S2-Ep1: Introduction to Burnout and the Science of Chronic Stress with Ras Contractor

Season 2, Episode 1: Introduction to Burnout and the Science of Chronic Stress

Welcome to the beginning of a transformative 5-part series on The Dang Good Show! In this episode, Christine Dang sits down with Ras Contractor, founder of High Level Think, to explore the hidden epidemic of burnout and chronic stress affecting millions of workers today.

Discover what's really happening in your body when you experience chronic stress, and why traditional approaches to burnout often miss the mark. Ras shares his unique journey from engineering to becoming a resilience specialist, blending Eastern wisdom with Western neuroscience to help companies achieve 30-50% revenue growth while transforming employee wellbeing.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The alarming statistics: 66% of American and 47% of Canadian workers are experiencing burnout

• Why burnout isn't just "being tired"—it's your body's shutdown signal

• The "flexed muscle" analogy that perfectly explains chronic stress

• Early warning signs you might be missing

• The game-changing "physiological sigh" breathing technique

• Why high achievers are particularly susceptible to burnout

• How workplace culture creates (or prevents) burnout

• One simple daily audit to assess your burnout risk

Whether you're feeling the weight of chronic stress yourself or leading a team through challenging times, this episode offers eye-opening insights and practical strategies to begin your journey toward sustainable resilience.

Coming Up in This Series:

• Episode 2: Mind and Body Training - Practical Neuroscience Applications

• Episode 3: Building Resilience - Team and Culture

• Episode 4: Leadership Through Change and Transformation

• Episode 5: Creating Sustainable High Performance

Resources mentioned:

• Episode 32: Breaking the Cycle of Burnout - Strategies for Sustainable Self-Care

• Ras Contractor: highlevelthink.com | Instagram: @RasAllahContractor

Transcript

• Segment 1: Introduction

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  Hey there, beautiful people. Welcome back to The Dang Good Show. I'm your host, Christine Dang, but you can call me C Dang. Today marks the beginning of a special five-part series I believe could be transformative for many of you listening. Over the next few episodes, we're diving deep into something that affects more of us than we'd like to admit: burnout. But we're not just talking about it. We're exploring real solutions with someone who's made it his mission to turn chronic stress into resilience.

  I'm thrilled to introduce Ras Contractor, founder of High Level Think. Ras is an old dear friend and brings a unique perspective to this conversation. After spending over a decade building healthy dynamic teams across industries from marketing to construction, he's developed a comprehensive approach that addresses burnout at its root. What I find fascinating about Ras is how he combines hard science and biomechanics with practical implementable strategies. But more importantly, he's helped companies achieve remarkable transformations. We're talking 30 to 50% revenue growth and massive improvements in employee engagement.

  Today, we begin our journey understanding what burnout really is and why it's become such a critical issue in our modern world. Ras, welcome.

  Ras Allah Contractor

  Thanks for having me, C-Dang. It's good to be working on this together. When we reconnected earlier this year, it was really fun to get to this point. It's also interesting how time flies because this came fast.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  I know it's wild because I think for me and you when we knew each other back then we were both in different industries and then now we've kind of evolved into what we do now which is just really helping people, which is amazing.

  Ras Allah Contractor

  That's so true, right? It's the type of thing where this might be also the arc of people as they grow up and you're doing things and you're living a life and then you sort of just learn more and you ideally just are trying to improve yourself and the things around you.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  Exactly. So that kind of goes into our first question, Ras. What led you from engineering to becoming a burnout specialist?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So I wouldn't call myself a burnout specialist. I think that there are PhDs and master's students and people that have been practicing traditional Eastern Western medicine that are solving powerful problems for people. I'll call myself an experimenter, a lifelong learner who took a five-year break of learning in my early 20s and then recognized that that's not the way to be.

  So I was an engineer because that's what made sense externally. And then I was given signals that maybe this isn't the right path, but I went through with it. And then at the end of it, I just realized that I needed to do something different. And so I did, and then needed to do something different quickly.

