How to Beat Burnout

[00:00:00]When I was a CEO, I was an executive, I never [music] worked less than 80 hours a week. It was a great job. I truly believed in the mission of the organization. I was an enthusiast for [music] it, but I was burning out by the end of 10 years. From the early parts of the coronavirus epidemic to the direct aftermath, [music] there's a pretty big increase from about half the population to almost two-thirds of the population that are showing some signs of burning out. When you are feeling [music] like a desiccated husk of a human being and everything feels like an insurmountable task, despite the fact that at one point you were really good [music] at your job. Where ordinary work is extraordinarily hard, it's hard to see how you can ever make things better. You just [music] want to give up, quit, run away. You're fantasizing about just walking off the job. You don't have to live this way. Spoiler alert in this episode, you don't have to be overwhelmed.

[00:00:53]Everybody, welcome to Office Hours.

[00:00:56]I'm Arthur Brooks.

[00:00:57]This is my podcast about how all of us can lift each other up and bring each other together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I've dedicated my career as a behavioral scientist to love and happiness, and I want to bring those ideas to you in part because I want you to have more love and happiness in your life, but I have an ulterior motive, which is that I want you to join me as a happiness teacher. I want to arm you with the best facts, science, and data to help people understand that they can live better, happier lives. I want you to be a teacher just like me, because that's how we scale this. This is how we make a better world. So, thank you for being part of this movement, whether this is your first episode of the podcast or whether it's well into the first year of episodes. Many of you have been with us from the very beginning, and I thank you for that. Please do continue to share the episodes with other people, pass them on. It's really good for the algorithms, the algorithms that rule our lives. Unhappily, they do rely on the replication that comes when you by word of mouth are sharing these particular ideas. So, send a copy of this to somebody that you love if that you think that they can use it. Also, please do give me your comments and feedback and criticism and and and and ideas for new episodes of the podcast. What would you like me to be talking about? Uh write to me at [email protected].

[00:02:12]Um if you'd like to go a little deeper in these ideas, you can always get it from my newsletter. We have a more than 200,000 people um with a huge rate of readership right now. I mean, it's just it's amazing how many of you are reading the newsletter. If you're not yet, you can get that for free, completely for free at arthurbrooks.com/newsletter.

[00:02:30]And if you want to talk about these ideas in person with other people and occasionally with me as well, we are holding retreats now on the ideas that are in this podcast on the science of human happiness. You can go to retreats.

[00:02:43]arthurbrooks.com to learn more about that. And as always, you can read my books. Here's my latest book. Um if you've been watching the podcast, you know I've been talking about it relentlessly, The Meaning of Your Life.

[00:02:54]Um pretty much everything comes back to the meaning of your life, doesn't it?

[00:02:57]Well, certainly all of my work does.

[00:02:59]Now, I mentioned a minute ago that I'm super interested in what you think I should be talking about. And and and many of you the last time I asked about it, um you wrote in and the number one topic that people said they wanted me to write and speak about was topics as we age, interestingly.

[00:03:15]Uh second half of life topics, how can we mature and get happier as we get older? And and maybe that says something about the demographics. Maybe maybe what I should to do is dedicate an episode to making kids get the hell off your lawn.

[00:03:28]Um maybe I should do an episode on how it was too loud at restaurants. I'm kidding. I know a lot of you watching are not super into the old folks jokes.

[00:03:36]But, the truth of the matter is that we are all moving on in years. Time is linear, after all. And I will be doing more topics on that, for sure. It's something I've thought an awful lot about. But, uh the second most requested topic is what I'm going to be talking about here today, which how can I engage in a different and more joyful way with my career and my work? Specifically, people have asked again and again for me to talk about burnout, the topic of burnout. Something that I've studied a lot over the years and teaching at a business school, I have a lot of colleagues who are doing it as well. Related to that is what I will do in a future episode, maybe even next week's, on workaholism. You know, the the the addiction to work. So, first burnout and then later workaholism.

[00:04:17]These are two very requested topics and there's incredibly interesting research on this that's extremely encouraging.

[00:04:23]If you're If you're suffering from burnout in your job, burnout in your career, burnout in your life, you're not alone. This is a very very common thing, but it is something that we can actually remedy with a little bit of information about the science. I promise you, your life can actually get better. And when you go on to different periods of your life, you can actually avoid this pitfall. So, that's what we're going to be talking about today.

[00:04:44]Now, when I talk about burnout, the first thing that I'm interested in or the first time I looked at it is like, who made that term up, burnout? I mean, I guess it's really descriptive, but you know, obviously somebody had to put it into current parlance. And it turns out that there are two people that you can that you can turn to to arguably have coined this term. The first, believe it or not, is Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian existentialist novelist from the late 19th century. In his most famous novel, his greatest novel, maybe the greatest novel that's ever been written in as a matter of fact. And if you want to learn more about psychology and the human psyche, you got to read this book if you haven't read it yet, The Brothers Karamazov, aka The Brothers K. It is a psychological thriller. And I promise you, you're not going to be able to put it down if you're interested in behavioral science.

[00:05:33]Um and in Brothers Karamazov, there are three brothers Karamazov that are um grappling with their relationship with each other and with their father, who's a drunk and a pretty bad guy. Now, the brothers all have different personalities. The youngest of the brothers is Alyosha, who's a saintly gentle figure. He's sort of the good guy of this. And And originally Dostoevsky was going to write three different novels for each of the three brothers. He only made it through the first one before he died. And this is the one that really focuses on Alyosha's life. As the At the very early part, um Alyosha's trying to figure out how he can serve humanity better.

[00:06:11]And he wants to join a monastery, become a Russian Christian Orthodox monk. So, he goes to his father and asks for permission. And his cynical half-drunk father, he says, "Fine."

