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Episode 114: Chase is back to talk Burnout!
103 Plays4 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast! May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the plan is for all the episodes this month to relate to important topics within Mental Health. We are also participating (along with other excellent creators) in #MentalHealthMtG and attempting to raise money for MH Organizations!!
In today's episode we have the return of Chase!!!! She helps Hobbes and Alex revisit a topic from way back in Episode 30: Nissa and Burnout. The hosts talk about their experiences with this topic as well as the nature of Burnout during a Pandemic. This again is a tough topic given that the first step is awareness that Burnout is even occurring. The hosts discuses some ideas on how to do this and ways to practice things such as self-compassion! As a reminder you can find links to MH Resources below.
We also are proud to have partnered with Grinding Coffee Co a black, LGBT+ affiliated and owned, coffee business that is aimed at providing coffee to gamers. You can read more about their mission here. You can use our partner code for discounted coffee!
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As promised, we plan to keep these Mental Health Links available moving forward too. For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
- Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle).
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Mental Health Month and Chase
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. So today we want to revisit a topic that I thought we'd just done fairly recently and then I realized that oh yeah we've been doing this podcast for a while so this was actually a couple years ago so it seems like a really good time to revisit the topic of burnout and we were
00:00:51
Speaker
That is a serious thing that we'll get to in a little bit. On a happy, serious thing, we have Chase back. Fairie. Hi. I returned. I know. The return of Chase. We've missed you. I've missed you guys too. I've been so busy and I feel really bad, but I'm really happy to be able to do stuff, actually. I'm really happy that
00:01:13
Speaker
things that worked out the way they did. Yeah. Well, I was going to say too, you know, and we want to also just give a reminder that May is Mental Health Awareness Month. So one of the big things that we are doing this month is all of our topics are focused on mental health would have seemed really weird to have Mental Health Month and not have Chase join us. Certainly. Given that like the person who's basically been on like
00:01:40
Speaker
I don't know, half of our mental health episodes at least. I mean, I don't know. I went back and looked, I made a list recently because we're doing the mental health MTG hashtag all month, creators are. And one of the things was somebody was asking me a lot about just what episodes we had done in
Goblin EDH Deck Giveaway for Charity
00:01:57
Speaker
the past. And I went through and like listed like every single heavy mental health episode that really had that focus. And I swear Chase is on at least half of them, if not more. So.
00:02:10
Speaker
We're very glad that we're able to welcome you back. And like I said, just wanting to remind everybody, May is Mental Health Awareness Month in general. We want to make sure that we're talking kind of a lot more about these topics of mental health explicitly. We know that that's something that this cast talks about all year, but we're really being intentional with kind of our approach to it.
00:02:31
Speaker
Part of this is too, we are giving doing a giveaway of a full goblin edh deck. And all you have to do to enter is just DM the cast donation to any mental health organization. You know, I've been asked a few times about ones that you know, like that I would either recommend or what I suggest and what I've been telling people is,
00:02:51
Speaker
Your local NAMI is often a good place. We really appreciate the work that the National Alliance of Mental Illness does. And they offer a lot in the community, both for people that may be struggling with mental health concerns, but also people that have the family members or people that are caregivers or that help. So, NAMI has been a good organization. Like I said, I've had a lot of people ask me about that.
00:03:19
Speaker
But yeah, that's all you gotta do. Just DM the cast any donation at all and we will enter you into that. We've also had some other people contact us and we may have other stuff to give away as the month goes on.
00:03:33
Speaker
Um, so I want to make sure that I got that kind of out of the way.
Feature on Grinding Coffee Company
00:03:37
Speaker
Absolutely. And do you want to talk about grinding coffee company real quick? Yes. Grinding coffee company. Um, they are the amazing LGBT black owned, um, and Rand operated coffee company that we pair with that has been working on coffee for gamers. Basically that's kind of like their whole mission. That's what they got started with was supporting gamers of different types, but also supporting, um, people's voices.
00:04:00
Speaker
And they've been doing a, you know, they actually have done a lot of work with their Kickstarter up and running, but now they're running into, they're actually getting picked up, hopefully to be carried even by Amazon or like bigger distribution. So that's exciting.
00:04:15
Speaker
Yeah. So I always want to make sure to say thank you to them too. Yes. And I think with that, let's do some, some intros and we can get
Chase on Deck Building and Introspection
00:04:23
Speaker
into the episodes. Yeah. What if people don't know Chase? It's been a while and we're such big deals that people may forgot, like don't even know who Chase is. I don't even know who I am myself, if I'm completely honest. I think this is going to be an episode of Discovery for me.
00:04:39
Speaker
Discovery and introduction of chase. Yeah, I like it introspection Very much Hi friends, I am not making this awkward. My name is chase. I'm also known as mana curves I'm a commander content creator on the internets as the young people say I stream paper commander a collaborative deck building and I write articles for TCG player about collaborative deck building which is super fun and I really love
00:05:08
Speaker
Can you talk about what collaborative deck building is? Because I think that's something that people might not think about. So collaborative deck building is the concept of building a deck within a group rather than sitting down by yourself and building. I find that collaborative deck building is probably one of my favorite ways to build now. I actually think it makes me a better deck builder, because I come to
00:05:34
Speaker
a group of people with a concept. Whether pre-COVID it was how we go to my LGS and then actually sit down and ask a couple of my friends at the LGS to come help me with this. Or now as it is, I go on Twitch, I announce that I'm building an entire commander deck with chat and chat comes in stream and recommends cards and we bounce ideas off each other.
00:05:58
Speaker
We add, we cut, we figure out our combos, we figure out what we want to do, and then by the end of the stream we have a complete commander deck that everybody has a hand in rather than just me.
00:06:08
Speaker
And it's awesome. You're picking, you know, you've been able to highlight kind of a lot of the newer cards as they come out and kind of different ways maybe to think about that and bringing in that hive mind to kind of see, you know, maybe not just like plugging in to a site and just looking at what the most played cards are, but it's kind of discussing what you guys want the theme to be and really kind of, yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it's amazing. It's awesome.
00:06:31
Speaker
I've had a lot of fun with it. I've been able to make some things that I definitely would have never touched on my own had it not been for people online. I've actually built some decks that I, again, never thought I'd build. I just finished building Alabou. I really need to get the pronunciation on that Boros cart.
