Quality Bits

On Burnout with a Psychologist in Tech Antonela Mandic

• Lina Zubyte • Season 2 • Episode 8

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Antonela Mandic is a psychologist who has been working in tech as well as a team coach. In this episode of Quality Bits, Antonela not only shares the parallels between pscyhology and some tech concepts like agile, but also opens up about burnout she has gone through herself.

Tune in to hear more about:

  • What burnout is
  • The road to recovery
  • Steps you can take to prevent it
  • ... and so much more :)

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Thank you for listening! ✨

Lina Zubyte (00:06):
Hi everyone. Welcome to Quality Bits, a podcast about building high quality products and teams. I'm your host, Lina Zubyte. Antonela Mandic is a psychotherapist who works in tech. I kept on learning from her when we worked together. She's extremely inspiring and extremely insightful. She helped out so much with any kind of conflicts we had and people issues, and her knowledge was so, so useful in our workplace. In this episode, I'm talking to her about this road from psychotherapy to tech, as well as her own experiences with the topic that is so relevant for a lot of us, which is a burnout. You will learn more what a burnout is, the misconceptions we have about it and what you do if you find yourself or someone you care about in a position of a burnout. Enjoy this conversation.

(01:22):
Hi Antonela. Welcome to Quality Bits.

Antonela Mandic (01:26):
Hi, Lina.

Lina Zubyte (01:27):
It's so nice to have you here today because I really enjoyed working with you. When we did work together, I always felt you were so full of heart and empathy and your background is really interesting. So could you share a little bit about yourself?

Antonela Mandic (01:45):
Yes. Thank you for inviting me here. I'm really excited and happy to be talking to you. I'm a psychologist and I have my practice for body psychotherapy and I also work as a team coach with teams mostly in IT. I'm from Croatia, I'm in Germany, currently living in Berlin.

Lina Zubyte (02:08):
So how did you get to this realization that you could apply things that you've learned in psychology in the tech world? Because when we met, you were working as delivery manager. So what was the shift from a psychologist to a team coach or delivery manager?

Antonela Mandic (02:25):
Yeah, so it started even while I was studying, I was always very curious about different types of working environments, about different things what I could do. So already as a student, I started to work in an IT company. Back then I was a soft skills trainer and somewhere along the way I met Agile practices and I kind of fell in love with it. Then I was just attracted to continue in that direction to explore agile a bit more, became agile coach, but psychology was all the time, stayed my passion. So I continued with my education for psychotherapy and these two paths were always meeting each other so far in my life, and yeah, I like it that way. To have this kind of both interests.

Lina Zubyte (03:12):
Would you say there are some kind of parallels between agile principles and principles in psychology?

Antonela Mandic (03:21):
That's a good one. Yeah, definitely. I mean, with Agile, why I really love Agile because it can really be integrated in a lot of things. In a way you approach your daily chores in the house or the way you learn. So it's the same about the psychotherapy to really look for small incremental steps. Although sometimes we might have a big breakthroughs, but at the end, the psychotherapy process is a set of small discoveries and also experiments. So especially working with the body. So in my psychotherapy practice, I work a lot also with body movement, breath, body awareness, and that's actually a continuous experimentation. So together we can see what is happening with a client. I might propose something, client might try something, and from there we see what happens and what is the next step. So yeah, I would say that there is a lot of connection.

Lina Zubyte (04:21):
Yeah, continuous experimentation, continuous delivery, continuous improvement. Right?

Antonela Mandic (04:28):
Exactly. I mean the only thing that in psychotherapy it's a little bit different that we are not trying to reach outcomes specifically. It's a little bit more open and at the end of course the long-term goal is to see some kind of transformation often from a client side or a change, but in a single session, it's also important to give up this outcome oriented mindset and to be more open to just explore without an agenda necessarily.

Lina Zubyte (04:57):
Yeah, sometimes I wish that our teamwork as well would be a little bit more relaxed without some kind of deadline creeping in because that adds so much of pressure and then our systems or some kind of habits break as a result because we start rushing, we start going faster and just forget some of those continuous resilience habits that help us have a nice team dynamic or work balance as well.

