The primary focus of this podcast episode is the profound exploration of stress and burnout, particularly as it pertains to high-capacity leaders. I, Aaron Santmyire, alongside Dr. Jonathan Hoover, delve into the insights presented in his book, "Stress Fracture," which provides essential guidance for those grappling with the relentless pressures of leadership. We engage in a candid discussion about the nuances of stress and how it can escalate into burnout, emphasizing the critical need for self-care amid demanding responsibilities. Dr. Hoover shares his wealth of knowledge on recognizing the signs of emotional and physical exhaustion, along with practical strategies to mitigate these challenges. Our conversation ultimately seeks to inspire hope and awareness, highlighting that recovery and a renewed sense of purpose are attainable for those who have experienced the depths of burnout.

Takeaways:

• This episode features Dr. Jonathan Hoover, who discusses his book 'Stress Fracture', which addresses the challenges faced by high-capacity leaders.
• The conversation emphasizes the importance of recognizing the distinction between stress and burnout, as well as the strategies to mitigate them effectively.
• Listeners are encouraged to practice intentional rest, particularly during periods of heightened stress, to avoid emotional and physical exhaustion.
• Dr. Hoover highlights the significance of spiritual wellness and navigational health in predicting burnout, which can serve as essential components for recovery and resilience.
• The episode offers insights into the symptoms of burnout, particularly for leaders, and how they can be addressed through proactive measures and support.
• Lastly, the discussion underscores the need for a supportive community to help high-capacity leaders navigate through crises and remind them of their inherent value and purpose.

Hey there and welcome back to the Clarity podcast.

This podcast is all about providing clarity insight encouragement for life and mission.

My name is Eric Sandemier and I get to be your host.

Today we have the phenomenal opportunity to have podcast Dr. Jonathan Hoover.

We get to sit down and learn from him on his book Stress Fracture.

This is a book that was recommended to me by Liz Munoz and I got to read it on airplane trip and one I was challenged.

You know, I thought in my role this would be something I could recommend to others but found reading it, wow, it hit pretty close to home for me and so just some valuable lessons I learned from Jonathan you'll get to hear in the podcast.

He's passionate about this subject.

I what I appreciate there's many things I appreciate.

One is he provides hope, he gives some practical insights that we can all put into place and just the reality of being a high capacity leader, wanting to be a driver, wanted to get things done.

At the same time how do we take care of ourselves?

And yeah, just the realities of emotional exhaust and physical exhaustion that can lead to burnout.

So really appreciated Jonathan being on the podcast.

Do want to ask you to continue to subscribe to the podcast and to the podcast I subscribe to or the ones I listen to and ask you also to continue.

Send in your questions for Back channel with Foeth.

That's where we get to sit down with Dick Foth and get to learn from him.

Well, there's no time better than now to get started.

So here we go.

Foreign.

So excited to be here today with a new friend of the podcast, Jonathan.

Welcome to the podcast.

Hey, it's so great to be with you.

Thanks for the invitation, Aaron.

For sure.

Jonathan, your your writings were recommended to me by Liz Munoz and I get to serve with her in our member care department.

And that's wonder and it's been a blessing just to learn from you.

It's been an encouragement for me.

But for someone who hasn't got to know you yet and hasn't had the opportunity to read your book or follow you, could you just share a little bit about yourself?

Yeah.

So I serve two wonderful organizations.

I have two full time jobs.

I'm senior associate pastor at New Spring Church in Wichita, Kansas.

We're a large ministry in the Midwest and then I'm the program director of the Master of Science in General Psychology program at Regent University and I'm an assistant professor there.

So I have a weird mix of things in my life.

I'm both a pastor and a research psychologist and Very active in academic research.

The book you're referring to is really the first project that I wrote for about what I study, but for a popular audience.

And so, yeah, it's been a great, great journey.

Personally, my wife and I have been married for, let's see if I can do the math, right.

This will, this will be 24 years.

This, this year.

And then we have two wonderful daughters, one who's getting ready to graduate from Regent University and one.

One who's a junior in high school.

So.

Wow.

Very, very cool.

So this subject matter, you said this is what you study and how did, what's the genesis story of that?

Because, I mean, there's many things to study.

How did you land in this specific area?

Yeah, well, I was an adult coming into studying psychology.

I had done some college when I was younger, right out of high school, hadn't even finished.

And when I went into this ministry role 16 years ago, I decided to go back and study psychology primarily because I was doing pastoral couples counseling.

I realized very quickly I was in over my head.

And so as I was beginning, the very beginning of my psychology reading research, my dad, who is a senior pastor here at the church that I serve, had what I would describe as a nervous breakdown.

