Something You Should Know - Your Incredible Sense of Smell & Overcoming Burn Out - SYSK Choice

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know. Got a big decision to make? Maybe you should wash your hands first. Then what you never knew about your sense of smell. You can smell when snow is coming and you can smell emotions. Oh, that's so interesting. Scientists have studied three in particular.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Joy, fear and disgust are discernible through smell. You can smell when snow is coming and it's a sort of three part thing. And it is indeed pretty accurate. Also, is listening to your gut instinct a good way to make a decision? And burnout. A lot of people get burned out at work. So you don't burn out because there's something wrong with you. You burn out more because there's something wrong with the way your company operates and ultimately with the way we tend to overvalue work. All this today on Something You Should Know. human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life.

Starting point is 00:01:46 Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi there, welcome. It's time for another episode of Something You Should Know. Before too long, you will probably have a big decision to make. We all have big decisions to make.

Starting point is 00:02:28 So before you buy that new car or even before you decide what restaurant to go to, here's a suggestion. Wash your hands. It could actually change your decision. You see, human beings tend to repeat past decisions instead of trying something new. But a study found that if you wash your hands, you can override that process. Researchers say that the reason it works is because when you wash your hands, it's pretty much of a mindless activity that can have a subconscious wiping-the-slate-clean effect. It can help reset the thought process to focus on current needs

Starting point is 00:03:08 and separate that from past decisions and influences. It almost sounds too simple, but the research says it works. And that is something you should know. How does smell work? We've discussed your sense of smell before here on this podcast, but not in the way we're about to. Today, we're going to look at questions like, what happens that allows you to smell something in the first place? Why do you like some smells but hate others? Can you actually smell an emotion, like fear?

Starting point is 00:03:46 Why do some smells conjure up a memory? Are there smells we cannot detect? Or if something gives off an odor, can we smell it? These are some of the interesting questions explored by Jude Stewart. Jude is a writer who really got in touch with her sense of smell as she researched her book Revelations in Air, a guidebook to smell. And she's here to discuss things about your sense of smell that you likely never knew but have probably wondered about. Hi Jude, welcome to Something You Should Know. Oh hi, thanks for having me Mike. I suspect most of us

Starting point is 00:04:24 haven't really thought a lot about our sense of smell and what it does or why we have it. What is it? What is smell? Yeah, I think it's weird because there's a feeling sometimes that smells are subliminal and that they're creepy and that they're going to act on you and make you buy stuff you don't want to buy or what have you. And I think it's, it's more than we're just not paying attention to it. And, you know, because we're not clued in, and we're not aware of how smell is shaping our environment or our associations. And because it's not related to our verbal parts of our brain, we can't always put words to why smells make us feel a certain way. It feels a little upsetting in that way, but I wanted to

Starting point is 00:05:05 really tap into that by getting to understand more about how my sense of smell works and how it's shaping my perceptions. So how does it work? Well, really quickly, it basically is a process of you're perceiving airborne chemicals. That's why smell exists is to help us understand information about our environment that might prove to be a threat or an opportunity. So, you know, if you have a fire in the distance, you want to perceive it before you come upon the fire. If you're going to eat some food that is off, you want to know right away that it's off and smell is helping you. So briefly, it's just that the odor molecules go up your nose and they travel up in there. And then they go to the place where your glasses sit

Starting point is 00:05:45 on the nose of your face. And that's where you have these olfactory neurons. They are attached to your brain. They're the closest your brain gets to touching the outside world. And inside them are these little receptors and the receptors bind to the odorant and they tell you what the smell is. And what's crazy about that is that we don't really know why we perceive them as they are. There's not really a kind of an equivalent to the color spectrum for different colors or the audio spectrum where we can tell what a sound's going to be because of where it falls in that continuum. We don't have that for smell. So something about the molecule shape will let us know what it's going to smell like, but you can change that shape a little tiny bit and

