Your brain runs your business. Here's what happens when it breaks down — and exactly how to rebuild it. For founders, operators, and anyone running on empty.
GROWTH PILLAR: Leadership & Ops
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A neuroscience-based framework for understanding burnout, a six-element recovery system, and practical steps to protect mental performance before the crash happens.
Burnout isn't a mindset problem. It's a brain problem.
Blaz Marolt has burned out three times. The second put him on sick leave for six months. By the third, he saw it coming — and stopped it. In this East Trade Winds session, Blaz breaks down exactly what happens inside your brain during burnout and gives you a factory-based framework to understand it, prevent it, and recover from it.
He covers the six core inputs your brain needs to produce healthy neurons — relationships, movement, novelty, nature, omega-3 nutrition, and pauses. Lose one and you manage. Lose two and the domino effect begins. He explains why recovery takes months, not weeks, why sleeping in on weekends doesn't fix a sleep deficit, and why 75 to 80 percent of new neurons die before they ever do their job.
This is not a wellness pep talk. It's operational intelligence for anyone who leads people, runs a business, or simply needs their brain to perform.
Topics covered include the neuroscience of burnout, neurogenesis and how new neurons are built, the factory analogy for brain health, why bad client relationships physically affect your brain, the role of novelty and language learning in neuroplasticity, the three types of pauses your brain requires, and why recovery timelines are longer than most people expect.
Connect with Blaz Marolt: Website: blazmarolt.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/blazmarolt YouTube Business: BlazMarolt-operations-wd-40 YouTube Healing with Blaz: youtube.com/channel/UCgpJGfAUbmzG3YQsyPnnLSw
Referred by Mary Clavieres.
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Blaz (00:06)
burnout. So I've been burnt out two and a half times since the past seven years. And the first time when I was burnt out, it took me about a month and a half to recover. And I didn't know it was burnt out at all. The second time was the worst one.
where I was on sick leave for six months actually. And I knew what was happening, but I couldn't prevent it. And the last time, the 0.51, was when I knew I was getting into burnout and I was able to prevent it actually to making sure that I lived the life and I made sure that my brain was functioning the way it was supposed to be. And what I'm going to be presenting today is more in terms of
what is happening inside our brain during burnout. And I'm going to be using an analogy of a factory of this and a simple acronym that you can remember on why burnout happens. So the last thing that I'm going to say here is that this is also intended so that either for you to understand it or to explain to others who in a simple way what burnout is so that we don't have to have those complex definitions.
And the easiest definition of a burnout is pretty much that it's the disruption of normal brain functions, especially the creation of new neurons. So as a result, nurturing existing or establishing new connections within our brain slows or completely shuts down. And depending on whether it only slows or it shuts down, it goes to the severity of our burnout. Now, before we go into...
how that happens is the facts about our brain and body. I'm gonna go through this really quickly. So if anybody has any questions, I can answer them, but I want to go into the gist of it. First, the primary mission of our brain is survival. Legibly, our brain does not care where we live. If we live under a bridge, if we live wherever, it only wants us to survive. So this is where, if you know the Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes in. The barrier off, the more you want.
or the worse you are off, the less you want. The second one is our subconscious is in charge. Our consciousness is a byproduct of our evolution. And our subconscious is pretty much making the majority of the decisions. So whoever thinks that they're in charge mentally and like consciously, it's not the case, unfortunately. I wish that were true, but it's not. And then our bodies are still in the Stone Age.
So our evolution hasn't caught up to where we are yet. So us being in front of our computers right now is really bad for us because we're supposed to be hunter-getters. We're supposed to be walking and doing all of the things, not thinking, stressing out about whether we're going to survive tomorrow or we're going to have our jobs tomorrow because of the economy and all of that stuff. And then lastly is trauma. So specifically childhood trauma and neurodivergent people have a high risk of burnout.
I come into both of the categories. I know that I can have burnout way faster than the majority of people. So also be aware of this when if you're asking and talking with people that may have had multiple burnouts and you hadn't had any, because we live our lives differently and we have come up from different experiences and different environments. So that is also a really interesting thing. All right.
Now let's go to the gist of it. So the way we can look at our brain and the way we produce our neurons in this case is through a lens of a factory. So I've been a plant production director. So this is a little bit more common to me. But if we look at the six elemental piece here, these are our inputs that go into our brain. And these are the inputs that if we look at the factory, we actually have
two general inputs, the orders and the raw materials. And when the orders and raw materials are present, we come into the factory, have our process, quality assurance, people that then check out a happy neuron, hopefully, or any product that you have, which then goes into our brain where it needs to be. Now this process, as you all know, doesn't happen from today till tomorrow. It usually lasts a long, long time. So in my factory, this process from orders till the final product was actually four months.
And what is happening inside our brain is the hippocampus is where our neurons are made and neurogenesis is the creation of new neurons. And based on if we're living a good life, healthy life, we're going to have, we're going to be producing more neurons. And now let's go into the six elemental piece. So the first one.
For us, this important is love or relationships. So in general, we have three different types, positive ones, negative ones, or no relationships at all. Positive ones, I don't need to explain, we need them. Negative ones actually affect us physically as well. And they negatively affect us in terms of neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, and everything else. And it's better to actually have no relationships than negative ones as well. So since we're here, we're business owners, we all know that we...
or we have had, or we know of a friend that had had a client that begged them, just begged them to take them on as a client. And usually that meant, hey, I'm going to give you a reduced cost. And as soon as you got that client, right? What happened was that client was the biggest a-hole in your whole portfolio. They were pushing you on pennies on deliverables and you were just sucking at life. You hated it. And you wanted just to cut off that client.
