an impact. You're thinking about starting a business, sharing your voice. How do women do it that handle motherhood, family and still chase after those dreams? We'll listen each week as we dive into the stories of women who know. This is Call Me CEO. Welcome back everyone to Call Me CEO. This is your host, camille Walker, and here we celebrate women building businesses.

Camille: 1:02

We primarily focus on mothers building businesses. Women building businesses. We primarily focus on mothers building businesses, and if you are a mother and listening, you know that it adds a little extra dynamic of how you need to manage your life, your business and your goals. If you do not have a child, that's okay too. Women are always juggling so many things. It doesn't matter if you have the title of the mother.

Camille: 1:25

We are caretakers, givers and, a lot of times, people who need to set healthy boundaries. So today we have an expert to help us do that. We are speaking with Dr Camilla Moore and we are going to be talking about how you can overcome imposter syndrome, put together healthy boundaries and also how to beat the burnout. That sounds pretty aggressive, but really, how do you overcome it? She is a certified Harvard certified stress management instructor, and Camilla is also someone who is a mother, so we're going to be talking about how to set up those healthy stress boundaries and also how to even notice or detect the signs of early burnout, so you don't get all the way there.

Camille: 2:17

So thank you so much for being on the show today. Camilla, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Have me too. We've already had such a good chat. I feel like we have a lot for the audience to catch up on. I will do my best to bring up all of the awesome things we've already discussed, but please tell them where you live and a little bit about you, your family and what you do.

Dr. Camilla: 2:40

Sure, so we're in the Northeast, we live in Rhode Island, beautiful little, you know, surrounded by water. Rhode Island and I yes, it's really a beautiful little state. I have a four-year-old son who is 100% four years old, and I have a great husband. We had a lot of we wanted kids for a long time. It took us a while to have him, took a lot of work, a lot of medical intervention, but we got him, and so I work from home. My husband has a traditional work, nine to well. I mean, I don't think anybody works nine to five anymore, but we come together at home every day and and it's been great, it's great.

Camille: 3:27

Now you have a huge background in mental health and your passion there. You were in the corporate world for years. Tell us a little bit more about where you started, what led you into this path, a little bit of your corporate experience and then where you are now.

Dr. Camilla: 3:44

Sure. So I am a chiropractor by trade and I worked in a few different corporate. I had my private practice. I also worked on site. We have the Acushnet company is local, which most people don't recognize the word Acushnet but they do recognize Titleist and Footjoy. That is the company here we have their headquarters. So I worked on site with them with their corporate wellness program for many years and I also was a contractor for our big hospital system here which we call Lifespan, although now I think it's rebranded Brown Health.

Dr. Camilla: 4:18

We have Brown Medical School here. So I worked with them. I did research their teaching hospital for Brown Medical School. So I did research with them, guest lecturer at the Brown Medical School for the students on stress and burnout, and I worked just as a chiropractor building that practice within their lifestyle medicine department. I have a board certification in lifestyle medicine and so we worked there. So I've seen a lot of different pieces of the healthcare from many different lenses in private practice and corporate health and also in the kind of the big box healthcare systems, and it's all been very educational, it's been very interesting and all of them provide something a little bit different. But I've enjoyed all of my experiences and I take all of that with me and I apply it to what we're doing today.

Camille: 5:06

Oh, that's awesome. Now, if I look at the math correctly, if little William is four and you started this business about that time when you became a mother, your new offering this was right around the pandemic, am I right? Like, what's the lineup of this? This is like a huge, a lot going on, especially considering, you know, stress and burnout and everything else. Very much a lot of changes happening about that mark. So what? How did that line up with the pandemic?

Dr. Camilla: 5:36

So there was so we had. I was working at the hospital system for during during COVID. I had sold my practice in 2018 and I had already had a toe in the door at Lifespan, where I was working and we just expanded the service there and so but then COVID hit. We also, simultaneously, were going through fertility treatment. We found out we were pregnant. I was. William was born in June of 2020, the summer of 2020. So, if you do the math like, in March is when everything kind of locked out.

Camille: 6:11

Okay, okay, wait, just a minute. Were you freaking out because you had this? You'd waited so long to get pregnant and then this baby's almost here and the world is like shutting down. What was that like?

Dr. Camilla: 6:21

Yeah, you know I was okay. I think you know we, I at the time, and I think we can go back to this space, but there was, this was the time where we really didn't know much but, I, also trusted.