Antonela Mandic (05:24):
Yes, and I think that it's really something that's a crucial ingredient for experimentation to have at the same time, like ambitious long-term goal you want to reach, but then also a lot of space for discovering and experimenting, which of course often clashes with short-term financial benefits. So that's always the dilemma that we see in many companies. And yeah, it's about finding the balance there.

Lina Zubyte (05:50):
You have worked with quite a few teams. How do you help them find this balance between delivering and also working together well as a team, having some kind of mindfulness in a sense in their team and not burning out as well?

Antonela Mandic (06:08):
Well, as you know, it's like a mix of a lot of aspects. What first comes to my mind is really to be realistic and honest to yourself about the capabilities of a team. What can you actually deliver? Because what we also all often tend to do is that we get over optimistic in the planning because it gives us this kick of positivity and we don't want to be this kind of bad guy or girl who will say that something might not be feasible. So yeah, I think first of all, yeah, this kind of honesty to really have an open communication in the team and to reflect and to communicate early what is going on, what are the challenges, what is feasible instead of just committing and then in the process starting to get stressed and then not delivering on expectations. So this is something I see over and over, and if you go deeper beneath that, it's basically also a lot about people feeling psychologically safe in the team to raise a question, to raise a topic, to openly discuss, to confront each other. So at the end, it's also a lot about how willing the team is to go into constructive conflicts, to talk about challenging things, to give feedback to each other because this is what at the end can help us to create products of better quality, better results, whatever we are working on.

Lina Zubyte (07:35):
So you've been doing quite a lot of side projects and side hustles that I've heard about. So what have you been up to recently? We haven't worked together for a while, so could you update me on what's going on?

Antonela Mandic (07:50):
Oh yes. Recently I've mostly been focused on my own wellbeing, and this is something very different from maybe how you know me before - really being involved in many things and passionate also about doing many things. So basically end of last year I had a burnout and this really shifted a lot of my priorities, but also the way that I was used to work or to approach to work. So this whole year has been a lot about my wellbeing, me really finding the balance with myself, with work, also taking a lot of time to just rest, recharge and not necessarily be productive in a classical sense. I have my psychotherapy practice, I was continuing with my client, but in a little bit lesser scope, and I was also having some freelance gigs with companies with teams from time to time. But overall, I think my year was in the tone of slowing down and now I start to increase my workload slowly I feel energy coming back, but still I still want to stay with this intention of balance as my kind of strong focus for the moment.

Lina Zubyte (09:08):
So as a psychologist, how would you define a burnout? We throw this word quite a lot, but I guess a lot of us would struggle to understand am I having it or am I not having it or did I have it? Very often we see it in retrospect that maybe I had it at that moment, but then I somehow recovered? What is a burnout?

Antonela Mandic (09:30):
Yeah, it's funny that it is still a little bit unknown and vague question also because we use this word in many different meanings. For example, we can say, oh, this week I'm really burned out at work, meaning that it was just very stressful week. Or we can say I'm burned out when I have a lack of motivation. Or we can say I'm burned out when I have issue like sleeping. Or you can also be burned out when your whole system is collapsing and you are not able to be productive anymore. So there is a range I would say. So it can go to a certain degree. So I see burnout as a loss of capacity and that capacity can be in a different way. So it's a loss of mental capacity, emotional capacity, physical capacity, and also spiritual capacity. And that loss of capacity can of course be on a different degree.

(10:29):
And when we talk about full-blown burnout, it basically means that we are not able to function in a way that we did before. So we lost some of the capacity that we had before due to unsustainable way of living, working. So this would be my take on it. And for example, there also there are different differentiation in the field. For example, there is one Dutch organization and they differentiate being overstrained, which means that we are just in a more difficult place and maybe losing motivation, feeling more tired. And the difference between being overstrained and burnout is that if we are overstrained and we stop, we will kind of recover in the four to six weeks in average. So it means that the system is sending a warning sign, but if you hear it and accept it and really slow down and take rest and work on your nervous system, that you will be more quickly to recover.