  So in the end, I've always been a health and wellness guy. I tried to work out earlier than what was comfortable. I was always experimenting with different activities and sports, and I like to meet lots of people and learn from them. I just was always trying things. And as I had issues, I learned about the issue and tried to solve it because I think I learned the value of my body and then I would push it and then it would, there would be a problem and I would go in to figure out how to fix it or become stronger. And so maybe I'm just a guy who's been trying to get bigger, faster, stronger and kinder my whole life.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  Now you mentioned Eastern and Western science. I think that really speaks to me because I've always believed there's truth in both approaches. So you're basically building a bridge between the worlds that usually don't even speak the same language, like Western science with its brain scans and data, and then you have Eastern medicine with its energy and ancient wisdom. I love that you didn't pick a side because I've noticed that people who only stick to hardcore science miss out on thousands of years of wisdom. And while those reject all research, might be missing tools that could really help them in the end. It's like having two different maps to the same treasure, you know?

  So what really intrigues me is your healing journey, using neuroscience and biomechanics to repair your body while weaving in everything else you've learned. That's not a typical recovery story. Was there a moment when these different pieces clicked together for you? Like when the science suddenly validated something Eastern medicine had been teaching forever? Because I think our listeners would love to understand how this actually works when you're helping someone heal from burnout.

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So healing is a personal journey. I'm not a doctor. All I can do is provide information and use the information and my experience to help suggest opportunity and options for people. People have to do their own work. They have to go through their own journey. They have to understand themselves and I'm just part of the process if that's something that makes sense.

  So going back, I grew up doing Hatha yoga because both my parents were certified instructors and there was talk of if you do a corpse pose, relaxation, a Savasana, it's like sleeping. And I was like, oh, sweet, I don't have to sleep. That's weird because I had stressful sleeping my whole life. I grew up in pubs because I was playing in a band and then discovered things here. So sleep is always a weird thing for me. So Savasana, interesting information.

  Fast forward to today, Andrew Huberman is talking about non-sleep, deep rest, which is basically the same thing and how we can get to that deep state. That's a quick kind of connecting the past to what people are probably seeing on social media today.

  For myself, after I solved a several year decline in health around 2021, so I was just turning 40, I was running up a hill, I got to the top and I was dying. Typical, like you've just exerted yourself too much, you can't capture enough oxygen to solve what you feel like is the problem. So you just got to lay there gasping or stand there gasping. I didn't fall down, but I was standing there hunched over gasping for air.

  I continued my run, I just took the data and moved forward, did some research, found something called the physiological sigh. And so with this, it's an inhale, another one, and then. And so that tells the brain to relax, expands the biomechanics of breathing, and allows you to potentially push through where you feel like you probably can't.

  I used this a week later without running in between and I was able to run up the hill and around for the rest of the run, which is about 20 minutes total, five minutes up the hill, 15 minutes for the rest of the run. That blew my mind. Because I don't see transformations like that. I've been playing sports, I've studied to be a personal trainer, I have some very deep knowledge of the body. To start with, this was game changing.

  That told me there's something going on that I'm not totally aware of and if we can cue our body to relax whereby my body was panicking a week before, let's go down this rabbit hole, please.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  Wow. So basically what you're saying is that for you, you ran up the hill, you did your breathing to calm your nervous system down, and then you were able to run 20 minutes versus people who would run up the hill, freak out and just stop because they can't control that breathing. Is that what you're saying?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  Yeah, exactly. Just a breathing cue that gives us a higher capacity to function.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  That breathing technique is something I'm definitely going to try.

  Ras Allah Contractor

  I can't wait to think about it. And not to mention, there's other, that's just the start of it. So just imagine like this one cue changes the way we behave under stress. And then just to address what happens to our body, under stress, things tighten, we stop breathing and it exacerbates. Now, if you're able to undo that, then you're not going to have the sort of tightening and collapsing that happens as a result of the stress in our body, which then creates more capacity to do work. It's just crazy when you cycle it.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  That's amazing. You just unlocked something in my mind. Now with talking about stress, why is burnout such a critical issue right now?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So I think burnout's always been a thing because there's always been health issues. There's always been people get frustrated. Something interesting from over 10 years ago that in conversation came up: People don't get up to be a frustrating human. You're not born a frustrating human. You're born a baby who is excited to learn about the world and just frustrated when things don't make sense and when things are scary.