[00:06:24]But he makes a prediction about what's going to happen to Alyosha. He says, quote, "You will burn and you will burn out."

[00:06:31]And that's where it entered the parlance in Russian, actually, translated into English, which was this metaphor for flaming out.

[00:06:38]Now, a century after that novel's appearance, this was in in 1880, that The Brothers Karamazov was published.

[00:06:45]Social scientists came up with a a different definition. It was actually 1974.

[00:06:51]A German-American psychologist by the name of Herbert Freudenberger. He supplied a definition of the noun burnout, which people were sort of using, but he actually defined it for the first time. He called it the state of being exhausted by making extreme demands on energy, strength, or resources from one's job, which could cause one to become ineffective in achieving the intents and purposes. In other words, you're pedaling faster and faster and faster on your bike, but your bike is going slower and slower and slower. That's the process of actually burning out. That's That's more or less how he talked about it.

[00:07:23]Now, what do we know? We know that the phenomenon is not a myth. It's really, really common in the literature. You can find it in places all around the world.

[00:07:33]Uh one of the most interesting studies on this, uh that's pretty recent, from 2024, actually comes from the UK.

[00:07:38]There's no reason to think that this would differ in any meaningful way from American data that show that 63% of employees of professionals show at least one sign of burnout. And that's up 51% from 2021.

[00:07:52]So, from the early parts of the coronavirus epidemic to the direct aftermath, there's a pretty big increase from about half the population to almost 2/3 of the population that are showing some signs of burning out. It seems to have had something to do with the COVID pandemic. And I'm going to come back to this because there's a direct link for most people between burnout and remote work. Now, this is going to be counterintuitive what I'm going to tell you because most people think, "Look, if I could actually just go to remote work and set my hours and do more hybrid, then I would burn out a little bit less." But, that's not always how your brain works. The neuropsychology actually is pretty counterintuitive in many many cases.

[00:08:29]But, you know if you're a follower of this show that you'll be rejuvenated almost always if you have more contact with people in real life. That's one of the ways that your brain works best is when you have direct eye contact physical contact with other members of the human species. Now, it has to be people that you like to be sure, but there's a production of neurochemicals like oxytocin, for example, when you're with your friends that you just don't get when you're isolated. Loneliness is unbelievably taxing and leads to burnout. Now, I don't want to get ahead here. I'm going to come back to this in a minute, but it's not a big coincidence that as we went from one kind of working to another kind of working on a mass scale that burnout actually increased in ways that might be counterintuitive.

[00:09:13]According to the Harvard Business Review in 2021, early parts of the coronavirus epidemic, 89% of their survey, this is at HBR, said that their work life was getting worse during the pandemic, okay? So, once again, this is when people were were isolated from each other. More than three in five, so 60% admitted struggling to manage their workloads and said they experienced burnout often or extremely often in the previous 3 months. I'll put that into the into the notes. This is an HBR article from 2021 on on burnout. What's the definition that we're going to be working with?

[00:09:47]Yeah, there's the bicycle metaphor, but basically what I'm going to be talking about is when you're feeling like a desiccated husk of a human being and everything feels like an insurmountable task despite the fact that at one point you were really good at your job. Where ordinary work is extraordinarily hard.

[00:10:04]It's hard to see how you can ever make things better. You just want to give up, quit, run away. You're fantasizing about just walking off the job. I will not be seeing you Monday.

[00:10:15]You don't have to live this way is the main point that I'm going to get to.

[00:10:18]Spoiler alert in this episode, you don't have to be overwhelmed. You can actually solve burnout. This is not a permanent state of affairs. Um if you understand how burnout cycles work and how your brain works, you can actually reverse it. And the changes aren't that aren't actually that hard. And so that's really really good news, but you have to take control. Like everything else, if you want to make something better in your life, you need to understand it. I recommend understanding it scientifically. You need to make some habits, some changes in your behavior, and that requires some commitment, and it's even better if you understand it well enough to explain to other people, which is why teachers are the ones who get the greatest benefit from that which they teach. So, that's what I'm going to ask you to do today in the case of burnout.

[00:10:58]Let's talk a little bit about the about, you know, how it feels when you're burning out just from day to day. And and I'll do this kind of from personal experience. You know, I've done a lot of different things in my career for those of you who know a little bit about my professional background cuz you've been watching the show, you know that the first 12 years of my career as a classical musician from 19 to 31 I was a professional French horn player. And then I, you know, gave up music when I when I went to graduate school. I finished my bachelor's degree when I was 30 when I was 31 I left music and I started my PhD. I studied and finished my PhD to be a behavioral scientist. And so and then for a decade I was a professor. And then for 11 years after that I was a CEO of a big nonprofit organization, a big think tank in Washington D.C. That was before I'm doing what I'm doing now, which is writing, speaking, and teaching about happiness about which makes me blissfully happy. But the job before this, when I was a CEO, I was an executive, I never worked less than 80 hours a week. I was on the road 50% of the time. It was a great job. I truly believed in the mission of the organization. I was an enthusiast for it, but I was burning out by the end of 10 years.

[00:12:01]I I I served as the president for 10 years and 6 months, and by about the ninth year, I was in serious stages of burnout, but I didn't know it. I mean, I kind of knew. I'm a behavioral scientist after all. I know how to read the literature.

[00:12:16]But I was paying attention to all my employees' lives. I was paying attention to what I was trying to do with my business, and I wasn't paying attention to the ultimate enterprise that mattered for my effectiveness, which was the enterprise of my own life, love, and career.

[00:12:31]And and the result of it is that in retrospect, I was exhibiting all of the classic signs of burnout. There are three, according to psychologists.