(11:31):
And on the other side, when we really exhaust our system, when we push through the limits, when we feel overstrained and we still continued to keep the same pace, we might arrive at a burnout, which means that there is also a collapse, that there is also nervous system disregulation. It can be also on a physical level, often combined with some kind of somatic and health symptoms. And that really takes much longer time to recover from. So in average one to one and a half years with professional support and it can go even up to five years. So it's a very serious condition that I was also not aware of myself before. I remember there were some friends a few years ago and they were saying that they were having a really strong burnout. And I remember talking to them and I was saying, yeah, I think I also have it.

(12:25):
Because at that point I was just in a lower state with my motivation and I was feeling tired. But then end of this year, I was really realizing that yes, that was an early stage, but being in the full burnout is a different experience because the difference is that you cannot perform anymore. I mean performing the way you used to. So there is simply a lack of capacity and you cannot force yourself or push yourself to do it because then you get a deeper crash the day after. So it's really about the lack of capacity. And also one of the diagnostic criteria for burnout is that the person becomes less productive at their work because of these circumstances.

Lina Zubyte (13:14):
But five years, that's something that sounds really a lot.

Antonela Mandic (13:19):
Don't tell me about it. When I heard for the first time, in the first year, I heard this prognosis that it takes at least one year to recover from burnout. I was just trying to ignore that I ever heard this information because I was like, what? It cannot be, this is not possible. This is imaginary thing. I just couldn't. When you come from a really high paced state and you are really used to this kind of lifestyle, it's really hard to accept that you are in a way forced to slow down.

Lina Zubyte (13:52):
Crazy. Yeah. Because likely you get to that state because of this overachiever kind of mindset. And then to learn something that, hey, now you will need to slow down for multiple years. It's like what? I thought it'll be tomorrow that I will feel better.

Antonela Mandic (14:07):
Exactly. I remember at the beginning when I started to feel bad every day I was thinking like, okay, but tomorrow I stop with this all and I become again just like my old self, and then it just wouldn't happen because my system needed something else. And that's also one of the misconceptions is that people who have a burnout burned out because they didn't like their job or maybe they were not happy at their work. So this can also happen of course. So having a purpose is one of the protective factors for not getting a burnout, but still you can really love what you do and you can overwork yourself and get burnout. And this is what happened to me because I really loved everything that I did. So I was not forced into anything. Everything was my choice, my passion, but it was just a lot of things at the same time. And also as you said, it was through a lot of years. Burnout doesn't happen because you had a tough month at work. It's really about your lifestyle, about your approach to work. And then if you keep on going like that through a lot of years, then it also takes a lot of time to change that and to heal.

Lina Zubyte (15:28):
How can you recognize the first signs? So you said that there were conversations when likely it was the first stage or something of the burnout. How did you recognize that okay, this is a real deal and tomorrow maybe it won't get better?

Antonela Mandic (15:43):
I made a little theory myself that is not scientifically validated, but it's more like how I look at the burnout stages. So the first stage is just kind of feeling tired. Things are stressful, and then it progresses to a loss of enthusiasm, loss of motivation, loss of spark. And this is where a lot of people often say that they are burned out because those are the symptoms of burnout, and those are the warning signs. And then the third step is usually different body symptoms like issues with sleeping or headaches or basically whatever issues you may be used to have before it becomes amplified. So the body starts to react. And then the last stage is really also nervous system collapse, which then shows up for example, also in a lack of energy, in a lack of mental endurance and capability. So I was noticing my symptoms across all of these stages.

(16:46):
I was also trying to address it and I did certain changes. For example, I shortened my work week to have more space for myself. I was trying to take care of myself, but kind of behind this all was, yeah, it was my achiever attitude kind of. So it didn't really matter. I tried to do some changes, but it was really hard for me to tackle the core issue. And that was that I was just very driven as a personality. So this was for me, the biggest challenge to accept when I started to realize, okay, this is burnout and that I cannot do anymore, the things that I used to do. It was a big also challenge for me to accept that this is also part of me and to accept myself also with that. And because you asked for a specific symptom, so in my case, it was simply being able to do significantly less than I was.

(17:48):
For example, before I could work full-time, eight hours and then do accounting a little bit of accounting afterwards or go to a German course. And when the symptoms started for me just doing a 45 minutes of something on a computer, I felt extremely tired, no energy, lack of focus, which was also for me very shocking because I always felt I could rely on my brain in a way that whatever is happening, I knew that I can just anytime choose to focus or give a little bit more, and suddenly this was not there. It was just not working. So maybe to give a little bit of structure, there is four types of burnout symptoms. So one is mental, and this is what I just described with memory changes, focus, concentration, not being as in way sharp as you are used to be. Then there are also emotional symptoms.