Starting point is 00:06:24 the smell will shift in this unexpected way. So it's still really early days in the sulfaction studies. It's pretty interesting. Well, that brings up an interesting question because we can only see colors in the visual color spectrum, but can we smell infinite smells? Are there things that perhaps aren't even invented yet or created yet that will have a smell that we've never smelled? Would we be able to smell that? Yes, that's a great question. We still don't know yet how many different smells we can distinguish between. The estimates range between 80 million and possibly 1 trillion smells, which is theoretical and a little disputed, but still possible. I found it amazing to think that unlike colors, we can invent new smells. And in fact,

Starting point is 00:07:11 not only is that possible, but it's happening all the time. There's a whole industry of fragrance and flavor chemists who are cooking up smells in the lab that don't exist in nature, these molecules, but somehow we can perceive them as a smell. And the reasons why you would do that are many different reasons. One of them is obviously that you want to make things that are novel and smell good. That's the biggest motivation. But sometimes it's to synthesize smells that we find in nature that are perhaps some exotic plant that could be hunted to extinction to make perfumes, or you can take the smell molecules, synthesize them in the lab, and then have that smell forever to enjoy. Sometimes they're purely accidents. There's a really popular invented smell called calone that I think was created when somebody was trying to come up with a cure for a disease and it didn't work as such, but

Starting point is 00:08:00 the molecule smelled really great and it smells like ocean breeze. So anytime you have that shampoo or care products that smells like the ocean, that's probably has calone in it. How do you spell that? C-A-L-O-N-E. Is smell completely subjective or are there smells that are universally loved and universally hated? It's more universally loved than universally hated. It's interesting. Smell is all about what you associate smells with. So obviously there are certain things that none of us like the smell of. The smell of death is not great. Most people don't like the smell of poop, but it's surprising what you'll habituate to too. If you're used to the smell of trash in the streets, then you're not going to notice it after a while. There was some interesting science around trying to find the most universal stink bomb. And what they discovered is it was harder to do than they thought. I think this was sponsored by the army

Starting point is 00:08:54 as a potential military tactic. The one thing that seemed to be surefire is making sure you had some weird combination of smells that didn't resolve well. On the flip side, a smell that is pretty much universally loved or at least not disliked is vanilla. And the reasons for that are pretty simple. Vanilla doesn't have itself usually a starring role in things we eat, but it has a great supporting role. It makes other flavors elevate and just taste better. So that's why pretty much every baked good that we make, it has a little dash of vanilla extract in there. The second reason is that vanilla does not activate some things that make us dislike smells. We have this system of nerves in our face called the trigeminal nerve, and they are activated through smelling. When you smell something that

Starting point is 00:09:39 has like stinging hot chili peppers, or when you chop up onions and you cry, this is your trigeminal nerve being activated. Vanilla doesn't activate that at all. And some people don't like that feeling, and that's why they will dislike a certain smell. So vanilla has the main obstacle removed. It always seems to me that the reason that I like smells, when I think about the smells that I like, is they're associated with a time or a place or a person or something that, that I don't love a smell that isn't. I mean, I might like a smell that's, that I smell and go, well, that smells nice, but I don't have that attachment to it that I do when I think of cut grass and I think of my father mowing the lawn or my grandma baking in the kitchen. It's really interesting with smell is that there's sort of a biological basis for that.

Starting point is 00:10:32 When you're smelling things, unlike the other senses, your smell bypasses all that sort of neocortex, higher order logic, verbalization part of your brain. And instead goes right past that new brain into your old brain. And there's specifically two areas that it's associated with, the amygdala, which is responsible for emotion, and hippocampus, which is responsible for memory. So if you think about it, you have a really important event in your life, you generally feel emotional about that event. And if you happen to smell something in that moment, those three things will fuse, the smell, the memory, and the emotion. And then every time you smell that smell, you will bring all those feelings and emotions back with incredible clarity. You say that you can smell emotions. What do you mean?

