Front Burner - Pandemic burnout is real

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Today on Front Burner, Anne Helen Petersen explains the forces behind burnout and why more and more Canadians are struggling with it one year into a global pandemic that has altered the way many of us work and live.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Today, we're going to talk about burnout. My guest is Anne Helen Peterson. You might have heard of her.

She wrote this really popular book. It's called Can't Even, How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. We're going to talk about the forces that she thinks have contributed to this and how the pandemic is generally making burnout even worse. Okay, let's get to it. Hi, Anne. Thanks so much for joining me today. It's my total pleasure. So look, what does burnout look like for you? When do you know that you're burnt out? You know, it's such an interesting question because I think it's changed slightly from pre-pandemic to during the pandemic and people being quarantined. So pre-pandemic, the way that I recognized it was kind of twofold. One is that there would be errands that I needed to do that I just couldn't bring myself to do. I called this kind of hokey errand paralysis.

And I was like, why can I not just sharpen my knives? Like, why can't I just do this straightforward mailing back of this package? Right. Just simple things, right? The to-do list that you're like, why can't I ever get to the end of it? It just recycles every single week onto the next week. I get that. I get that. And then part of it too, was this flattening of all the things that I was excited to do or would have otherwise been excited to do. So things like going on a weekend trip or going to see friends, you know, just things that you're planning for that seem to just feel like one more obligation, like another thing that is on that to do list. And they get the the life and the joy sucked out of them. I totally get that. And then how did it change for you in the pandemic?

Well, I think it's very similar in a lot of ways, except for like there there's just so little texture, and it continues to be not a ton of texture to our lives, particularly, I think, during the winter months. And I think that you get this feeling of like, of infinite, infinite days, right? You're like, no day is any different than the other. I can't distinguish. Is it Thursday? Is it Monday? I call it like one endless Wednesday, right? Your weekends don't feel any different from your weekdays. And particularly when it comes to work and for people who have been able to work from home, I think work colonizes whatever time you make available to it. So one thing that's happened when people have stopped commuting and stopped having robust social lives outside of their work is that it's very easy to roll over and start working and then just kind of keep working as much as you can throughout the day. I think whatever your

child care situation might hamper that. But a lot of people that I know find themselves working much longer hours than they did before. But at the same time, I think because work isn't bracketed in any sort of meaningful way and there isn't this meaningful barrier between non-work time and work time, not that there really totally was before. I there before, yeah. I think that there's less of an incentive to be like, okay, I'm going to do really concentrated, good work for two hours

because I know at five o'clock, I have to leave the office. What do you think the consequences of that are? Like, what does it do to a person? I think that our brains aren't meant to work in this capacity all the time. I think that when you find yourself working all the time, your productivity actually does go down. You do worse work. you do worse work, you don't have time for your brain to rest and to reset, and to do that sort of background work that is so important to creativity, and different innovative types

of thinking. I actually so interesting, you say that, because, you know, being stuck in this, you know, everyday loop, and then filling it with work, I find too, you know, it has occasionally done things to me that have surprised me, right? Like, so for example, the other week, I just completely lost the ball in the middle of this interview. And I was so convinced that this interview made no sense. I guessed that our entire team, the whole day, I was like, I think we need to redo this episode. It didn't make any sense. And, you know, at the end of the day, everyone kept being like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what you're talking about. And then, you know, lo and behold, like, it was fine. It made sense. But like, I was

so surprised that, you know, I could be so off base, right? Like, where was that coming from? Well, I think our brains are kind of broken. Burnout breaks your brain. But also there have been some pretty interesting articles about how the continuous stress that people have been under, whether you're an essential worker, whether you're a mom who's trying to juggle child care, different child care arrangements, and as well as your own work. I think a lot of people do feel this need to continue to prove their productivity to their workplaces. So our brains under this stress have been sort of short circuiting, like our short term memory isn't very good. Sometimes I find myself like,

what is the word for that? I have no idea. Where am I? What am I doing? Those experiences, I think, collide with the other symptoms of burnout in terms of fatigue and kind of like a beige, a feeling that the world is like there's just not much topography to the world right now there's just not much that that we can even look forward to and I know this is particularly true in the Canadian context because the the vaccine rollout is a little bit slower and so it's like okay we're very jealous of you guys right now right but at the same time like there's we're preparing for a fourth surge so there's all these different messages that I think we're all trying to internalize all the time about like, I need to be a better worker, but also we're going through a global pandemic. And also I'm worried about, you know, what's going on with my family, what's going on with my partner, what's going on with my own body and my mind. And a lot of those things can lead to that overarching feeling of burnout and fatigue. Do you see some benefits to working from home as well?

