63 | Burnout and self-care with Gina Badger

Camille Freeman (00:00)
Well, hi there. Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I am a licensed nutritionist and registered herbalist. In this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits that might be interesting or helpful for other practitioners. I am delighted to share with you this week an interview that I did with herbalist Gina Badger, discussing burnout as well as general strategies that we may be able to put in place as clinicians in order to protect our time, to protect our energy, and to set more clear boundaries with our clients and even with ourselves in order to prevent burnout or to give ourselves a little bit of breathing room if we're already in that space. Now, one of the reasons I wanted to bring Gina in to talk to us on the podcast is because Gina specializes in working with practitioners who are experiencing burnout care workers, I think is the word they specifically use. I thought, Who better to discuss this than somebody who has experienced it themselves, but also somebody who works with others who are going through this process? I'm going to give you the short version of Gina's bio. I'm going to put the full version in the show notes if you want to learn more about them, or perhaps connect with them if you are feeling a little bit of burnout yourself and want to get some care, check the bio.

Camille Freeman (01:24)
At the end of the episode, Gina will also share some links and other ways to get in touch. Gina is a clinical energetic herbalist who offers care through their multidisciplinary clinic named Long Spell. I love the name Long Spell, by the way, editorial note. Their life work is contributing to a collective vision of holistic health care that's equally heartfelt and irreverent, down to Earth and visionary, gentle and rigorous. So like I said, check the show notes for the full version of Gina's bio and let us dive into the interview. All right. Well, I am here with Gina. I'm so excited to talk to you today and I'm really grateful that you were able to carve out some time, especially given the topic.

Gina Badger (02:08)
That.

Camille Freeman (02:09)
We're going to be talking about. So I'm wondering if you could just start us off and tell us a little bit about burnout, how you understand that phenomenon and how it showed up for you.

Gina Badger (02:24)
Yeah, for sure. I think, yeah, I mean, there's a standard clinical definition for what burnout is that's pretty narrow that tends to focus mostly on workplace performance. My understanding is an experience is more holistic and I think probably quite a bit more broad. I think subjectively for me, burnout was just this feeling that part of my job is to take care of myself so that I can show up for my clients. I mean, part of my job, but a fundamental part of my job is to do that. And so when I started to get the sense that I was approaching a big strain in my ability to do that, which starts to show up in little ways initially, like a routine that normally is seamless, suddenly not working anymore. Things start to pile up. Things aren't manageable anymore. I think for me, I started to notice little details, but I also started to notice just one of the hallmarks of even the clinical definition of burnout, which is just an extreme exhaustion that doesn't go away. It's certainly not at the end of the weekend. And this happened for me at a time when I was doing a year long clinical training program.

Gina Badger (04:16)
I was in class online for seven hours a day, every week for a year. And halfway or a quarter of the way through that, it really dawned on me what a commitment that is because, of course, it's not just those seven hours, it's everything you need to do to show up for those seven hours. And then also just the ripple effect in terms of how that impacts the rest of your schedule. And in my case, I didn't make any major alterations to my practice. I was still running my business at the same time. And it was just getting to be too much. The weekend wasn't enough. I would routinely look ahead at my schedule for the next couple of months, see when I didn't have that many clients or didn't have any clients booked in the week. And I would just block the time off and take myself away. And for me, in particular, I live in Vancouver on the West Coast, and we're pretty close to a bunch of little Gulf islands. You can take a ferry and just be little drop off the edge of the world for a minute. And so I kept basically booking emergency trips to go do that.

Gina Badger (05:37)
And I couldn't really afford those trips. I couldn't afford the time off. I couldn't afford the rental rate, but I just had to. It was the way that I was propping myself up. And after doing that enough times, I was like, okay, I think I'm burnt out. I think I need to really pull back and make some changes.

Camille Freeman (05:59)
Yeah. And can you talk to us a little bit about what changes you made? Yeah.

Gina Badger (06:09)
Oh, wow. I think that there were a lot, and I'm still making them, this was about a year and a half ago, the period that I just narrated. So there were some immediate changes that I made, and I basically did a survey of what are the things in my practice that are taking more time than they ought to. And that's both literally the time spent replying to a message, but also the emotional energy that it takes sometimes to respond over and over again and explain things. So I really tried to turn some energy to what can I systematize and automate to create room in both of those senses. So in particular, I revamped my communications policy to make sure that all of my clients know what to expect from me in terms of communication between appointments, made sure that language was really clear and tight in my intake form. Same with the cancelation policy, just making sure that there wasn't going to... Because if there's a ripple effect to all these things. If your cancelation policy isn't clear and people don't know what it is, they're going to email you to ask about it. And then maybe you don't know the answer to their question.