  But you have people who are really frustrating to be around. You have people who really awesome to be around. You have people who just like, they just are. And so that's a function of the things that we go through in life. So burnout's always been an issue, but chronic stress was never tied to it in a very powerful way. And what's happening on the Western side is that the data and the research is showing the correlation. And I think it's always kind of been there on the Eastern side because the value of breathing effectively and relaxing and stretching has always been important there. So burnout's always been an issue, but let's deal with it now.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  That is, yeah, I think so just for you listeners, let's just paint this picture, okay? I want to talk about the alarming statistic of what's going on. So workplace stress is at alarming levels in 2025 even. Research is showing that basically 47% of Canadian workers were feeling burnout while 66% of our neighbor American employees are experiencing burnout.

  So the key drivers include heavy workloads, emotional fatigue, poor work-life balance, lack of support, and labor shortages. And this is just something I just Googled and just reading it off to you guys. So the younger generations like Gen Z report high stress from unpaid overtime and concerns about global political turmoil. And so 61% are even questioning about their career path due to impact in their mental health. That's ridiculous, Ras. That's crazy.

  But yeah, that's a lot. I mean, 47 is almost 50, but 66% in America. I can see that in America. I feel like a lot of the corporate workload, they were progressing and now they're kind of going back to the old ways of working. Any takes on that? I know you would.

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So I mean, during the pandemic there was this push to wellness because it was a way to kind of keep people engaged. Because the pandemic, once everything goes back and then you get inflation and you get geopolitical turmoil, just in the North American side, you got tariffs kind of kicking around. So as soon as that happens, leadership panics, shareholders starts to get pissy. And then it's like, just get work done and cut labor costs as much as possible.

  So profits in capitalism, profits in business trump most things and it's difficult in times of duress to recognize that if you just focus on the profit line, you're going to cause problems downstream. So what can we do? Not much, really. Like you just have to educate, educate, educate and people will pick it up.

  But if you think about the alarming statistics that you just shared. Here's my hot take. There are stressors. Things aren't going to be great. But if you put that aside and train resilience, then you perceive stress in a different way. So we're not necessarily running into a chronic stress epidemic. We're under trained to handle life as it is today.

  And so if we go in and train to be more robust mind and body, then you're not as concerned about the geopolitical tensions because you focus on what is in front of you. You're not as concerned about the things that are going around at work that don't necessarily affect your day to day because you're just head down, get this done, and sometimes just collect the paycheck. Or you're so empowered that you head down, collect the paycheck, build the stuff on the side, and then just leave the situation.

  Whatever that is, it's reversing the trend to let the things around this hit us in the face and go what can I do? How can I do this? And what's the first step to moving forward? And maybe that's the core of resilience training.

• Segment 2: The Hidden Cost of Burnout

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  So that's perfect. It just kind of goes into our next segment, which is about the hidden costs of burnout. So let's explore the physical, mental and organizational impacts. And the first question I have for you is what happens in our bodies when we experience chronic stress?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  All right. Chronic stress is stress, but it's latent. So it's there, but we don't totally know it's there. And we can kind of just function as normal or so we think. If it continues, then it just stays. And that is where the problem comes from.

  We'll use the example of a muscle. If I was to just flex my arm and hold it and hold it and hold it and hold it. At some point my arm's going to get tired, but if I don't listen and relax the arm, then it's going to shut down that signal and just push through because the body will adapt. And then it'll just keep going and going and going. At some point it's going to seize up and I'm going to have this really jarring pain through my arm. That's the end state.