Dr. Camilla: 6:38

I was like, well they're, they're telling us what we need to do. We were still seeing patients in the office, but we had drastically changed what we were doing and part of why we were still seeing patients was because one it gave a lot of, so many other services were shutting down that we were able to still support our chronic pain patients. And we were also and we there was only like three of us in the office but we were also able to sustain our employees. And so we're in a time where there are a lot of people being laid off and furloughed because we were still generating income in our little department. We were still able to support our staff and it was honestly like it was.

Dr. Camilla: 7:21

I don't want to say I didn't love that time, but I loved the cohesiveness in the community that we were able to actually create there, because people felt safe coming to our office and the staff and I like we just kind of hunkered down. We would watch the briefings every week. You know we had Gina Raimondo was our governor at the time so we'd watch that briefing every lunchtime and just kind of get a sense of like where we were. But there were a lot of unknowns, but I am an introvert at heart. So when they were like, oh, you can't lost our dog, who was like I don't know if you're a dog person, but like, yeah, we had lost, you know, our first, which is your fur baby.

Dr. Camilla: 8:14

Yeah, like three weeks before William was born, my son was born and so, like COVID for us was like this mix of, you know, huge emotions of grieving and celebrating.

Camille: 8:25

Oh my gosh.

Dr. Camilla: 8:26

Yes, so we just kind of went with it. You know, my husband is very easygoing. He's kind of a go with the flow kind of guy and so he's like everything's going to be okay. Then I believed him.

Camille: 8:39

Good. Isn't it nice to have people around like that, where you're like okay, we can get through anything, especially if it's your partner. That's huge.

Dr. Camilla: 8:47

For me that's big.

Camille: 8:49

Yes, all right. Well, we have a few main topics that we are going to unpack here, and your expertise is signs of burnout, what to do when you get there, and also taking a little piece of that, I think, as entrepreneurs, putting ourselves out there all the time, imposter syndrome is something that can come up a lot where we have to be aware, and I think that those two are almost like sisters where they're like, hey, you're not doing enough, and the other one's like, oh, look at that person over there. You know where it's like. If you're feeling like you're not doing enough, you're always pushing yourself to the next thing, but then you're also comparing. That's a recipe for burnout with that. So take us through some steps of perhaps, maybe what to look for and how we can equip ourselves with some tools for success.

Dr. Camilla: 9:43

It's a great question. So let's start with imposter syndrome and let's kind of break down where that comes from and how that can contribute to our stress and also what we can do about it. So imposter syndrome, when you look at it, has its root in stress and fear, and so what we have to understand is that behind every stress is a fear, and that is our survival mechanism. So the reason that we've been able to survive for tens of thousands of years is because we are innately fairly skeptical as people. We didn't get this far by watching the lion go and his dad and just casually following him in there. We got this way by seeing the lion go and his dad and say I wonder if that's safe, I wonder if that is okay. And so that's where, when we hear these two voices right, because imposter syndrome I always think of like the two voices on either side like no, you can't do this and yes, you can do that. No, you can't, yes, you can. And we have this kind of this, this warning system on one hand and this logical brain on the other, and the mistake that most people make is they try to just overwhelm the negative with positive thoughts and enough positive affirmations, then you will just silence this inner critic and you will silence that negativity. And that is just not how it works. That back and forth in our brain actually creates more stress. So what we want to do is we want to take that negative thought of you can't do this and break it down into the root fear of it and get to the root cause of it. And the way that we do that is we apply those of you in business will know the five whys, which is a way to get to the root of any sort of corporate problem, of any sort of issue that you're having. Keep asking the question why? For every time you have the answer to the previous question, why, for every time you have the answer to the previous question, why? So we can apply that concept here and we can say you can't do this because of X, y, z, because you're not good enough, and you say okay, if that were true, what would that mean? Well, if I wasn't good enough, I would lose my job. Okay, well, if that was true, what would that mean? Well, that would mean that I wouldn't have any money. Okay, if that was true, what would that mean? Well, that would mean that I wouldn't have any money. Okay, if that was true, what would that mean? Well, that would mean that I would be out on the street and I would be alone.

Dr. Camilla: 12:08

And so, very quickly, we go from this seemingly superficial thought of like you can't do this because you're not good enough, to this root fear that is primal in us, that we are now afraid of being alone. And you have to think. This is happening in the most primitive part of our brain. Right, this is where we have survived, this is our limbic system, our amygdala, and so if you do kind of backtrack those 20,000 years, then what you see is that we got to the place where we are now through cooperation and community. We need each other to survive, and we needed each other to survive.