Just the exhaustion from years of overwhelming stress impacted him in such a huge way physically and emotionally.

And what I was struck by was how there were not very many people who could explain to us what was going on.

I mean, they could tell us they felt like he had depression.

And certainly he had the symptoms of depression.

And I would say that he probably was clinically depressed.

No question he was dealing with clinical anxiety at that time, but understanding the sort of uniqueness of his situation, we were really struggling with that.

And I was aware enough as I was beginning my education in psychology to recognize that some of what we were seeing from him wasn't prototypical major depressive disorder.

And so that really got me started looking into this, especially the fact as well, that when my dad really got better over, I would say, six to eight weeks, that also doesn't fit our picture of major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.

And I began to look at high capacity leaders particularly, and their propensity to push themselves too hard and their propensity to collapse.

And I began to find that it was the rule and not the exception.

And people that some people don't even realize had nervous breakdowns.

You have Walt Disney, you have Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame, who had such a profound nervous breakdown that he tried to take his own.

You have J.C. penney, who's one that I don't talk about in my book, but an exceptional nervous breakdown in his story.

You have.

I mean, the list just goes on and on of leaders who.

They hit a wall.

And then when I interview them about this, their stories are profoundly similar.

The challenges they were experiencing, experiencing have such a distinct profile that it really inspired me to try to understand psychologically, how can we understand what's happening when someone pushes themselves to the absolute limits of what they're able to do and really breaks themselves down?

And then how do we help build them back up?

And that has been.

I study a lot of things, but that's the core of what I study in my academic research.

Wow.

And you definitely have.

Definitely have a passion for it.

And that's.

That comes out through your book.

And it was an encouragement for me.

One of the opportunities I have is to care.

One, honestly, it's good for me personally, and two is I care for other people.

It just, it really challenged me and yeah, I just really appreciate it.

So stress and burnout are those two different things.

And could you maybe unpack those for us?

Yeah, for sure.

And by the way, I would also say burnout.

Psychologically, we have a certain meaning when we say burnout.

So some people, when they say burnout, they just mean, I've done something so much that I don't like it anymore.

Like the idea of I'm burnout on eating pasta because I've eaten pasta for five nights.

The same kind of thing of I'm burnout on this job because I've done it for 20 years and it's always the same thing.

That's a legitimate use of the word.

But that's not what we mean when we talk about burnout.

We're talking about an exhaustion based off of prolonged, unrelenting chronic stress.

So if you want to understand the way the trajectory of it.

Stress is just any kind of challenge that we put on our physiology or on our mind.

And so stress by itself is not a bad thing.

As a matter of fact, there is good stress.

And I would make the point scripturally that stress is pre fall.

So we see God giving Adam roles to do, jobs to do, and that activity counts as stress.

Right.

Management of creation that God has put him in charge of that actually is stress.

And so we call that good stress or eustress is what it's called in our field.

And we see what happens when we don't have that.

So if you were to visit a loved one in the hospital, Say who's been in ICU for 16 days, 18 days on, maybe a respirator, you would be concerned about their physiology because their muscles will start to become emaciated.

You look at them and you start to think, wow, they're wasting away.

Well, what's happening is that lack of daily stress, of getting up and walking around, that challenge that we put on our body just by doing life is missing.

We get sick.

So some stress is absolutely reasonable and good.

But then there's what we call distress.

And distress is when we go from that good stretching challenge.

That should push us a little bit out of our comfort zone, but not injure us to the point where stress is beginning to create injury and chronic stress takes it another level.

Because we can deal with a lot of stress if it's very short term.

Like my wife and I just signed a contract on a house yesterday.

We know that the next two months is going to be very stressful.

Right?

But it's two months and so we will be okay.

But.

And anybody who's bought a home, you know what I'm talking about.

But if that was going to be our stress load ongoing, that would be a huge problem.

This is the same kind of idea that if I were to ask you, Aaron, to lift a 20 pound weight and flex and lift that and curl, that you'd be fine.

But then if I were to ask you to take that same 20 pound weight and hold it out extended in front of you for a length of time, you would start to really, really hurt.

And that's what happens.

Those chronic stressors are the things that they're straining us cognitively, perhaps physiologically.

But a lot of the stress I talk about in my book is cognitive stress.

And we don't pay attention to the fact that we keep heaping on more cognitive stress.

And so we're holding it day after day.

It's not that the stress is going to break you because of how much you're carrying one day, it's because you're carrying it day after day after day after day after day, and it accumulates.

That's when we start to see burnout occur.

And burnout occurs because we have let that chronic stress become our normal.

And there's a point at which we don't realize that we're emptying out our reserves of energy.