(18:48):
So emotional symptoms means that there is less self-regulation and less capacity to hold emotions without acting them out or without them over flooding you. And this was also something that was, I mean, still is, but it was really my strength before that I could really carry or contain a lot of emotions. And then suddenly I was just feeling very emotional, like crying on certain things that usually would never make me cry. For some people it also goes in another direction. It gets more in a hypervigilant state and for example, being angry and bursting out anger or frustration. So it usually goes either in this frustration or anger side or kind of sadness and feeling kind of helpless. And then that's also the place where a lot of trauma can come up because our system is in general like undefended and some mechanisms that we used to use for keeping ourselves together are not there anymore.

(19:56):
Even mostly we were unconscious of them or we are unconscious of them, but when they get taken away, things starts to resurface. And that was also for me, the case. I mean, I'm a therapist and I did a lot of personal psychotherapy, also trauma therapy, but somehow when the burnout happened, the new layer of it came up. So I would say that in burnout in a way, whatever you are struggling with in life will probably get shown more or get more underlined/presented. And then there are the bodily symptoms. So lack of energy, exhaustion, different pains, conditions, whatever. It can really be anything. They say that any symptom that increases with stress can be a sign of a burnout. So for some who have a tendency to have headaches, it's going to be headaches. For some other people, it's going to be something else. For me, it was just extreme exhaustion.

(20:56):
For example, I would ride the bike on a route that I normally ride like 25 minutes, and I needed to shift in the lowest gear like a granny because my heart was going overdrive. I was just feeling so exhausted to ride a bicycle on a flat road. It's really hard to explain that. And I went to the doctor's check. That's also something that's really important for everybody struggling with burnout to really get a health check because it can often be tied with some conditions. But my blood tests were okay. So it was really my nervous system kind of not anymore being able to shift from parasympathetic to sympathetic state, but just staying in this kind of dormant state, just keeping the vital functions in a way. And the fourth one is the spiritual symptoms or the spiritual plane, which I also like to mention.

(21:58):
And people often think that it's about God, but it's actually about our relationship to life and our trust in life. And what happens in burnout is often a loss of faith, feeling disconnected. And also the main topic in burnout is also to surrender. Are you willing to surrender to what is happening and to accept instead of trying to fight and control and be in your controlling stance. And that's also something that's for a lot of people nowadays very difficult and me included, because we are so used to being in this proactive mode, doing trying things, making it better. And at the beginning of burnout, recovery, it's actually the other way around. You need to learn to surrender, to accept where you are, and only from there you can move on.

Lina Zubyte (22:54):
It is really frustrating to recognize that, hey, I used to do this thing in this way and that it should be so easy and now it's not easy. Your example with cycling, I can think of examples as well, and sometimes the same road is much more difficult and it's annoying. It's like, why my body is not doing it today? What's going on? But it's one thing one day and maybe another. There's hormone fluctuations and all kinds of things that may happen, but there's another thing when it's continuous and it is a stress kind of factor. When I had my first psychotherapy session, I was really surprised how the psychotherapist asked about the health. They were like, okay, do you have any chronic illnesses? How's your nutrition? How's your exercise? How's your sleep? I was like, what is this? I was really surprised. I thought we should just talk about my mental state, but all these things add stress or show stress in our lives, so this is such a nice science that we can catch, but it can be very frustrating when we see that we cannot do this anymore.

(24:06):
And as you said, noticing that the thing that you're used to do is taking longer or is not as smooth, I think is a very good thing for all of us to learn, to notice. Because I also had a colleague who would say, oh, I used to do this kind of task in one hour. Now I notice that it takes me three hours, so I'm going to take a day off. I need some rest. And I loved that. I was like, well, that's really cool that you're listening to your body and you're doing it. And seeing an example, that was inspiring because I was like, oh, I should also listen to my body. What am I doing? Because sometimes we just get angry on ourselves and we're frustrated instead of just being like, okay, what's going on? Why am I like this?