00:06:48
Speaker
Um, but I finished building that with chat the other day and it's out of my comfort zone because the floor hold red white, so I don't really do that. And I was able to, um, play test it multiple times and, uh, it runs very beautifully. Um, and I have, uh, the good people of Twitch to thank for, uh, that monstrosity because it's really good. That's awesome. Yeah. It sounds like a really good way to kind of get out of your own filters and your own
00:07:19
Speaker
just biases in your own tendencies to look through cards because I found that I haven't been playing much, I haven't been playing at all since the COVID time. So there's all these new sets and all these new cards and just it kind of all runs together for me. And I'm trying to like filter through and find things. And I know I'm finding certain things for a couple of the decks that I've been playing, but trying to come up with something new to do has been tougher. So at some point I got to sit down and try to go through the cards, but that sounds like a really fun way to break out of that.
00:07:49
Speaker
Oh, I love
Alex's Recovery and Mental Health
00:07:50
Speaker
it. Even one of my favorite things to do is if I can't do it on stream, I like to post a tweet and say build a commander deck in the thread of this tweet. And people just drop down cards they think are cool. And it gives me kind of a cool concept too, which I really like. I think it's a really good way to connect to people because you can tell a lot about their play style by the kind of cards they recommend.
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah, I was going to say that you've always had this, really, I think what has made you such a strong creator is that your ability to interact with your audience and to really get to know them. I mean, I think that's the part of it that you love. And this seems like a different way to get to know people and get to know about their personality and everything else.
00:08:28
Speaker
Oh, definitely. I am very familiar with my Twitch chat. If you're listening to this, shout out to Muffin's crab baskets. He got Jason, not the Walled Inspector, Aerosmunt. I got a lot of different people in chat who have just such strong
00:08:45
Speaker
opinions and recommendations. It's always very fun to see them bantering playfully in chat about cuts and trying to force me to use my veto. Because I allow myself one veto where I'm like, I don't care what you guys say. This is definitely going in the deck or it's definitely getting cut. And they try to force my hand sometimes. They're like, if we force her hand on this card, she can't possibly cut this one. That's awesome. It's very funny. Yeah.
00:09:15
Speaker
Well, Hobbs, you want to introduce yourself? Yeah. So I am Hobbs Q. I can be found on Twitter at Hobbs Q. And I realize my pronouns are he him. I did not say that upfront when I was talking before. I don't know why I'm rambling. Because I realized that we actually introduced a question. We just kind of started talking. We're almost 10 minutes in and we're still working on introductions. Introductions, OK. We're tangenting off tangents and it's OK.
00:09:44
Speaker
I'm Hobbs Q. He him can be found on Twitter at Hobbs Q. In my professional world, I am a psychologist. If people are new to the show and learning about us during Mental Health Month, that's just something that I let people know. That's kind of where my real world job in life is. So that's me. I'm Hobbs.
00:10:03
Speaker
And I'm Alex Newman phone on Twitter at Mel underscore chronicler pronouncing him and so we were gonna do an intro question So I'll just start that and then we can go back around and then like actually get into the the topic of the episode But so for mental health month awareness month, we wanted to just do Kind of the same question we did last week if you'd listen to that episode we're gonna something that small that you do for to help
00:10:29
Speaker
your own mental health, something small to kind of treat yourself sort of thing. And some for me lately, because I just recently moved. I've talked about that a little bit, but it's nice because now I can, there's a lot more stuff I can kind of walk to. It's also nice because back in February, I broke my leg and I wasn't able to really walk for a while, at least not like freely around too much. You know, when you're crushing around, there's not a lot of going out in the neighborhood and walking like I used to do.
00:10:58
Speaker
And so it's been nice and for a little while I was starting to, I found, for folks who don't know me, I do a lot of walking. Like I don't even have a car. I tend to just walk places. So not being able to do that was actually had a negative effect on my mental health for a while. So it's been nice now that I'm mostly recovered. I mean, at this point still kind of just building back up a little bit.
00:11:23
Speaker
But in the new apartment, there's a lot of stuff that's closer. So it's easier to just go like I'm gonna take a 15-minute walk Go to Walmart and I don't really need to grocery shop But I'll just grab my backpack go buy a random pizza or something and then come back
00:11:38
Speaker
And so it's just like, it's given me an opportunity to really get out and start to move some more. And I'm really hopeful this summer, there's a nice nature preserve, like, literally, there's entrances to it from our parking lot. So I can't wait to get out there and start walking around. Oh, that's awesome. That's cool. That's, that's, that's a great thing to have at the back
Chase on Self-Care Challenges with Magic
00:12:00
Speaker
of your own, like just how I mean, you're where you're living, like, just be able to pop in. That's cool.
00:12:06
Speaker
So, how about yourself, Chase? I'm trying not to turn this into an existential answer. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, get as existential as you want here. Yeah, if I'm being completely and totally honest and authentic, which I really try to be, I've been actually really struggling with finding my sense of self-care as of late. It's been very difficult, partially because magic used to be a very large form of self-care for me.
00:12:35
Speaker
And now I view it more as it's still a hobby and I still enjoy it. But it's also a job for me. It's, you know, it's part of my work. And I love it. I love my work. But I also have a level of stress added to it. So that coupled with my other job, you know, my real like,
00:12:52
Speaker
Magic is my real job. My other real job too. I had two real jobs. Let's be honest. We were talking about this a little bit before we jumped on. Magic is a big part of that. You have things that you're trying to do in your life right now. The job market sucks for what you've talked about in the past with us. Last people saw you, we've been talking about you were finishing up your degree, you were
00:13:16
Speaker
getting all of that going, you graduated, you were a big girl, and COVID has been very unfriendly to the job market in general. Magic has been a source of income for me.
00:13:34
Speaker
And that's been very difficult, struggling, struggling to locate, you know, a job, but also finding that sense of self-care because magic is now a job for me. And while I still enjoy it, there's still that level of additional stress. So I've been really struggling to figure out self-care because I'll end up going, well, you know, I have to organize my decklists because I used to do that as a form of self-care, but now it just feels like part of work.
00:14:02
Speaker
So I've really been struggling to figure that out, and I've been trying to figure out in a way that isn't harmful. I've been shopping a lot recently, and that gives me ease of mind, not ease of wallet. So I wouldn't count that as self-care either. But I'm trying to work on that, and I'm trying to restrain that. And so I think my form of self-care lately is to kind of take a step back and be more self-aware of the habits that I'm forming and trying to counteract those habits and supplement them with better behaviors.
