Science Vs - Burnout: Can We Fix Work?

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Work can really suck. And for lots of us, burnout has been feeling especially terrible. This week, we dive into how burnout messes with our brains and bodies, and we find out whether working from home is making things worse. Plus: Could the four-day workweek be the key to fixing our jobs? We speak to neuroscientist Professor Wendy Suzuki, economist Professor Nick Bloom, and Dr. Alex Pang. Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/3FPO90w  Check out Wendy Suzuki’s book, Good Anxiety, and Alex Pang’s book, Shorter. We also talked to Professor Heejung Chung about the downsides of working from home. Her book is The Flexibility Paradox. This episode was produced by Meryl Horn with help from Wendy Zukerman, Rose Rimler, Nick DelRose, Michelle Dang, and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord and Bumi Hidaka. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Professor Heejung Chung, Professor Ivanka Savic Berglund, Professor Tammy Allen, Dr. Miriam Marra, Dr. Washika Haak-Saheem, Dr. Will Stronge, Professor Michael Dokery, and Professor John Roberts. And a big big thanks to Bethel Habte, Ellen Frankman, Mike Podmore, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against being fed up. On today's show, burnout. What is it doing to us? And is there anything we can do about it? These days, there's this meme where people quit their crappy jobs in the finest blaze of glory. Here's my favorite. It's Beth's. She shared this video on TikTok. You can't see her face in it, but you can see her pink braids. And to start, she takes some deep breaths.

All right. And then picks up this phone. Attention Walmart shoppers and associates. My name is Beth from electronics. I've been working at Walmart for almost five years and I can say that everyone here is overworked and underpaid. Beth is pissed. We're told that we're replaceable. And sick of our bosses. Shame on y'all.

I hope you don't speak to your families the way you speak to us. F*** manage it and f*** this job. I quit. And watching her video is such a rush. It's like, yeah, she did it. And there's more bets out there than ever before. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in August, around one in every 35 workers in the US quit their jobs. That was more than 4 million people. It's the highest on record. Hence, the videos. I quit. I quit. I quit and quit and quit. Oh yeah. I am quitting this job. People are quitting for all kinds of reasons. But one thing that we're hearing over and over again is that a major problem here is burnout.

It's this idea that work stress builds and builds until you're totally exhausted and you just can't do it anymore. This was a huge issue even before the pandemic. One big study in the US found that almost a third of people who were working had burnout. Almost a third. And it feels like it's just gotten worse since the pandemic started. So today, we're going to dig into this. We're asking, how is burnout messing with our bodies and our brains?

And then, we're going to look at a possible fix. It's one of the buzziest solutions around. The pandemic is changing almost every aspect of work, and it might even make our weekends longer. The idea of a four-day workweek is picking up steam. It sounds mad that companies would do this, give us a day off and pay us the same. But champions of the four-day workweek reckon we'll be more productive

and still get all our work done in just four days. So is that true? When it comes to burnout, there's a lot of... I am quitting this job. But then there's a lot of... I am quitting this job. But then, there's science. Science vs. Burnout is coming up just after the break. It's season three of

The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right.

I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan 11. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st.

What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about burnout, what it's doing to us, and how we can fix it. And let's start with what burnout is doing inside our brains, because science is just starting to reveal what all of this work stress might actually be doing to us.

To tell us all about it, we called up Professor Wendy Suzuki. Hello. Hi. She's a neuroscientist at NYU. And Wendy's been hearing more and more about people who are totally fried from their work. They're saying, I'm not getting enough pay. I'm working too much.

I feel like a rat on a running wheel. Like, I just can't do it anymore. I quit. And so we wanted to know what exactly is happening to us while we're in this state. So Wendy says we can think of burnout as an extreme form of stress. And to understand what it's doing to our body, she took us back in time, thousands of years ago. So picture it. You're walking by a river, stone tool in one hand, baby on your back. And you hear a twig crack. Now that could be a bear that's about to kill you and your baby. And so you have immediate anxiety from that little noise before you know what it is. And that triggers a physiological stress