Antonela Mandic (24:50):
Exactly. That's a wonderful example. And I think we need to build in more of this in our approach to work, because when you take this break early on, it's really allowing your body to regenerate in a much more smooth and much more flowing way. And it's not about just going it faster through the burnout, but also just keeping yourself more happy and more fulfilled in the process. I feel this is something that we all should be training ourselves and learning to recognize our limits, because also, this is something when it comes to boundaries, I was very proficient in communicating my boundaries and also I was able and to stay with my boundaries, but why I got burnout is that I wasn't recognizing them, so I was just misperceiving what my boundaries are. I was convinced that that was sustainable lifestyle for me until I really got a strong feedback. It doesn't work.

Lina Zubyte (25:57):
I guess your boundaries have to come from experience and also adjust accordingly instead of just having some kind of, okay, this is my vision and this is what it is, and then we believe in some kind of illusion of who we are, and that is sort of control. I may say, okay, I'm the most productive person on earth, but likely I'm human, so I won't be productive every day, and then I'll be disappointed and angry with myself.

Antonela Mandic (26:23):
Yeah, exactly. And what is the trick that then the ego comes in, you might recognize, okay, this might be my boundary, but then ego comes in with either, as you said, self-image, I am person like this for this, or with certain goals that we have, okay, I really want to finish this training, or I want to save this amount of money, or I want to get promoted, or I want to start my company, whatever. And then this drive inside us can override our boundaries in a way that we are tricking ourselves a little bit. Like closing one eye to it

Lina Zubyte (27:02):
Reminds me of a story that my friend said. She met her colleague and then the colleague said, oh, I want to get a house. I want to have a car. And then when she told me the story, I was like, this feels weird. But that sounds like this ego example, that they are fooling themselves, that once they reach this, they reach certain status and that shows some kind of productivity thing. I'm not even sure.

Antonela Mandic (27:28):
This might be extreme example, but I think that we all have it in a certain way, things that we believe that we need to do, or that for any reasons, we all have our little cages of what we feel that our life must be or our work must be. So it's also very important to allow yourself and also self-honesty to see, okay, how I really feel.

Lina Zubyte (27:55):
So when you catch yourself a burnout, how can you recover? What are the steps we can take to recharge, get energy back and be passionate again about things?

Antonela Mandic (28:09):
So the first step, and actually the hardest step for most people, especially people who come from this high achieving background, is to just accept where you are and to really work on your nourishment. So the first step is trying to really minimize your effort, your load in any sense, and really take care of your body, of your nervous system through some kind of somatic work. Learning to rest, which can also be very difficult for people in burnout because basically what happened in burnout is like a chronic activation of our sympathetic nervous system, which is fight and flight. So we get so activated and there is no way to calm down unless we go in a incomplete inactivity or sleep if person can sleep or watching something. But it's really hard to just calm down and relax without having this kind of external stimuli or sleep or something.

(29:17):
So this is also something that a person needs to learn through these first steps of recovery, how to be at ease and how to allow yourself rest and also just accept where you are before moving anywhere, because I believe that enthusiasm is our natural state. When you look at a healthy child, you see a lot of enthusiasm. So the question is, what is blocking this enthusiasm to come? And in burnout, the first step is really to take care of the body, of the system to kind of regenerate, and it might last longer than you think. So you need to really follow your body, and after that, slowly the little sparks of enthusiasm will start to kind of grow, and then you just need to follow them while still keeping this balance. So that's the other part of the challenge.

Lina Zubyte (30:12):
On another hand, how could we prevent it? Is there some ways that you could prevent a burnout?

Antonela Mandic (30:19):
Yeah, so definitely one thing is just adding rest in our days because a lot of us are really living a hectic life with just running from one thing to another. In most of tech companies, it's like meetings are back to back. There is no time to breathe through to, I don't know, whatever. So it's really about learning to insert these moments in your life where you can allow yourself to unwind to just, even if it's just taking some breaths in between two things that you're doing or if you're having something stressful to allow yourself to shake it off in a way. So physical activity is really helpful in that because it helps our body to release all the tension that comes with stress. And by physical activity, I don't mean you need to go to the gym, you can just shake a little bit or dance or go for a walk.