Starting point is 00:11:20 Oh, that's so interesting. Scientists have studied three in particular. Joy, fear, and disgust are discernible through smell. One fun experiment had two groups, and they each watched a different movie. One group watched Disney's The Jungle Book, so a very cheerful, joyful-inducing type of movie. And then another movie was Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. So it's a movie that elicits fear. So these folks were all wearing t-shirts, the t-shirts were removed, and then they were given to another group. And the question was, can you smell the t-shirts that are associated with fear and the ones that are associated with joy? And the answer is overwhelmingly yes, that people were able to detect those things through smell alone. I want to talk about how we can smell emotions because I think that's really interesting. I'm talking to Jude Stewart and she is author of a book called Revelations in Air, a guidebook to smell. Metrolinx and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow

Starting point is 00:12:28 all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. For those who embrace the impossible, the Defender 110 is up for the adventure. This iconic, award-winning vehicle has been redefined with a distinctive, modern design. A reimagined exterior features compelling proportions and precise detailing.

Starting point is 00:12:53 Built with integrity and purpose, the interior boasts robust, durable materials. Whether it's the all-terrain capability, ample cargo capacity, or innovative camera technology, the Defender 110 lets you go further and do more. And with seating for up to seven, everyone can enjoy the journey. Learn more at LandRover.ca. So Jude, I've heard people talk about how animals can smell fear. You know, don't let them smell your, don't be afraid. Don't let them smell the fear. But I didn't know that humans could do it. Yeah, there's another smell researcher whose name is Rachel Hertz. She's written a book called The Scent of Desire.

Starting point is 00:13:29 And in that, she says that smells are to animals what emotions are to people. So if you think about how important it is for us to understand each other's emotions as humans, that's so critical to communications. Animals are using smells in the same way, but we are also animals. So we are to some extent using a smell in that sense as well. It was interesting to read in your book that you can smell when it's going to snow. And see, I've always thought you could, but I thought it was just me. Isn't that so nice to have those hunches confirmed? You can smell when snow is

Starting point is 00:14:07 coming and it's a sort of three-part thing. The first is that cold tends to deaden your sense of smell. So what you're registering first off is the cold and that blankness. And into that blankness will be a sudden rise in humidity. And that's the precipitation coming. And then the third thing that you'll notice is, again, those trigeminal nerves in your face will start to tingle and activate. So those three sensations together help you predict snow. And it is indeed pretty accurate. I never knew that you could trademark smells. And in fact, that Play-Doh, the smell of Play-Doh is actually trademarked.

Starting point is 00:14:46 This is correct. This is absolutely correct. I wanted to look at Play-Doh because I thought, oh, it's an iconic childhood smell and it'd be great for emotions and nostalgia. And what I didn't realize is that it's one of the very few trademark smells. And I had to figure out, I had to learn a bit about the difference between a trademark and a patent. A patent has to do with a product's functionality, like does it do the thing that it promised to do? And a trademark doesn't have to do with functionality. It has to do with those intangible qualities, like is this the real thing?

Starting point is 00:15:18 So when you're smelling Play-Doh, what you're smelling is the fact that it's the actual Play-Doh and not some kind of imitation. Is the smell put in there deliberately to smell that way, or is it a byproduct of what the Play-Doh is made of? It's both. You can actually look up the trademark online and see what they describe as the smell notes. But yeah, it's a combination of the actual ingredients, but then also a few additives that are actually like vanilla and cherry notes. So the next time you pick up your Play-Doh, maybe see if you can sniff for those notes, but you'll also notice some like kind of damp doughy quality. It has a bit of salt to it. Those are actual ingredients of the product. I wonder, can you like distill