You know, I don't have to commute anymore. I feel like I'm eating better. I can, you know, I think I can see my kid maybe more than I would have had I been at the office. Oh, totally. Totally. I think the future is going to be what a lot of people call flexible or hybrid work schedules where maybe one or two or three days a week you go into the office, but the rest of the time is much more flexible to workers' needs. And I think there is incredible potential for people to actually make life, make work bend to their needs instead of bending their life to work's needs. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I do feel I have an 11 month old baby at home,

and I do feel like I have always been so good at letting work seep into my personal life. But on good days, I let my personal life seep into my work. And that has been a really positive thing as well. These are things that you have been talking about well before the pandemic in your book and this viral piece that you wrote for BuzzFeed that just made its way around the entire internet. I remember reading it at the time. And so can you talk to me a little bit about the foundations of burnout that you were already seeing pre-pandemic? You know, what are the forces that are creating this burnout, particularly in our generation, millennials. I think you and I are both kind of elder millennials. Yes, I'm an elder millennial. I was born in 1981. Okay. So the thing that really

became clear to me as I started digging into how millennials, particularly people who were aspiring to be upwardly mobile millennials or people who were born into the middle class, this idea about productivity and our attitude towards work and what work can do for us and what stability should look like, what success should look like, the real motivator is that we are terrified of downward mobility, right? Of not doing as well or better than our parents. And our parents were also terrified of that, right? And so what's motivating most people is this feeling that like, well, this is really hard.

I thought that like if I graduated from college, right? Everyone told me if I just went to college, then I could find a route to stability. If I just got married, if I just figured out stable housing, then things would find a route to stability. If I just got married, if I just figured out stable housing, then things would be, you know, good for me. It's not, and that's just not the case. So I think a lot of the compulsion towards working in a way that leads to burnout and really identifying so strongly with your job and when things go poorly with your job, feeling like

there's nothing else. Also, having no personality or identity or very little personality or identity outside of your job is that people are just terrified of precarity and experiencing precarity. You're like, oh, I thought I was middle class. Why am I living month to month? Why do I not even have, you know, $15,000, $20,000 in savings in case of a catastrophe? Why is it so hard? What if I just work more? Will that solve my problems?

And it won't, right? But I do think that there's this understanding, especially after the recession, that the only way to stay above water, to keep your head above water, when there are so few safety nets to catch us, sorry, that's a mixed metaphor, but you get what I'm saying is that you just have to work all the time. Like that is the only solution.

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that a large portion of people who aren't as privileged, who haven't been part of the middle class, felt long, long before this, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think precarity in general and feeling like you have to work all the time in order to find stability, that is something that I think has become more acknowledged as part of a societal affliction, because it's something that the middle class is experiencing, right? And so when you have more people, like, when you have a majority of the workforce that

identifies with something, then it feels like it's much more of a societal problem. It should have been a societal problem when it wasn't the middle class experiencing it, right? Like it should have always been a societal problem. And I think that one thing that I have grappled with over the course of the last two years, and I think other people are as well, is thinking through like, we can't just decide things are problems when white bourgeois people decide that they're problems, right? And you and I are talking about work from home, but I just want to acknowledge that particularly during this pandemic, there are a lot of people who just don't have that option. You know, frontline workers,

I'm thinking of grocery store clerks and personal support workers and doctors, and this must be, you know, unbelievably stressful. Stephanie Van Wynne worked here at Humber River Hospital as an occupational health nurse. Today, her colleagues are reeling after learning that the 25-year-old took her own life. Karine Dion, a general practitioner working in the ER at the Granby Hospital, took her own life. This is her sister that you're looking at there. Since this summer, she tried to do a lot of activity, physics, meditation, yoga, and things like that. So she tried very hard.

But this autumn, she didn't sleep for a couple of days again. And at this time, the stress was too high. Yeah, well, and I think that the precariousness of actually thinking about risking your life every day, right? Like oftentimes we think that people who do that work that puts them in the line of danger as, you know, rescue workers in some capacity, like those are people who are like,

oh, that is an incredibly difficult job. Like think about the amount of stress that they have to carry in their lives. And that that stress has been levied on hundreds of thousands of people who are grocery store workers, right? People who are just putting themselves in the line of danger simply by being in public spaces. And I think that dealing with all of that accumulated worry and also worry about your extended family, because it's not just you, right? It's not just, oh, I go to my job at the grocery store. It's also who am I exposing when I come home? And I think as more and more