So these are the bad relationships here. The second one is movement. As I said, we evolved as hunter-getters. We still need movement. We need to move as much or as often as we can. Go in nature, do things. The only thing that we don't want to do is to sit in front of the computers for eight to 10 hours a day like I am on a daily basis. And I'm pretty sure quite a lot of you as well. So that is what's really bad for us. And movement is...
Completely OK if you only do 10, 15, 20 minutes just walking. And if you can break a sweat, that's even better.
The next one, is really important specifically to neuroplasticity is novelty. We need to have new ideas, new information. We need to read or learn new languages. So specifically here, if we're looking at our brain, if we learn a new language, that is the best novelty that we can have because it it switches things in our brain that actually produce more neurons due to it.
The next one is nature. We're hunter-gatherers. And if you've ever thought to yourself why you feel so calm when you see green, if a stream is running somewhere or when the birds are singing, that's why, because all of those three means that we're somewhere safe. And if you live in a city or in an apartment where there's no greenery and stuff, like the best thing to do is to surround yourself with plants.
within your buildings, they can be artificial. doesn't really matter. Our brain doesn't understand that they're artificial straight up. Like, so for me, if I look on the left side, have a window and I have the forest there. If I leave and go on my right side, I have a stream with the forest again. I can, I have like, I am five feet away from going into the nature. So for me, that is good. You also need to have that. Then the next one is omega-3 and a healthy diet.
I'm not going to be talking about a healthy diet because we all know what it is and what not, but omega-3 are the fatty acids that our brain is made of. So around 72 to 76 % of our brain is made out of fatty acids and omega-3 is the best one for it. Where can we get them? Inside fish and other quality meats. But what I do, because, well, in any case, I'm lazy,
is I just pop a pill of omega-3s, and that pretty much covers my daily needs, because I don't eat a lot of fish. And the last one, and this one is by far the most important one, are the pauses. So we have three different types of pauses here. The first one is taking breaks during the day. So right now, after we're done here, I'm going to take a 10, 15-minute break. And I'm going to be doing this throughout my day, because...
neurologically speaking, our brain can only be productive for four or six hours a day. Anything more, it's not possible. Like our brain is going to fry. And we need to make sure that when we're actually, when our brain is the most productive, we have to make it the most productive time of our day. Otherwise we're just going to waste our day pretty much. The second one, our vacations. So I know, I don't know about Canada, but I know that ⁓ the U S had their three day, three day weekend. So yesterday,
⁓ But those are not the vacations that I'm talking about. The vacations I'm talking about, you need to have them at least a week or two. If you're neurodivergent or if you have trauma, you actually need more, three plus days more than an average person would because of the processes that are still happening inside their brain. So as business owners, I know it's hard because if we're business owners, we can't take two weeks off just to...
be on vacation and all that stuff. But we need to try to do as much as we can. And the last one is the most important one is we need to sleep for seven to nine hours. If we don't, our brain is not going to function properly. And also we cannot do so that we sleep from Monday to Friday only like four or five hours. And then on weekends, we catch up on our sleep. Our brain doesn't work like that because of the byproducts. So amyloid beta's are actually
Our brain produces them daily and when we're sleeping, it needs to flush them out. And also neurogenesis happens during our sleep time. These are the six that you have to have. And if you don't have them, are going to be in the negative. If you have them, they're going to be in the positive. But the two M's down here are the ones that are nice to have. If you're listening to a lot of music, there's also pure dopamine for our brain. And the music that you listen to, it doesn't really matter. If you like the music, that's good. And that's great.
speaker-8 (09:07)
So this.
Blaz (09:25)
And the last one is meditation. I don't do that. I've been trying to do it regularly every day. I'm currently only doing it once a week, but what meditation does for us, it pretty much focuses us and focuses us on ourselves. And if you know Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow, System 1 and System 2, well, we actually have a System 3, which is the default mode network. And when we're in meditation, we actually go in inside that.
that mode more often. And the default mode network is where all of our amazing thoughts, new ideas actually come into fruition more. And now if we do all of that, we then come to neuroplasticity, which is definitely where novelty is the lead of all of these here. And we can actually 5x our neurons from that. So what then happens? I'm going to explain it from
my perspective when I was completely gone for six months due to my burnout. What happened was my boss changed and my relationships within the firm completely changed. So I started working more, which meant I didn't have any pauses. And because I didn't have any pauses, I wasn't going to Spanish classes, which I had before. And because of that, I didn't get novelty.
and it pretty much became a house of cards or a domino effect. You can survive without being in burnout of one of these six, but as soon as you reach two that are negative, you actually start getting a domino effect and you just crash out. And the last thing here is that when you're getting to burnout, how can you get out of it? It's pretty much making sure that all of these are positive for you. But when are you gonna get out of burnout? It also depends on.
how serious your burnout is. Because if a factory closes down, it doesn't start right away when we want it to. If the factory stops getting orders.
you shut it down. But when you get new orders, you actually have to then order raw materials, which for us means D6. And then we need to re-establish our processes, our Q &A and all of that. And then it comes to, in this case, the neuron. And for our brain, it actually takes up to three weeks for the neuron to either go into the right place in the brain or completely die out. And 75 % to 80 % of our neurons actually die out before
they actually go and reinforce our existing connections or just repair our brain. So that's what usually takes so long and why people are so frustrated because of burnout. That they start working on themselves and then they think they're going to instantly get improvement or advancement. For me, when I was burned out for six months, I started doing these, I'm going to say like month one and by month five was only when I was seeing.
the benefits of it. So it can take a long, long time. And that is it for my presentation.