So we're kind of going to the storehouse of energy and pulling it every day.

But we don't realize that we're withdrawing more than we're adding.

And so there is that projected deficit you're going to hit a point where there's no more energy to pull.

And that's where you see a high capacity leader hit the wall.

One day they're fine, the next day they're not fine.

It's because they finally went to the well and the well was dry.

Right.

And that would be what I would consider to be profound burnout or nervous breakdown territory.

So that's kind of the line from daily good stress to bad stress to chronic daily stress to burnout to nervous breakdown territory.

And so for a medical guy like me, I'm thinking, are there symptoms?

Because, you know, you.

That.

That, I mean, and somewhat it's not fearful, but as I consider myself a leader to think, hey, one day I go to the well, there's water, and then the next day I go, there's no water.

So can you help us with that?

Like, and I know self assessment is often inaccurate.

That's what my friend Roger says.

So I don't know.

So what do we do about that?

Well, and that's the thing.

Any of the primary physiological symptoms we look at that are related to burnout, and there are a lot of them, they could also mean something else.

So one of the things I always say is if you start to experience physiological symptoms that we would associate with burnout, it's worth seeing your doctor regardless, because it could be something else.

But a few things we see physiologically is we see a sense of overall lethargy and fatigue, or lethargy and fatigue.

I feel almost heavy, like, I don't know any other way to put it.

But then so many people that I've interviewed have said, I just have this tremendous heavy feeling.

And that, by the way, we see that with depression as well, but it's not usually as rapid in terms of onset.

That's the scary part for me is the rapid part.

Yes.

Oh, absolutely.

Well, here's the deal, too, and this may be more than you want to know, but it's interesting in research on dementia that we find that there are certain protective factors against dementia.

And it does not keep somebody who has the biomarkers of dementia.

When we look at the brain after the fact and we see plaques and tangles and that sort of thing, it does not keep it from eventually developing what it seems to do.

Right.

We have good research that shows what it seems to do is slow the time period that it shows up.

But when it does show up, it's profound.

And when I was reading this, I'm like, oh, this is exactly what we see with Burnout with high capacity people, they have all these things that they've built up to manage, not breaking down.

They have all these things in their life to keep them from breaking down.

So rather than that sort of slow trajectory that we see into burnout with others with high capacity leaders, we see that rapid trajectory, they have adapted so well, they seem to be doing fine until the day when they're not doing fine.

And you're right, it is something that every leader needs to be aware of.

But yeah, so physiologically a lot of things that would be relative with depression as well.

We look for rapid diet changes.

Are you eating more or less than you usually do?

Is your eating routine disrupted?

And in relationship to that, are you seeing weight changes that you're unexpecting?

It's not that you're trying to lose a few pounds, but you are losing weight that you weren't planning to lose, or you're gaining weight that you weren't planning to gain.

We would look for slower healing times.

So you just begin to anecdotally know that when you cut yourself accidentally or when you bruise or those sorts of things, you're not healing quite as fast.

And that's certainly the case with any kind of respiratory illness that we see a delay in recovery from respiratory illness.

And there's some interesting research that hasn't fully been fleshed out from the COVID era, but I'm interested to see how it finalizes out that there may have been an even greater susceptibility not to getting Covid, but to Covid having been worse for people who were in high stress lifestyles.

That would certainly fit with what we know about stress and immunity.

And so those are things I would say cognitively we look for substantial change from how, you know, your brain works.

And I would say this is specifically very disturbing for high capacity leaders because they wake up one morning and it's not that any of us remember everything.

We forget, everybody forgets stuff.

But one day you wake up and you realize, I can't hold on to information in my head.

I can remember long term things, but when somebody gives me something short term to remember, I just, I can't hold onto it.

And instead of, you know, everybody has that, that time where you start to walk down a hall and you realize, I don't remember what I was going down this hall for.

And that happens to everybody.

But when it starts to happen a lot, and that's, forgive me for breaking so many sentences, but that's something.

When I interview high capacity leaders in their 50s, late 50s, early 60s.

They will say, well, I'm concerned, maybe I'm getting dementia, I'm concerned maybe my memory's going and I can't tell them that that's not happening.

But it very well could just be overwhelming stress because remember, your brain is having to flex to handle, if we use the muscle metaphor, it's having to flex to handle the load of what you're doing.

So whenever the load becomes unreasonable, you're going to start to lose other capacities.

You're going to start to lose abilities you already recognize.

So you start to recognize I'm not remembering things as well.

I'm more easily agitated, I'm more impulsive.

So I'm making decisions that I would have normally thought about more.

I'm creatively rigid right now.