[00:12:39]Emotional exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization. I'll explain this in a second. And a negative view of personal effectiveness. So, what's emotional exhaustion? Where you say, you wake up in the in the morning and you're already tired. And you don't know why.

[00:12:53]It's like it's not like I'm sleeping less than I used to. I mean, I've never been a good sleeper. I'm a crummy sleeper, but but 6 and 1/2 hours was rejuvenating for me, and then it wasn't.

[00:13:02]It's just weird that you can rest and you don't feel rested. And and so, even at the beginning of a day, you start feeling like I I I can't face it, you know.

[00:13:11]I love it. I believe in it, but I just can't face it. I can't face it. That's a That's a sign of emotional exhaustion.

[00:13:16]And for sure, I was feeling that. I was feeling that. I would come back from a vacation with my family, and I would feel tired as I was coming back from the vacation every time I thought about actually going back to work despite the fact that I really believed in my organization.

[00:13:31]The second was cynicism or depersonalization where you start to see yourself from the outside in in a distorted way. I would say, you know, I don't feel like people there are like me. I don't feel I don't feel well liked. I don't feel It's not just unappreciated for Pete's sake. I mean, I'm not just a baby about it. I just don't feel like they like me.

[00:13:49]Is the whole thing, which is weird because in retrospect, you know, I was very well liked. I mean, I was just the person that I am most doing the best that I could for the organization. I mean, not everybody liked me, but but in general, it was going really well with respect to the personalities. But I that as as as time went on, I was really burning out. I couldn't see that. Every little thing made me feel awkward and uncomfortable. And last but not least was this negative view of personal effectiveness. I started feeling like I wasn't doing a good job.

[00:14:17]And and that that was weird, too, because if you looked at the numbers, we would say we had to raise money from philanthropy. That's how we supported this nonprofit organization, and the numbers were going up and up and up and up and up. We had no problem hiring people. You know, we would have 100 applicants for every person that we hired, and we hired the very best people in Washington, D.C., and we had lots of access to policy makers, and by all the metrics that I was keeping on the dashboard on my computer, it was I felt like I'm just like I've I've lost my edge, man. I've just lost my edge.

[00:14:47]And those are the classic signs where you're exhausted emotionally, you're cynical about what's actually going on, and and and and and you're negative about your own performance in the face of all the evidence that might be to the contrary. And sure enough, I was feeling that. And and and in retrospect, I see that that was the classic signs of burnout. Had I stayed in that job, what I would have needed to do is to take a little time off, quite frankly. I would I what I would have done is in retrospect ask for a sabbatical of a month or two, uh gone away, and I'll tell you some things I would have done when I went away. But we got to wait for that, cuz that's going to come a little bit later in the episode because I'm going to talk about how to treat burnout if you actually have it. Okay, so there but for the grace of God go I. I'm going to give you a bunch of advice on this, but even I was mistaken in not seeing this in a in a previous incarnation of my career.

[00:15:38]When you're burned out, you feel a weary weariness about not being able to face your work demands. Even though you can absolutely do your job. You're good at your job, but you just can't face it. It's like I can't face that thing anymore. Um you lose enthusiasm for your work, for doing your work in a high-quality way.

[00:15:58]You lose confidence in your ability and your competence.

[00:16:02]Now, before I continue, um you might be asking yourself, do I fit these criteria? Am I actually in burnout? And it took me years of retrospect to figure out that I was. I could have actually used a survey for doing so. So, I've actually looked for a couple of good ones and I'm going to put one in the description below. Actually, got this one from Psychology Today. It's a pretty nice survey that will help you understand if you're burning out on your job. So, you know, look in the in the show notes and you'll actually find a click on it. It's not dispositive. It's not perfect, but it'll give you a good concept of whether or not this is the case in your life.

[00:16:34]Now, what's actually happening physiologically? I like to talk about the neurobiology of how this works. When you're in burnout, there's actually telltale signs, um and generally in the adrenal system. So, there's dysfunction in your adrenal system. Your adrenal glands sit above your kidneys. They they produce stress hormones, classically cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. Epinephrine, aka adrenaline, is the fight or flight chemical. That's what gives you butterflies and makes it possible when you hear a twig snap behind you to go run and climb a tree so a saber-tooth tiger doesn't catch you and eat you.

[00:17:07]Cortisol is a is a slower hormone that's produced after time. Usually, the the it'll kick in after more like 20 minutes after something happens to keep you in a more continuous state of alert when you need to be alert about something cuz there is danger, cuz there is threat, you have cortisol in your system to suppress other things, to suppress digestion, to suppress your immune system so that all of your energy, alertness, all of um you know, um your sort of your life force can be can be oriented, can be directed towards staying alive right now.

[00:17:41]Which makes perfect sense. That's what it's good at. The trouble is that when it's chronically elevated, you'll be chronically suppressing these other things that you need for your health and well-being. And and that's one of the reasons that people actually talk about chronic stress. Not surprisingly, burnout implicates your adrenal systems in all sorts of ways. To begin with, it gives you a chronically high overproduction of cortisol, this third um stress hormone from the cortex of your adrenal glands that keeps you in the sort of the the the low-grade state of alert. I'll put a a nice article on this in the in the show notes that actually comes from the Psychological Bulletin entitled Burnout and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease, Evidence, Possible Causal Paths, and Promising Research Directions that shows that there's a lot of disease that can come from that. Um more in a second, but it comes from this permanently or or chronically elevated state of cortisol production.