people are getting vaccinated, some of that stress is diminishing. But one thing that I've written about is that I think a lot of people are going to have significant PTSD from this period. And it's, you know, it's a slow motion accumulated PTSD, but it's going to take a long time for us to actually grapple with and reckon with the trauma of going through this past year. I think we got to talk about since we're talking about this burden that people take on how this is all probably disproportionately affecting women, right? When schools emptied in the spring, the she-session wasn't far behind. Gina Vivian stopped taking shifts as a home care nurse to look after her twin boys. There was no way I could work. Each day I'm not working. Each day I'm not using my skills.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think this is anecdotally. I think this is anecdotally, I think that the people that are most frazzled or feel like they cannot do this even one week, one month more are older and felt very isolated for a long time, for people who have chronic illnesses, like the pandemic is hard in so many different intersecting ways. But I think especially for those who haven't had access to care for their children and also are trying to continue to be an ideal worker, which, you know, the ideal worker under capitalism is someone who has no family obligations, who can pretend like they have no family obligations. When you try to bring those two realities together, the idea that like, oh, I am working as if I have no family, and then my family and all of my family's demands are right there, then, you know, people absorb that stress and that incredible fatigue. And I think at this point, you know, people absorb that stress and that incredible fatigue. And I think at this point, you know, I think of burnout as like you hit the wall and then you

scale the wall and then you keep going. And that's what we've been asking a lot of mothers to do over the course of the last year. so i have to say when people discuss burnout i often feel like the discussion gravitates to things individuals can do right like go do yoga uh workout, self care. And that's, that's all fine. But you know, as we've discussed in this conversation, the forces that produced this burnout, they're so much larger than just sort of augmenting individual behavior. And so where do you want to start here when it comes to some some real solutions to this? You know, I think that sometimes people really want to deal with this on the personal level, because they think of it as a personal problem. And this was, I hope, one of the things that my original article and that my book gave people the opportunity to do

was to see that it wasn't just them dealing with their own exhaustion, their own fatigue at, you know, navigating the world, and to give it a name, but then also to understand that the problem isn't that like, you're bad at self care, right? Like self care is such, it's like a, it's a bandaid on a bullet wound. It is such a temporary salve and also like a completely capitalistic understanding of how you can fix these things. It's like, oh, buy a bath bomb, right? Yeah. Get a sheet mask. Yeah. Which is like, no, this doesn't fix anything. This is just me spending more money. I mean, the problem is capitalism, right? The problem is our current iteration of capitalism. And it creates, it wants us to be work robots. And our resistance to that manifests in the form of burnout. You know, burnout is our minds and our bodies saying no, right? But there are different iterations. There are different ways

that we can install safety nets that make people feel less of that precarity that I think pushes us towards this attitude towards work. There's all sorts of policy reforms and ideas about how we can stop being so fixated on growth at any cost. But I think that the first step in that conversation is realizing that this is a societal problem. This is not a personal one. in that conversation is realizing that this is a societal problem. This is not a personal one.

So how can companies establish guardrails that protect their workers from like the runaway truck of work? And that's something that I think a lot of companies are thinking about seriously as we move into this more hybrid style of work, understanding that they have a workforce that is currently exhausted, just exhausted. So what do we do moving forward to try to make workers into their most resilient selves? And I don't mean that in like an exploitative sort of sense. I mean it in a good workers are workers who are rested. Good workers are workers who have lives outside of work. And I think that there are lots of things that we can think about in terms of the politicians that we're electing and the policies that we support that can look towards how we can try to make people's lives on an everyday basis feel less precarious. Anne Helen Peterson, thank you so much

for this conversation. It was really, really interesting. Thank you. A real pleasure. Thank you so much. Before we go today, and speaking of the burden, frontline workers who have risked their lives in this pandemic, and at times given their lives, have carried. I want to play you some of an interview my colleague Natasha Fata did this weekend with Dr. Michael Warner, Medical Director of Critical Care at Michael Guerin Hospital. Dr. Warner talked about a patient of his, the wife of a man who he says was forced to go to work at a factory who didn't have any paid time off. Well, he got COVID and so did his wife in her 40s. And after extraordinary efforts to

keep her alive, on the weekend, she died. Here is Dr. Warner. I can tell you that both teams are severely affected by this, as is her family, who I've spoken with. You know, Natasha, they didn't get to see her from the moment that she entered the hospital. They'll never see her. And the closest they got was a Zoom meeting while she was in the prone position on a ventilator. That's the closest they got.

And then the updates for me multiple times a day. And, you know, when I listened to myself being interviewed earlier today, I could tell how angry I was. And I think I'm beyond angry now. I'm just so sad. And her story is so important. But unfortunately, it's not unique and until we acknowledge that certain people are getting killed by this and certain people just want to live their lives because they're not at risk and we need to square that circle and move forward together we're not going to move forward we need to square that circle and move forward together, we're not going to move forward.

We need to stop everything and focus on protecting the people who are getting sick from this. It's just a humane thing to do. All right, that is all for today. Thank you so much for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.