Gina Badger (07:37)
You need to spend the time figuring it out. And then you need to tear your hair out, trying to figure out how to articulate it properly. So I just identified some holes in those policies and tightened them up. I think that same went for payment, all of these the brack of the clinical work to make sure that the way I had that set up served me and that I communicated it clearly. And then around this time, I got an email auto responder from my friend and colleague, Marika, who is a Somatic Practitioner. And basically it was like an auto reply that said some very basic things. Like, if you want to reschedule your appointment, here's the link. If you are thinking maybe you want to work together, here's what the process is. If you want to sign up for my group, make sure you read this page before you ask me a question. And also letting people know when she checks email and how long it takes for her to reply. And I thought, oh, that's a really good idea. So I implemented something similar. And yeah, I feel like the combined effect of those things just let me take a breath, create a little bit of honestly, mostly emotional and psychological.

Camille Freeman (09:11)
Space.

Gina Badger (09:12)
So that I could attend to myself and to some bigger things that I needed to look at changing.

Camille Freeman (09:21)
Yeah. One of the things we communicated about this a little bit, and I just thought it was really lovely the way you put it, was that creating the surface boundaries helps clear your time to address bigger things. And so surface boundaries in this case would be things like getting your auto responder and really getting super clear on communication and policies and cancelation and all of that thing.

Gina Badger (09:51)
Yeah.

Camille Freeman (09:52)
Just because I... Go ahead.

Gina Badger (09:57)
Yeah. I think for so many practitioners starting out, it's hard to front load the time in policies because it's pretty painstaking. And to some extent, you don't really know what you need until you do it. And then you're like, o ops, need a policy for that. So I think in part for me, this was just a moment of coming clear with myself about those things.

Camille Freeman (10:24)
Yeah. And I find that a lot of people are Frankensteining policies where it is like, oh, it came up so I added this one little clause, but maybe didn't step back at the time and say, okay, how does this fit into the bigger picture? Am I communicating this to people? Is it just a teeny little thing somewhere? Are there conflicting things written in different places? Because after you've been in practice for a while, that's what you wind up with is the Frankenstein of everything. It says one thing on your website and one thing in this form and one thing in the welcome letter.

Gina Badger (10:55)
So.

Camille Freeman (10:56)
I think that is, like you said, it's so painstaking to go through every last little thing and be like, okay, what is it actually saying? What is my policy? Is it working? Could it be better for me or the client, etc? I know people will be curious, so I was wondering if you would be willing to share what is your communication policy with clients between visits?

Gina Badger (11:21)
Yeah, interesting. It actually is shifting, I think, in part in response to my work that I did in the growth course that you facilitate, I had around this burnout time tightened up what already existed, which is like a pretty hard line communications policy, which is basically like, if you get a new prescription, if you develop new symptoms while you're working with the formula, if you get a new diagnosis, please email me immediately because I need to know that in case it affects safety and appropriateness of the formula. But outside of that, basically, if you have a clinical question or if you email me for some other reason, I will pro rate my hourly rate for the time that it takes to work through your issue over email. On the one hand, I think it's great to have a policy like that because then if when it does happen that somebody wants to have more extended discussion that would typically occur within the space of a follow up appointment, it's easy to just say, we can discuss this over email when that happens, I prorate my hourly rate, or if you want, we can wait until your next appointment.

Gina Badger (12:56)
So your client is at choice around how they want to apply resources to that support request that they have. But then on the other hand, I feel like I've basically never done that. I've never charged anybody in that way. And I think that's a combination of the fact that I have the policy so people don't ask for that support. And also I'm often very happy to just answer a quick question. It's not a big deal. And I don't need to charge $1.50 for that or whatever, or whatever the 15 minute increment is. But yeah, and then in the growth course, one of the things we talked about is what are some easily doable ways to enhance the client experience? Or I forget what the language is that you use around it, just make sure that they're having a great experience once they're in your practice. And I did find that even on my end, I was missing that a little bit. I sometimes wanted the client to let me know how the surgery went or whatever, and that it helped me as well. With the depth of work that we are doing as herbalist, I don't have 200 current clients.

Gina Badger (14:36)
At any point, it's maybe a maximum of 50 at the very most. And that's not too many people to be having some contact with between the appointments. So yeah, I've started initiating little check ins like that. I use Gmail and I'll schedule send often. If someone tells me they have a surgery date, I'll right after the appointment, send an email just saying, How's your recovery going? Schedule send. And I've been finding it doesn't take that much time. It actually helps me to be in a place with the follow up where I know where things are at and I know what question to ask and I feel more prepared. And then there's always the option to say, okay, we've gone to a depth with this where I think we should really talk about it in your next appointment. And that's a fine thing to say.