response that we're all familiar with. Increased heart rate, increased respiration, that funny feeling in your stomach, which is blood rushing from your digestive and reproductive organs out to your muscles so that you can either fight the bear or run away. And that's how the stress response evolved to help us get out of danger. And the problem today is that we have the equivalent of twigs cracking multiple times an hour. At work, those cracking twigs are your boss saying, can you, can you work this weekend? Uh, there there's so much to do. You know, there's, there's 10 shifts at the restaurant because you're the only worker there because I can't hire anybody else. And I need you to work. Uh, there's going to be a review of your performance. You're too good at this. Sorry. That was my boss voice. So, so this happens to us all the time, every single day,

our body treats that as a threat. And so that stress response is, is deployed. Oh, sorry. My cat is, wait. It's all right. It's all right. Is that your cat's stress response? No, he, um, he has a infection in his nose. So sometimes he has this, uh, I think he's okay. Are you okay? Okay. He's good. Um, so, so all of these perceived threats at work will deploy our stress response. So that stress response is literally our brain recognizing a threat and then kicking off this process where stuff like cortisol and adrenaline shoot through our body. And when we experience this stress response over and over, it can start to take its toll. So, for example, it can start to screw around with our brain cells.

Here's how we think that might happen. If you picture each brain cell like a big tree, the branches of the tree are called dendrites and they take in messages from other brain cells. Studies in mice and rats have found that when they experience a ton of stress for weeks, some of those branches can get hacked away. Yeah, their little rodent brains have fewer and shorter dendrites. So it's basically pruning your branches so you can't get as much information. It's not like one bout of stress and these dendrites start to die. That's long-term stress. And curiously, research is suggesting that brain cells aren't just getting pruned everywhere. So one particular part of the brain that seems to be affected is our prefrontal cortex.

It's this part of our brain that's particularly important for helping us focus and pay attention. It's the CEO of your brain. You know, I need to focus on Wendy because she is asking me questions right now. It is my prefrontal cortex that's helping me do that, and I'm not focused on my cat over there who might have an infection, but he doesn't need me to focus on him right now.

One study took 40 people with severe burnout, put them into an MRI machine to actually look into their brains. And they found that those people tended to have a smaller prefrontal cortex compared to a group of people who were doing just fine. Other studies in chronically stressed out people have found this kind of thing too. Now, this kind of research can't tell us that burnout is causing that part of the brain to shrink because maybe these people already had a smaller prefrontal cortex. But based on those animal studies, Wendy Suzuki is pretty convinced. And if burnout can shrink our prefrontal cortex, then this could start to affect our ability to concentrate.

And we do see that people with burnout in studies sometimes struggle with focusing or remembering stuff. And so your prefrontal cortex is not working as well. Your decision-making process is not working as well. So research is starting to show that burnout can have these real impacts on our brains. And it's also bad for our bodies. All that stress ups our risk of heart disease. It can bung up our immune system. And it might even make us grind our teeth, which often happens in the middle of the night when you've got no idea. This has gotten worse since the pandemic.

More dentists are seeing it, including my dentist. I just came back from the dentist and found out that I was grinding my teeth, which I didn't know what I was doing. I was a teeth grinder even before the pandemic. I could tell when I'm stressed because one side of my mouth gets sore. It's so disappointing because not only do we have to live with stress, it also does this secret things to us in the middle of the night. Yes, it's really bad. It does terrible things to the brain. It does terrible things to the body. When you think about it, it's kind of weird that stress related to work could cause these damaging reactions in the body. When you think about it, it's kind of weird that stress related to work

could cause these damaging reactions in our body. Reactions that are similar to when we're worried a bear might maul our baby. But Wendy says this actually makes sense. Work is a huge part of our lives. For many of us, it's how we survive. Money worries are a major anxiety in our society. And so while it's not a violent, you know, battle with guns, it is a constant fear of not having enough money. And, you know, for yourself, for your baby, for your whole family, maybe it's not just your family, but you're supporting other families, that is a huge burden. So stress and burnout can totally mess with our brains and our bodies, right down to our teeth. And as we're realizing how damaging this can be, researchers are also trying to tease out particular things at work that can cause these problems.

They've found that feeling like you can't do your job properly, being overworked and underpaid, they're all linked to burnout. But for many of us, it seems especially bad right now. So next up, we want to zoom into one big change that's happened during this pandemic, working from home. At the peak of the pandemic in the US, 40% of people with jobs were doing this. And for me, when it started a year and a half ago, it felt like this almost exciting thing that meant I didn't have to pretend I understood Swedish in front of Daniel Eck anymore. Yeah, yeah. But now I'm wondering if working from home has made things even worse.