Dr. Camilla: 12:51

We could not go it alone 20,000 years ago. That's why we had our packs, that's why we had our communities, that's why we had our tribes, and so everybody had different roles to play. So everybody had different roles to play. Well, if you were to extract an individual from that community back, then that person's risk of dying increased exponentially, because that one person would then need to have to find food, gather food, hunt for food, protect themselves from predators. They'd have to stay awake at night so that they could protect themselves, find water, they'd have to survive on their own, and so being alone back then was the worst thing, because that would lead to death.

Dr. Camilla: 13:35

And so we apply that, and how strong that fear of being alone in isolation is, and all of a sudden these negative thoughts have teeth. They really mean something. And so once we can get to that root fear of why we feel, why we are saying what we're saying, then what we can do is that's where we bring in our compassion, we can bring in our acceptance and we can sit with this uncomfortable fear and be okay with it because we know that we are okay. And then, once we have made peace with that and we are calm and we've stopped resisting that, then we can reframe this into something positive. And so that's where the positive aspect comes in. Then you can bring in your positive thoughts.

Dr. Camilla: 14:24

But we have to break this cycle of back and forth, and the way that we do that is by breaking it down to that root fear, understanding that this is something real.

Dr. Camilla: 14:34

Sit with that uncomfortableness, be okay with it and feel safe before it will dissipate, and then we can move on.

Dr. Camilla: 14:43

And so when we talk about imposter syndrome, if we continue to fight it like that and we continue to just try to overwhelm it because it has roots in our survival mechanisms it will always be there, which means you will always be fighting it. The idea here is to understand where it comes from and to have that process be second nature, so that you can recognize where that root fear is and flip the script instantly, rather than letting it fester and having to ruminate over it. So that's where our imposter syndrome can lead to a lot of stress, and that's one of the things that I realized where a lot of my stress was coming from when I really started breaking this down and taking a look at it and I realized it wasn wasn't that I wasn't exercising enough or it wasn't that I wasn't meditating enough or sleeping enough. No, it was because this inner critic in my mind was taking over and creating so much turmoil in my mind that it was becoming a physical stress.

Camille: 15:42

That's a really good way of breaking it down and I, as someone who I'm familiar with the series of whys and I think that one thing that I would imagine, if this is something that's new to you or that you're even out of practice of doing, do you suggest that people write it down so that they can kind of process it, because I think it would be hard maybe to think about it and try to keep track of the reverse, the reverse, the reverse, the reverse. Do you suggest that people write it down and then get to that space and then sit?

Dr. Camilla: 16:17

Yes, when we teach this in our program, that is exactly what we do is we actually have a worksheet where we are going through this, because, for the first time, it's too much to keep it all in your head. Plus, magic happens when you put pen to paper. You really, you know, first of all you can see the words on the page, but also your brain. It really imprints on your brain. That's why journaling is such an effective therapeutic tool, because it gets out what is in our mind and puts it into physical space. But, yes, absolutely, and so I usually just teach it as a shift method S-H-I-F-T, where S is where you say the words out loud that you have to actually say what the negative thought is.

Dr. Camilla: 17:00

You would write that down. H is where you hunt for that root cause. So that's where you're practicing that. If this were true, then what would happen if this were true? The I is where you identify what that root fear is, and then the F is just feeling okay and sitting with that uncomfortableness, and then T is the transition and being able to. That's where you bring in your reframing and your positive psychology of how can we flip this script.

Camille: 17:27

Oh, I like that.

Dr. Camilla: 17:28

It is much easier to write it down and it's a practice. That's the point. It's like there's nothing wrong with you, like there's nothing, like this isn't a character flaw, like we all have this. That's the point is that it's part of what makes us so good at being at who we are. It's just something that we need to learn how to work with If it's something that you don't want to stop you from getting to where you want to be.

Camille: 17:55

Yeah, and I think, in a culture, too, where we are always going from one thing to the next to the next, to actually stop and sit and digest those whys and those feelings would really take a concerted effort, because I don't think that's something that we're making time for in the everyday world of like, oh, this stress is really mounting. Why is this feeling so overwhelming? Because a lot of times we just look around the room and we're like because the kids are screaming and there's dishes and I have work to do and you know. So what would be some Before we get to the, perhaps the shift process, and we're just in the moment of like the world's on fire at 5 PM, whatever that looks like, or in the day. What are some tactics or tools that you can do that are a little shorter term? Perhaps Do you have something in mind with that?