So where I would normally be open to different ideas and considering different ways of doing things, I find myself holding on to what's been successful before.

Anything that I feel like I've done before that has worked, I rigidly hold onto and won't let go of.

I'm very becoming, risk averse.

So.

And it can be very confusing for people who are around you because you're more impulsive, but you're also like more risk averse.

It's a weird, it's a weird constellation of things.

But I would also say, so the three things I look for, by the way, I look for, okay, what's happening to this person physiologically, what's happening to this person cognitively and emotionally?

And then finally, what do people in their sphere tell them?

So when your wife is telling you or your husband is telling you, you don't seem like yourself.

I'm worried that you're doing too much.

I'm worried that you're pushing too hard.

That can be very difficult to hear.

Or people at your workplace are like, we're concerned we've given you too much to do, right?

You go home and you're just like, I'm gonna prove them wrong.

I'm gonna prove that I can do all this stuff.

But actually those God given influences in your life, who.

The more that becomes, instead of a solo, there's somebody singing the solo in your life that you're doing too much and it becomes a choir, right?

Then you have to listen to the choir, right?

That.

I don't know if that makes any sense.

No, it makes it ton.

It makes a ton of sense.

And I think, you know, people that are drivers and want to get stuff done, that's where a lot of their identity comes from.

I'LL speak for me.

I mean, that's, you know, I know my identity is in Christ.

I know that's where that is.

At the same time, I've been rewarded my whole life for getting things done.

You know what I mean?

And so you get that positive affirmation.

And then you do want to think, you know, I can't, I can continue to do this.

And you don't want to think, well, you know, I can, you know, I can't do that.

And so it's.

Yeah, it's challenging.

Like I said, I read your book as a recommendation and I thought, well, this would be something I can help other people with.

But then I thought, well, this is a lot that I need to put in that practice in my life, for sure.

Well, I wrote it for myself as much as for anybody else.

So I'm right there with you.

It's for sure.

So you put an acronym in there, person, which really helps me memory wise.

You talked about forgetting things, but I can remember acronyms.

Will you share that for the audience?

Because that was something that I grabbed a hold of and thought that's something I can remember in my personal life.

Yeah, I stumbled into it by accident because I was on an airplane with a guy and I was talking to him about a stress load.

And there are several different models out there.

SAMHSA has their eight areas of wellness and there's several different models out there of wellness.

And I was trying to pull one out of the air that I could use as I'm talking to this guy and I sort of accidentally merged a bunch of stuff, but it ended up working out really well for me.

So I use the person model, which is just basically about our wellness in six areas.

Physical wellness, emotional, relational, spiritual, occupational and navigational.

Wellness and navigational has to do with what?

In psychology we would talk about agency.

My belief that what I do can impact my life and then also my sense of contentment, excuse me, with where I am in life and where I'm going.

And incidentally, you know, I talk about it in the book.

I have some, you know, the book, really, that's the backbone of the book.

But it wasn't academically tested until about two months ago.

Oh, wow.

My daughter, who is a psychology student, college university student, and myself, we built an academic measure to use.

Actually, you're the first person I'm telling about this.

Other than the fact that it's in peer review right now, sure.

But we developed a measure to academically test.

First of all, the model is, are those six Areas, a good exhaustive index of what, you know, exhaustion, because we're really calling it a measure of broad domain exhaustion.

Is it a good measure of exhaustion?

We wanted to know, does it predict burnout?

Using another measure of burnout and what we found, we found a couple of things.

One was yes, the person model absolutely holds.

It did, it did beautifully.

In academic testing with a large sample, we found that the measure that we'll be introducing with that new article that'll come out, Lord willing, soon in a journal was a good measure.

It predicted burnout at a great rate, which we were thankful for.

But beyond all of that, an interesting finding.

Our model, the person model, includes two elements that aren't very common among these models out there.

One is spiritual health and one is navigational health.

Navigational health is almost out of the blue new and different from almost all of them.

But what we found was spiritual health was profoundly important.

Okay.

Actually it was more relevant to our measures ability to predict burnout than even physiological health or physical health, which was actually surprising.

But the other thing was the standout was navigational health.

And we didn't see that coming either, that it was a very powerful predictor.

How do I feel about where I'm at in life, my contentment with where I currently am and my sense that what I do will make a difference in my future?

And so that was very interesting for us, especially as we, I operate in a, in a field, field of psychology that is very secular.

We have so many wonderful Christians in our field, but it's very secular.

But believe me, I love the ability to show this, this academic research with, with high level statistics to show, look, actually spiritual wellness was a major component in predicting burnout because it absolutely was.

Wow.