Starting point is 00:16:00 that in a bottle? Can they make Play-Doh perfume? Oh, Mike, you can distill everything in a bottle? Can they make Play-Doh perfume? Oh, Mike, you can distill everything in a bottle. Every smell is potentially synthesizable and probably has. I mean, there are some very interesting perfumes out there. I think Eau de Play-Doh is probably out there. Really? Eau de Play-Doh. Nice. What are some of the smells that you find particularly fascinating? I really enjoyed, I really like some stinks. I wanted to learn things about, you know, perfume ingredients and spices and pleasant smells and certainly didn't want to overload the book with stinks. But I also wanted to get to know some things that people like that they maybe shouldn't like as smells. Gasoline and skunk were two of those that I kind of dove into. A stink that I kind of set out to learn to be friends with was the smell of durian. It's this

Starting point is 00:16:53 really, really smelly kind of spiked fruit that comes from Southeast Asia, from Malaysia in particular. And it smells like rotting onions. There's some very vivid descriptions of it. It smells very gross. And then when you open it up, though, it has this beautiful custardy center and a really high sugar content. So people tend to make it into ice cream. And it is the weirdest ice cream I think I've ever had. It never fully resolves the weirdness of the smell and the sweetness and the wonderful custardy, velvety texture.

Starting point is 00:17:23 And it's so weird. You just keep getting hits of strangeness when you eat it i eventually just became very hooked on it you mentioned gasoline okay i like the smell of gasoline and i know why because my earliest memories of gasoline the smell of gasoline was more or less combined with a fresh cut grass because my father used to fill up the lawnmower with gasoline, and then he would cut the grass. And that's those two smells are linked for me. And so I like the smell of gasoline. I mean, I don't crave the smell of gasoline, but I don't find it objectionable. I find it rather pleasant. But I guess most people don't.

Starting point is 00:18:04 Oh, you know, actually, I think a lot of people do secretly like it, but interestingly, it does have, like many solvents, have this influence over your nervous system that's similar to being drunk. So do not huff a lot of gasoline. It's bad for you, but nonetheless, it is sort of giving you a high. But I'm with you. I went on a lot of road trips as a kid, and to me, the smell of gasoline is like travel and adventure and, you know, footloose and fancy free in the car. So it's specifically because when I was young, my father, when we would be driving, my father would be smoking a cigar occasionally, but the smell was just horrible. And ever since then, I can't stand cigars, but other people love the smell of cigars. You know, it's funny because I am a fan of the smell of tobacco before it's been burnt. I really

Starting point is 00:19:03 like that tin note. And I think it has to do again with associations. You know, a friend of the smell of tobacco before it's been burnt. I really like that tin note. And I think it has to do again with associations. You know, a friend of mine during COVID was, he was supposed to move overseas to his dream job. And then at the last minute he couldn't go and he was stuck here. And so we would, he would come over and he took a pipe smoking just to kind of pass the time. And he had all these beautiful pipes and beautiful tins. And he told me about how smell is so important that there's literally this concept of the tin note, the smell in the tin or the room note, whether or not it leaves a beautiful or objectionable smell in the room. And it was such so bound up in his enthusiasm that I became really keen on the smell of tobacco, but you know, it was voluntary. I wasn't stuck in a tiny car.

Starting point is 00:19:46 I defend your position. I think you were right not to like it. It's probably not so nice to make you smell it that much. It's interesting to me how people take their sense of smell for granted. I equate it with like electricity. Like you don't realize how important electricity is until there's a power failure and then you realize how essential it is and you don't realize how important your sense of smell is until you lose it and with covid especially but also just as people get older

Starting point is 00:20:18 your sense of smell sometimes fades away temporarily or, or maybe permanently, and then you really miss it. And that's why I think partly it's a, it's important to, to kind of maximize, use it or you lose it, maximize on what you've got, you know, and become kind of attuned to the smell that you have. But yeah, that is, that is unfortunately kind of common. And, and one of the reasons why people tend to eat, you know, saltier food when they get older is because the, they're not smelling it as much. It's not quite as satisfying. So they're seeking that hit of whatever is going to taste like something.

