Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - Simple Steps to Guard Against Burnout This Lockdown

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

England is going back into a nationwide lockdown today and if you’re feeling pretty apprehensive about that, you’re very much not alone. The fact that so many of us are going to be staying home for the next month really increases the relevance of this latest episode, a conversation in which we’re looking at the goal of how you can protect yourself against mental and emotional burnout. More than a fancy term for being exhausted and overworked, burnout is condition that’s been recognised by the World Health Organisation. It’s something that has touched so many of us during the last national lockdown as Covid-19 drove a wrecking ball through our normal ways of living, working and socialising, and has lingered throughout the past months of fluctuating restrictions. In this episode, Senior Editor Roisín Dervish-O'Kane calls up Professor Amy O’Hana, a counsellor and lecturer at Oregon State University in the US and author of Beyond Burnout: What to do When your Work isn’t Working for You, along with Professor Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst, Goldsmiths University professor and author of Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. Together they discuss what burnout is, what it isn’t, how to spot the signs if you are going through it and, crucially, what you can do to protect your mental, emotional and spiritual health as England moves into Lockdown 2.0.  Follow Roisín Dervish-O'Kane on Instagram: @roisin.dervishokane Follow Women's Health on Instagram: @womenshealthuk Topics: What are the signs you're experiencing burnout How do you tell burnout apart from tiredness Why has the pandemic made us more vulnerable to burnout What should you do if you're suffering from burnout How can you avoid burnout during the second national lockdown Like what you’re hearing? We'd love if you could rate and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, as it really helps other people find the show. Also, remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, so you’ll never miss an episode.  Got a goal in mind? Shoot us a message on Instagram putting ‘Going for Goal’ at the start of your message and our experts could be helping you achieve your health goal in an upcoming episode. Alternatively, you can email us: [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, you are listening to Going for Goal, the weekly women's health podcast. I'm your host for a she and Dev show Kane, senior editor on women's health and this is your weekly chance to plug in and be inspired to work on your health and wellness. This is, of course, not a normal Thursday. The UK is going back into a nationwide lockdown today. And if you're feeling pretty apprehensive about that, then you are very much not alone. So before we get into this week's show, I just wanted to say that we are all sending lots of love to. strength and resilient vibes to anyone who needs it. And the fact that we're all going to be staying home for the next month really increases the relevance of today's conversation, in which we're looking at the goal of how you can protect yourself against mental and emotional burnout. Now, more than a fancy term for being exhausted and overworked, burnout is a condition that's been recognised by the World Health Organisation. It's something that has touched so many of us during the last national lockdown and has

lingered throughout the past months of fluctuating restrictions as COVID-19 is driven and wrecking ball through our normal ways of living, working and socialising. To help us comb through this topic, I called up Professor Amy O'Hana. She's a counsellor and lecturer at Oregon State University in the US and author of Beyond Burnout, What to Do When Your Work Isn't Working for You. I also called Professor Josh Cohen, who was a psychoanalyst and professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmith's University of London. He's author of Not Working, Why We Have to Stop, and a piece he wrote for The Guardian

all about how the pandemic has revealed the extent to which we depend on work for our sense of self went viral at the start of the March lockdown. Together we discuss what burnout is, what it isn't, how to spot the signs if you are going through it, and, most importantly, the steps you can take to protect your mental, emotional and spiritual health if you realise that the pressures of today are making you burnout.

It's important stuff. Let's get into it. Professor Amy O'Hana and Professor Josh Cohen, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. Thank you. So on this episode, we are here to talk about burnout. What it is, what it isn't, and what strategies going for goal listeners can employ to free themselves from its clutches. Before we get into it, let's find out a little bit more about you both. So starting with you, Amy, how did you come to?