Dr. Camilla: 18:51

So in general, like if you start to feel yourself one, you have to identify what your personal stress triggers are and what they, how they manifest themselves, because stress is a physiological response. It is, you know, we it's a fight, flight, freeze or fall, like we do one of those four things when we are in our stress response. But it's all physiological, which means that it is a body response. And so you have to understand where is your body responding to this, like, do you tend to clench your fists? Do you tend to raise your shoulders? Do you feel it in your back? Does your jaw tighten up? So being aware of your own stress manifestations, like how that presents itself in your body, is the first step, because if you can't identify that, then you don't know if you're in a stress response, even if you do feel that stress. The second thing is that the key to breaking that, that is part of what we call a sympathetic nervous system response, and we have two kind of parallel systems in our nervous system. We have the sympathetic response and we have the parasympathetic response and those two things balance each other out. In general terms, our sympathetic is what we've traditionally called our fight or flight and our parasympathetic is traditionally what we've called our rest and digest. We have since learned and expanded what those do, but for the purpose of this conversation, that's a great way to think about it. So you want to balance this out, and we see this in terminology now, like regulating your nervous system, toning the vagus nerve, like all these. They are all the same. They're all the same thing and accomplishing the same goal, which is to break the cycle of the sympathetic nervous system and bring in the parasympathetic nervous system. And the best way to do that is to bring your body, your mind, back into your body, and the easiest way to do that is through breathing, the only way. So the so these are. Those are two parts of what we call the autonomic nervous system, which is the nervous system in our body that works automatically. We don't think about it. It keeps our heart beating, it keeps our stomach digesting, it keeps our lungs breathing, and so we don't even think about it. But breathing is the only way that we can control the autonomic nervous system. It is the only way that we can actually tap into that rest and digest that parasympathetic and control it, because if you think about it, you can't tell your heart to just start beating less. You can't tell your stomach to just stop digesting, but you can control your breathing, and so that's the gateway to calming down, that's the gateway to breaking through that sympathetic nervous system, that fight or flight, and calming down. So any deep breathing will help to bring that through.

Dr. Camilla: 21:44

So when I teach it, I teach just basic belly breathing. That we teach in yoga, but anything that slows it down and I would focus. Normally there's breathing in and then breathing out. There's four parts there's breathing in, retention of that breath in, breathing out and retention of that breath out, and so in yoga this is called pranayama, the movement of the life force. That's what we call it. But what you want to do, if you're trying to relax, you want to exhale longer than you are inhaling. So if you are inhaling for a count of four, you want to exhale for a count of eight, and so that will help relax that nervous system. And there's different patterns of breathing that can help, but that is the general. If you can just get your breath back into balance, that will do wonders and that helps break that cycle of that fight or flight.

Camille: 22:40

I've always known breathing is important and we're sure that, like it helps to. Anytime I do my group coaching, we always do breathing before we start, and it was funny because we were actually just this last week talking about the tornado of our lives and everything that was in it and writing it down and I said, okay, before we move on, let's do some breathing, cause I know like just even thinking or writing down those stress, the stress that you have, can put you into that state of like oh no, oh no, you know, just like feeling like you have to hold your breath or something. So I've never had it explained exactly that way before. I really like that. That it's the only thing that you have in control of resetting, which makes sense, like, of course, because our body is operating and our brain is affecting it in ways we don't even know, but then the breathing is such a tool for getting us back.

Dr. Camilla: 23:33

There are other ways to help break that, but they're not tapping into that parasympathetic nervous system like breathing is.

Dr. Camilla: 23:41

We know that things like cross body patterns or tapping we know that we can do that or on social media right now there's a specific spot in your ear Like all of these actually are trying to trigger that vagus nerve. But the best, fastest, most reliable and take it on the go way to do it is through breathing, because you can do that anywhere and during you asked about the pandemic, I would do. There's, like I said, there's patterns. There's four, seven, eight breathing. That has been studied a lot to see how that helps to calm us down. So that's a breathing pattern. But I would do these breathing patterns underneath my mask all day, every day, and that would just help to keep myself calm and regulated. Whenever I started to feel a little anxious, I started to feel a little anxious and because no one, no one knows, and even now, like if we're in traffic and I'm late or I'm getting stressed, I just focus on my breathing. That's great.

Camille: 24:43

So would you say where we talk about the triggers of burnout or what are the signs of burnout? Are those those stress responders that you were talking about with, like the clenching of the jaw or the raising of the shoulders, or what are some other things that we can look for for signals of leading to burnout?