00:14:31
Speaker
And I've also been fiddling a lot on my Switch and fiddling around with just things on my desk. I just, I found that reading manga, I picked up a lot of manga recently and that's been really good as well as my Switch has been really helpful as well.
00:14:47
Speaker
I'll say, you know, are you still playing Animal Crossing at this point? Actually, no. Well, here, okay, I have an explanation for this. Yes and no. So I stopped playing, but then, and we're getting into chase rambling now, but it's fine, it's the podcast, is Animal Crossing came out with these amiibo cards that were Sanrio. Alex, do you know what I'm talking about? No, I stopped playing.
00:15:15
Speaker
So, um, San Rios like Hello Kitty and like pom pom paren. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, um, they did a collaboration with Animal Crossing for amiibo cards. So they have villagers inspired by the animal, the Hello Kitty creatures. Um, and I was like, Oh my God. But you could only get them on target if you ordered online at target and scalpers bought them up like crazy. So nobody could buy them.
00:15:40
Speaker
But my friend was able to purchase some because she got off work earlier than I did. She was able to swoop in and get them before the scalpers got all of them. And she lent them to me because you can use them as multiple times. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she let me borrow them.
00:15:57
Speaker
And I scanned the cards and now I have two of the little villagers from Hello Kitty on my island and they live there now. And I love it. So I'm like, I need to make this a home for these cute animals. They suck you right back in. They do. They sell smart. The resale value on those cards are insane. I see them going for like, um,
00:16:21
Speaker
70, 50, 70, and they're just little, they're basically magic cards, but they have the little technology in them to scan on your Switch. And it's crazy expensive how people are trying to resell these. So I was really thankful that she was able to get some. Otherwise, I wouldn't be playing Animal Crossing. I did buy a bunch of new Switch games as well and have been fiddling with those as well too. But dang, I show some real interesting Switch games to pick up for self-care.
00:16:49
Speaker
We may have to talk about that a little bit. I'm playing some other things, but I've got some stuff I recently picked up on my Switch. I'm an old school Pokémon person. I got in right when Red and Blue came over, so the new Pokémon Snap I picked up. I haven't had a chance to play it much, but when I put that thing on my brand new 50-inch TV, it looks cool.
00:17:12
Speaker
Just a little safari going through and taking pictures of Pokemon. I got to dig into that at some point. Oh, that's a stark contrast to what I bought. I bought Catherine Fullbody, which is listed as a psychological romantic horror. And I also picked up Mortal Kombat 11. I went on the different end, I think. It's been great, though, because fatalities are fun.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, they are fun. Case is completely right on this. It's cool because I got my first fatality the other day. I did it. I did it because I've been trying to figure out fatality since I was like seven. I was raised on Mortal Kombat. Was that the best choice? Probably not.
00:18:10
Speaker
My dad tried to cover my eyes when the fatalities happened, but let's be honest. When you hear squelching screaming sounds of agony on the TV, you know what's going on. Your imagination might actually be worse. Worse than what you see.
00:18:27
Speaker
Especially on those graphics. Hitchcock famously talks about not showing certain things on screen because your mind's going to come up with something worse because it's going to be very personal. So I love it. Yeah, I love this. I love hearing that Chase grew up normally like me. My dad started showing me horror films when I was like five or six.
00:18:50
Speaker
Oh, same. Freddy, Jason, all of it. Yeah, my mom, when I was a kid, she would pay me like 50 cents to watch a nightmare with her. A little like five, six year old Chase. That was a lot of money. Yeah. And I was like, I literally she would give me two quarters and I'm like, ha, sucker. I would watch horror movies with her and I used to be so scared of them. And she said, I'll pay you. And I'm like, fears out the door. I'm about to be rich.
00:19:20
Speaker
And now I love them. Well, so for me for self care, I, man, I'm trying to think because of anything, you know, I've been talking a lot about self care lately, online. And so I think that being able to get into regular exercise again,
00:19:44
Speaker
It wasn't a horrible winter in Minnesota by any means, but I mean, it still is icy and my main form of working out is running. It's what I love to do and it wasn't always safe. So I'm more regularly able to do that right now, which has just been really nice for me, just getting kind of a regular routine and stuff going again.
00:20:07
Speaker
So yeah, that's all I've got. Cool. Well, now that we're 20 minutes into the recording and we finished introductions. I'm sorry, but these were some good introductions. If I had time to listen to a podcast, I would listen to this one. I really like what we're doing here.
00:20:23
Speaker
What I was going to segue to very smoothly, because we're known for our incredibly smooth segues, is that this is appropriate for the topic in that I think for, you know, we're talking about burnout and
Revival of Burnout Discussion
00:20:36
Speaker
things. We're gonna talk about burnout today. And this is a very good friends getting together and having a conversation is a great way to kind of help
00:20:45
Speaker
With some of that and then things so We did talk about this. I just want to I don't know I feel compelled to do this whenever we revisit topics because we did talk about this, but it was several years ago And it's it's there's topics that are important to talk about especially a lot of the mental health things that we like to focus on are very important to Revisit because a sometimes people haven't heard the first episode be I went back and listened this first episode now
00:21:10
Speaker
know, some of our we were learning. And I know at least for myself, my sound quality was really bad. And I'd always I cringe a little bit when I listened to myself in some of their early episodes. But it's so it's always good to come back to these things. And this is something that especially now that
00:21:29
Speaker
we're coming up on three years, we're going to be doing more frequently as we have these topics that we hit fairly early that were really important. And that's why we wanted to talk about them then. They're still important. Guess what? Mental health is still a thing that we need to talk about two years later. We apparently didn't solve the problems.
00:21:45
Speaker
And with a different lens, too, because, you know, at that point, we didn't have Chase with us, actually. Exactly. And like, it's great, because we have Chase to bring her perspective. But also, you know, we have, you know, Hobbs and I have another two years worth of perspective. And as I mentioned in the front of the show, we have the COVID and everyone I think has some some issues of potential burnout and things. And so this may be a more relevant topic to everyone listening than it may have been.