to learn and educate others about burnout? Well, to be quite honest, I experienced burnout the first time at the age of 24 when I was working as a social worker. And it was so impactful to me that it made me change my college major from business where I had planned to go. I was planning to get out of social work and I'm going to go make lots of money. I'm not doing. social work anymore. So I decided to get an MBA. But I was so intrigued as to this phenomenon and this experience that it pulled me back into the counseling profession. And I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on burnout. So that's how it initially started. And then throughout my work as a counselor, specifically in my career counseling work, I've just witnessed it in my clients

and in the workplace as well. Interesting. Same question to you, Josh. Yeah, it's very interesting what Amy says, because when burnout was first sort of formulated as a diagnosis in the early 70s, it was really identified with the caring professions in particular. So that might be a really interesting vein of discussion. I got interested in burnout in a more indirect way. I trained first as an academic. My discipline was literature, so it seems quite far from. all of this, but I decided that I wanted to retrain as a psychoanalyst. And as a psychoanalyst, you generally are presumed to get interested in very interior states like guilt and idealization.

And you're supposed to be less interested in stuff that is coming at you from the outside world, like working too hard or getting very exhausted. But I was very intrigued to feel. I was very intrigued to find that my patients were coming to the couch or to the chair and to a person really, they would so often open their sessions by talking about a state of exhaustion and about their sessions less in the first instance in terms of the need to talk about specific life problems or symptoms and more in terms of a kind of a one-hour refuge from the demands of the outside world. It was as though this was the first thing that they valued about doing psychotherapy,

simply that they could get more and more an hour off their smartphones, an hour off email, an hour off the demands of home life, domestic life, working life, which of course are now completely ambient. And so I was really interested in the functional. of psychoanalysis as a protected space from the outside world? I think talking about burnout this year is particularly interesting because the way burnout is described, it's often so much as like this very modern malady

and something that's come about in response to our living really fast-paced lives. But if that's the case, how comes it's something that so many people have experienced this year when people have been working, living, parenting, being in relationships pretty much all in the same space? Why do you think that is? Well, my theory is that burnout comes from disconnection. It comes from a fragmentation of the self. And in that, we experience physical exhaustion, for sure, but we also experience disconnection from our sense of meaning, our sense of purpose. And now this year in particular COVID 2020, we are all home. We are even, we're feeling more disconnected than ever. And so in my opinion, in my, in my theory that I posit in my book beyond burnout,

the more disconnection we feel, the more disconnection we have, the more burnout we have as well. So because we are maybe disconnected from our roles that we'd be normally playing in the various spaces that we normally inhabit and we feel further away from ourselves, that could then be exacerbating this sense of burnout? I think so. Yes, I think it is the disconnection from the routine, perhaps, but I think that's a very surface connection we have. My suspicion is that it's even deeper. It's the energetic connection between humans that we're missing. We are connecting now on Zoom, most of us for work or many of us for work. We're running businesses from the dining room table.

We're trying to teach our kids their lessons in school and doing all of that from home. And we've lost that, that energetic, vibrant connection, the human to human, the eye contact, the smile in the office, the, hey, how are you doing? How is your weekend? That kind of connection. That's so interesting the way you put it, because I often think, The way the burnout is portrayed, and it's kind of what, like I just alluded to previously, it's almost, you think of it as an accumulation of too much stuff, like too much traveling,

too much work, too much stimulation. But from the way you're putting it, it's almost like we're experiencing this burnout from a lack. Josh, what's your take? So my take as much as Amy described, in our pre-COVID lives, we might have been more frenetic, we might have been covering a lot more ground, but we also had a kind of internal distance between the different spheres of our lives, between, say, our domestic lives and our working lives. And what we found, I think, a lot of us in COVID, if we are still able

to work, is that our lives have collapsed into a single space, that our most intimate relationships are operating right alongside our more public relationships. So I was just in an examination, university online examination. And one of my fellow examiners had her little boy running in and out of the living room while she was trying to speak. And it was quite distracting, but it was also a kind of sobering, slightly comical reminder of the way in which, which the different areas of our lives have bled into each other.