Camille Freeman (15:34)
Yes, indeed. It's absolutely a fine thing to say. Yeah. I do think it's almost like some policies are reactive or responsive to something that's happening. And then some are proactive. And then you realize, actually, I didn't need that, like a theoretical policy. And then that's the thing. They are living documents. We can adjust them as we go. Yeah. So you were saying before we went live here that you've been dancing with the idea of clear communication versus excessive communication in some of these matters. And I was wondering if you could share what's on your mind or what you've been thinking about those ideas lately.

Gina Badger (16:28)
Yeah. I mean, I guess there's a couple of facets of it. Before I started working as an herbalist, I was an editor. And so it's something that I'm always thinking about is the details, the material of the words makes a difference. So obviously, yeah, we want to say enough and be complete and thorough in our policy and communication around that. But also if there's extra words, you can lose people pretty easy. So that's one element of it that I've been thinking about with my email auto responder in particular, just going through and tightening it up for the 10th time. So it still doesn't read like a robot, but it's also not overly wordy. But the other thing I'm thinking about this may be like a level of technical detail that's not interesting, but my practice expanded this year to include another practitioner. And so at this point, there's a bunch of emails. There's a public facing email that is connected to both practitioners' booking emails. And so those emails come to me and not to the other practitioner. And just sorting through the details around which auto responder should go to whom and the mechanism that that auto responder goes out.

Gina Badger (18:07)
So I was using Gmail's vacation responder, but when you do it that way, it's one message that goes out to all of the addresses that come in through your inbox. And that just didn't work anymore with more than one person. So I've switched to using templates and filters.

Gina Badger (18:33)
With anyone who uses Gmail, that'll make sense. And anyone who doesn't, you'll be like, huh? But yeah, templates basically are like canned responses that you can draft within Gmail, and then you can use a filter to send that canned response to a particular subset of the messages that you get. And you can set that one of the parameters is like, what's the email that it was sent to? But the difference is that an auto responder, it doesn't get sent to every single email that the person sends. So it'll send it only once every four days or something. Whereas the can response and filter thing, it sends it to literally every message. So you might have even noticed that today when we were communicating. And I think that's annoying. I wouldn't want that. So that's where I was like, oh, here I am communicating clearly but excessively to the point of being irritating to people. I don't have the solution figured out yet. it. Yeah.

Camille Freeman (19:46)
I love these technical details because I feel like so much of clinical practice is these types of things where it's like, well, if I get it set up, it's really going to help. But it takes a lot of work and thought and effort and technical knowledge to get it that way.

Gina Badger (20:10)
And.

Camille Freeman (20:10)
So it's almost like trying different things and they'd be like, Nope, not that one. I'm going to make this adjustment. Nope, not that one. And you just keep chipping away at it.

Gina Badger (20:23)
Yes, exactly. I think the things, yeah, it's one of the things that's maybe the hardest for me, like, psychologically or emotionally about this work is because all of that work is just basically invisible. Our clients are unaware that we're doing it. They don't care. They certainly don't want to pay us to do it. And yet it's really vital. Without it, we can't show up for the hour that we spend with them and be focused and compassionate and skilled. So yeah, it can feel demoralizing for me sometimes when you're in the middle of trying to find a solution. Yeah.

Camille Freeman (21:13)
Oh, yeah. No, I hear that. And that's one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on here to talk about this, because just something as basic as the auto responder, which not everybody has, and maybe not everybody has even considered having. But that type of thing it is. It's the invisible unseen work that isn't standard. You don't graduate from Herb school and they're like, oh, well, be sure you set up your auto responder. That's just you have to learn that on your own. It's not verbalized. It's not out there as a strategy for people to think about and consider and work with themselves if it seems appropriate. I do think it's such a small thing, but it can make a big difference. And I was actually realizing, I didn't circle back and ask you, have you noticed, since you have the auto responder and changed some of these policies, have you noticed a difference in your clients, the types of questions, the volume of questions, anything along those lines?

Gina Badger (22:22)
Yeah. I think that the biggest thing that I need the auto responder for and that it does a good job with is expectations around how quickly people are going to hear back from me. I'm not focusing on communications for every one of my work days, but I do tend to check my email at some point during the day between Tuesday and Saturday, which is my work week. So just letting people know, I check my email Tuesday through Saturday, I typically respond within two working days, but it also might take a little bit longer. That's huge. I just had changed my auto responder because I was actually on vacation and then I forgot to switch it back to the standard. And a client had an appointment scheduled today that they needed to reschedule and they were new and they didn't know how to do it themselves. And I got several emails from this person that were getting increasingly frantic because they were worried I was going to charge them the cancelation fee. And did I get their email? And then I was like, That happened because I didn't take care of my auto responder and just unleashes this chain of chaos.