00:22:15
Speaker
two years ago. So back then we talked about Nissa and her storyline and I don't really want to revisit that too much. We went through a bunch of the story beats of going from plane to plane and probably building up stress for her because she can feel the planes and they went to a lot of places that were kind of messed up with Amonkhet and Innistrad and finally like got to Dominaria and it was too much for her. But
00:22:57
Speaker
She is a good framework for kind of how, you know, people that feel, and I would say that this is something that gets talked about a lot, like they have very strong emotional feelings. There's this level of burnout and, you know, they talk about this with compassion fatigue. So this was an element that I'm just going to bring up briefly because in some ways I do feel that Nissa is a good representation of that.
00:23:03
Speaker
I think let's just...
00:23:21
Speaker
They talk about this in the helping professions and a lot, which is that idea that you are working with tough situations, you are working with tough topics that are not easy to deal with and can be very emotionally draining. And because of that,
00:23:41
Speaker
you know, that you can end up with a situation where people, you know, get burned out, just flat out just from their job themselves. And I think that Nissa, we kind of see that with her journey with the Gatewatch, and then also just with kind of what her life has been up to this point. And so I think that it is, I think Nissa is a very good kind of framework for thinking about people that kind of have those connections and those ties. Yeah, how difficult that was for her to the point where she did step away.
00:24:11
Speaker
I'm going to hit this definition of burnout and then use that a little bit to explain where I think she was burned out. Now we can talk about that before we talk about burnout itself in the real world. But burnout is a feeling of mental and physical exhaustion. It's feeling debilitated, detached, and unable to continue caring or coping. As you said, Hobbs,
00:24:36
Speaker
It was good in her story, in Dominaria in particular, she just said, that's it, I'm done, I'm leaving. And I think that was a good representation of this. I like that comparison of her to sort of the
00:24:52
Speaker
The empathy, I'm sorry, what was the term you used? Compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue, thank you. Because I think her ability to sort of feel planes is like literally an empathetic ability, but rather than an empathy with people, it's an empathy with the plane. And so it has some good parallels there with people who are very empathetic and dealing with situations like that. Yeah.
00:25:22
Speaker
So that that's a good comparison. I hadn't really put that parallel together. Compassion fatigue is real. It is very, very, very real. Yeah, I mean, do you want to I mean, we can talk a little bit about this as a topic just, you know, burnout is definitely related to this. I mean, it's that they're very similar concepts. But compassion fatigue, I think,
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, it is a very real risk, I would say. I think compassion fatigue is a form of burnout, I think. Just because you can be burnt out from a lot of different things, but compassion fatigue is kind of like a different feeling of burnt out.
00:26:10
Speaker
Oh, uh, Alex and I, uh, uh, my boyfriend, we were talking and we like to refer it to his spoons. You know, how many spoons do I have to, you know, today to juggle things? Uh, and you know, some days you just don't have enough spoons and you can handle some things, but you don't have spoons for other things. Yeah. I actually recently took to, you know, just with the,
00:26:36
Speaker
I'm just now getting more into D&D just because we're running the group, but we've been talking a lot more about spell slots. Just that concept that, you know, you only have so many slots and once they're full, you need to be able to have a rest in order to get it. I mean, D&D is a very good to me, bringing up these concepts. So I have found that to be very helpful with some people I've been working with lately, because the spoons one has been a long standing metaphor that I also love.
00:27:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good one. I've actually shared with my team at work about that because that's one thing that I am really fortunate. I work at a place that's very cognizant of mental health and they're very, they care about their employees and it's kind of incredible some of the things that happen in a place that actually cares about their employees. But so like I've had some conversations with my supervisor and my team about like Spoons Theory and some of that because I don't know, it was relatively early.
00:27:34
Speaker
I can be a very outgoing person sometimes. I talk and talk. I mean, we're on a podcast. It's literally what I'm doing right now. But also, I'm fairly introverted. I have periods of time where I just
00:27:49
Speaker
And especially at lower energy points where suddenly I seem to kind of just shut down. And so there was one day, like relatively early in my new position, so about three years ago, where my supervisor just pulled me aside one day and she's like, are you okay? And I said, oh, yeah, no, just fine. And she's like, because it seems like, you know, you're
00:28:08
Speaker
things may not be. And I'm like, no, I'm okay. But you just have to understand, like, I sometimes am going to be in a like a low energy mode where I just don't have the energy to be the outgoing person that I generally am like, I that's, I like to interact with people that way. But
00:28:25
Speaker
I don't always have that energy. I don't always have the cognitive capabilities to do that because I'm focused on this or I didn't get enough spoons or whatever. The spoons, exactly. And that's when I actually shared the article with her. Yeah, I mean, and I know some other people will, you know, use like a gas tank analogy because that's a more universal touchstone. Or maybe you brought that up in a case.
00:28:47
Speaker
We've used batteries before, the battery, how you are a phone, preferably an iPhone. If you're an Android, it's fine.
00:29:02
Speaker
I get enough of this hate in my life outside of magic. I don't know if I need it on this cast too. I'll bring it in here. You charge your phone overnight, you wake up, you unplug it, and then throughout the day when you use your phone, your battery goes down and that's a normal progression of things.
00:29:19
Speaker
and certain tasks on your phone. Like if you watch like a video or like a TV show on your phone that's going to take up more battery than say if you checked the weather. So I like to kind of look at it like that too is the different tasks that you do take up different percentages of your battery.
00:29:36
Speaker
Bam, look at all these metaphors. These are all things you can use in your own life, people. I love that metaphor, because then I don't know about those. I'm sure Android have something similar, but the iPhone, you have an option in the battery thing where it'll literally tell you how much, what percentage of the power is being used by each app. And it's always way too much on Twitter, just like my cognitive energy. Far too much of it is being used by Twitter.
00:30:05
Speaker
That's really that's that's pretty awesome. I mean it is funny because I was thinking that like historically Twitter has been my highest data app usage and It makes sense and as you said times that I like okay, maybe if I just don't go on Twitter Yeah, I can save data. Yeah. No, I mean that's I've once again removed it from my phone now I'll admit my shameful secret as I have it open in a like
00:30:31
Speaker
internet page so I will go and check it on my phone occasionally but because I don't have the app it's less convenient so I don't go to that all the time so instead I'll go to Pokemon Go and that has a more positive effect on my mental health generally or I oh I heart you I love you it's a really fun like color-based game that someone on our Discord recommended and it
00:30:58
Speaker
Oh, that's right, they did, yeah. Yeah, I love hue, H-U-E, like the color. So it's a game where you're kind of like, they shuffle up these, this picture that just has a color gradient and they shuffle up the cells and you have to move them around until they're in the right color gradient again. And it's really nice to sort of relaxing focus on this sort of thing for me. You're making me want to know how, oh no.