And actually, rather than this being cozy and simplifying, in some ways it can be quite suffocating and it can amplify the pressures on us, the sense that things are coming at us at the same time instantaneously, that there's no distant, there's no lag in time or space. You know, there's, we're kind of, everything is upon us at the same time. Burnout is so prescient this year. It feels very much all around. And it's got that kind of, it's got a nebulous enough sort of name that I think people can

forget that it is actually like a bona fide, like legitimate mental health condition. Amy, can you tell me about that how it was basically how the condition came to be formed? And you've done some, I know you've done some work as well on about how. how burnout differs from other conditions, for example, common mental health conditions that people might experience like depression. Can you speak to that? Sure. Well, as Josh mentioned, the term burnout originated around the 1970s from the psychoanalysis field. And it's not, it has never really been recognized as a bona fide mental health condition until recently. I think last year actually is when the World Health Organization began using that term and stating that it is definitely

a mental condition that needs intervention and recognition. And the DSM-5, which is the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders used in many Western mental health systems, burnout is not recognized as a mental health disorder. However, the symptoms of burnout actually mirror the symptoms of clinical depression. And so it's very common to have a burnout be misdiagnosed because a worker may be experiencing emotional exhaustion, lack of productivity, sleeplessness, and all of those symptoms, they go to their medical doctor and are given antidepressants or they may go through psychotherapy, which is good.

it will likely help those symptoms, but unless you're getting to the actual root, the actual cause, which is one's vocation, and the problems associated with that, then it doesn't mean you won't get better, but it does mean that you're probably going to get better faster if you know exactly what you're dealing with. What differentiates burnout from other mental and emotional symptoms or problems is vocation. It is always, link to one's vocation. And when I say vocation, I don't necessarily mean one's career or job. I mean one's bigger sense of connection with work, productivity, and meaning. Burnout is often, and we've referred to it as almost like a form of exhaustion. So how do you kind of spot the difference between extreme tiredness and fatigue and burnout? Pretty simple. If you can go on a nice vacation and come back 100%, you're not burned out. That's physical exhaustion. Burnout is an ongoing chronic disconnection of self-work, a larger purpose, others that just doesn't go away after all the good things that we do, eating well, going on vacation, the self-kit. And that's indicative of that

deeper, that deeper soul, existential, whatever it is for you. Yeah, absolutely. Exhaustion is internally restful. Burnout is the opposite. Burnout is a state of physical exhaustion accompanied by internal agitation, by feeling that there is always something still to do. In a situation where people maybe can't go on that rejuvenating break where they shut out the world, what equivalent kind of check can you do to help yourself work out whether what's going on for you is extreme tiredness or is actually something. more sinister and could be burnout. I think check in with your mood. Your mood is a great indicator of, in a way, how ill you are. If a kind of angry tone comes into your mind's ear, resentful, bitter, the chances are that you're burnt out rather than merely tired.

So it's sort of really listening to the tone of voice you hear when you talk to yourself. Yeah, brilliant. And having that mindful kind of attention to it. Yeah. Doing your own psychoanalysis. Definitely. Always, always, always. What are some of the key signs of burnout that people could look out for? When I did my dissertation 15 years ago, the research, the primary body of research,

believe that burnout showed up in three ways. And those are emotional exhaustion, cynicism, or being sarcastic. or cynical and reduce productivity. And so each of those areas are connected to our way of being human. So emotional exhaustion is our heart. Cynicism is our cognition, our perception, our consciousness. We're sarcastic. We've lost our hope.

And then reduced accomplishment or reduced productivity is really our physical exhaustion. So those are the three ways that shows up. And then, of course, that I believe it's a lot of. a little bit deeper. In fact, the psychoanalyst who initially coined the term burnout, Herbert Freudenberger, believed that it was a disconnection between one's expectations and the unfulfillment of those. So it was very much a lack of hoping for something and having that hoping unfulfilled or a dream unfulfilled.

And so that is more connected, I think, to our deeper psyche as humans. Like you're always falling short of your own, you're always missing out on your own goals and always falling short of your own expectations, as well as if your productivity is down, then maybe your boss's expectations as well. Absolutely. So then it just becomes a small. Not a happy place to be. Josh, do you have anything to add? There's a kind of useful terminology in a way for thinking about this in psychoanalysis. You know, the old form of feeling, bad about oneself is guilt. And in psychoanalysis, we talk about the super ego. And the super ego is this voice in your mind that tells you that you're bad, that you're