  Chronic stress is I just didn't undo my arm. So consider chronic stress something that is creating pressure, tension, stress that is creating a neurological biomechanical result, a hormone changes ever so slightly until it becomes too much for the body and then the body says, you're not listening, I'm going to make you listen, you're on to the more difficult.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  So distressing it, right? What would that look like? So if you're constantly flexing, how would we distress? And is this the same as releasing tightness in our body?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  That's exactly the same. So go back to the arm example. I'm flexing my arm ever so gently because I'm just like the way it looks or pretend that. And so what will happen is at some point the arm is going to, the muscles in the arm are going to send a signal in my brain and say, buddy, just chill. Okay. I'm going to relax my arm, shake it out and okay, I really want to do it again. That's fine. I'll just keep flexing it.

  But the relaxation, giving it time to recalibrate and then reflexing is that's the cycle of work rest, work recovery. Right? It's listening to the body, listening to the body. So go back to those elements of chronic stress you talked about, or you talk about work, you talk about relationships at work, money as well. I want to talk about nutritional stress at some point.

  The body is telling you, hey, I don't like going to work. There's something at work that's bugging me. I don't like getting up in the morning. There's something around me that's bugging me. I don't want to go home. There's something at home that's bugging me. I don't feel good because of what I ate, but I love eating it.

  The body's telling you something. When you listen to your body, then you can address it. If you're not listening, then the body is just going to be stuffing that signal down and it's going to find different ways to tell you and at some point you're going to be forced to listen.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  What are the early warning signs from people that they often miss?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  If we're talking about early signs, now we're talking about before it's created massive problems for you, right? That's the ideal time to be looking at something. I don't go to bed peacefully and just looking forward to the next day or grateful for the experience of being in your life, and if you don't wake up with energy, excited to do the thing that you're going to do.

  Within the boundaries of yes, you didn't sleep because you had to go to bed late because it could be kids, animals, whatever. That all makes sense. But there's still an element of wake up, okay, I'm excited to do this. And go to bed, I'm excited, I'm ready to fall asleep. And if that's not your bookend of the day, then there's something in your life that's creating stress for you. And it's worth assessing, at the very least acknowledging.

• Segment 3: Personal Story & Transformation

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  I love how you put that. And I think that kind of segues into the next session that I really want to talk about is your personal story and transformation. Because everything you talked about is, I can tell, is from experience. So I want to hear more about your journey and the aha moments that we did talk about in the past. So was there a specific moment when you realized traditional approaches weren't working?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  Okay, so in my whole life, I can look back and go, I should have caught that. That would have been nice to catch early. That would have been important. Would have saved this later on, but that's not how life works. We typically don't see the message until it comes at us a few times or really creates enough damage to then force us to then change, right? So you have to go through a lot of pain to get the motivation or the discipline to change the behavior, right? So that's kind of what I've noticed in my life and I see it everywhere around me.

  So one moment that stands out for me is definitely my experience with iritis. So this is an inflammation of the eye because of a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which is a rheumatoid arthritic condition as a result of a gene I have in my blood. Long-winded, but ultimately my eye gets inflamed whenever I get stressed to a certain point, and this is the first time it happened in my 20s.

  The doctor told me, this just happens, that's how life is. Fast forward 20 years later, and in my study of neuroscience and biomechanics, I learned that there's biomechanical and neurological transitions that come as a result of the stress that then manifest for me as I write this. And so, something's missing. I could have learned this earlier, but I had to find it out for myself 20 years later.

  Another moment that stands out for me is when I was in high school, I sprained my ankle really bad playing basketball. And as a result of that, I ended up getting orthotics for my flat feet and wearing orthotics in normal shoes for 25 years. What I learned later is that the reason my feet were flat were because my biomechanics were off. So I wasn't walking properly because of wearing shoes too early and because of not understanding the way that the body moves and turns and powers up and relaxes.