[00:18:35]Because of that effect, sustained burnout does all the sorts of things that you always hear about when your cortisol's elevated, when your stress is too much, when you're living with stress for a long period of time, you get systemic inflammation. Uh inflammation is implicated in all sorts of problems from diseases like arthritis to um early-onset dementia, uh immunosuppression, meaning you can get you get sick when you've been super stressed out for a long time, you might notice you get cold after cold after cold, metabolic syndrome, meaning that your you know, the metabolism of calories doesn't goes haywire, doesn't work right, you might find that you put on tons of weight even though you don't feel like you're eating very much or you're exercising as much as you once did because metabolically you're not working at an efficient rate. You're you're, you know, the way that you process glucose isn't going to be right, etc. I've talked about these mechanisms biologically in previous episodes. Your cardiovascular health will be problematic as I just mentioned in the article that I just cited and and believe it or not premature death.

[00:19:33]People who are super stressed out, they just don't live as long. And and that might because be because they're burned out in their jobs, but other things as well. It's one of the reasons that people who have really unhappy tense marriages, they tend to die young is cuz they have elevated levels of stress hormones, which is why you need to deal with your problems and not be living with a person who completely freaks you out and stresses you out all the time.

[00:19:55]I'll put an article on this on called a prospective study the association between obesity and burnout among apparently healthy men and women, which is really on this metabolic syndrome.

[00:20:07]Which shows very clearly when you're burned out of your job, you tend to gain weight. And it's really really hard for you to lose weight. Okay, so what causes it? What causes this, you know, these feelings of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, depersonalization, negative view of self, and inability to get up and go when you things that used to be easy feel hard, things that used to feel hard feel impossible.

[00:20:30]You're exhausted at the beginning of the day instead of the end of the day. What causes it? Cuz that's what we really want to look at. If this is you, what are the reasons? A very interesting, very nice article from the Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health from 2022.

[00:20:45]Spanish researchers were able to identify the seven big causes at work of burnout. This And and and many of these are overlapping. So, you don't just have to pick one. This is not a mutually exclusive list. You can have all of them. Lucky you. But the seven big sources are are number one what they call work overload. And that's just basically crushing demand. So, work overload is different than than working super long hours. So, work overload is that you're just trying to carry too much stuff. The The demands on you are simply too high. It's kind of a cognitive load. I got to do this and this and this and this and this. I can't even figure out what to put on my to-do list. There's actually so much. That's really what that refers to. And And you all know how that feels. I bet everybody watching me knows has times in their life. Burnout happens when that's chronically the case. That's number one.

[00:21:32]Number two is what they call emotional labor. When it's just emotionally hard to be um in the workplace. The main reason for this is HR problems, actually. The main reason for this is that you have um human interaction issues. You have You have colleagues that are difficult to deal with. You're managing employees who are obstreperous.

[00:21:52]You have a really, really horrible boss.

[00:21:55]Whatever happens to be, it's human relations problems that you're having at work. That's what That's what creates a lot of emotional labor. And no joke, man, you can have the best job in the world, but if you don't get along with your boss, you don't get don't get along with your colleagues, you're going to burn out. Sure as I'm talking to you here, you're going to be You're going to be burning out. That is so unbelievably stressful because people live in society. I mean, there's even uh non-human studies on on on chimpanzees and and and gorillas and and troops of monkeys and baboons that shows that they get chronically high stress levels when there's a lot of conflict inside their troop, inside their social living situation, and they die young. They exhibit all of the burnout signs, actually, that are happening just because people don't get along in their troop. You need harmony in your human relations to not burn out.

[00:22:44]That's number two. Number three is is what they call a lack of autonomy. And that's really control over your work situation. If you go back, I think the second episode of this of this podcast that I that I I recorded or it's It's one of the first five that I I I recorded was happiness at work.

[00:23:01]And this comes from the from the I'll put it in the in the notes here or we'll have a link to that episode that irrational capital or research from a Wall Street did this work that talked about the things that you can do to make a happier workplace if you're a boss.

[00:23:15]And one of the clear ones is giving people more of a sense a sense of autonomy and control. When people feel like they're in control of certain aspects of the workplace and their work day, etc. etc. It is so important because when you don't have control, when your work day and everything that you do is in the hands of another person, that that raises stress, raises cortisol, raises the likelihood of burnout. Number four is ambiguity or conflict about your role. You don't know what you're supposed to do. It's not clear what you're supposed to do. Um when people don't have clarity, they they they don't have control. And you know, there were times that I was a CEO that I had to learn this the hard way where, you know, I would do something like, "I'm going to bring in this unbelievably talented person. I met somebody in a job someplace." And they were so great. And and I wouldn't really have a job for them. I would say, "Just come work for me and and it'll be so great." Why? Because I just have a sense that you're so good. I want you to kind of create your own job. That turned out to almost always be a mistake because it would feel like they're sent to set up for failure because they don't know what they're supposed to do. So, there's no metrics for their success.

[00:24:21]For most people, that actually looks like maximum control, but it's actually minimum control for them because of the lack of autonomy, because of the ambiguity, because of the conflict about their role. Now, for some people it's great.

[00:24:35]For me it's great. I mean, I'm I always want to create my own job. I want to do my own thing, for sure. I mean, I'm a I'm an academic.

[00:24:41]Um if I wanted a boss, I wouldn't be an academic because I like to be in creative control of what I do, for sure.

[00:24:49]But most people don't want that kind of ambiguity and the result is that that that living in ambiguity actually makes it feel like their job is never defined and their job is never done and that leads to burnout.

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[00:27:23]The next one, number five, is inadequate supervision. And that's that's sort of the bad boss effect. So, bad supervision or inadequate supervision where the the job demands are changing all the time or or the boss is arbitrary and capricious or the boss is really really absent and then comes in and you know, barks orders down the hall and no, it's just not good. So, bad bossing is number five.