To find out more, we called up Professor Nick Bloom. He's an economist from Stanford University. Here's producer Rose Rimla. Are you working from home right now? I'm actually at my parents' house. You're working from someone's home. Yeah, someone's at my old home in London, where I'm from, as you can probably tell from my accent. Nick has been researching working from home for years. So it was sort of a trip for him when this became a hot topic. It was kind of like watching his hometown indie band make it big. The joke used to be working from home, shirking from home, or working remotely, remotely working.

And my friends would joke and say like, you know, you're watching those old fashioned black and white movies or sleeping or something, you know. So everyone had this view that working from home is literally goofing off. That reminded me that my dad worked from home when I was a kid and I would come home from school and he'd be watching Judge Judy. So there might be some truth in that. Well, to find out just how much truth is in that, Nick did one of the best randomized control trials out there to help show what we are doing when we're working from home and what working from home is doing to us. It all started around 2010 for the class he was teaching. I had a student in the back of my class called James Liang who turned out to be the founding CEO and at that point chairman of this huge travel agent.

This company is the biggest online travel agency in China. And back then, James was interested in letting his employees work from home, but he wanted to try it out first with an experiment. So here's how they did their study. About 250 people joined the trial. Then the researchers divided them into two groups at random. James Liang, the CEO, drew a ping pong ball out of an urn and it said even and it meant everyone with an even birthday. So if you were born on the second, fourth, you know, six, eight, tenth of the month, you then got to work from home. And if it said odd like me, I'm the fifth of May, you have to stay in the office. So one group kept going into the office and the other

worked from home four days a week. Nick and James then tracked these workers for nine months and they found plenty of good stuff. People working from home were less likely to quit and because they didn't have to commute anymore, they got to spend more time with their family. Plus, they didn't have to hang out with annoying co-workers anymore. Like one worker told Nick... The person in the cubicle next to me in the office,

they are cutting their toenails under the desk with an enormous toenail clipper at work. Oh, it's so gross. It's like disgusting. And she said, it's horrible. I can't concentrate. You know, when they get that clipper, I hear that clip, clip, clip sound. Yeah. So working from home was definitely good for that person. And it was also good for the company. Nick and James found that the group working from home got more stuff done, which back in 2011 was a shock.

James and I and Evaness involved were completely amazed, like stunned, when it turned out that people working from home are not less productive, actually more productive. They were 13% more productive working from home than they were in the office, which is, that is an enormous amount. 13%, that's almost an extra day a week. But here is the problem. While some of those gains

were from people being more efficient, perhaps not being so distracted by the clip, clip, clip of toenail clippers. A lot of it was just because people were pulling more hours of work. Other studies have found this too, that people working from home just spend more time on the job. And this could partly be because working from home can just blur the boundaries between being on the job and not on the job, and it can make it harder to switch off. A survey of about a thousand people working from home during the pandemic found that two

thirds of them said that this was a big downside for them. And other research has found that people working from home are almost twice as likely to worry about work when they're not on the clock. And Wendy Suzuki sure is feeling the crunch of working from home. Now I'm just working 25 hours a day because I can't get away from Zoom and I can't even go to the bathroom. You know, at least when I was at work, I could shut my door and, you know, sneak off to the bathroom. And even in Nick's study over at the travel agency,

a year or so later, half the people working from home wanted to go back to the office, mostly because they were lonely. They said, forget it. We're going back. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of stunning. These are folks that opted to work from home initially, took part in the experiment. They're changing their mind. They're asking to come back. So even though working from home sure has its upsides, more flexibility, not commuting, no click, click, click of toenails, for some of us it's probably grinding us down even more. After the break, though, a solution is at hand.