  Moving into that created problems. And then fast forward to today, I understand how dangerous the normal style of shoes are with a narrow toe and a raised heel and I use barefoot style shoes and my toes are stronger and I am more mobile, I'm stronger from sort of top to bottom, bottom to top than I was in my 20s because I learned something that science wasn't teaching us.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  That's interesting. So how did your engineering background influence your approach or influence how you got here? It was just based from personal experiences that made you go to where you are right now?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So I would say that the engineering studies helped me kind of think in a systems mindset. It refined what was more naturally my systems headspace. And so there's some critical thinking, there's some diving in, they're trying to teach you that you can build things and you can just start from the ground up. And if you dive deep into the root cause, then you can assess the problem effectively and create a robust solution.

  So if you think about engineering just being the study of how things move and go together and how to build things, loosely, then that helps. That being said, always wanting to be healthy and maybe seeing some stuff in the way that my body was responding, my mind was responding, not the way I wanted and maybe not the way I expected it to. And so, you combined all that and it just you go into life trying to just solve things.

  I mean, if you think about the common knowledge in rest, food, movement, it changes, right? Like fat's good, fat's bad, too much protein, too little protein, protein when. So engineering, we would say, helped me with moving into experimentation. I would say that's definitely a big part.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  So it's kind of nice to see how you've evolved over time into what you're doing right now. Because I think what you're doing right now is super, super cool especially going to the corporate world going in there fixing things that's broken. And I just kind of want to reflect back to one of the episodes that I did talk about burnout in episode 32, you guys. I kind of explored the topic of burnout and how we can break the cycle through sustainable self-care, which Ras has been sharing with us and drawing on my personal experience as well. So if you guys are curious, definitely listen to episode 32. It's called Breaking the Cycle of Burnout and Strategies for Sustainable Self-Care.

• Segment 4: The Root Causes Nobody Talks About

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  So the next thing I want to talk about is the root causes no one really talks about. So let's dive deep into this. And I'm going to ask you the first question that popped in my mind is, why do high achievers seem particularly susceptible to burnout?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  Okay, so I have a hot take on this one. High achievers are likely heading to burnout because they desire to achieve more than they desire to pay attention to their own signals. On the flip side, low performers are probably just already burnt out. They just maybe burnt out early and didn't really notice it, or it's happened very slowly, or whatever the reason.

  I believe strongly that, and we talked about this earlier, it requires pain and difficult times to rewire and then build the discipline to move forward and fix the things that are causing the problem. So everybody, your entire viewership, the rest of the world are capable of whatever they put their mind to. But the hindrances, the chronic stress, things that are filters that aren't helping us need to be addressed, assessed, dealt with, at the very least acknowledged and then everything's possible.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  So I guess it kind of is almost asking like how does a workplace culture contribute to burnout then?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So culture, let's define culture as the way the organism behaves. So whether it's me as an organism, you as an organism, and all those moving parts and moving things inside us, or a family, a group of friends, a team within a company, a department within a company, an entire company, a conglomerate of companies, that is the culture. And the culture is made up of the people in it and the people who run the company or the team or the household.

  Culture is the way we behave but the way we behave as a group is misaligned with the individuals values then you're going to have complete dissidents the whole time and it's going to create a problem. Acting out burnout people leaving. People joining that shouldn't join, all sides of it.

  So how does it start at the top? The people who build the team build your organization build the company, build the family, build the group of friends. They have to understand what type of culture they want and then protect it. Protect it like it's the most important thing that is in your realm of control. Protect your great culture because chaos, entropy is working to erode said culture. And if you do you're going to enjoy what's happening.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  You're absolutely right. And you hit something that I'm so passionate about. You know what drives me crazy is when companies roll out these big training initiatives and make it mandatory for every employee, but then leadership is mysteriously too busy to participate. I've seen this disconnect happen so many times and it's like watching a train wreck in slow motion because here's what happens.

  Employees go through the training, right? They get excited about this new idea and the approaches, and then they go back to their department where their managers are still doing the things the old way. Talk about mixed messages. It also reminds me of that saying, culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can have the best training program in the world, but if leadership isn't walking the walk, it's dead on arrival. Yeah, the magic happens when leaders go first. Exactly what you said.