And I love the academic rigor and I could, yeah, I could go a lot of ways on that, but I love it and I appreciate the, the intentionality.

And like I said, you, you come alive when you talk about it.

And so that lets you, lets me know it's definitely to be your passion.

So somebody that's listening into this, maybe they're a high capacity leader, maybe they're a spouse of a high capacity leader, maybe they're a friend of a high capacity leader, maybe they're a child of a high capacity leader.

What are some things that they can do, two or three things that they can do to maybe help that high capacity leader or to obviously praying for them and encourage them.

But how do they help?

Signs.

They could be looking for any words of wisdom for them.

Yeah.

So if you're concerned that somebody you love is walking a road toward burnout.

Yeah, I think choose your timing carefully, but have an intentional conversation with them.

Be objective, share with them the actual things you're seeing.

Because my experience has been working with many of these people, especially those who are at the highest capacity.

They will not accept the subjective idea that you just think they're doing too much.

They're going to need objective information about what is it that you're seeing, what is it that you're concerned about.

So, you know, try to have that conversation with good evidence, good timing.

Don't pick, don't pick a time when, if you try to talk to somebody about how overstressed they are in a moment where they're overwhelmed, it's just going to make it worse.

So we want to try to find, pick our moment, find a good moment.

On the other hand, I would say, and I'm actually meeting with a family member of a person today where the crisis is happening right now.

And if you're dealing with a high capacity leader and the crisis is happening, there are a few things.

One is you need to get them some appointments made.

So if you're their spouse, their kid, whatever, they need to see their physician.

Right.

And yesterday wouldn't be too soon for them to see their physician.

Get them in as quickly as you can.

Let the doctor know they're in a little bit of a crisis and have them checked out.

You need to get them see a good, qualified, licensed clinical counselor.

I would say call your church and find out who's a really great Christian licensed therapist in town and then find out who is a spiritual person in their life.

Their pastor, their small group leader, somebody in their life that they really respect and hold an esteem that they can talk to as well.

Right here we're trying to speak to their physical needs with their doctor, their emotional needs with their therapist, and spiritual needs with somebody that they would view as somebody they would trust spiritually.

But a few other things.

One is try to figure out what you can loose them from right now, right.

If they're really in crisis, they won't fight you too much on you can't do that today, right.

If it's true, breakdown, crisis time.

But it takes somebody in their life saying you can't do that today.

It takes somebody in their life saying you can't go into work today.

We need to stop and figure out how to get you some help.

The more they're in a crisis, the less they'll fight you.

But you need to do that because letting them, it's actually not fair to them to give them the impression that they can be in crisis and be under their normal stress load.

Part of fairness and honesty, truth and grace.

Jesus came to us full of truth and grace is to be able to say, the grace part is we are going to get you help and you are going to be okay.

This is not your new normal.

It's going to be okay.

But the truth part is you can't go to work today and do what you always do because you're not okay right now.

And then the other thing is keep them making small decisions.

We know from research that keeping them engaged in.

We don't want them to feel powerless because depression is almost always triggered by the time it's crisis time.

They are experiencing depression.

Right.

Burnout is a way to acquire depression.

There's no doubt about that.

And so what we don't want them to do is become completely deactivated.

So what I mean is, as you're taking them to the therapist and you're stopping by Subway on the way back, make them decide whether it's a ham sandwich or a turkey sandwich.

Make them decide whether we're going to, you know, stop and get groceries before I take you home or I'm going to take you home and I'm going to get like, make them make some decisions.

So keep them active.

But.

So I don't know if what I'm saying makes sense that you do have to kind of manage in a crisis.

If it's your family member, you kind of have to stand up and manage their situation a little bit.

What you want to do is be respectful of them.

Help them understand this is not forever.

Make sure they're getting the right kind of help.

Keep them active.

Don't let them just completely deactivate.

But also don't let them roll into work like it's a normal day.

They'll make the crisis worse because if they truly are in crisis, everybody will be shocked when they show up at work.

So it's actually better to get them the help they need and get them back when they're doing better.

Yeah.

And so you speak of, you said it a few times in there like this is not your new normal.

You know, that they, they are going to.

Can you speak to that?

Because I think sometimes we've, I've heard, I've heard, hey, that that person's burned out and they've never been the same or hey, that person's.

They were, this is how they were before they burned out or they had a breakdown, and then they're just a show of who they used to be.

Can.

Can you speak to that?

Yeah.

And, you know, I think my opinion has changed on this a little bit because I have seen, now that I've seen more cases and consulted a little more on this, I think it really depends on whether the person was very passionate about what they were doing before they burned out.

Okay.

Because I think there's two different things burnout can do.