00:31:25
Speaker
Today, I've spent two hours and 20 minutes on social media, an hour and 50 of that for TikTok, nine minutes of Twitter. That's actually impressive. For just today though, just today. Okay, that's fair.
00:31:43
Speaker
I'm scared to see the rest of this. What's my week activity? Oh, we're not going to disclose this onto the internet. That's scary. Oh, that's scary. Okay, let's talk about you know, Alex, you gave us a really good definition for burnout.
00:32:00
Speaker
But let's talk about what it might look like. Because I think that it is something that, you know, when we say that word, people might have kind of just automatic thoughts for themselves.
Identifying and Addressing Burnout
00:32:10
Speaker
But let's just talk generally what some signs of burnout may be. Because like with compassion fatigue, some of these are things that people just might not really notice or think about. And I want to talk about how that's a little different in the pandemic world too.
00:32:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'll look I can start there and something that maybe is odd or people wouldn't think about like for burnout in in like my hobbies I found that the the one of the best first signs for me is when I start to like resent it.
00:32:40
Speaker
So I've been playing World of Warcraft Classic right now. I enjoy playing the game. I have a really good and supportive community that I'm playing with in my guild. But I'm hitting the point where we have weekly scheduled events. We're going to go...
00:32:56
Speaker
go into this, deal with these zombies, go into this Naxxramas and deal with these undead. I'm getting to a point where I'm starting to resent that time that I'm spending there because I'd rather be doing something else. I'm starting to have a conversation with my guild about stepping back a little bit.
00:33:16
Speaker
I'm an officer in the Guild and so I have some some responsibilities that I've been been carrying for various things and it's finding ways to continue to make sure that those are taken care of while also giving me the space that I need for my own mental health. When it comes I think that that's a very
00:33:40
Speaker
rare, not rare, I would say that's a difficult skill to cultivate. Knowing when knowing when to bail. And I know that sounds weird. But again, hubs, your kids getting older, it's time for her to watch Steven Universe discord messages from Alex that just like is like, Hey, Steven Universe.
00:34:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's such a good show. I'm showing it to Alex right now. And he's like, this is amazing. I'm like, because it's great. But basically, there's an episode where Steven wants to build a rocket, because Pearl is from outer space. And she's literally landlocked on Earth. And she's a war criminal. That's literally what she is.
00:34:27
Speaker
And she's you're selling the show to me right now. I'm selling the show. Just like she's landlocked on earth and Steven wants her to see space again. And he and his dad tried to build a rocket for Pearl. And his dad says, you know, there's no shame in knowing when to bail. And like right before Steven's makeshift rocket crashes into a rock, Steven goes,
00:34:52
Speaker
He goes, no shame in bailing. And he jumps out of the rocket, and the rocket crashes. And then Pearl is like, wait, we could actually build a rocket. So then she tries to build this rocket. She spends all this time, puts all this emotional energy into it. She's been on Earth for thousands of years. She wants to see space. She wants to show sleep in space. This is like a sun to her, and she misses home. And she eventually builds this rocket.
00:35:18
Speaker
And she takes Steven put Steven in the rocket and they literally fly up into the atmosphere, and she is so focused on her goal of getting to space and showing Steven space as she fails to notice the rocket literally falling apart around her and Steven.
00:35:34
Speaker
pulls the air hatch so that the bubble around them pops off and it's just them in open air. And she's like, what are you doing? And he goes, Pearl, you know, I he says, you just got to know when to bail. And he says, I know that you miss space and that you want to show it to me and we'll do it one day, but you have to know when to bail. And she looks up for a moment and then she realizes that
00:36:00
Speaker
things are literally falling apart around her and only then after she kind of gets that moment does she literally pull the parachute and you know yeah i mean that's the whole the whole i think this thank you so much for that analogy you did bring it and sell it because i mean it is really um it's it's it's awareness it's mindfulness it's the fact that when your head is down and you are in the middle of this you don't notice you're not going to notice right we talk about burnout is that example of um
00:36:30
Speaker
I talk about stressors a lot with people, and we talk about the big world stressors. So as people know on this cast, I'm sure I've talked about Duncan. And before we got on the air, I just mentioned that we're going to have to say goodbye to him. And that's a big stressor. And I know it is. I can see it. I know that it's horrible. It's going to be very sad. It's very stressful.
00:36:52
Speaker
But I can kind of plan for it a little bit better. Like, you know, I can plan self-care around it. I can, you know, I'm going to celebrate him this week. I'm going to, you know, grill up some steak for him. I mean, you know, like there's things that I can do to help me start to kind of almost like cope ahead, which is a concept that I know that Chase has talked a lot about on this show in the past. We've talked about coping ahead. That's great for those big stressors.
00:37:18
Speaker
The day-to-day that we don't pay attention to, the little things that just actually can build up until the repetitive amount of like, well, that's just one spoon. That's just one spell slot. That's just a little bit of my battery. I don't need to worry about it. And then like you said, you look at the end of the day and let's say you spread out your usage.
00:37:41
Speaker
you're still drained and you don't necessarily even know why you're drained. And that's the thing that I think about like my exhaustion when it comes to burnout. I just feel tired some days and I might not even have a clue why that is because when you're in the midst of it, you don't have that like helicopter view where you're pulling back and you're able to see what's going on. And you don't notice what is right around you. And I do think that that's one of the things that we talk about with burnout, it makes it harder to
00:38:09
Speaker
to deal with because you have to first step is you have to be aware that you're getting to that point before you've hit the wall.
00:38:18
Speaker
a thousand percent and I'm kind of in the midst of sort of experiencing that myself where I feel like I'm not doing enough and I feel lesser because I'm having a hard time locating my postgraduate job. I've been applying like crazy, searching like crazy. I don't get messages back or even emails back or anything like that. I don't even get told if I'm denied and I beat myself up and I say that I'm doing a horrible job
00:38:48
Speaker
at finding a job and then I have what I'm doing now and content and I feel like I'm not doing enough with content and I worry that what I'm putting out is lesser and I don't think I do enough and I'm saying you know I'm not doing enough I could be doing more and the other day
00:39:06
Speaker
my boyfriend, who is also named Alex. Alex, I'm trying not to be in some secret relationship with me. I was like, man, you chased steps away from the show for a while. This is how we tell you.