wrong, that you have fallen short of yourself morally in some way, that you should feel very small. So there's another way of thinking about yourself. psychoanalysis, which is the idea of the ego ideal. And the ego ideal is less the authoritative voice that tells you how terrible you are, then the ideal version of yourself that assures you that you can be the best you can be so that the super ego says you must or you must not. But the ego ideal says you can. Think about that Nike out. Think about the ways in which in our current culture,

what we're often feeling tyrannized and pressured by is not feeling that we're morally deficient, more that we're not the best version of ourselves, that we don't maximise our potential enough. This is an idea, of course, that is reinforced at so many levels of our culture, and social media is a kind of fundamental. fantastic petri dish for this kind of message enforcement. It's always telling us that we can

be a little more, that we can do a little more. And it means that you don't ever experience the satisfaction of having even temporarily arrived at a place. There's a wonderful essay by the Austrian writer Peter Hanker called On Tiredness. And there he talks about tiredness as a kind of almost joyful state. He talks about doing this farm work as a kid and working with this incredibly physically demanding thresher that left him bone-tired and soot black in his skin at the end of the day. And yet there is a kind of blissful oblivion at the end of that because you feel that you've got to the end of something and you can tune out. Whereas burnout is really about coming to a state of exhaustion, but still being needleed all the time by the need to do something else or to be

somewhere else or just to be, you know, making yourself present, advertising yourself to the world. I think that's such a tricky thing with workplace culture this year as well, because I guess in the way that, I don't know, we maybe used to virtue signal when you're in the office by maybe getting in early or looking super focused. I don't know if there's been a sense of people maybe almost working harder or feeling like they need to work harder in order to prove themselves. I'd be interesting to know, and especially now as we come to a point of economic decline and rising unemployment, whether there's that sense of, whether that scarcity and that sense of needing to kind of advertise ourselves to to our superiors and be seen to be working hard,

whether that's going to kind of contribute to this burnout? So I think what you just shared is absolutely spot on just as far as this frenetic pace that we are, that we engage in day to day, that we go and we do and we achieve. And now that we're all home, perhaps that's elevated some more because we have to prove ourselves even more. We have to show our boss that we are working hard or accomplishing or achieving just as much as we used to. And that it feels like such an impossible task when everything, our whole lives, our work lives, our family lives. And then our own personal stuff, our own emotional stuff is just all right there at the dining room table. And even deeper,

I think if we in our quote unquote normal everyday life where pre-COVID where we feel perhaps disconnected from our selves and our meaning, it's even harder to stop and ask ourselves, does this actually give me joy? Does this actually give me meaning? Does this, am I feeling productive? Am I feeling like I'm making a contribution? And do I feel connected to people and what and love and what's really important? all the things around me that are most important to me.

Well, that's one thing that it sounds like people who are thinking that they may be experiencing burnout or maybe vulnerable to experiencing it. That sounds like something they would need to prioritize. I'd love to move on to the bit where we talk about what people can do at the moment because this is advice that people are crying out for. where would you start? Where would you start? What are some of the key things?

If someone's got to do a bit of a life audit and think, right, this isn't working, I'm spending too much time working, everything's bleeding into one another and I'm feeling disconnected. Where would you recommend someone start? We prioritize the minutest demands of the workplace over life basics like love,

and meaningful connection. And the strange thing about this is a kind of inversion whereby necessities start to feel like luxuries, like spending a little time with your partner or your kids. And really superfluities like writing the extra email start to feel to us like necessities, things that we can't do without. And I think it has to do with a sense

that what is immediately purposeful and productive is more important than things that are more ongoing. There's no immediate purpose to spending an hour talking with your partner. You can sort of do without it for one evening and the next evening and the next. And then suddenly you realised you haven't really talked to them in a year. So what I talk about really is the need to make time for what we might call aimlessness, for non-productive, non-purposeful kinds of activity that put us in touch less with doing and more with being.