We're travelling across the sea to a magical place where the sky glows green and the Huldufolk merrily work without ever experiencing burnout. Or so we're told. The four-day workweek is coming up after the break. Welcome back. We've talked about the burnout blues and the womp, womp, womp of working from home. Now we're diving into one of the buzziest ideas

to take us out of our working woes. The four-day work week. It's the idea that you only have to work four days a week to get that. But we get paid the same. It's cheerleaders say that shaving off a day of work will make us happier and healthier. And we'll get just as much stuff done. And lately, this idea has been getting a lot of hype. This is all about working smarter, not working longer. It improves job

satisfaction. It improves meaning for these workers. But how does it affect the bottom line? So how does it affect the bottom line? And it's not like I'm cosying up to Jim from accounting here. Sorry, Jim. It's just that there's no way lots of companies are going to take this on if it means that we're not getting our work done. Well, if you're following the news, it suggests that this isn't a problem because they're saying, just look at what's happening in Iceland. Yeah, Iceland has become the kind of

darling of the four-day workweek movement. We're hearing that tons of people over there have made the switch and they are so much more productive that they're finishing all their work. And all of this is helping to fuel this much bigger push for a four-day workweek. It's a global phenomenon, right? It's not just like Scandinavian countries that are really obsessed with work-life balance and, you know, wearing hand-knit sweaters and lighting candles. It's also Korea and Japan, you know, two countries whose languages have their own words for working yourself to death. This is Dr. Alex Pong. He recently wrote a book all about working fewer hours called Shorter.

And he's spoken to a bunch of companies who are doing this four-day workweek thing and who say that it's working great for them. So we wanted to know how. Like, how can we literally take a day off work and get the same amount done? Well, it turns out that for a lot of us, our time is getting sucked up by things like pointless meetings. Meetings are something that everybody knows can be better, but in almost every place doesn't change.

There were estimates of, you know, the money that companies waste on meetings that generate fairly scary numbers. Now, a lot of the research on this isn't from good scientific papers, but a survey of 6,000 professionals from Doodle, the company that makes a scheduling tool, found that workers said they wasted

around two hours a week in crappy meetings. That meant that the US could be wasting nearly $400 billion on meetings every year. And Alex says that he's seen some creative solutions to cut down on draggy work chats. Like, he told Rose about a company that had a robot which warned people when their meeting time was running out. It said, Someone else is waiting to use the room, and I, Roombot, the scheduling software,

I'm going to get mad if you don't get out of here in the next 90 seconds. Was it like a robot on wheels that had flailing arms? Would it zoom around the meeting with its arms flailing? Unfortunately, no. It was just a disembodied computer voice. But, you know, any of us who've seen 2001 A Space Odyssey know that those disembodied voices can be terrifying enough. I wouldn't open that PowerPoint if I was you, Dave. Exactly.

So, cutting down on meetings. That's one thing that places are doing to squish us into a four-day work week. Another thing is bringing in fancy new technology to make things more efficient. Like, Alex spoke to a pest control company that's pulled this off. They brought in some new tech that plotted the perfect route to drive from one job to the next. And apparently, it cut down so much on the time that their workmen were spending in trucks driving from one place to another that it was possible now to move everybody to a four-day week. Okay, so what we're seeing is that some companies can get away with this four-day workweek thing by cutting down on meetings and bringing in new technology. But as we kept digging into this four-day workweek dream, we realized that often when people were

spouting the virtues of this idea, there was one big turd in the Blue Lagoon, which brings us back to the poster child of all this. Iceland. Iceland. Iceland. Iceland. Iceland. Headlines screaming across the world, four-day workweek, an overwhelming success in Iceland.

And, quote, Iceland's four-day workweek trial was a triumph for all. But let's look at what really happened in Iceland. Back in 2015, the government started letting some of its employees work shorter hours. That was thanks to the unions. And it snowballed, eventually including all sorts of workers, like... The childcare centre and also a police force in one of the towns outside Reykjavik. When researchers over there looked at how much paperwork the bureaucrats were getting through, things like invoices and birth certificates, they found that the workers were getting their jobs done. In some cases, even processing things a little bit faster. But the problem is that Iceland wasn't doing a four-day work week.

A lot of the time, the employees didn't have that big a change in their hours. Each week, some employees worked about four hours less. Others only got one hour off. That's it. A researcher who analyzed the Icelandic data told us that he wasn't really that surprised there wasn't a productivity crash because there wasn't that dramatic a change in their work hours. Now what is surprising from the Iceland story though is that even though these workers didn't get a whole day off, just a few hours in some cases, many workers in Iceland still said that after this change, they felt so much better about it.