00:39:22
Speaker
my boyfriend who is also named Alex. Um, he went, I talked to him and I said, I feel like I'm just just not doing enough. I feel like I'm lazy. I feel like I'm putting in no effort. And he goes, What do you mean? You're literally trying so hard to find a job. You have a job already. You make content, you do a stream three times a week, you write an article, and you also upload videos and you do a bi weekly D&D stream. That's a lot. And I went,
00:39:50
Speaker
Well, when you put it like that, that does sound like a lot. And he goes, exactly. So maybe don't be so mean to yourself, because you're doing so much. And after I kind of heard how much I was doing, I kind of felt the weight of the spoons I was holding and have been making like, that's why I said at the beginning why I was trying not to be so existential about my, my answer to my intro question is that I am still learning to figure out
00:40:19
Speaker
that form of self-care that does not add an extra spoon or adds extra weight to a spoon I already have, you know? Alex, I think that one thing that I remember us talking a lot about when we talked about kind of figuring out ways to deal with burnout and ways once you're aware of it, and we've talked about this, this is very important, it's the becoming aware of it piece, but once you are aware of it, one of the things that is kind of really, I think,
00:40:47
Speaker
Important is to think about your identity and part of that can be Being able to have different outlets and and I think this can happen a lot with magic where people really identify as a magic player And we've talked a lot about this. It's like, you know magic becomes part of that identity, which is it's fine You know, that's actually a good thing. It's part of my identity. It's part of why we're doing this cast. It's it's a big part of who I am and
00:41:13
Speaker
It can't for me be the only thing when it becomes so intertwined that my hobby that was my self-care is now my only identity. I don't have a lot of other options because what would you do? Oh, well, I'll go play a game of magic. And if magic is what's stressing me out, I need to be able to be aware of that. Exactly. I'm so sorry to interrupt because I know you're addressing Alex. I'm sorry. Go for it.
00:41:40
Speaker
I've literally, I've been to my card shop recently to pick up cards, because they're following COVID precautions, but you can still pick up cards and then leave. And I've had people be like, hey, do you want to play a game? Hey, do you want to play a game? And in my mind, and I've even openly said, not really today, I've played Magic like four times this week, and I don't want to, you know,
00:42:08
Speaker
work on my day off. I know that sounds weird but like sometimes my brain when I play games that aren't streamed my brain is like that would have been a good stream moment and then I'm like you're playing for yourself dummy and it's just hard to find that moment.
00:42:24
Speaker
I was just really funny. I kind of thought about that. I know there was a while when I was streaming more or on streams more, and it was kind of fun to just step back and play a game that I didn't have to worry about that. I think we did that for the boxing league, Chase. You and I played with some other people in the league, and we talked about we're not even going to stream this. Yeah, and then we were like, that would have been so sick for stream. Right. But at the same time, I think part of what that was was that we
00:42:52
Speaker
we didn't feel that that need to be on. And I think that it's how are you stepping away? You know, Alex, you talk about Twitter, for example. Yeah, yeah, taking taking that step away from that. And, and then, you know, and that's the thing, one thing to the first best way to do it is if you can take a step away from it. Now, there's going to be stressors and things that
00:43:17
Speaker
as part of the cause, you know, there's a stressor within them that you can't always step away from. If work is your stressor, you can't, by and large, you can't just not work for a period of time. But then some of it then becomes even more introspection, which is why I think it was funny, Chase, when you were at the beginning, again, what you didn't want to be existential, but it's like, that's kind of important to what we're talking about, especially this topic is to build those tools of introspection.
00:43:45
Speaker
Um, and that's when it can be really important to say, okay, work is causing me stress, but what about work is causing me stress? Is it a particular thing? Is it a particular person? Is there something we can do about this? Can I go talk to my supervisor to be talking about my experiences working in an office?
Self-Compassion and Introspection in Burnout
00:44:02
Speaker
It's like, can I talk to my supervisor to have someone help me with this project to have someone else do it? There was a point in time
00:44:09
Speaker
a number of years ago where I was really stressed at work and I literally thought about quitting my job every day I walked into the office. And then I realized that it's because there was one individual I worked with who I could not stand working with.
00:44:22
Speaker
So I had a frank conversation with my supervisor and I said, look, every day I think about quitting this job and I realize it's because I just have a hard time working with this person. And he's like, okay, we'll make it work. And he ended up finding some other assignment that I could do for about a year, year and a half. So I was still working there doing stuff, but I was doing a different project and I didn't really have to interact with that person. And all that stress went away, which.
00:44:48
Speaker
worked well for me in that situation and so that's where it can be really helpful to try to find if you can drill down.
00:44:55
Speaker
I definitely think a really good way to perform that for yourself is because I know I have a hard time identifying stressors for myself because of how I was raised and the experiences I had when I was raised, how I'm trying to unlearn some of that. And so for me, a way for me to unlearn that.
00:45:18
Speaker
is to kind of apply what I like to call the best friend, not hypothesis, but like hypothetical, the best friend hypothetical, where you are pretending that you have a best friend that you really care about, telling you
00:45:42
Speaker
the thing that you're experiencing right now. I love doing that too because it puts it so much into perspective. Like you imagine your best friend saying like, oh my gosh, I'm doing this and this and this and this and I'm working this and I'm writing this and I'm streaming this and I'm just exhausted. And you would look at your best friend and you'd be like, it sounds like you need to take a bit of a breather. But if you had said that to yourself, you would be like, I just need to persevere. Push through.
00:46:09
Speaker
Yes, it's just the best friend hypothetical, such a great way for me to put things into perspective and kind of realize my own, my own, not barriers. What's the word? Oh, god, see, this shows you how I am. Boundaries.
00:46:36
Speaker
This technique of asking somebody what they would tell other people because a lot of times burnout really is involved with a topic of compassion. I've done this in groups. I've asked people to define compassion and you get a lot of really great answers.
00:46:54
Speaker
about just like what compassion means like you know how it is to feel for others to be able to like want to help them to forgive them to be gentle and almost
00:47:10
Speaker
Almost always. There is no mention when you talk about compassion if you just introduce it as a concept of toward yourself. It's always something that we give to other people. And the idea of self-compassion actually is kind of this idea that the same things that you are giving to other people are things that you have to be able to kind of recognize and do for yourself.