Gina Badger (23:56)
So that piece really helps. And then the other piece that's related to that is, well, yeah, is clients will email to order a refill of their formula, and they will often wait until the last minute to do that. And there's a turnaround time. I'm not in the apothecary every day. So if you need your refill next week, there's a certain timeline that you need to let me know. And so it's been really helpful for that, too. So people know what to expect in terms of receiving that refill after they send the email. And I don't have to lay it all out a million times. I know if I'm away from my desk that this is the biggest thing. It's the anxiety piece for me. I'm not fussing that I have to send the email to let them know I just know it's taken care.

Camille Freeman (25:05)
Yeah, that's huge. I do think that especially setting the expectation is so important because people have just different email cultures. I do have clients who will be anxious or expecting a response within the day. That is there. They're just on email a lot and for them, if you don't get back within a day, there's some issue. And I do think that having laying out the expectation and just saying, listen, here's the days I check email, here's how fast I can get back to you. I have received your message. I think that's the other thing with an auto responder. It's like, I got it. It didn't go into the ether. It was received. It has been filed away somewhere in line for response. I think that can be reassuring as well.

Gina Badger (26:00)
For.

Camille Freeman (26:01)
People. One of the things I realized because I've also been just trying to figure out my own inbox situation and all this, but I realized that I personally was contributing to the expectations by responding too quickly sometimes. It's like, the faster you respond, the faster people expect you to respond.

Gina Badger (26:23)
Yes.

Camille Freeman (26:25)
I also think, at least for my practice and my work, there's very few emergencies. Most of the time they could wait a day or two or even a week without it being a major issue. And so, yeah, I love the idea of vocalizing or what's the equivalent in writing? Getting it out there so that people know here's the plan, here's the plan.

Gina Badger (26:57)
Here's the plan. Yeah. I mean, there's an irritating amount of discipline that's required to your last point around creating email cultures that are humane, which includes, yeah, I think not checking our email at times that we can't actually reply because then you're just wasting your time reading the email and flagging it to deal with later. And I think we all do that because it's just the whole dopamine inbox thing. Yeah, absolutely. It's really hard to figure out how to damper that.

Camille Freeman (27:40)
Yeah. No, I absolutely hear that. Yesterday I saw something, a blog post somebody wrote, maybe, but it was just a very basic blog post. And the premise of it was, don't spend more time replying to somebody's email than they spend writing the email.

Gina Badger (28:01)
I was.

Camille Freeman (28:01)
Like, Oh, that's... I mean, it's a little different for a client, I think, depending on... That's a different relationship, but a plain old email in the inbox. I was like, Oh, it's actually a really good point that somebody has clearly sent you a form letter. This happened to me today. I got a form. It's clearly a letter, an email that had been sent to a number of different people and just changed out the name. And it was asking for a fair amount of work on my part I was like, I don't... It's like you're talking about. It's a little thing. But then when you look at it in the context of creating space and leading towards burnout and making time for the things that are your actual paid work, I think that all ties in.

Gina Badger (28:52)
Yeah.

Camille Freeman (28:53)
So anyway, for me, that was a helpful... I never really thought about it in that term and those terms before, but I like that little motto.

Gina Badger (29:02)
Yeah. It's a good thing to hold and remember.

Camille Freeman (29:10)
Yes. Well, I want to be respectful of your time, speaking of time. And so I'm just so thankful for you sharing all these experiences. And it seems like to me, the take away here is that the more work we can do on the front end to establish some of these non sexy processes to create smoothness and clarity, the more space we have and possibly the more we can ward off, like, overwork and burnout. Would you say that's a fair summary?

Gina Badger (29:51)
I think front lining and then just thinking about to your point earlier about a different version of a thing ending up on the website versus on the booking platform, this type of thing. Something I really appreciate about some of the systems and structures that you have put in place that you open up to practitioners you're in dialog with and supporting through your work is having just regular check ins where there's a certain number of things that you're doing. So I feel like maybe with policies, we tend to notice as we're working with them, oh, this isn't quite working. And I feel like there could be a nice, maybe it's like a monthly admin task where it's like you've got a little list of things that you put in the parking lot throughout the month that was like, you need to tweak this or amend that or remove this thing and grouping those tasks together. So you can be a little more systematic about implementing the changes when you need to instead of doing it a little bit of piecemeal here and there.