Here's Alex again. What they found after four years was that people were happier, they were healthier, they were less stressed. Not surprisingly, almost everybody likes having a shorter work week. Yeah, work-life balance got better. People said they felt better overall. They, work-life balance got better. People said they felt better overall. They had fewer headaches, less trouble sleeping. One person in the trial said that this was, quote, a gift from the heavens, end quote. And that tells us that maybe to avoid

burnout, we don't need a full day less of work each week, although that would be nice. But maybe just a few hours off the clock would help. But the thing is, even that might be hard for some CEOs to swallow. Yeah. We're always going to have CEOs whose calculation is, I need more Kobe beef in, you know, the Viking freezer in my apocalypse bunker in New Zealand. You know, full stop. So, while CEOs keep building bunkers on top of hobbits in New Zealand, and we gather up arms for our workers revolution. Is there anything we can do in the meantime to help ourselves if we're feeling burned out? Well there is some good news here because we know that generally speaking we can bounce back from a lot. Like remember that study we told you about of burnt out people's brains where they tended to have a smaller prefrontal cortex?

Well, a lot of the people in that study got out of their stressful jobs, started doing therapy, and a year and a half later, some of their brains were looking better. Here's Wendy Suzuki again. So there is hope. We know that your brain can recover. And one thing that might make your prefrontal cortex bigger and potentially work better is doing exercise.

Wendy and other folks have done research to back this up. I'm not talking about becoming a triathlete. I'm talking about walking more in your day. You don't even need new clothes. Just go outside, walk more. And actually, I've been feeling pretty burnt out recently, especially this week, which felt pretty weird because we're doing this episode. On Tuesday night, after 12 hours nonstop while I was recording, I hit a bit of a breaking point. She also found that when you're working from home, you're twice as likely... So, I went for a run. I just finished my day at work and I was so stressed the whole day.

I swear, I was about to cry because I couldn't say the words in the script properly it was a bad day but then I took Wendy's advice which felt kind of small because we're being asked to work too hard there's so much pressure on us right now and it it felt like a run with like trying to solve climate change by switching off your lights at home. But I went for a run and those people aren't cheering at me but they may as well be because I better. And we haven't solved anything. But at least for today, I feel better. So, Wendy, one last question. Mm-hmm. If you're in a situation like a work environment that is chronically stressing you out,

at what point do you just quit? Because if it's so bad for your brain and your body to be in constant stress. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, if there's no way out, no, you know, all means have been tried and nothing worked, then it is not good to stay long term in situations of very, very high stress. It's not good for your brain. It's not good for your body. So that's what I can tell you as a neuroscientist. Everybody must make their own decision of whether to make that video of quitting, you know, because of burnout.

Yeah. And if you're going to quit, may as well do it in style. That's Science Versus. Hello? Hey, Meryl Horne, producer at Science Versus. Hello? Hey, Meryl Horne, producer at Science Versus. Hi, Wendy. How many citations in this week's episode? This week there are 102 citations. A hundred and two.

And if people want to see them in all their glory, where should they go? They can go to the show notes and then follow the links to the transcripts. And Wendy Suzuki has a new book out right now. It's called Good Anxiety and it has lots of tips for dealing with stress from work and other kinds of anxiety. It's called Good Anxiety. Yeah. And Alex Pong's book about the four-day work week is called Shorter.

So we'll also have a link to that in our show notes. Yeah. And if you listening want to give us any tips about dealing with burnout, what do you do when you're kind of getting stressed out at work? I would love to hear those. You could tweet me at Wendy Zook. Yeah, we want to know. Thanks so much, Meryl. Bye,anda. Bye. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Rose Rimler, Nick Delrose, Michelle Dang and Akedi Forster-Keyes. We're edited by Blythe Sorrell.

Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord and Bumi Hidaka. A huge thanks to all of the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Professor Heejung Chung, Professor Ivanka Sabik-Berglund, Professor Tammy Allen, Dr. Miriam Mara, Dr. Washika Hak-Sai, Dr. Will Strong, Professor Michael Dockery and Professor John Roberts. Plus a big, big thanks to Bethel Habte, Ellen Frankman, Mike Padore,

the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.