00:47:33
Speaker
it is it is amazing like you said that sometimes it takes this idea of like the theory of mind like you need to do it for somebody else even in your mind to kind of trick yourself like wow it does sound horrible like my best friend is an asshole like or just like my best friend needs some help i need to help them out um and i think that it's being able to kind of
00:47:53
Speaker
have almost like that separation. This is actually just randomly getting into this is kind of the theory behind the way that we're using the D&D group is to get people to work on problem solving and emotion regulation and a lot of these skills that they maybe need by playing a character.
00:48:15
Speaker
Well, I mean, it's literally problem solving. It's problem solving in a way that is detached, but not dissociated, right? Like you can still introduce these certain issues and problems and scenarios, but because you're in the sort of fantastical setting, you're able to sort of take a step back from it in a healthy way and end up really learning something, which I think is phenomenal.
00:48:41
Speaker
And in some ways it allows them to very exactly use the best friend hypothetical for the characters that they're playing. So, you know, we've kind of been talking this whole thing, like I said, the biggest thing when it comes to burnout a lot of times, and this is where I think it does come back to Nissa when we're looking at her story, is the self-awareness piece.
Pandemic's Effect on Coping and Mental Health
00:49:05
Speaker
And why we're talking about it today is to maybe get people thinking. Like we're in the middle of a pandemic.
00:49:11
Speaker
A lot of your resources and your coping strategies may not be there right now, or they may be the things that you've relied on to the point where you're actually getting burnout from them too. Because even when Jen and I were talking about this when we were walking over to the park, I told her what we were recording today and she was just talking about how such importance is, you know, we talked about
00:49:34
Speaker
the LGSs or we talked about community which is such an aspect of magic that we focus on and these things maybe haven't been available to us so we're seeking out other things. We're also dealing with our normal level of stress added with masks and not going out and
00:49:53
Speaker
I mean, and you have the same things in different contexts now. Now going to your LGS where it might have been a place to relax and decompress, now it's a source of stress because depending on where you are, maybe you have people who aren't taking things seriously. So you're like, I'm wearing a mask, but no one else here is. And that could cause a lot of stress in a place that used to be what was supposed to help with that.
00:50:18
Speaker
Or you may have your context like people, I know there's some people in my department who haven't been back to the office for 13 months now, 14 months. So they've been at home working from home for over a year. And before you'd go to the office, you do the work things and the work stress there. And then you go home where there's a physical separation from it. They haven't had that for over a year.
00:50:42
Speaker
And so they need to learn how to deal with that in their own context. I haven't had that because of what my job is. I've been going into the office, which has its own set of stressors for the last year and a half. I could honestly go on and on about the concept of how most jobs are able to be performed from home, but the capitalist notion of you have to be into the space. I definitely feel like there should be a separation, but I definitely see a lot of
00:51:26
Speaker
My mom is somebody that, you know, she does promotional items, which is a lot of, you know, basically everything that she's doing is graphic design or ordering. And it's all stuff that can be done very easily kind of from home. And she is somebody who also benefits from working from home. And it's a full recognition. It's not for everybody. And I've had a lot of people talk about this, like they want to go back into the office and
00:51:39
Speaker
I don't quite understand why some jobs cannot be performed at home.
00:51:49
Speaker
And you said it's, but it's, it's recognizing that like some people maybe do better and we don't even give them, like you said, Chase, the option or the chance. The joke at the VA was, you know, we've had staff that have wanted to offer to do telehealth for people that wanted it one or two days a week where they could work from home and offer these. And the VA was like, nah, we can't do that. It's too difficult. It's blah, blah, blah. And then literally,
00:52:17
Speaker
you know, a pandemic happens and somehow all the technology and everything got figured out in a day. Yeah. You know, or like a couple days and it's just that idea that like it was just because there wasn't a push or a need for it because employee health maybe wasn't taken as. Seriously. Seriously that like maybe and now but now we're are getting discussions. Finally, it's like if the infrastructure is there, maybe we can talk about
00:52:42
Speaker
a hybrid model or how this could look. That's my job. And in some fairness to them, a lot of people had that capability before. And my job, I physically need to physically be in the physical building just because of what I do. But we're talking about bringing people back. And they very specifically said, we don't think there's going to be very many people who are 100% in the office all the time now.
00:53:11
Speaker
like their plan is starting at hybrid.
00:53:16
Speaker
Like some number will, you know, some small number will be at home all the time. Some small number will be in the office all the time. And there's going to be a large chunk in the middle that are some form of hybrid. And now the conversation is over the next six-ish months or however long it kind of takes to get things to, or they feel comfortable bringing people back, is figuring out what that hybrid looks like for everybody. Because there's a, there's a very large gap between zero days in the office and every day in the office.
00:53:46
Speaker
And it's figuring out what the balance is for different people and different teams. And what's funny, I think, speaking to Chase's point, capitalism is almost recognizing maybe though that it's like you had to show them that it was beneficial because now it's like, oh, we don't have to rent the same office space. Or there's ways that we can save money by having people be at home. So maybe we get the benefits.
00:54:08
Speaker
Actually, I haven't seen that reaction. I've actually seen a lot of articles. Recently, I saw one on Twitter where a CEO gave the most poo-poo-doo-poop reason. They were like, people need to be in the office. Oh my gosh. Wow. That's funny. I think the exact opposite reaction. That's really funny. Yeah. They're calling for people to be in the office and then just saying that it's unnecessary.
00:54:33
Speaker
To me it made me feel like I I don't feel very viscerally, but I felt very visceral about that. I'm like, shut up I would too because you know, like my my brother-in-law's in advertising and like his company is like Recognizing that their productivity measures were basically the same See in in my I don't know about productivity stuff for my company, but if there it's
00:54:57
Speaker
They're, by and large, it's like people first, employees first. And so that's been a big part of the conversation is what do, how do we feel and what do we, and like, obviously we've been doing, our productivity is well enough. Like through the pandemic and everything, we got the things done that we needed to get done. So then it was the conversation is how do people feel? And actually we had a department meeting. So I think there were like 50 or 60 people in our combined teams and they,
00:55:27
Speaker
They had this little survey thing which was kind of cool They could create questions and send them out to people and we could all answer and see the data sort of in real time And so they asked everybody okay scale of one to ten if five was your normal Productivity back before when we were a hundred percent in the office. Where do you think you're at today? And there was a handful of people at four but most people were at six to eight and
00:55:52
Speaker
And they're like, okay, cool. Like that's good to hear. And then that's part of the conversation going forward is where do people feel that their work is best for them to be working? And letting people make these decisions is maybe something that could.
