The Psychology of Stress & Burnout
David Oromith · 68 minutes · recorded May 17, 2026
The talk opens with a grounding meditation in which we settle the body and set an intention. David brings together the Buddhist view that stress is the gap between how we want things to be and how they are with Paul and Eve Ekman's psychology of demand versus felt resource, then works through the three stages of burnout: exhaustion, loss of meaning, and shutdown. He closes with the eight sources of well-being, including optimism, gratitude, connection and play.
An evening talk in Carmarthen that over 150 people signed up to, which tells you something about the subject. David weaves two strands together: what the Buddhist tradition says about stress and burnout and the practices it offers, and what Western psychology has found, drawing mainly on the decades of emotions research by Dr Paul Ekman and Dr Eve Ekman, whose work is unusually focused on what can actually be done. He starts with the strategy most of us are running: make the job work, get the family sorted, fix each thing in turn, and then finally be at peace because nothing is going wrong. The trouble is that solving one problem reliably produces the next, so peace of mind stays permanently one problem away. On the psychology, the talk separates the stress that pushes you a little beyond your comfort zone and prompts some growth from the kind under discussion here, which is not good stress at all but overwhelm and inertia, a gap so large that nothing can be done. What decides which one you get is largely the story you tell about the demand. Meaning turns out to be the buffer, and not in the sense of gritting your teeth: people take on genuinely hard things and stay well while doing them because the difficulty is worthwhile. The talk closes on four practices that build the same buffer, optimism, mindfulness, connection and gratitude, including a small one you can do from a chair by a window, wishing a stranger in the street a good day.
Gratitude and appreciation Stress and burnout Compassion (karuna)