Dr. Camilla: 25:00

It's a good question, and I think that the easiest way to explain that is by just define three commonly misused terms or misunderstood terms, and that is stress, chronic stress and burnout, and so we're just going to have a quick definition of each one of those before we answer that question. So stress is a normal response, right, like that is a survival mechanism and, like we said, it's a physiological response and we recover from it. So you're driving to work, you get cut off, you white knuckle it, that driver flies on down the road, you recover, you're breathing better and it's done. That's a normal stress response where you've had a stimulus, you've had an encounter, your body has responded, but then you've been able to recover and get back to baseline. Chronic stress is when you have repeated stress episodes without the ability to adequately recover. So if you're driving to work, you get cut off, you white knuckle it and he goes down and runs down the road. You are calming down, but then you get to the office and all of a sudden, like this employee is out and that fire is burning down the place and you have all of these crises and you don't have time to recover, but you have these compilations of different stresses that are just accumulating through the day, so over the day, over the week, over the month. What we know is that over months and years, this chronic stress can lead to diseases. You will have a higher incidence of things like obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, major adverse cardiac events, sleep disorders. So we know that digestive disorders. We know that when you don't have the ability to respond adequately to the small stresses, that when they accumulate they become physical illnesses.

Dr. Camilla: 26:48

Burnout is more of an environmental issue. It is when you as an individual are in a situation and an environment or a relationship whether that's a personal relationship or a work relationship where you yourself are being depleted, where you don't feel like you are being seen, you don't feel like you're being heard, that who you are does not matter. And in the workplace what we see is, we see that in the language, we see that being, I feel, replaceable. It doesn't matter what I do, you know what's the point, right. So we see these character traits of burnout where we have lack of motivation, we have cynicism, we have just emotional fatigue of just what's the point right.

Dr. Camilla: 27:33

And so traditionally, burnout has been in the workplace. But in my experience and my work I see that, especially with women and especially with moms, that can also transcend the workplace into our personal lives, because traditionally women are now in the workplace in droves. But economically we're there, but socially we know, statistically, most of the housework, most of the childcare, most of all of those things are still on women, and so that can lead to burnout at home when you are trying to do all of these things and you're not getting any sort of appreciation and you're not getting any sort of acclimation, you're not getting anything back. And we see this in our language, right, we hear I don't feel appreciated, it doesn't matter what I do, what's the point? You know, I don't feel like. Are you listening to me? You have the same argument over and over. So burnout is an environmental issue and it's an indication that you as a person are not getting your needs met, whereas stress and chronic stress are more of a physiological response.

Camille: 28:43

Is that very interesting? Okay, yes, and as you're talking about this, this episode is not brought to you by aura. However, I am an affiliate of theirs and I love their ring and it helps you track your stress response and if you're giving yourself adequate resiliency and recovery time through your heartbeat on a ring that you wear. It also tracks your temperature, your sleep and your hormone in regard to the the temperature of your body going up and down, and it also notifies you if you're sick. So if you're interested in that, I'm going to put it in a link below before we go into that next topic.

Camille: 29:20

But it has been life-changing for me because just this morning I was looking at my stress response of yesterday and I saw I was spending a lot of the day in stress and my son was looking at it with me, who's eight, and he's like but look, mom, you gave yourself time to recover. And even he was having that conversation and that language with me of the importance of taking time to slow down or recover or breathe or go outside or have that conversation with a friend or whatever, so that you can have the stress is going to come regardless, but that it gives you time to recover. Anyway, I've loved the aura ring and we'll continue our conversation, but I just had to like plug that real quick because it's been life changing.

Dr. Camilla: 30:04

It tracks, I mean it's. It's. It's exactly like what we're talking about is like one of the keys of being able to identify it right so that you can respond and being able to track. And it's about learning about yourself. It's the self-discovery. You know this journey of self-discovery where you the way you get to burnout is by not listening to that. But it's hard to listen to something and bring awareness to something that you are unaware of, to begin, and so having that that's I mean, we see this across the board in any sort of change therapy, right, the first thing you want to do is start tracking what you are doing so that you know where you want to be.

Camille: 30:45

Yeah, so I love that you explained the difference between chronic stress and and also burnout, because where one is physiological, one is more mental.

Camille: 30:55

They can go hand in hand when your body is so burnt out, but also to acknowledge the fact that when you're in a space like that, I would imagine depression is a lot more a part of the program and it's not giving yourself that time to recover and to be to fill that purpose or to fill that appreciation. So how, okay. So, now that we know those pieces and we're looking at, what signs do we look at of the chronic stress aside from the aura ring? Cause, that's how I can track it. But for someone who doesn't have that, what is a way that we can track that? Yeah Well, one, you made a. You is a way that we can track that.