00:56:09
Speaker
lead to improvement in burnout. And I mean, one of the things is we know, like, if we want to talk about the impact of burnout outside of that, it's, you know, missed days, and it's missed work, and it's missed, you know, things like if you know, if you get burnout, you get that level of stress, we know even just in the body, you're more likely to get sick. And so if you're, you know, and then either you got employees coming to work sick, or you got people just kind of calling in or no showing and, and even, even a little bit less extreme than that, it's just reduced productivity.
00:56:37
Speaker
I'll be honest, I'll level with you two and whomever's listening. I was one of the fours because right now there's a lot going on and I feel like I'm not as productive as I used to be because I'm dealing with a lot of stress. And a lot of that isn't even workplace stress for me. There's other stressors going on that are just sort of tangentially connected. But so that's part of it and that's a
00:57:03
Speaker
sign of burnout is, have this listed as improved cognitive, impaired cognitive function, you're not focusing, you're not getting things as clearly as you were before. And that's a factor that even if it isn't as extreme enough that you're getting sick, even if it isn't as bad enough that you're taking needing to take time off, you just may not be getting as much stuff done, because you're not focusing as well as you were.
00:57:31
Speaker
I actually had a recent experience with that myself where I discovered that in those weeks period that I previously described where I was kind of working myself to the bone, every single Thursday for, I want to say the entirety of last month, I would get a migraine and I would be in bed all day.
00:57:54
Speaker
And that happened pretty consistently because Thursdays are one of my days off. And I was just in bed, ice pack on headlights out. I was dead to the world. And that impacted me a lot and impacted my work a lot. But I've been working myself so hard that I would literally manifest stressors that impacted my health.
00:58:17
Speaker
I've worked with people that when I was in my other capacity that were at work and that were having mental health struggles and didn't seem to make that connection. I think that you're talking about Chase that like basically they were working on weekends and then lo and behold symptoms were always worth on like Thursday before they started their work week.
00:58:41
Speaker
They would just be like wow, I don't know why but all my symptoms seem to have been worse on that day I was sleeping worse like all of these things were happening and I think we go back to that I mean to me and the message for me for today that I keep coming back to is that awareness that being able to step back and almost have kind of a
00:59:01
Speaker
perspective on things to be able to realize what is your typical? What is it that you're able to manage? What can you deal with? And I definitely think that to tie it back into the story, I definitely think that
00:59:16
Speaker
This is why we invite you on the show. Yeah, I definitely think that Nissa was just like, I can't handle this right now. I have too many spoons. And she understood that. And I think removing yourself from a situation is an act of self care. Going back to my Steven Universe Method Four, there's no shame in bailing out. There really isn't. Yeah, if it's gonna literally save you, whether it be physically or mentally, there's no shame in back and down or bailing out.
00:59:46
Speaker
No and and hubs maybe you you can take this cuz the from the past episode and i want to be you know we don't have to cover everything there but you were talking a lot about the difference between taking a break and avoidance i think that's really important to talk about.
01:00:02
Speaker
Yeah, so we talk so especially when it comes to things like anxiety and things like, you know, we've talked a lot on the show about avoidance. We've talked a lot about how that can really narrow your world. So you know, Alex, you've talked a lot about how you almost like it almost got you back trapped in your home, because of the things that you
01:00:21
Speaker
You know, you start avoiding to avoid so that you're, and you're like three steps of avoidance. So like, you know, if going to a crowded place is scary, well, you don't go to that place. Well, now just even thinking about going to that place. Well, if I'm near a place like that, so then you avoid that. And pretty soon you're just working yourself backwards.
01:00:40
Speaker
So avoidance really is kind of something that we talk about is like you are really just not engaging with it or you're disengaging in a way that is very unhealthy. Taking a break is different because there is an intentionality to it. With avoidance, there's almost kind of not even a recognition of what you're doing. You're just making your world smaller.
01:01:02
Speaker
and you're not really having a plan of how you're going to cope with it or deal with it. The plan to cope with it or deal with it is to not.
01:01:11
Speaker
With taking a break, the idea is that you've recognized that something, you have that intentionality of where you're going to step away from something because it is not healthy for you right now. And usually then what we talk about is, well, okay, what you're looking to do then is, well, what am I going to do when I step away? What are things that I can do for self care? It's you're turning that kind of stepping away into
01:01:39
Speaker
preparation to, you know, not preparation, self-care. You're stepping away to turn it into, how do I deal with things? How do I cope with it? You're taking a break from something because there's a recognition. And the recognition and the awareness makes it where it's kind of that difference from avoidance. I couldn't have said it better myself, and I do mean that, despite me doing a funny haha. I definitely think that
01:02:08
Speaker
Again, it's a skill that is very difficult to cultivate is doing that internal check-in and knowing the difference between that break and avoidance. And I just think it takes time and learning and really knowing yourself. And it takes a while to know how to do that and to know when to do that. I think it's...
01:02:33
Speaker
It's a delicate topic because it's so different for each individual. And that's kind of why I like to use that best friend hypothesis, because you can you can kind of use that to gauge that to hypothetical, I have a degree, I keep forgetting what hypothesis and hypotheticals are. But essentially, like, if you
01:02:53
Speaker
You know insert that best friend situation where you're like, I'm having a really rough week I need to take a day off versus I need to avoid this particular instance of work because this person is there there's a difference between that using that high that best friend hypothetical I think kind of can help differentiate between the two and kind of keep you sort of in tune with your those boundaries inside yourself and
01:03:20
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. HopsQ can be found at HopsQ, and Alex Newman can be found at Mel underscore. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinmoorpod on Twitter, or email us at goblinmoorpodcast at email.com.
01:03:38
Speaker
If you want to support your friendly neighborhood gospel, the cast can be found at patreon.com. Opening and closing music by Vindergarten, who can be found on twitter at Vindergarten, or online at vindergarten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raffaeo, who can be found on twitter at steve raffle.
01:04:01
Speaker
Goblin lore is proud to be presented by hipsters of the coast as part of their growing vorthos content as well as magic content of all kinds. Check them out on twitter at hipsters MTG or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you all for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.