Camille Freeman (31:06)
Yes. I love that idea of adding it to a monthly review or even a quarterly type of review of the policies just to make sure... Because it is so easy to handle it for one person and forget to handle it at the systems level. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, oh, I'm going to adjust it a little bit. But if you don't adjust it at all the places it needs to be adjusted, then it just creates bifurcations that are complicating everything. Such a great idea to add it, to have a later list or a parking lot and just actually add it to a to do list at a specific time. I love that.

Camille Freeman (31:53)
It's that under the surface work that can make everything easier or not.

Gina Badger (32:00)
Yeah.

Camille Freeman (32:01)
All right. Well, anything else that you wanted to say to folks who are other practitioners who might be experiencing any of this before we wrap up?

Gina Badger (32:13)
Yes, there is one thing which is I think you can dig really deep with burnout around how did it occur in the first place? What are the underlying factors? And I really encourage everybody to explore that for themselves because unfortunately, I feel like it's a bit of a chronic condition for people who do care work. And some of the things that are causing it, we can change and control and others we can't. But I think for those things that are within our domain, we owe it to ourselves and to our clients to do that. And one of my own insights around that that I just want to underline is that I don't I don't think that burnout is necessarily so much about trying to do too many things because I think as humans, we have many examples of people who do a lot and do a lot until the day they die. And you're like, how do they do that? And I think I have a theory which is that it's actually more about the balance of doing things that draw and doing things that feed us. And so for me, I think that the regular check in that I need to have with myself is like, am I doing enough to feed myself so that I have the capacity to show up and do the work?

Gina Badger (33:43)
And it's like literally feeding myself food I'm enjoying, but also it's like, yeah, am I seeing my friends? Do I have a hobby? These are really serious questions that are somewhat easier to overlook than we think. And I think, yeah, we're all counseling our clients to do that stuff. But really joy is important and pleasure is important. And so I think that some of the space that we can free up with policies, it needs to go toward joy and pleasure and social life and love and all those important things that actually keep us thriving.

Camille Freeman (34:31)
I love that. Which brings me to a point which we haven't mentioned yet, which is that you help people with this. You specifically help care providers who are experiencing burnout or similar types of symptoms. Do you want to mention anything about that type of work?

Gina Badger (34:54)
Yeah. Something I've been working on this year is an introductory offering for care workers, and it's a very broad, very generous, very open definition of what a care worker is. So if any of your paid or unpaid work involves supporting others, I consider that to be care work. The introductory offer is two short appointments spaced about a month apart and a formula. In the intake, we do an inventory of what are the things that... What are three tiny actions that you can implement right away to create some breathing space. Then the herbal formula works on lots of nervous system support and supporting the endocrine system in recovering from stress and whatever else is needed, however those symptoms are impacting the individual person. But it's like a rescue formula a little bit. Let's start rebuilding. And then there's options to do that work on an ongoing basis as you go deeper into how do we want to care for the underlying patterns that got you into the emergency place. Yeah. And it's been a super fun offering to do. It started out as just an experiment, and I think I'm going to keep it as an ongoing offering.

Gina Badger (36:34)
So yeah, it's there on my website, which is longspell.com. And if any practitioners want help with burnout, I'm here for it.

Camille Freeman (36:45)
Yeah. I do think that as a practitioner, sometimes we feel like, oh, I am an herbalist. Why do I need to go to an herbalist to help me? But it's such a different energetic to have that outside perspective and to trust somebody else to support you. It's a big part of the healing process, I think.

Gina Badger (37:13)
I.

Camille Freeman (37:14)
Love that that's there. Encourage people to reach out to Gina if you are on the verge or already over the cliff a little bit. Gina, is there anywhere else that people can connect with you if they want to just follow along social or newsletter or anything like that?

Gina Badger (37:31)
Yeah. I have bits and starts of activity on Instagram. The handle is @longspellclinic, where you can also see my friend and colleague, Nika Khanjani's Somatic Experiencing Practice. And there's a newsletter that you can sign up for either via the Instagram or the Longspell website.

Camille Freeman (38:02)
I love it. Perfect. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us about this. I hope this is helpful for people. And please reach out to Gina if you think there's some support needed. All right. Take care, everybody.

Gina Badger (38:16)
Thanks, Camille.

Camille Freeman (38:26)
Thanks for listening to In the Clinic with Camille. Hey, did you know that I write a weekly practitioner note for herbalists and nutritionists? If you would like to get that in your inbox, you can sign up at CamilleFreeman.com/newsletter. I'd love to have you join us there.