Starting point is 00:20:57 Well, when you say use it or lose it, like, I mean, I don't think people think much about using their sense of smell. It's just there. I mean, you smell what you smell and that's the end of that. So what do you mean by, you know, use it? Smell is shaping our reality and we might not just realize that we're registering smells. So I think tuning into that, it was allowed me to sort of be aware of all my senses working in concert together to create an impression of something. And it was, I realized that it was information that I was not necessarily consciously taking in but unconsciously taking in and so I wanted to be attuned to that. Interestingly your olfactory

Starting point is 00:21:32 neurons that where the receptors are they regenerate every four to six weeks so you know depending on the smells that you expose yourself to you can you know if you get out there and you're more adventurous you could possibly regenerate with some more interesting receptors. Well, I can certainly tell that my sense of smell is not as vivid as it used to be, but I still can smell everything just fine. But I can't imagine what it would be like to not be able to smell at all. Smell is just a rich aspect of what surrounds us. It's interesting when you think on the flip side of people who've lost their sense of smell.

Starting point is 00:22:11 They tend to be highly prone to depression or anxiety. They lose interest in sex. They sometimes eat not enough and they lose weight or they eat too much because they're eating too much salty or fatty food, just trying to get some kind of hit. And they describe the experience as one of just being sterile. You walk into your house, your house doesn't smell like your house. Your wife doesn't smell like your wife. It's very lonely.

Starting point is 00:22:36 And with all the people who've lost their sense of smell through COVID, luckily, most of them are recovering it, but it can take weeks or months. And they don't really appreciate what they've lost until the sense of smell is gone. And then they tend to report a really dire situation that I hope changes for people. One of the smells you researched that I want you to talk about is baby smell, the smell of a newborn baby, because it's really interesting what that smell is and where it goes and what it means. So talk about that. I was interested in the way in which that, that smell kind of, again, fuses with memory, fuses with emotion. You know, the time when my baby was so small, it's like nothing else exists

Starting point is 00:23:16 in the world, but this little person. And when you finally gotten them clean and sweet smelling, and they smell like their little bodies, it's, it And it's such a fleeting sense. It doesn't last very long, maybe weeks. And so I was interested to find out what science have to say about that. And in fact, it's a little crazy. They don't entirely know where new baby smell comes from, but it's very clear that parents can identify their own children from that smell super early on. There's one study where women had had very limited exposure to their newborns, 10 minutes to an hour of total exposure. And they were asked to identify which t-shirt had been worn by their baby. And to an overwhelming degree, they were able to do it even though they

Starting point is 00:24:01 had no hit of this, not very much encounter with this smell. They still kind of knew it right away. And it's been tested with fathers as well with amniotic fluid in a different study. And the fathers were able to tell which amniotic fluid was their child. So it's very strongly imprinting. Wouldn't you think that the smell of a baby is one of those smells that pretty much everybody's going to like. You know, that could give vanilla a run for its money. I agree with you there. I think so. Particularly the smell of your own baby. If you don't like the way your own baby smells, that could be a real problem.

Starting point is 00:24:38 And it's interesting how kids' smells shift over time. You know how as kids get older, they don't smell quite so nice. There was a study I encountered that was about trying to quantify or, you know, get to the bottom of that. And it's indeed true as kids get older and they need less paternal or parental care, they do in fact sort of smell less, less attractive than sort of pushing the parent away in an olfactory sense. Well, it's such a universally interesting topic because pretty much everybody has a sense of smell. And I imagine everybody's wondered about how it works and why it works the way it does and why it brings up memories and things. And so it's interesting to hear the research. Jude Stewart has been my guest. She is author of the book Revelations in Air,

Starting point is 00:25:24 a guidebook to smell. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Jude. This was fun. Thanks so much, Mike. It was a real pleasure. I enjoyed talking to you. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building.

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Starting point is 00:26:06 This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking. Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend, the skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. How many times have you heard people describe themselves as burned out? Oh man, I am so burned out.