Dr. Camilla: 31:36

Yeah Well one. You made a good point which I think I want to emphasize. There is a lot of crossover between stress, chronic stress and burnout. Those are not mutually exclusive episodes. Those can very easily overlap, and oftentimes do. But when we're breaking it down and trying to solve the problem that it's important to be able to distinguish what those are. And so to this question of how you know what are the, what are the red flags for burnout? Honestly, one of the one being able to identify where your energy is going so that you know what you need to do is very important.

Dr. Camilla: 32:18

And one of the very easy ways to do this is again, it's a writing exercise, but just draw two columns on a piece of paper plus for charges, negative for drains and then you start putting onto those lists the elements of all of the elements of your life and you start looking at life. Instead of tasks and responsibilities or even priorities, you start evaluating them based on how much energy they take from you and how much energy you give to it or you get from it. So, for example, I run every morning. That's my first business meeting of the day. That sets the tone. It is, yes, it's for my health, but it's also the most important thing that I do for my business. Every day is clear, my head, get my exercise in, I feel better for the day, I'm motivated, I'm more productive. Everything is better. So that does not compromise, so that's a plus.

Dr. Camilla: 33:20

But, as we talked about, I also have a four-year-old who I love more than life itself. Would die for him, would kill for him. I love him more than life itself. He goes on the plus column because I get so much out of just having him in my life, but he's also four years old and sometimes he's a a hundred percent four year old. So that takes, that is a drain, and it doesn't matter. It's not a measure of my commitment, it's not a measure of my love for him, but it is an acknowledgement that when we have those tough days, or even those tough moments, that they will need recovery time, we will need recovery time, that they will need recovery time, we will need recovery time.

Dr. Camilla: 34:00

And so identifying what those big issues are in your life and they may be, you know our generation, this generation of women in their 40s, 50s and even 60s are part of what they call the sandwich generation. Now you are caregiving for your children, but you're also caregiving for your aging parents, and so that is also a very common component of this energy diagram, where you love your parents, but it may take a lot of drain and a lot of energy and you might not be getting a whole lot out of it anymore with that relationship. It depends on where they are, so being able to see what that looks like and to understand that the days that you have to take care of them even more, you may need a little bit more recovery time. That's where you can start balancing this out. Or you may end up having to hire somebody to come in to help either with the kids or your parents. But identifying it before you try to solve the problem, that's the key.

Camille: 34:58

What would you say is a good exercise for someone who maybe they're listening right now and thinking I have so many stresses that I'm not. And this is something that's interesting that my sister brought up to me recently and she studies the brain, she's getting her PhD in performance psychology and she said one thing that we always need to keep in mind is that positive stress and negative stress. Our brain doesn't know the difference, meaning you could be putting together a birthday party for your four-year-old and there are kids running everywhere and the cake needs to be cut and there's pizza and you're whatever. You're just like being pulled in all these directions and it's fun. You're having fun but you're under stress, versus being in a workplace and someone's coming into the room and telling you they're upset about something and it's your fault. That is negative stress, but your brain and your body are processing them. The same which I thought that's interesting Even working out is stress and it's good for us, but it's also stress on the body and that can affect all you know it's.

Camille: 36:07

There is a lot to measure and weigh and try to figure out. So what is a good way with your example of, like those big stressors in your life, what is a good way to know, like what you need to quantify and what is just like everyday stuff that happens. Does that question make sense?

Dr. Camilla: 36:28

It does, and I would not distinguish the two, because it's the little things, as we were talking about before. It's the little things, it's the death by a thousand cuts that you have to be aware of, it's not the big stressors and I appreciate what your sisters say, because it's true and that's where, taking the emotion out of stress and looking at it as a physiological response, that is a very important exercise to do, because one it takes away. You know, I actually don't love the term resilience, because it tends to invoke this sense of strength and power and like if you could just muster your way through it, if you were just strong enough, you'd be okay. And that is not the case at all.

Dr. Camilla: 37:09

You know, what we talk about when we're talking about resilience is your body's ability to recover from that stress. It's how you know what is your capacity to not just handle that stress but also to recover. And so we have limited capacity as human beings. We can increase that capacity with all of the things that you're talking about, like exercising positive psychology, meditation, nutrition, sleep. All of those things are very important to increase our resilience and our capacity to not just handle stress but to recover from stress. And so that is, I think, we the terms you stress and distress, like the good stress and the bad stress, yes, like there's a motivating factor that we have, with a sense of urgency that maybe stress can help with. But in general, we also still have to acknowledge that it is a physiological response at its root, that is, a survival mechanism that we will need time to recover from.

