ODL 434: Restoration Over Optimization: Rebuilding Capacity When Self-Care Isn’t Enough

Created On:  8/10/2026                   

Target Audience:

This course is targeted for social workers, psychologists, counselors, nurses and case managers.

Instructional Level:

Beginner

Overview:

Helping professionals are often socialized to believe that the answer to burnout is brief acts of self-care, better time management, increased efficiency, or pushing through with more discipline. In reality, burnout recovery is not about optimization, it is about restoration.

Chronic exposure to emotional and cognitive overload, trauma narratives, high caseloads, and systemic deficiencies and pressures gradually deplete the nervous system and reduce the brain and body’s capacity to recover. When we attempt to solve exhaustion with more productivity strategies, we often intensify the cognitive, emotional, and physical depletion we are trying to fix.

This 5-hour training reframes burnout recovery as a structured process of restoring capacity rather than another attempt to improve efficiency output. Participants will explore how ongoing work stress affects energy, mood, cognitive function, physical health, and professional effectiveness. Participants will examine how burnout develops, how to recognize warning signs, and why restoration, not efficiency, is the foundation of recovery.

The heart of the workshop introduces a practical, sustainable Restoration Plan built around small, realistic personal and workplace shifts. Participants will design micro-level recovery strategies such as reframing their relationship to work, clarifying values and priorities, developing boundary-setting language, protecting downtime, and making thoughtful workload adjustments. These changes are designed to reduce cumulative stress and rebuild resilience without requiring major life overhauls. Attendees will leave with a clear, personalized restoration framework that supports professional longevity, immune health, and renewed engagement in their work.

Course Objectives:

By the end of the session, the participant will be able to:

• Differentiate between acute stress that is resolved naturally and chronic stress that accumulates when structured recovery is not integrated into daily routines.
• Identify warning signs of chronic stress overload and burnout, including patterns of over-functioning, over-responsibility, and excessive multitasking.
• Identify two micro-level recovery strategies.
• Describe how ongoing, unrelieved stress affects energy, mood, cognitive function, physical health, and professional effectiveness.
• Develop a personalized long-term Restoration Plan that includes realistic personal and workplace-based changes.

Presenter:

Rhonda DiNovo, LMSW, MSW, ADC-IP

Rhonda DiNovo serves as Clinical Assistant Professor, MSW Program Coordinator, and Coordinator of the Graduate Drug and Addictions Studies Certificate Program in the College of Social Work at the University of South Carolina. She teaches students important theoretical and practical approaches in interdisciplinary health and mental health, as well as principles and practices of motivational interviewing and cognitive behavior therapy. Rhonda also serves as Field Supervisor and Director of the West Columbia Outreach Program, a police social work outreach service offered through the West Columbia Police Department that provides brief screening, assessment, and referral to treatment services and community resources to those in mental health and substance use crises.  Prior to becoming a full-time faculty member in the College of Social Work, Rhonda served 3 years as Director of Substance Abuse Prevention and Education for the University of South Carolina, and 8 years as Prevention Specialist for adolescents and their families at LRADAC.