Some people are not passionate about what they're doing, and when they get burned out, they're never going to have a taste to return back to what they did before.

And so if that's the case, then we're dealing with things like restlessness.

There's a sense within them that I'm unfulfilled and I need to find something fulfilling.

This, in a sense, is the kind of the prototypical midlife crisis we used to talk about.

Right.

Is you're not passionate about something and eventually you hit this crisis, which is sort of like a redefinition crisis.

Most of the people I work with are not like that.

Most of the people I work with were very passionate about what they did before they hit a crisis.

And I would say for those individuals, this is not your new normal.

You will get through this if you get the right help, and you will be, in my opinion, probably more successful at what you used to love once you get a more healthy dynamic going than what you were even before.

My dad has certainly had, you know, it's been 16 years since his nervous breakdown.

And I would say of the, of the, you know, 40 plus years I've been watching, you know, his ministry as his kid, these have been his best 16 years.

Right.

I would say they're unquestionably better than what came before.

And not only that, but I think I've now seen this not only here in this church, but.

But I've seen it in organizations where leaders are transparent.

Right.

So they're not transparent during the crisis, because what you say during the crisis will make no sense and you'll scare people.

But if you will get better and then come back on the heels of a crisis and be honest with people about your journey.

What I have seen is the people will love you more, they will appreciate you more, and they will hoist you up on their shoulders and help you move into this new season post getting better.

So that's when I talk about, this isn't your new normal.

So many leaders have told me, and this is what my dad told my mom on the airplane as they, you know, left to go get my dad help that first day, that it was very clear that everything was falling apart.

When, when they were headed out, my dad told my mom, he's like, I don't think I can ever go back again.

Wow.

And I have had so many leaders tell me that same thing.

You know, I want to get better, I want to do better, but I know I can't go back to what I used to do.

I know that I've messed it up because look at me, I'm a failure.

I wasn't able to show up to work this morning.

I wasn't able to do the things that I normally do.

Listen, if you're a high capacity leader, everybody's rooting for you to get better and come back, right?

If you're a high capacity person, nobody wants to lose you.

And just because you're burned out doesn't mean you've now reached the end of your effectiveness.

It means that you've now learned where the boundary is.

You've now learned, okay, there is such a thing as pushing myself too hard, too far for too long.

And I've got to learn not to.

Not to get.

Get to that point.

No, that's a good word.

And I do, you know, I get the goal is not to get there.

I do.

But at the same time, once people have been there, it's good for them to know that there is, there is hope and there can be.

And what I heard you say is it can be a clarifying experience like recognizing there's things that, you know, I can't do that anymore, or knowing where it'd be clarifying to know where your limit is at.

You know, I can't, I can't do that again because I pushed too far.

And then also maybe clarifying that you were doing things that were just not interesting to you, and you were just doing it because it became the kind of out of habit.

But then in a time like this, you can make some life changes and shifts.

So it's a refining moment.

Yeah, for sure.

And I think, yeah, like I said, it's not something you're striving towards.

But at the same time, if people are there, you know, they can, could.

They could see it in that and the reality that we have hope in Christ.

One of the things you point out is rest like you stress.

What do you mean by resting like you stress?

It's, you know, one of my favorite authors on the topic of stress.

And you can get his books for cheap on Used on Amazon because they're old books.

But Hans Selye was a Hungarian psychologist who actually did most of his research in Canada.

But he was doing research in the 60s and 70s using rats and mice to look at what the effects of stress on physiology are.

And then of course, eventually extrapolating it to human beings and so forth.

But one of the things that his research really clearly shows is that when we are stressed, we are depleting an internal resource.

Those energy stores are getting depleted.

God created a process for us to restock our resources, which is rest, right?

That's why God was so particular about the Sabbath, not because he wanted religion.

The Pharisees didn't understand.

The Pharisees thought the Sabbath was about virtue signaling to everybody around them.

What God was trying to share was the importance of the recharging of the system.

And it was almost as though God was saying, look, if I were to not give you the need for an understood period of rest, that would be like giving you the greatest cell phone in the world and no charger.

It's, you know, the capability is there, but the length of capability is going to be very short.

So the idea here is if I'm not stressing a lot, then perhaps I could rest without much intentionality, without being very strategic about my rest regimen.

But on the other hand, the times when you're stressed the most, which by the way, is when we're likely to rest the least, right?

Again, my wife and I are thinking about the moving boxes and all the things, right?

So it's more likely for us to miss sleep and to miss restful activities, which I'm not just talking about sleep.

Miss restful activities because we've got all these things going on.

But paradoxically, it is when your stress is the worst that you need to be most strategic about your rest regimen.