Camille: 38:13

Okay, so we identify it. So how do we now recover? Help us recover.

Dr. Camilla: 38:21

So the little stresses and this is where it's helpful to just jot them down, like the little stresses that you have and the big stresses that you have, and that's where that energy diagram can be super helpful, because it'll start to quantify it for you. And so what we need is we need our strategy for managing the little stresses during the day. So for me, that is things like driving in traffic or having a difficult conversation or you know these just the being late is a big thing for me, just the the being late is a big thing for me. So if I'm running late, like these day-to-day things where we can start to feel ourselves, get stressed, we need to be able to recognize them and have a little strategy to to counteract them, and breathing, for me, is one of them.

Dr. Camilla: 39:07

Mindset is also very important, where we can zoom out.

Dr. Camilla: 39:12

You know there's um, there's a in Chinese medicine, traditional Chinese medicine.

Dr. Camilla: 39:16

There's this concept that fear restricts and love opens, and so if we think about that in terms of stress, like and we see this right the more stress we get, the narrower and narrower and bring our mindset to openness and big picture and curiosity, and so shifting from this is going to be a crisis, to opening and saying, okay, well, what if this, what if it is, and what are we going to do about it? And, big picture, if I'm five minutes late, I'm going to apologize and it's going to be fine, you know. So, being able to shift our mindset into something that is much more positive and helpful, instead of recognizing that we're going to go down the rabbit hole that we create. And I do this, I do this myself, I don't say this judgmentally, like these are the things that I do on a daily basis to help counteract it. But we need to be able to identify the things that stress us out, understand why they stress us out, but then also have our strategy for maintain, for recovering from them in the moment, so they don't accumulate.

Camille: 40:26

Yeah, yeah, that's really powerful. I think that that's something too I'm trying to help my kids understand. With anxiety and stress. It's something that is. We just live it at a much faster paced high pressure. The States are crazy Y'all.

Camille: 40:43

I went to Europe over the summer and I was in Paris and New Zealand and in a smaller town of France, and there is just not the rush. You go out to eat and you eat for two hours and people sit with their chairs facing the street so that they can watch people as they walk by. So it's not even the pressure of having to maintain conversation with the person you're with the entire time. Part of the time you're just sitting and watching and processing your own thoughts, not that they're sitting and judging. I don't feel like it's like that at all. That's not the vibe. It's more taking a sense of the present moment and just being with the person you're with. And I looked at my husband and said, gosh, we could really learn a lot from the Parisians, from these French people where they are going to the grass and just laying out on the grass and letting their kids kick the ball around and there's no fire.

Camille: 41:40

And not to say that people in America don't do that as well, but I think that it's interesting that we do have a faster paced expectation of ourselves, especially as women. We're wearing all of these hats and, like you said, it's not only the business but it's the work and the family and the home, and I think it would be a great favor to anyone listening If you get the chance to go experience a different culture outside of America, because I think that it gives you a new perspective of life doesn't have to be pushed to the nth degree to be a success. At least that's what it showed me. It really showed light on how our day and our present mindset and moment can be shifted if we make it a priority. And I think that that's why your work is so important is you help people to kind of navigate that. But it takes work because I don't think it's the natural preset of America doing less, like.

Dr. Camilla: 42:44

At the end of this, at the end of the program, what we inevitably end up seeing is people are moving slower, they are doing less, they are getting more out of it. They are, you know, they are reaching their business goals easier, they are enjoying their family life easier, and so what we can do is remove the clutter. And yes, I think we are a unique country in that sense. You know we have and here in the Northeast, like we see it, even more, you know, between we have Boston, we have New York, but we also have, you know, all it's, it's, it's in it, Like we have Ivy league schools and we have, you know, we have all of it.

Dr. Camilla: 43:41

And so it is high, high powered, it is high stress, it is fast paced. And for what? For what? And that is one of my favorite sayings is to what end? To what end? You know if you're going to do like, if that's going to happen. That's what I, when we talk about zooming out and looking at the perspective as a stress mechanism that's one of the things is like shifting that mindset into what do I really want out of this? Then we really have that opportunity to slow down and we really have that opportunity to slow down and that life is longer that way. It is better that way.