[00:27:46]Number six is a lack of social support.

[00:27:49]And this is really important. Gallup has done all this cool polling that shows the number one predictor of you staying in a job is having a best friend at the job. It's so important to have friends at work, it turns out. And being lonely at work is the worst. It's almost as bad as actually not getting along with your colleagues. So, 55% of people in America today say they wouldn't leave their job for a better paying job because it would mean leaving their friends and they want to be with their friends. Having a lack of social support, inadequate social support, no social support is unbelievably stressful for most people and actually leads to burnout. Now, why is this important? Because if you're running a company or you're in a position of authority, create the conditions where they can love each other or at least like each other, where they can collaborate and have fun with each other. You know, I used to think we all have to get along and have a good time, but I also realized later on that looking at in time use studies that people actually don't like hanging out with their boss. They like hanging out with each other if they like each other, but they don't like it when the boss is there. As a matter of fact, that's one of the things that that the lowers quality of life for most employees is spending time with their boss. Not that their boss is a jerk, but because people don't like being bossed and evaluated even in their in their relaxed moments.

[00:29:01]And so I had to I had to recognize that one of my jobs as a as a CEO was creating a great workplace where people wanted to work together and then get the heck out of the way, which was important. And number seven for burnout, and this is one of the really big ones that I'll talk about in a minute, is that people burn out when their working hours impinge on their personal life. And that happens when the hours are just too insane or people are are expected to be on all the time.

[00:29:26]So, all hours of day and night um that you're on. So, you know, you're hanging out with your friends and your phone beep and it's your boss. And okay, I got to go do this thing. I got to go send this file. Sorry, I got to go home. I got to work on this PowerPoint presentation. Ah, honey, I know I wanted to watch whatever, you know, Mrs. B and I are all we're in I'm recording this um right now and um uh cycling season has started and she my wife is a huge cycling enthusiast and we watch races, cycling races at the end of the day. And and and you know, when I'm actually I don't have good boundaries between my my work life and my non-work life, the phone will go off and I'll look at it and I'll say I got to go send an email and it's not great. And if I let it happen too much, it'll actually lead lead to burnout in my life and in in your life as well. So, those are the big seven.

[00:30:09]Work overload, emotional labor, a lack of control, ambiguity about your job, inadequate supervision, a lack of social connections, and and work that impinges on your personal life. Those are the big seven, right? Now, once again, you might have multiples, but think about your own life.

[00:30:26]Which one do you suffer from?

[00:30:28]Certain workplaces and industries are more liable to burnout than others. And and and this is the point that I really wanted to make. It's a really interesting point as far as I'm concerned.

[00:30:36]There is almost no burnout, very little burnout in blue-collar professions.

[00:30:41]You almost never see the signs of it and people almost never complain about it in blue-collar jobs, in manufacturing and utilities and construction. And I mean, I've read about this, but then I've seen it, too, because I you know, I have a son who's been involved in a lot of um manual labor and skills and and and trades. You know, my son was a was a um an infantryman in the Marine Corps, then did mortars, and finally was a sniper in the Marine Corps. And then when he came out of the Scout Sniper Platoon in the Marine Corps, he went into construction.

[00:31:10]He was working in construction. Now Now he was a supervisor, but it wasn't an office job. He was on site pushing jobs all the time. And it was a lot. He worked super long hours, but he never exhibited any of the signs of burnout that I actually see from people working a fraction of the hours, but in in service jobs, in white-collar jobs. Most burnout occurs in white-collar jobs. And I dare say that most people who are watching me, but not all, are in a lot of these white-collar service jobs. And you're probably not working 16 hours at a day. I I hope you're not. But you might be exhibiting burnout despite the fact that you're not you're not coming home and saying, "Oh, my feet hurt so much." The problem is that white-collar jobs have all of the charac- many of the characteristics that I talked about in that list, in that Spanish study, the of the big seven. And they have one more thing that's critical when you look at the literature that was not in that list, but I have to talk about, that leads to tons of burnout. Here it is.

[00:32:06]Meetings. Meetings will burn you out.

[00:32:09]Virtually everybody hates meetings. Um people holding meetings hate them, people in them hate them. Usually it's a small minority of people who actually like meetings, and those are the people who are dominating meetings, people who are following Sullivan's law that that a meeting will expand to use the time which it's allotted. You know, I I've been in academia for you know, in and out of academia for the past 30 years, and and faculty meetings always work the same way.

[00:32:33]For the person that department chair or the dean or somebody says, "Well, okay, so you know, we have 90 minutes for this meeting. I bet we can finish up in 30 minutes cuz it's a pretty limited agenda. No, no, no, no, that's going to take 90 minutes because you get to the end of 30 minutes, you've done the business at hand, and then the Dean of the department chair says, you know, anybody else have anything on their mind?

[00:32:52]And the same three or four people put their hands up, and pretty pretty soon it's 90 minutes. And everybody else has stuff to do and places to go and deadlines and a personal life and and that leads to a ton of burnout. That's called meeting fatigue, and it's no joke a real thing. I've I've actually written about it. I'll put one of my columns about meeting fatigue and and the research, the the neurocognitive effect of meetings into the show notes. People joke about it, but it's actually no joke. You know the best meeting is is one that gets canceled, quite frankly.

[00:33:25]The occupations that typically suffer the worst burnout rates are the ones that function as meeting factories, inefficient places that have people in meetings that don't need to be there in meetings that actually last too long. If there's one thing that you can do as boss, it's have fewer meetings, and you will actually help a lot along the lines of what we're talking about in many other ways as well.

[00:33:44]Here's an interesting finding from the literature.