Starting point is 00:26:39 Maybe you've even said it about yourself. But what does it mean to be burned out? Is there a real definition? Or if you say you're burned out and you think you're burned out, well, you must be burned out. And if you are feeling burned out, what is it you can do about it so you don't feel that way? Jonathan Malasik quit his job as a tenured professor because he was burned out. He then researched and wrote a book about it called The End of Burnout, Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. Hey, Jonathan, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Starting point is 00:27:17 Thank you so much for having me. So to hear people talk about burnout, I mean, almost seems like an epidemic. So what is it exactly? It seems like a self-described thing that if you say you're burned out, then you must be. But is burnout like a real thing? Are there a list of symptoms that if this happens, if you feel this way, then you're burned out? Or is it not that? There's a big difference between our common cultural conversation about burnout and the scientific conversation about it. And in ordinary colloquial speech, we talk about burnout just like you were saying. It becomes a kind of catch-all term for our dissatisfaction with work. And it can mean just about anything

Starting point is 00:28:06 from boredom to a to-do list that seems unmanageable to a total career breakdown. And if burnout can mean any of those things, it's pretty hard to put a definition on it when it's, as you say, just general dissatisfaction about your work. This is why I think that we need to turn to the really good research on the question of burnout. My definition of burnout is most broadly the experience of being stretched across this gap between your ideals for work and the reality of your job. And the researchers on burnout measure the experience in three ways. They describe it as feelings of exhaustion, which I think most of us are familiar with, the feelings of cynicism or depersonalization, which is when you start to treat

Starting point is 00:29:07 the people you work with, whether they're co-workers or customers or patients or students or whatever, as less than the full human beings they are. And finally, burnout includes an experience of feeling like your work isn't accomplishing anything. It's a feeling of ineffectiveness at work. And I think that we'll have a much better chance of addressing the problem if we can start talking about burnout in those more precise terms. Yeah. Well, I like those terms because it does bring it into focus, and it isn't this vague kind of, oh, I'm so burned out, which, you know, who knows what that means? It could just mean, you know, you need a break.

Starting point is 00:29:53 I've always thought of burnout as also being the lack of a break. Like, people who often are burned out never seem to take a break. They never take vacation. They're working on the weekends. They're just, they're constantly, the candle is always lit. Right. And this is how burnout can sometimes become a term for self-praise. You know, our culture values work so much. To be a good worker is simply to be a praiseworthy human being. And so if you claim that you are burned out, then you're saying that you were an ideal worker. That, like you said, you never take a break. You work through weekends. You work through vacations. You're always ready to take on a new project. You're always responsive to client requests and supervisors' emails and all of that. And when all that adds up and you experience the strain,

Starting point is 00:30:54 then you can think of yourself and tell others that you're a kind of martyr, that you have fulfilled our cultural ideals of work so much that it has actually ruined your life. And you are praised in that sense. So it's an ideal of work that can really is ultimately self-defeating. So based on what you're saying, the picture that's starting to emerge is the tired, doesn't care anymore, grumpy old guy at work who seems burned out. Yeah, the one thing that I would change about your description, and this is certainly what I thought about burnout at the beginning, is that the person who's suffering from burnout is not necessarily the old guy. In the research, there's a pretty consistent finding that it's younger workers who are

Starting point is 00:31:57 earlier in their careers who are more susceptible to burnout. And I think a big reason for that is when you're just starting out your career, that's often when your ideals are at their peak. You are ready to take on the world. You have a ton of energy. You're ambitious and you're eager to climb the ladder of your organization's hierarchy. And at the same time, the reality of your job is often pretty unsatisfying. You might not make very much. You might not get the best assignments. You might be overlooked

Starting point is 00:32:39 as you're trying to climb that ladder. And so it's often those younger workers who are exposed to the conditions that cause burnout. And then what happens if they have a really bad case of burnout? They'll quit and they'll move to a different career, perhaps until they find one that they can do sustainably. And so the older workers who are still around

Starting point is 00:33:04 are the survivors. They're the ones who didn't burn out. But does part of the definition of burnout have to be that the person acknowledges it, that they agree that they're burned out? Or can you determine that somebody's burned out and have them say, no, I'm fine. Yeah, this gets into the tricky question of the clinical status of burnout, which is that it doesn't have any, at least not in the United States. So you can't go to a psychiatrist and get a diagnosis of burnout.