Camille: 44:27

And you're going to get everything that you want that way, by removing the clutter. Amen. I feel like clutter in my house is like a stress where, man, if I can get reduced the clutter, my brain, I try to. I explained to my husband I'm like it's like taking a deep breath for my brain when I have less visual clutter, which right now I'm recovering from a trip that two back to back, so I feel like I have a lot of clutter to cleanse, but it the same thing goes for your life. Well, this has been fantastic. I feel like we could talk forever, but I'm going to pass the baton of what and where people can find you so that they can continue these conversations, dig more into stress and your program that you offer is called. You told me the name. It's called the, called the SMART program.

Dr. Camilla: 45:16

The SMART program yeah, stress Management and Resiliency Training. So you can find me on Instagram. I'm on Instagram daily, dr Camilla Moore. You can find me on LinkedIn, camilla Moore, on there, and I think we're going to have a link to a quiz, a burnout quiz, a work-life balance IQ test for your burnout, and what that does is it's just a short thing, but it starts to do what we were talking about, where you're taking kind of these broader topics, these broader feelings, and being able to quantify it and be able to actually see where are the places where you are at risk for burnout.

Camille: 45:55

I love that, and the thing about it is is that you are worth it and no one else can do it for you. That's the crux of it all. I think it's one of those things where we tend to put ourselves on the back burner when it comes to digging into that mental work. Please don't do that. If this episode has struck a chord or felt like something you want to dive into, please take that link and go and take it to that next step. I challenge you to do that because you're worth it. And as we wrap up this episode, there's always two sets of questions. I didn't I didn't pre tell you so surprise. So I like to ask every guest what are you reading, watching or listening to? That can be. You can answer one of each or just one. And then the second question is what is a motherhood moment that you'd like to share with us?

Dr. Camilla: 46:42

Whether it be something fun, humorous, heartfelt, whatever comes to mind, I just started doing my deep breathing exercises when you were like pop quiz, hotshot.

Camille: 46:53

You got this, which anybody in my generation will know.

Dr. Camilla: 46:56

That line is from um sandra bullock. And uh, they had totally, let's see it pop quiz. Hot shot was, oh, whatever.

Camille: 47:06

First first movies sandra bullock, the net that's one of my favorites okay, yeah, so it was before the net speed.

Dr. Camilla: 47:14

Okay.

Camille: 47:15

Counterweaves which by way they both had a crush on each other and they met the other person didn't. Don't? Did you see that on Ellen? I'm like, oh my gosh, they're so cute, they are so cute, um.

Dr. Camilla: 47:26

So what I am listening to, what I'm listening to now, um, I'll do two. I'll do, uh, one interesting and then one, um, just interesting show. So I listen. So I've been listening to this podcast called the Hidden Brain, the Chakra Vedantan, and it is fascinating. It is all about the different parts of our brain and why we do what we do. So he has a lot of sociologists on there, he has a lot of psychologists on there, psychiatrists on there, but it's just very well done and I learned a lot from it. And then the other show that I just started watching which is just for fun, is because that's how I have some downtime is Shrinking, which is on Apple TV with Harrison Ford and one other actor that I don't know, but it is super funny and it is not suitable for children and there is a lot of bad language in there. Uh, but it's also, yes, but it's also hilarious. So those are my two, uh, public service announcements.

Dr. Camilla: 48:28

Um, motherhood moments. I um, the one that comes to mind was just like last week. We were shopping, we were shopping, we were shopping in Whole Foods and he almost like bumped into a woman. But he turned around. He was like, oh, excuse me, I'm sorry, and like just turned around and kept walking. Yes, that's so cute as a little four-year-old man. Yes, but there was one more there was.

Dr. Camilla: 49:00

We were we're looking at kindergartens and we went to the school yesterday and they had probably the tallest slide I've ever seen in my life, for like this age group, I mean it was, and I like it took a lot of, a lot of breathing on playgrounds for me to watch my child like climb to the top, and this kid, like didn't hesitate for a second. He like he was like, do you mind if I go play? The teacher that we were with was like sure, because we were doing a tour, and she, he just went all the way up and uh, without hesitation, and just all the way down, and I just like the to see him grow into somebody that was that courageous and confident. That was just a good moment for me.

Camille: 49:43

That's really cool. Well, this has been such a good conversation. Thank you so much for coming onto the show. I learned a lot. I know that our audience loved it as well, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave our show a five-star rating and review. That helps everyone to find it, as well as making sure that you're subscribed. That way, you can have notices for when episodes go live. So thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate it and we'll see you next time. Hey CEOs, thank you so much for spending your time with me. If you found this episode inspiring or helpful, please let me know in a comment and a five-star review. You could have the chance of being a featured review on an upcoming episode. Continue the conversation on Instagram at callmeCEOPodcast, and remember you are the boss.