And that can take the form of aimless conversation. It can take the form of walking. It can take the form of so many different activities that really exist for themselves and not for some extraneous purpose. It sounds really simple, but anything from taking a walk, to doing a jigsaw puzzle with your kid,

can become a way of sort of being in touch with yourself and with somebody else for the sake of relating rather than because there's some kind of purpose or reward that will sort of emerge at the end of it. We are on such the same wavelength, Josh, because I would answer that question in exactly the same way. Instead of focusing on what I am to do, focus on who I am to be. And perhaps I'll say it the same thing you just said, but in a different way. And that is when I was a kid in school learning grammar and language,

I learned to write with the being verbs first. Am is, our, was, were the being been. And then we have the action verbs after that. But we learn the being verbs first because being is our natural state as humans. And yet we forget that when we start to go to work. Both your points there, they are so important and need to be heard. But from the perspective of so many, so for going for goal listeners, requires a bit of a paradigm shift to go from thinking about doing and achieving to going from just being.

And especially at a time, Josh, I think, well, Amy, I can't remember, as you said, you're both very aligned. I can't remember which one of you said this, but it was a very good point who was saying that because there is so much less movement now, there are fewer opportunities to check in with yourself and kind of take stock or analyze something, think about how something makes you feel, whether something is kind of on the right track. How would you advise someone in as practical way as possible that allows themselves time or space to change? check in with who they want to be and how they are feeling, if this is so far away from the way they're operating at the moment. I mean, one thing that I would say is, I don't know how

Amy feels about this. I'm always suspicious of things like checking in with yourself will make you a better worker, because of course, then you're putting the emphasis back on action again and on productivity, as though that's all it's for and it doesn't really, it is. really an end in itself. What I would say, though, is that we can see very clearly that the endless grind and the sort of the tyranny of habit when it comes to email and sort of constant self-monitoring and self-maintenance doesn't make us better workers. It I think leads to, particularly that kind of hard-bitten cynicism that Amy was talking about as a key feature of burnout, a sense of weariness of life and the world, and it doesn't do much for our sense of collegiality or our goodwill towards work.

We sort of admired in this cloud of bitterness the whole time. So, I mean, you know, there's something about checking in with yourself that I think does balance you out. It does remind you that we are as much creatures of inaction as of action, that stillness is as important and valid and as much a part of who we are as movement. How do people work that into their schedule if it's something they're not really allowing? themselves to do or is even working it into your schedule, does that kind of defy the point? It actually does not take that long. When I'm teaching my students and even in my daily, just practice of life, five minutes, literally to just get reconnected to yourself. And it's an intentional process. I'll just share just a quick exercise that I do and I ask my students to do.

And that is just to simply be still, like Josh said, find a place of stillness. It can be in your office chair. It can be on your bed at home, wherever. And then start with breath because the breath is what connects us to our heart space and begin to breathe and then move your intention into your body. Feel if there's any tension or stress anywhere in your body. Breathe into that area. Then begin to channel all of that stress or tension back up through the heart

and then finally reconnect with your mind. Because we're running around our worlds, our lives with our minds leading us. And that's where we get disconnected a lot of times because our sense of meaning is connected to our heart. It shows up in our body. And then if we're not in touch with those pieces of ourselves, then we just become exhausted and demoralized and all the things.

But yet our minds are just frenetically racing. It's the wired and tired, wired and tired feeling that we have when we're burned out. So five minutes. Anytime you're starting to feel disconnected, morning is a great time to practice or evening we're at the forebed. So if it's getting back in touch with our bodies is a key. That's one way that people can kind of fend off a rising tide of burnout. Another one, something that you both seem to be talking about a lot, is almost kind of reconnecting with your values and reestablishing your values.

What's a way that people can kind of do this practically? Is it journaling? Is it, I don't know, writing a little thing about, so this makes me thinking of, you know, the things you'd write when you were a child at school. Like, hello, my name is, my name is X, I live in this, I like to play with my dog, this makes me sad, this makes me happy. Do you maybe always have to do a bit of that to work out your values? What would you, what would you guys recommend? I mean, you, the, the key word to me, would be conversation actually, would be dialogue, which can be dialogue with yourself on the page, but it can also be dialogue with somebody else. But to get into contact with yourself,

through yourself or another person, but to get into contact with yourself as somebody who is multidimensional, somebody who has a lot going on, who has a kind of curiosity about themselves in the world that is always opened up by just speaking freely. And of course, psychotherapy is just a kind of specialized form of that practice. But one of the things that happens to us when we get burnt out is we get stuck with a very constricted version of ourselves, very one-dimensional. And actually, we don't just get tired with the world around us. tired of ourselves. We get tired of the voice in our head because it's so repetitive.