[00:33:47]People go from enthusiastic to burned out, one of the key characteristics is something about their job that they used to like, now they don't like.

[00:33:55]So, it's not like they went from neutral to unhappy about something or from happy to neutral. No, they go from I love doing this thing to I don't like doing this thing. And and we know this from a pretty interesting 2016 article from the journal of psychology, which is an apex journal of psychology, that looked at employees who were engaged and not burned out um and those who were burnt out colleagues. And it turns out that their burnt out colleagues used to like the same things that the non-burnt out people currently like. They just stop liking them. So, this is a characteristic that I want you to be paying attention to. Is there a part of your job that you used to think was fun and interesting, and now it's a grind? That in and of itself is not just cuz you got tired of it. That is a actually a pretty clear sign that you burned out per se, which means that you're having these adrenal loads and and and a lot of the physiological psychological things that we're talking about here. It's not just like, "Ah, I got bored."

[00:34:45]Maybe, but mhm uh look out. That's a red flag. As always, what do we do in this show? I give you advice on what to do. So, I hope that you're pretty well versed on recognizing burnout, understanding the prevalence of burnout, understanding the where it came from, how you can see it in other people, all that stuff. But, what you really want to know is what do you do about it? I'm going to give you two pieces of advice. Number one is if you're supervising people, if you're a boss, what can you do to avoid it? And you trust me, you want to avoid it. You want to avoid burnout because burnout will wipe out your organization and make it really, really ineffective. And when people are unhappy, they don't do a good job. And then I want to talk about what you can do if you are burning out. Okay, so I'm going to give you both sides of this thing. Let's first start with employers. Now, who are the employers who miss this the most? Who are the employers who are most likely to burn out their employees? It's not the biggest jerks. It's not the the people who are, you know, barking out orders and insulting in people and and being abusive. It's actually not. It's what we call the pace-setting leaders. In the literature, this actually comes from the work of Daniel Goleman, um who does work on on on workplaces at Harvard Business School. Um and and Daniel Goleman talks about pace-setting leaders as leaders who think they're really inspirational.

[00:36:02]Look, I ask people to work long hours, but nobody's going to work longer hours than me because it's one for all and all for one. It turns out these people burn out their employees. Many times they burn themselves out, too. But, pace-setting leaders are the ones who are always on. You know, you send them an email at 4:30 in the morning, at 4:35 you get a response. You send them an email at 11:00 p.m., they're still on.

[00:36:23]They're just on all the time. It's weird. Why doesn't the have a life?"

[00:36:28]Maybe not. Pace-setting leaders are the worst offenders, even if they're the nicest people. So, fellow employers, are you a pace-setter? Are you inadvertently burning people out? If you think you are, here are the five things I'm going to ask you to do. Number one, don't ask people to sacrifice all the time their relationships for their job.

[00:36:48]I know that you are. Just cuz you are is not right for you to ask other people to do it. As a matter of fact, you should hope that people are not doing that because they deserve ethically to have good lives, and you want them to be in it in the long haul with you if they're good. Second, let people say what they feel at work within rational limits.

[00:37:06]It's important that people have a sense of voice and a sense of control. When they don't, it'll bottle up, and that bottling up, per se, will lead to the physiological manifestations of burnout, aka high adrenal activity, mostly in terms of cortisol. Number three, give employees more control. Let them have more control over what they're doing.

[00:37:25]This is very strongly associated with, once again, as I mentioned before, workplaces that don't have high levels of burnout. Number four, make sure your employees know what their job is and that they feel supported. That kills a couple of birds with one stone, getting back to the study I mentioned a minute ago about the sources of burnout. And last but not least, get rid of as many meetings as possible. Meetings, meetings And again, I know this is like my bugbear, and I'm, you know, harping on it like crazy, but it's really important. Kill the meetings. Kill the meetings. Kill the meetings. Watch morale grow. I mean, maybe you need some, but only at the base level. I'll do a whole show on meetings, so you know actually how to do this. Now, more challenging to put into practice is what you can actually do if you're work if you're burning out because if it were easy, you would have avoided it already. So, what do you do?

[00:38:11]Here's the big idea.

[00:38:13]You need more space between the part of your life that's your work and the part of your life that's not your work. Now, once again, I'm not talking about work-life balance cuz I think work-life balance is largely nonsense. It suggests that your work is not part of your life. And so, there's work and there's life. No, you don't need to balance work and life. You need work-life integration.

[00:38:33]Where your work makes your non-work better, and your non-work makes your work better. And to do that, you actually need both, which means that you need space between them. You need to actually be not working when you're not working. This is the critical idea. So, I want to tell you about ways to actually do that. Which is hard. If you're a workaholic, if you're a success-addicted individual, and I'm looking in the mirror here, it's hard to do to get work-life integration, because it just turns into work, work, work, work, work. The reason you may be burning out is not because you got a jerk boss.

[00:39:06]It may be because that you're a boss to yourself, and you're an unrelenting, unforgiving type to yourself. You may be the culprit here, okay? So, I'm not suggesting that you need to, you know, stick stick it to the boss. It may be that you need to stick it to your to yourself. How do you get more work-life integration? Number one is you actually need to take seriously, and algorithmically, and specifically, um, the the balance that you're trying to achieve in your hours. Again, I said balance, but what I really mean is integration, but here's how we do it. Is work within your defined hours for work.

[00:39:42]I periodically had to do this, where my work sprawled into all hours of the day, and I've had to cut it back. So, I'm specifically not doing work during certain hours, which enriches my relationships, but also refreshes me a lot more. Especially with the spread of mobile technologies, it's very easy for your work to creep into every nook and cranny, like a colorless, odorless gas.