(31:13):
It can be just five minutes. And I think the reason why we are not doing this, one of them is we are not used to it or we are having, as I said, ego kind of covers these impulses, but also there are often challenging emotions that we hold in ourselves. It can be pain that we experience as humans. We are all experiencing pain through our lives. For some people, they have also traumatic experiences, but for some people there is also a trauma, which is not necessarily one event, but for example, that can come in the way from your family, from the way you were brought up, from your current living conditions. So in a way, by constantly being busy and keeping moving, we are also not coming in contact with this. So we are in a way trying to be busy. So this doesn't come up. And sometimes when we stop, when we rest, when we don't consume content, these things can surface and we can meet our emotions that we are maybe trying to push down. I also believe that psychotherapy, especially psychotherapy working with body and nervous system can really help us also to build our capacity to be with our emotions, whatever they are, and then we can allow ourselves to stop because we are not afraid anymore that something might come from the dark.

Lina Zubyte (32:40):
Are there any books or resources that you like on the topic that you would recommend?

Antonela Mandic (32:46):
Yes, there is a wonderful podcast. It's called Fried the Burnout Podcast. Its mission is to end the burnout culture. So it has I think, weekly episodes talking with different experts concerning burnout, also burnout prevention, and a lot of topics come up that are really relevant also for people maybe who are looking how to prevent burnout. Although the leader of this podcast often says, when you are looking for ways to prevent burnout, there is a high chance that you already have burnout, right? Because in a way, until you feel any symptoms, you are not likely to think about preventing burnout. So it's also something to consider. And yeah, this podcast is really full of all different useful resources, so I can really recommend it.

Lina Zubyte (33:39):
Awesome. And now that you're recovering, recharging, hopefully regaining the enthusiasm, what are the areas or passions in your life that you're very excited about, and they make you happy?

Antonela Mandic (33:55):
Yes. Yeah. One thing I really love is to dance. I love expressive dance without necessarily having a strong structure, but more like going in a flow. And this is something that I didn't do for a long time because it just felt like too much to be in a group of people in that way. But now my passion for that is coming back, also for reading. I used to read a lot, but when I was in the middle of burnout, I actually couldn't read. I couldn't keep myself focused to read anything more complex. And I tried to read fiction books because I did so much nonfiction books - useful books that I really tried to find something that's nourishing for me. And professionally, as I said, I'm having a psychotherapy practice. So for a longer time I was working with just client that I already have a long-term client with a really lower hours per week, and now I feel capacity to welcome new clients into practice. So this is something that makes me happy, and I'm leading a group psychotherapy program in Stockholm through the next six months. And I also really love working with teams. So now and then I also have work connected to team coaching. I especially really love the topic of feedback and how to establish feedback culture and build capacity to really have honest, constructive conversations and healthy team dynamics.

Lina Zubyte (35:29):
Yeah, I think on feedback, we should talk again sometime in the future because I'm sure you have some great tips. So to wrap up this conversation and the topics we've spoken here about what is the one piece of advice you would give for building high quality products and teams?

Antonela Mandic (35:49):
It is about really reacting on first signs of something. And it can be, as we talked with burnout, it can be with reacting on first signs of your exhaustion or diminished capacity, but also in the team, it's about reacting on the first signs of conflict. It's about reacting on the first signs of delayed delivery. It's about reacting on the first sign that something might be broken in a relationship and it needs some kind of cleanup. Because when we react on these first signs, first of all, the reaction is much easier. There is also less things that we need to look at or work through and at the end, and we can stop it from derailing further. And at the same time, this is something we often don't do because we hope that it'll get sold by its own or it's not as big of a pain. So we try to continue nevertheless. So it really takes courage when you notice something to act, even though you don't need to, it could still go on and you could still be with it, but you want to react because you want to react early, and you want to also prevent whatever might happen.

Lina Zubyte (37:01):
Thank you.

Antonela Mandic (37:02):
Thank you, Lina as well. It's been really, really nice to be with you.

Lina Zubyte (37:08):
That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, please provide some feedback and let me know what you thought of it. Until the next time, do not forget to continue caring about and building those high quality products and teams. Bye.


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