  Ras Allah Contractor

  Absolutely. I'm glad that it resonated because it to me is like a truth. I've seen, all over the world, cutbacks and then bonuses. Let's go back to the really dark days of 2008. You even talk about the window through COVID where, yeah, like, the world economy is failing. And then as soon as things are resolved, bonuses are being doled out, right? That's a dark thing. We can maybe address that as we kind of work through the episodes.

  But more specifically to your point, imagine if leadership was setting the example. Cutbacks, I'm taking a salary cut. We need to work harder, I'm putting in the work. Something's screwed up, no, I take ownership of this because I'm the one that makes the final decisions. That mindset. Then people fall in line, they want to fight, run through a wall for you.

  I love sports because it's kind of a fun analogy, right? Like a great coach will have players breaking their backs to win the game at the end. And an average coach will probably start to lose close games and a really crappy coach won't even be in close games. So just the leadership is everything. It starts from the top, but it has to cascade down.

  And if there are elements within an organization or within a culture that are toxic, they need to be removed or dealt with. We'll say dealt with or removed. And then if there are elements in a culture that are high performing, they need to be, good job, this is what we want. Do you know what I mean?

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  Yeah, I think that kind of also hits on basically leaders needing to be more vulnerable, right? When they're vulnerable and they're enough to say that I'm learning this too, let's figure it out, or that pay cut that you mentioned, that creates a psychological safety that shows humanity. And most importantly, it shows that change can actually happen. And it matters as well, because at the end of the day, people don't follow what you say they follow what you do.

  And when there's alignment from the top to bottom, when everyone's speaking the same language and moving in the same direction, that's where real transformation happens. And I've seen this happen so many times. And so that kind of rolls into my next question because technology is being used more and more in different companies. So what role does technology play in modern burnout?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So let's take the word technology. Technology is making things faster, easier, quicker. And so if we look at technology from the dark ages and caveman days and then leading up to today, let's use the example of the phone. So right now, we can roll out of bed, check our phone, and everything's available.

  Rewind a bunch and in order to see what's going on in the outside world, whether it's a newspaper or what's going on at work, we would have had to roll out of bed, settle ourselves to some degree, walk out, get the newspaper, sit down, start to read it or walk out after this and then head over to the office and check our manual inbox before we start to deal with that.

  Look at that differential. How much was done to set ourselves up for the rest of the day prior to getting information? What happens now is we wake up, cortisol is high, which is normal, but we're spiking it with immediate bouts of either social media or news or email and that's going to create more stress for the body before it settles and primes itself to handle the stress.

  So from an organizational standpoint, quick information, emails at odd hours or overloaded emails because it's just easier to send an email than to call someone or talk to them or walk over. That leads to an intensity that our mind and body is not prepared for, which then leads to burnout.

  So, right, we have to really assess what we used to do and how our bodies and minds are changing and how quickly technology is changing and how we need to actually be aware of that and intentional about making sure that we don't lose key processes and systems in our lifestyle to be able to maintain the constant pace that we want to maintain.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  Would that be a good introduction to the concept of organizational health? Basically describe the company's capacity to function effectively, adopt change and achieve its goal. Is that where you come in, correct?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So I thank you for bringing this up. Now, organizational health, let's look at it from a perspective of health. If you're dealing with an individual, then you don't say, hey, you person X, you're going to walk 10,000 steps, lift weights for an hour every morning, and then you're going to stop eating until 1 PM every single day. That's not going to help everybody. It might help a subset of people.

  But if you don't go in and assess who the person is, the way they behave right now and what they're capable of, then you risk breaking them on the way to trying to fix them. So from an organizational health perspective, let's consider it the same thing. In order to work towards having a healthy, dynamic, powerful, dominant organization, you have to assess the current state of the organization.

  What's going on? What's my team? How do we behave? What are the things that we're paying attention to? And then that's your assessment. From there, you've got to figure out where you've got to go. How do we want to behave? What do we want to see in the future? What are we trying to accomplish together? And then, journey there.