Starting point is 00:33:40 And so to find out if someone is burned out, you have to get them to talk about it and to say what their experience of work is. And so the scientific research on burnout operates on surveys. And the most widely used one is called the Maslach Burnout Inventory, named after the pioneering researcher Christina Maslach. And it's a series of 22 questions that ask you about your experience at work. And it's a way of getting the person to say what their level of burnout is without directly asking the question, what is your level of burnout? It would seem that you could look at burnout as, I guess, like a resilience problem that, you know, some people just can't handle the pressure and that's why they get burned out,

Starting point is 00:34:35 that the problem is them. One of my big points about burnout is that it's not the result of some failure within the individual. So you don't burn out because there's something wrong with you. Rather, you burn out more because there's something wrong with the way your job is designed or the way your company operates. And ultimately, with the way our culture functions and the way we tend to overvalue work. We started this conversation by talking about how the term burnout gets thrown around a lot, that people use the term without a real clear definition. But according to your definition, how many people are burned out? Yeah, So it's not as big as some of the really splashy headlines that you see. If like me, you pay a lot of attention to headlines pertaining

Starting point is 00:35:35 to burnout. I've seen numbers in generally pretty shoddy surveys claiming that 77% of all workers are burned out. Or the most shocking and perhaps least believable one that I have seen is that 96% of millennial generation workers are burned out. Basically all of them. And those numbers are the product of poor surveys, imprecise definitions of burnout. When you look at the really good, more precise scientific definitions of burnout, the best research that I have seen would identify somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of workers scoring high on all three dimensions of burnout. They have a high score on exhaustion, a high score on cynicism, and a high score on a sense of personal ineffectiveness at work. Those are the classic cases of burnout. Now, it's possible to score high on only one of those three dimensions or two of them. So perhaps you're

Starting point is 00:36:55 exhausted, but not especially cynical and you feel like your work is accomplishing something. I think it's worth it to talk about someone in that category as being on the burnout spectrum. And so I estimate based on, well, it's not just my estimate, it's based on, you know, really good research on this, somewhere around half of workers in the U.S. are on the burnout spectrum at any given time. So that is a lot. So you said you estimate that about 50% of people are somewhere on the burnout spectrum. And I imagine that that 50% changes, that people come in and out of that spectrum. So I'm wondering, do you think that over the course of a lifetime, pretty much everybody ends up on the burnout spectrum at some point? Yeah, I think that

Starting point is 00:37:51 everybody is very likely to experience it at some point. And that's not really surprising if you think of burnout as this experience of being stretched between your gap, the gap between your ideals for work and the reality of your jobs. Our jobs, people change jobs many times over their careers. And it's likely that at some point they experienced conditions that didn't live up to the reasons that they went into that line of work to begin with. Maybe their workload was too much or not what they expected. Maybe they didn't have enough autonomy or control over the work that they did, or they didn't get the respect that they were hoping for. Those are fairly common experiences.

Starting point is 00:38:41 And when they last for a long time, then burnout is pretty likely. So yeah, I think it's not surprising that most people know what that experience is like. And so given that most people know it, what tends to be the successful way to address it? Is it if you're at an organization, do you have to leave that organization because that's where the problem started? Or can you stay in your job and somehow manage it in a way that the burnout disappears? I mean, what's the best way to fix it? There's probably no one best way, but the possibilities that you're talking about are the ones that we ought to try.