[00:40:02]It's horrible for you. And what that means is actually having boundaries, and putting down your devices, um, locking up your devices, um, at very least, as much of the first hour of the day as you possibly can, always the last hour of the day. This gets to the protocols, uh, episodes that I've done in the past always during meals, but I actually recommend having these boundaries where you say, "Look, if I'm going to work on the weekends, it's going to be a total of 4 hours on the weekend, for example.

[00:40:26]2 hours on Saturday, 2 hours on Sunday.

[00:40:29]4 hours on Sunday afternoon, 4 hours on Saturday afternoon, depending on what kind of Sabbath you keep if you like to keep Sabbath. But but not all day. I mean, you you you need to actually make decisions not to work. You know, some people, probably nobody watching this podcast have to tell them to make the decision to work. Most of you have to make the decision to not work and to circumscribe it very specifically across hours is a good is a good first practice. Second is especially not even to check in or to to to to get reminders of work. So, work one thing is like, you know, working on a report and putting together a PowerPoint, I'm making calls to clients, whatever happens to be.

[00:41:05]But really what a lot of people don't consider to be work is checking their texts and emails. And so, this is number two is setting times when you resolve not to write or check work email or text messages, any communications as well.

[00:41:18]Now, that might just be in the first category. You might say, "That's just work." But but for most people that isn't work, that's just, you know, keeping up to date is what it comes down to. But but specifically not communicating about it is a really really healthy thing to do. Um and it's a it's a it's a really good practice.

[00:41:34]The breaks where you're actually not on any electronic communications at all. As a matter of fact, that's a little Sabbath. And if you Sabbath keep, you you know how refreshing that can actually be. I know have colleagues and I have friends where I know I'm not going to be able to text them between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday. I'm just not going to be able to do that because they're they're serious about practicing their their Jewish faith. I know other people who are pretty serious about Sabbath keeping on Sundays because they're they're Christians, but they also know how good it is for them. Meaning, I'm not going to get an answer to my emails on Sundays if I send them an email. If that's what you do, that's great. But if even if you don't do that, then the 4 hours that you decide not to do that at the end of the day or, you know, certain parts of the weekend, no electronic communications feels like a like a little Sabbath. Um third, uh speaking of that, is is developing more of a metaphysical life.

[00:42:26]When I was super burned out in 2019 and I stepped down as president of the think tank in Washington, D.C., um I did what people have done for thousands of years, um religious people.

[00:42:37]I'm a traditionally religious person, I'm a Catholic, during part of my life, most important part of my life. Um and and what I decided to do was I decided to go walk the Camino, which is the Camino de Santiago. I've talked about it multiple occasions on this podcast, which is, you know, hundreds of miles across northern Spain, just walking, walking, walking. That's your only job.

[00:42:56]It's unbelievably rejuvenating.

[00:42:58]Ambulation is the quintessential human exercise. It's ergonomically so sound.

[00:43:04]Almost everybody can walk, not everybody, but almost everybody actually can, and and doing so, when you're doing so with a when you're when when you have a spiritual purpose, that's particularly meaningful and rejuvenating for me. That's a spiritual kind of activity. I also, when I left in 2019, is I ramped up my my commitment to the not to my faith, but to the practice of my faith. I started praying more earnestly every day. I started praying my rosary more, which is an an ancient Catholic meditation, Catholic prayer, um that uses prayer beads and and and repeated prayer. I started going to mass every day. I've been going to mass almost every day since 2019, as a matter of fact. Game changer, game changer for me. And again, if that's your thing, that's great. If it's not, there is a thing out there that metaphysically can sustain you in ways. And and there's a ton of research out there that shows that when people become more spiritually, meditatively, or religiously adroit, and again, that covers a lot of territory, whether you're religious or not, is doing something systematic for the transcendence of your spirit, that this is one of the absolute best ways that you can deal with burnout. So, those are the three ways to do it. Now, here's how to not do it. Here's and what to not do. A lot of people when they were burning out, when they've been burning out, they're like, "If I can go to remote work, that would be a real solution for me." Maybe probably not. And uh 2022 survey data really coming out of the worst part of the coronavirus epidemic showed that it found that 86% of fully remote workers experienced some degree of burnout in their job, which is much higher than the in-person workers before the coronavirus epidemic.

[00:44:43]There was something about going hybrid and especially going fully remote that was isolating that made the stress hormone production worse with respect to work. Probably had to do with the the separation from other people and the loneliness. 81% of hybrid workers experience burnout and it's much higher than fully in-person workers, it turns out.

[00:45:03]Now, this finding is consistent with the idea that blue-collar jobs, they don't tend to see very much burnout, and white-collar jobs tend to tend to see a ton of burnout, despite the fact that blue-collar jobs can be crushingly long hours. So, it's not about the hours per se. It has to do with the fact that you're out there doing stuff, seeing people, etc. etc. So, moving to remote work is not a solution to burnout for the vast majority of the people, despite the fact that it probably looks good. It's sort of makes sense. If I don't have to go in there, and I don't have to commute, and I'm so tired of that thing, I'll get a change of pace. Well, I'm not so sure.

[00:45:43]That's not probably how you should think about it. So, in the bottom line is basically this, is you need to separate work from non-work. Number one is to put your specific work into defined hours.

[00:45:54]Number two is setting times when you're not in new communication. Number three is to work on your spiritual or philosophical life. And number four is not getting into the pattern of thinking that if you step away from your in-person workplace, that that's going to be a panacea, and that's actually going to help you. So, those are the big ways to actually be dealing with burnout. Okay, I hope this has been really, really helpful. The follow-on to this is people who are burning out because they're addicted. And that's workaholism, an addiction to success and winning. I'm going to leave that for a future episode. Matter of fact, I'm going to record that episode right after that one cuz I've got these ideas in my bones right now, and I want to share them. You can watch it perhaps even as soon as next week, but certainly in a future episode, and you'll know when it comes out because it will, as always, be announced. I'll also do a couple of questions here.