• Segment 5: Conclusion & Next Steps

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  Thanks for sharing that Ras. I think a lot of times people know it, but they don't get validation from it. So we are basically at the end of the episode, but I do want to let you listeners know what is coming down the pipeline.

  So episode two, we're going to talk about mind and body training, practical neuroscience application. Episode three, we're building resilience, team and culture. And then we talk about in episode four, leadership through change and transformation, which I love this stuff. And then the last episode we're going to do is basically talk about creating sustainable high performance changes and whatnot.

  So with that in mind, I have a couple of questions for you, Ras, before we kind of end this up. What's one thing listeners can do today to assess their burnout risk?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  Love it. Take an audit, assess yourself. Are you waking up with energy? Are you going to bed peacefully? If you look at it from that perspective, that's where you start. Another step if you want to add is kind of journal your day. Pay attention to, again, what happens when you wake up, what happens before you go to sleep, the things you eat, how much you move. It sounds like a lot, but you're just kind of like thinking and writing.

  So if you just kind of look at that perspective, but assess based on how you wake up and how you go to sleep. If it's not the way you want it to be, then there's something that's going on that's not ideal for you. And if that's the case, there's time for a bit of a deep dive or maybe even a very, very gentle dive.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  And I think a lot of people don't really look inwards. And I think journaling is so important because like, sometimes we're thinking things, but that's in loops, right? But when we do write it down, it takes that thought out and put it on paper and you can actually see it for what it is. So journaling, I talk about it a lot in my past episodes. So guys, we're listening. Journaling is your best friend.

  And so the next question I have for you is what transformation is possible when we address burnout properly?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  So using your example of journaling, you get it out and then it's not loading you anymore. And at the same time, you can also write down a question and then go away and come back and it'll give you, you will have the answer writing into it.

  So what's possible addressing the bookends that I'm talking about? If you wake up with energy and you go to sleep peacefully, then your entire day becomes something that is powerful. You're capable of so much. Now moving towards that. I use myself as the example that I'll present to your audience.

  I didn't have great habits growing up. I didn't have great habits at many points in my life. I also have conditions that cause problems and I've made mistakes, big, big mistakes that have caused big, big problems for me. Today I sit in front of you, metaphorically and hypothetically speaking, as a very healthy 44 year old man who, because of what I've learned, I'm able to do things and I have energy and I have I'm strong, I'm mobile, like yes, we're always journeying to be better.

  But I'm happy with where I'm at and I'm moving towards getting better. And that's what's possible from wherever. So you can go through several years of your body collapsing on yourself and let me share some information with you and you'll be able to at least navigate where you're at.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  So that has been eye-opening and I think what strikes me most is how burnout isn't just being tired. It's literally our bodies saying that we just can't keep up anymore and that analogy about the constantly flexed muscle really hit home for me and I think for our listeners as well.

  So thank you so much for breaking down the science in such an accessible way. I know our listeners are walking away with a much deeper understanding of what's actually happening when they feel chronic stress building up.

  So the next episode, guys, we'll dive into our mind and body training approach and discover practical tools to start building resilience. And Ras will be sharing specific techniques you can implement right away. Until then, I want you to pay attention to your own stress signals this week. Notice when you're in a fight, flight or freeze mode. Just awareness alone can be the first step towards change.

  And for all the show notes, transcriptions, and links from today's episode, visit c-dang.com. And curious to learn more about Ras, well, you can definitely hit up his website at highlevelthink.com. Any last words, Ras, before we let everyone go?

  Ras Allah Contractor

  No, thank you for having me. I'm excited for this episode and the next four that are going to be our five part series. Yeah, if listeners want to catch me, the website's the easiest way to go. I'm on Instagram as RasAlaContractor. And yeah, look forward to connecting. And I'm just a resource.

  Christine "C-DANG" Dang

  Amazing. And thank you so much for that. And so thank you for joining us on the Dang Good Show. Stay mindful, stay curious, and as always, stay dang good. Much love, CDang signing off.