And speaking freely is a way of reminding yourself that actually there's more to you than, you know, the rituals of your daily routine and your task orientation. I definitely agree with that. And I would add on to the whole concept of reconnecting for women, the process can be a little different because we women experience burnout like men do, but for a slightly different reason. And oftentimes that has to do with us learning how to survive and thrive in a workforce that is very much dominated by masculine energy, for better or for worse. And we learn to step into that, which is amazing. But for women, it can be even more affected to embrace the feminine, embrace our creativity.

So do things that bring us, make us feel creative. So whatever that is for her, for the individual woman, so painting, writing, I'm a poet. I like to write poetry. baking, dancing, welding, you know, if that makes you feel creative, remodeling a house, whatever it is that can help the feminine women to just re-engage with the peace of ourselves that oftentimes is not valued or supported in the workforce.

Is there something in, when you're so wrapped up, I think with burnout, and correct me if I'm wrong, but something that I hear a lot is people, and as you said, Josh, they've become so one-dimensional and so you get so wrapped up in your own bullshit or your own nonsense and your responsibilities and what you're not doing, could another way be engaging maybe with stories again, engaging with someone else's narrative? So either reading or just getting involved watching a really great box set. I think when people are feeling like they are putting way too much into work and they're lost and they're burnt out and they don't feel quite ready to do the self-reflective analytical stuff right away, is there an argument that kind of diving into someone else's story?

can be a helpful, kind of a helpful crossing point. Surely. I mean, my background is in literature. That's actually what my academic position is in. And one of the things that I love about fiction and poetry is that on the one hand, it gives you all kinds of voices and stories that you can recognize and that you can see yourself in. but at the same time, it gives you other voices, voices that are not you.

It puts you in contact with something that isn't yourself. And so it kind of, it bridges that space between the inside of you and the outside of you. It makes you curious about yourself, but it also makes you curious about other people. And those things kind of mel together when you're reading fiction. Before I go, it would be great if either of you have any more, kind of tips or strategies or exercises or things that people can can kind of employ in their mission to beat burnout or kind of keep it at bay, which is what I think everyone's trying to do at the moment. It'd be great to know what they are. I would say that my advice

would be don't ignore it. It's so easy to ignore and just to go for your life and maybe get to retirement and be like, gosh, what is all of this for? And to me, that is just such a sad experience. It doesn't have to be that way. So your solution may not look like my solution, but find what works for you. And as Josh and I talked about today, just that whole idea of being versus doing, who are you to be versus what are you to do? And really maybe just start there with that question and let it lead you, let it lead you where you need to be for your own journey, for your own healing. Right. I think we all have the experience of sinking inersially into the sofa and closing our eyes and exhaustion. And then what happens to most of us these days is that we feel a kind of stab behind our temples which says,

oh my God, what do I have to do next? Listen out for that voice, but instead of becoming its servant, tune it out. Say, I understand, I understand you feel that there is something urgent that I need to do, but actually this moment of shutting my eyes and withdrawing into myself is more important. In a way, it's about training, about cultivating yourself to recognise the claim of your own tiredness and your own commitment to yourself. Oh, thank you both of you so much for coming on going for goals, talk about burnout. Thank you. Thank you both. I really hope you enjoyed that episode. That was Professor Josh Cohen and Professor Amy O'Hana,

unpicking the phenomenon of burnout and explaining why it's so important to address now of all times. If you want to comment on anything that's been raised in the show, you can email us or you can send us a DM via Instagram. All the details are in the show notes. I guess all that's left to say is it's not going to be a normal one this week, this month. So take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and let us know if there's anything that we can do on the podcast to help. You know, maybe you want some advice on home workouts.

Maybe you want some kind of new mental health strategies, whatever it is, get in touch because we make this podcast for you and you make this podcast. So we are here to help you. So tell us in whatever way we can best do that. Okay. we will be back next week, as ever. Stay home and take care of yourselves. Bye.