When “I’m Fine” Becomes Survival Mode: Recognizing Chronic Stress and Burnout

At our latest Wellness Connection session, Dr. Alejandro Chaoul joined MasterWord CEO Ludmila Golovine to talk about the signs of survival mode, the difference between stress and burnout, and why secondary trauma is a real occupational hazard for translators and interpreters.

Ask most translators and interpreters how they’re doing between assignments, and the answer is almost automatic: I’m fine. At Wellness Connection, our recurring wellness series for language professionals, Dr. Alejandro Chaoul sat down with MasterWord Founder & CEO Ludmila Golovine to look closely at that phrase: what it protects, what it hides, and how it can be a sign that someone is already living in survival mode.

Dr. Chaoul has studied in the Tibetan tradition for more than three decades and spent twenty years bringing mind-body practices into MD Anderson’s Integrative Medicine Program. He is the founding director of the Mind Body Spirit Institute at The Jung Center of Houston and the author of Tibetan Yoga for Health & Well-Being.

What Is Survival Mode? Signs of Chronic Stress and Burnout

Dr. Chaoul opened by drawing a distinction that’s easy to miss from the inside of it. Acute stress is normal, and even positive. It’s the sympathetic nervous system firing, whether that’s fight, flight, or freeze, mid-encounter in a hospital, a courtroom, or a detention facility. Once the situation passes, the parasympathetic system comes back online and the body rebalances. That’s homeostasis working as designed.

Chronic stress is when stress becomes the norm rather than the exception. It isn’t one difficult encounter but a workload with no natural reset between them: fight or flight, then fight or flight again. The sympathetic system stays switched on, and the body registers it through common chronic stress symptoms like elevated blood pressure, heart symptoms, and disrupted sleep. This is often the point where someone slips into survival mode without realizing it.

The difference between stress and burnout is what comes next. Burnout is the stage after chronic stress goes unaddressed. As Dr. Chaoul put it, the fuel is gone and the tank reads empty. Recognizing burnout before it happens means noticing that the question has quietly shifted from how to manage the stress to how to refill.

The Cost of Always Saying “I’m Fine” at Work

Golovine asked what we’re actually doing when we say “I’m fine” and keep walking. Dr. Chaoul noted that it can work for a while, because we’re saying it to ourselves as much as to anyone else. But there’s a cultural layer underneath it. In the U.S. especially, there’s a quiet expectation that you be okay at work, and saying otherwise can draw strange looks. He observed that people in minority positions, whether by gender, ethnicity, or race, often carry that expectation more heavily, and say “I’m fine” more often as a result.

He shared an example of a colleague who was doing strong work but kept getting passed over for promotion. When he finally asked why, his manager said: every time I see you, you’re smiling, so I assume you’re comfortable where you are.

The point wasn’t to stop saying “I’m fine.” It was to find balance in how we say what we feel, when, and to whom. Supporting mental health at work starts with small, honest moments like these, with a spouse, a family member, or a trusted friend, and building from there.

Secondary Trauma and Workplace Stress for Translators and Interpreters

For translators and interpreters, the trauma in the room is often someone else’s: a terminal diagnosis, a life-support decision, a sexual abuse investigation. It doesn’t always stay in the room, which is part of why translator burnout and interpreter burnout are recognized occupational risks in the localization industry.

Dr. Chaoul offered a distinction worth keeping. The stressor is the situation; the stress is how we react to it. We rarely control the first. We can prepare for the second, both individually and as workplaces that build the right conditions for the people in them.

He also named something specific to this profession. Interpreting in the first person puts you inside another person’s words in a way few roles do. The practice is finding the pause, a breath, a moment of reconnection with yourself, that lets you render those words faithfully while knowing, internally, that is not me.

When there are four or five such encounters in a single day, individual technique isn’t enough. On the palliative care team at MD Anderson, the team met at the end of each day to share what they’d carried. That kind of support matters, he said, and for freelancers without a team, it has to be built deliberately.

Empathy Is Not Compassion

The closing question of the session drew its sharpest distinction. Empathy means extending into someone else’s situation and feelings, and it can overextend. When interpreting a devastating conversation in the first person, empathy is often what pulls secondary stress into the interpreter’s own body. Compassion, by contrast, starts from being grounded in one’s own space and extends outward with the intention of relieving another person’s suffering. Dr. Chaoul noted that what the nursing literature often calls compassion fatigue is more accurately empathic fatigue, because compassion comes from a different place and tends to nourish rather than deplete.

He closed with a line from his teacher, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: as I am serving others, I come back home.

Bringing These Ideas Into Practice

Understanding the difference between a stressor and stress is one thing. Knowing how to manage stress at work in the moment, whether that’s a full minute, a difficult colleague, or a phone that won’t stop buzzing, is another. In our companion piece, Breathing Exercises and Mindfulness Practices to Manage Workplace Stress, Dr. Chaoul walks through the specific breathing techniques, daily resets, and Q&A takeaways from the session.

Sessions like this one are part of Wellness Connection, MasterWord’s ongoing initiative to prevent workplace burnout and support work-life balance in localization. As a Vicarious Trauma-Informed Organization, we build support for translator mental health and interpreter mental health into how we train, deploy, and care for our language professionals every day.

For guided meditations, recordings, and more Wellness Connection resources, visit MasterWord’s Wellness Connection page.