Dr Jenny Brockis - From Wellness to Burnout: How to Achieve Optimal Performance in Your Life.

Dr. Jenny Brockes is a medical practitioner, lifestyle medicine physician and health and wellness coach committed to reshaping the future of healthcare towards a focus on prevention and reduction of chronic disease.

The thing about Western medicine, where it is at at the moment, is that it has become increasingly fragmented. So we're seeing people as parts. The growing realisation is that everything is interconnected. We've got to go back to where we started from, understanding that we are a whole body and that what influences one part influences everything else as well. The level of burnout in so many people is so high and it can recur. If you are able to step back and think, oh, I need to readjust things and sort of do less and maybe delegate some of my stuff to other people so that they can shoulder some of the load, fine and good. But unless you keep tabs on that, it's very easy for it to creep back up and then you're in overload again. And you can burn out again because we're often blind to what we can't see for ourselves, especially when it gets bad. Not everybody crashes and burns in the same way that I did. A lot of people will smolder. So burnout can be a sort of a small forest fire, which can be managed relatively easily without you necessarily having to do too much apart from build the awareness of what you need to do to minimize or reduce your stress level so you're coping better.

How's it different to general practice? Do you want to give us just a bit of an idea about lifestyle medicine?

Okay. Lifestyle medicine is a holistic, evidence-based approach to medicine. It's a rapidly growing speciality. But it's really going back to the fundamentals of getting to the root of what's causing disease and illness in the first place. So there are six pillars of lifestyle medicine.

Yep.

Healthy nutrition, physical activity, restorative sleep, effective stress management, social connection and avoiding those risky behaviours which can make you less healthy.

Look at our evolution and where we've come from. It makes sense, right? Tell us about what's the natural advantage?

I wrote The Natural Advantage because I was concerned that we're living... We've become increasingly urbanised over the last few decades and that's going to continue. We're migrating more and more to live in these big concrete jungles and that means that our opportunity to interact with nature is becoming reduced. We're sort of clear-felling. Unless you've got good urban planning, we're not always... reinstating tree lined avenues and making sure that we've got access to local parks with greenery and vegetation or fountains or whatever. And all the research was saying that we need that interaction with nature to a certain level in order to stay healthy.

Welcome to the One True Measure podcast. I'm your guest, Blake O'Connell. On the podcast each week, we talk to exceptional guests about everything success and this concept of the journey to define, to measure success at an individual level, this inner journey to success. And this week, I'm really excited to talk to this lady about everything from health and wellness to this concept of burnout, optimal performance, and also the