What am I doing that is recharging the batteries so that I'm able to deal with this stress in my life?

This is especially true for caregivers of long of people with long term illnesses.

When you're trying to care for someone who is ill. Friends of ours just lost their child to cancer and the last year of their precious child's life was taking care of her around the clock.

It's so easy to forget, am I taking care of myself?

Am I staying okay?

You know, it's also the case when you're managing a business, a brand new business, trying to get it off the ground, or you're trying to deal with some sort of really hectic job Or I mean, the stories are all over the place.

But what people will tell me is, oh, yeah, I'm getting less sleep now because I'm so stressed out.

And it really has to be something you push back the other way and say, because you're so stressed out, you need to be getting better sleep, you need to be taking more time off, you need to be doing more things that energize your batteries because elsewise you won't be able to stand up to it.

Wow.

And as you said, it is those seasons where you're the most stressed that you're least likely to rest.

But I appreciated the challenge just to be intentional about it and not to let it up to happenstance or because I don't think you necessarily drift if you're a high capacity leader and the majority of people listen in this podcast are missionaries and they're living in stressful environments and just by what they're doing and the spiritual nature of what they're doing.

I wanted to ask you a question.

You alluded to it a little bit earlier about stress.

And a lot of times you'll see, or at least I've heard stories of people that were under stress and then they maybe end up making a bad decision morally or a temptation or something that maybe if they weren't under such amount of stress, they wouldn't have made that same decision.

But they did.

Right.

And some of those can be.

Yeah, they can be life impacting for everyone involved.

Have you seen that?

Any warning signs, any encouragement for leaders when it comes to making decisions in stressful situations that could lead to lifelong impact for those that they love?

Mm.

I'm working with a co author on a journal article on this right now.

In psychology, we talk about two ways people avoid temptation.

One is willpower.

And of course we have this idea in the popular world out there.

But willpower in psychology is the ability of my.

My ability to say no when the ultimate temptation presents itself.

So let's say somebody is a long term smoker, smoking, pack a day and then they quit.

Willpower would be when somebody sticks a cigarette in your face and says, do you want to smoke this?

Do you say no?

And what we know from research is that willpower is a Las Vegas gamble.

I mean, whether you will say no, it's not a character issue.

It really has more to do with whether you just.

All the right things are in place to say no.

On the other hand, there's something we call pre commitment, and pre commitment involves things that we do both at our level.

Of awareness and below our level of awareness to put ourselves at least some distance away from being presented in our face with the ultimate temptation.

I'll give you an example.

You know, so many people love the marshmallow study that we do with toddlers, right?

That the question is we put a little marshmallow on a plate in front of toddlers and say, if you wait until I say so, you can have two.

You can eat the one marshmallow now, but if you wait until I tell you, you can have two, and then you leave the room as an adult.

Now there's a camera in there, so you're watching to see what the kiddo's doing.

But this is very hard for a very small child who thinks concretely to hold off on eating this one marshmallow.

And, you know, some of the kids just pop that marshmallow right in their mouth, of course.

But the ones that are trying not to, interestingly, one of the things these kids will do is they will turn and look the other way from the marshmallow.

Or some of them, there's a little love seat in the room.

Some of them will take the marshmallow and go stick it under the pillow in the love seat to hide it from themselves.

Right?

This is pre commitment.

It shows us that God gave us a capacity for pre commitment that is actually within ourselves to recognize the importance of putting distance between ourselves and the ultimate temptation.

So where I'm going with this is chronic stress does not seem to mess with willpower.

Willpower is very unsuccessful out of the gate.

And.

But chronic stress doesn't seem to move the willpower needle one way or the other.

What it powerfully moves is pre commitment.

So chronic stress over time actually substantially reduces pre commitment.

So think about what we think about.

We think about moral failures in leaders in the Christian world.

Certainly there are some, and this is one of the things that my co author and I are writing about, there are some that clearly use ministry as a cloak to do things that they can only get access to by being in the ministry.

And that's a whole thing unto itself.

We're talking about the individuals for whom their moral failure violates their own moral code.

If we were to ask them, is this wrong?

They would say, clearly, yes, this is wrong.

And often we have one instance or a couple of instances, not a pattern, not a lifelong pattern of instances.

And that, of course, breaks our heart.

And we say, why is this happening?

And it does not excuse it.

Right?

My co author and I are trying very carefully to say what we're doing is we're not excusing the car accident.

We're looking at the tire skid marks to say, how did this accident happen?

And I think one of the things here is to say a leader who has a moral failure if they're super chronically stressed.

What we may have seen is that while they're wearing the badge of stress, look at what I'm doing for the Lord.