[00:46:42]You're not broken.

[00:46:43]>> [music] >> You're meaning starved.

[00:46:45]I talk to people all the time who are, by any external measure, successful.

[00:46:50]They built careers. They have families.

[00:46:52]They've checked the boxes. And yet, something feels off. Life feels thin.

[00:46:58]Like you're going through the motions.

[00:47:00]Like you're watching yourself from the outside.

[00:47:03]And here's what I want you to know.

[00:47:05]>> [music] >> That feeling is not a personal failing.

[00:47:07]It's not ingratitude. It's not something wrong with you.

[00:47:11]It's a meaning problem.

[00:47:13]And it's an epidemic. [music] The modern world is extraordinary at giving us comfort, achievement, [music] and distraction. It's terrible at giving us meaning.

[00:47:23]And no amount of success will fix that.

[00:47:25]I've seen it in my research, and I've seen it in my [music] own life.

[00:47:29]That's exactly what we work on at MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, in a program I've developed called The Meaning of Your Life.

[00:47:38]It's not a lecture. It's not a quick [music] fix. It's several days of real work in a small group on the questions that actually matter. [music] If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look.

[00:47:54]First question is written in by Claire McMurray, who writes that writes into the website, "How do you maximize happiness when you don't have a choice to create your calling because it's been thrust upon you?"

[00:48:05]Clara says that she left academia to be a full-time caregiver to her daughter who has a rare genetic disorder. That's beautiful, Clara. Thank you for what you're doing for your daughter, but I know it can be really, really hard. It can be hard because when you didn't choose it, even though I know it's probably unbelievably meaningful, it might not be the calling that you loved so very much and you might be grieving the fact that you're not able to do that work and that'd be just really hard for you, well, hard for your happiness.

[00:48:31]Maybe even hard for your sense of meaning in life.

[00:48:33]Let's remember that the institutions of meaning are manifold. There is not just about and not just about your career calling. I know it's important. I know the vocation work vocation is is critically important to a lot of people, but we tend to overemphasize it in the meaning and a happiness calculus. On the contrary, the happiest people have a diverse set of practices that they follow almost every day, only one of which is actually finding meaning in their work.

[00:49:01]The first three are faith and family and friendships. So, love of the divine, love of your family, and love of your friends. And and and looking for sustenance and meaning and happiness in those three things is really critically important. As a matter of fact, people who are very workaholic, they tend to burn out and not find meaning anymore because they under-nourish those first three sources of happiness and meaning.

[00:49:23]And so, for people who are in the in the position of doing something that's really, really, really important, but isn't their work calling, is looking more to the non-work parts of the meaning and happiness calculus. Largely having to do with faith, spiritual spirituality, or philosophical life, of looking toward family relationships, perhaps besides the one with the person for whom you're the full-time caregiver, and friendships is looking to cultivate deeper and deeper friendships. Those are ways to think about it. I know you're highly trained. I know. I know. And it And it's your dream and at some point you'll be able to pursue that more. I promise. But in the meantime, it's looking in other directions. Second, here this one comes from Josiah Kennedy.

[00:50:03]I love optimizing my life and using your protocols.

[00:50:07]Thank you, Josiah. Um but as a young university student, I'm finding that building these routines is making me increasingly isolated. Oops.

[00:50:14]How can I better incorporate leisure and social time? How can I get better at spending time with people? Okay, got it.

[00:50:19]Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good. I tried to emphasize that in my protocols. My protocols are unbelievably hardcore, but remember, Josiah, I'm not 20. I'm 61 when I'm taping this. My circumstances are different than yours.

[00:50:34]You need to actually adapt these ideas.

[00:50:36]This is nothing more than a a template for your adaptation to your own particular life and you shouldn't be neglecting your social life. On the contrary, I can go through my morning protocol starting at 4:30 in the morning and going through all the things that I do. And no small part because my life is organized socially in such a way that I'm doing some of it with other people.

[00:50:56]You know, I get up, I exercise, I go to mass with my wife, I come back and have coffee and breakfast with my wife. I'm, you know, working and writing all morning if I'm working at home and, you know, every 45 minutes or so, I say hello to my family and, you know, my grandsons come up the stairs when they wake up and I say, "Hey, good morning." and have a little wrestling session, a couple of jokes, then I go back to work.

[00:51:15]So, the truth of the matter is that I have a, you know, plenty rich social life. If you're in university, you're going to have to do it in a different way. So, don't be rigid. Conform to the things that will actually give you the greatest happiness while sticking to the kinds of protocols that will also protect and maintain uh your biology um as well as you possibly can.

[00:51:38]Hope that helps. Well, we're done. Uh let me know your thoughts. Give me all the questions that you want and more suggestions for topics like today's in direct response to your to your uh desire to hear more about burnout and you can do that by writing to [email protected]. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, any place where you get your podcast.

[00:51:56]Recommend this to just, you know, couple million of your close personal friends.

[00:52:01]Uh that will help us out an awful lot.

[00:52:02]Leave a comment. I promise I'll read them. I like to hear the criticism. I mean, the trolls don't turn me on so much, but but boy oh boy, even if it's a negative idea on negative criticism on this, um I want to know it. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms. Uh get the newsletter and read the book The Meaning of Your Life and I hope all of this is being really useful to you because that's why I do it. Thanks for staying with me this week and look forward [music] to seeing you next week.