Look at all the things that I'm accomplishing.

Yes, I'm wearing myself out.

Yes, I have no energy left.

But look at the amazing things I'm accomplishing for the Lord.

While they're doing that, Satan is using their reduction of pre commitment to structure this opportunity where they're not going to be ready when the moment comes.

And so what does that tell us?

It tells us two things.

One is managing your stress is not just about the, you know, the psychology of it all, the emotions of it all.

Right.

Managing your stress is part of how you're maintaining your moral compass in your ministry.

But it's not just that.

If I'm stressed out, I said a moment ago, you got to be more strategic about your rest and everything.

But it's not just that.

If you're super stressed out, you have to be more strategic about your pre commitment.

In moments where you're stressed, you're going to have to work even harder to say, I'm not going to let this back off my boundaries from trying to stay as clear as I can from the things that I need to.

I need to put myself farther away from things that I can get in trouble with now and not allow myself to edge closer to it.

Wow.

Good word.

Last question I have for you.

Yeah.

Somebody that has went through a season of burnout or emotional exhaustion and they're trying to.

They feel like they're trying to get their spiritual life back.

I don't know if that makes sense, but, you know, spiritually, they're trying to grow again.

Maybe they've just went through a season that feels like a desert.

Any words of encouragement for them?

And then I'm going to ask you to pray for us.

Yes.

I'm looking around the office right now to see if I have a copy to show you.

I don't think I do.

My dad wrote a book when he was at his worst, and he did what I would encourage anyone to do.

Spiritually, the book wasn't because he wanted to write for anyone else.

It was more of a he was journaling for himself that then got turned into a book.

But what he did was he went back to what he knew for sure.

He went back to.

He started with what do I know for sure about God?

Because he felt spiritually disconnected from God during that time.

And I got to go back to what I know.

So he went back to the basics of there has to be a message to believe, and there has to be a desire in the heart to believe it.

And he went through just kind of going through the basics.

And the basics.

Well, here's what I'll tell you.

God will not only meet you at that point, because he always will.

God won't meet you in the complexity of splitting hairs.

God will meet you when you go back to the basics.

Go back to what you know for sure.

Remember Billy Graham had a moment where he put his Bible on a stump in the middle of a field and said, I've just got to decide whether I believe this or not.

And then you start with the basics.

But that book that my dad wrote has now been the first book that's been handed to well over.

I think at last count, it was well over 35,000 people.

That was the first thing they received when they made a decision for Christ to walk through their new journey with the Lord.

And so God will not only use it to help you draw closer to him.

Check me on this.

Read the Bible and check me on this.

Is it not true that every crisis of faith where a person dug deeper into where God was trying to meet them?

Was it not a new season for them, where they came out stronger in their faith and where they came out into a new season of God's potential for them?

I believe that's uniformly true.

So if you will go back to the basics.

What do I know about God?

What do I know about his character?

By the way, this is what we teach with lament.

What is lament?

It's two parts.

It's weeping to God, saying, God, this is how I feel, and it's terrible, and I don't like it.

But then it's paired with a statement of faith.

But I know this is true about your character.

I know this is who you are.

Yeah, that's where I would end.

This is to say, if you're stressed out, lament to God.

God, I'm stressed.

I'm struggling.

This is hard.

I don't know even how to process what I'm going through.

But then start with, what do you know about God?

What is it that you would stake your life on about God?

And just start building from there, and you'll.

You'll be Surprised how that spiritual energy will come back to you.

Awesome.

Jonathan, it has been a joy and I love spending time with people that are passionate about the giftings and talents God has given them and, and you have a spiritual gifting for writing and communicating and it's been an honor.

Will you pray for us today?

I would love to.

Father, thank you so much for this time that we've had together.

Thank you for Aaron and this powerful ministry.

Father, for every missionary that's listening to this, I pray that you would give them a special sense of your peace and energy in this moment.

Father, what they are doing to change the world on the mission field is something that none of us will fully appreciate until we see you in glory and you help us understand what they've done for the kingdom.

Father, they are world changers that are not trumpeted now but will be in your kingdom and we're thankful for that.

We pray that you would give them your compassion, peace.

The world is a very challenging place right now.

I pray you would give them safety, keep their families safe, keep them in out of harm's way, you know, Father, I just pray that you would.

For those who are just under the stress of ministry, Father, I pray you would remind them why you called them.

Help them see their purpose that you've called them to and then Father, help them see clear pathways to reduce their stress, to be able to be all that you've called them to be in this moment.

And we'll trust you for that outcome and give you all the glory and praise as always because it belongs to you in the first place.

In Jesus name, Amen.

Amen.