Starting point is 00:39:27 If you think about burnout as being the result of an organizational culture that is not meeting the needs and the ideals of the workers, and you look around that organization and a lot of people are complaining from burnout, then something needs to change around that organization and a lot of people are complaining from burnout, then something needs to change in that organization. And it's probably not going to be one person's decision what that change ought to be. People are going to have to talk to each other as a department, as a unit, as an entire organization

Starting point is 00:40:04 to figure out what is going wrong, what things they're doing that maybe they don't need to do anymore because it's making everybody miserable and figure out how to redesign jobs. It's possible to do that on an individual level, just with a conversation between you and your superiors. But that solves the problem for you, but it might not solve the problem for others in your organization. And certainly, when it doesn't seem like there's any hope of larger change, then quitting is often the only way to solve the problem. And in my case, that was the solution. I had been a college professor. It was my dream job. Over time, I became more and more miserable and I couldn't figure out why. And when the opportunity presented

Starting point is 00:41:00 itself, because my wife had gotten a good job offer thousands of miles away, I quit and it worked. I am no longer burned out. Of course I had to take a huge pay cut. I'm not in that career anymore. Um, but yeah, I mean, quitting is, is one surefire way to deal with burnout though. It's often not an appealing one and not one that scales up very well. It would seem that there are some people, though, who, you know, they can never say no, they take on too much, and it's not going to matter where they go. That's kind of their modus operandi. They're just one of those, I can take on everything kind of problem, and moving jobs isn't going to solve it because it's them.

Starting point is 00:41:45 It's not the organization. Yeah, that's a good point. And that person is someone who has unrealistic ideals for work and unrealistic ideals of what it means to be a good worker or to be a good person. And in that case, yeah, they need to shift their ideals to be a little bit more in line with reality. But at the same time, those ideals don't spring up totally from just inside the person. They're cultural ideals. They're ideals that many of us share and that workers absorb from the culture. That saying yes to assignments and always being ready and always hustling is the sign of a good worker and a good human being. Has the nature of work, the way work has changed over the last couple of decades, do you think that's contributed to the burnout problem?

Starting point is 00:42:46 I think that work genuinely has gotten worse in some ways over the past several decades. And workers of my generation and younger, so I'm in my mid-40s, have experienced worsening conditions in our jobs. Our work has been more precarious. You know, our careers have existed in the era of mass layoffs. Wages for workers have almost totally stagnated for 50 years. And at the same time, work has become emotionally very intense as we've shifted to a service economy. And with the wide availability of mobile technology and email and Slack channels and all of that, there's never a time when we couldn't be working. And so work truly has changed in ways that are harmful to workers and are likely to contribute to their burnout. My sense is that a big part of burnout today,

Starting point is 00:43:57 or at least an ingredient in the mix, is this idea that didn't used to exist that you're always connected to your work, your boss can always find you, you can always be notified of some problem, that waiting for that phone call, that email ping, that text message, saying that, calling you to work in a way. It's a constant vigilance. And it doesn't go away. It doesn't go away on vacation. It doesn't go away. It sometimes doesn't even go away. It doesn't go away on vacation. It doesn't go away. It sometimes doesn't even go away when you sleep. And that contributes to the total pervasiveness of work in our lives. And work simply doesn't deserve all of our lives. Work is good. We need

Starting point is 00:45:00 to work. And it's a good thing, but it's not all we are as human beings. If you're feeling burned out, whether or not you fit the definition or not, but if you feel subjectively, it's your feeling that you are burned out. Is there something someone can do in the short term, fairly immediately, to help relieve some of that horrible feeling? You can start by trying to take a real weekend, for instance, and try to disconnect from work. But if you're truly burned out, the feeling is going to return on Monday morning because the conditions of your job have not changed over that weekend. The real cure for burnout has to be a shared effort to remake the work that we do. So this is why I think it has to happen at the organizational level. And there it has to begin with conversations with coworkers, with clients, with superiors about what it is in the job experience that is becoming damaging to you.

Starting point is 00:46:09 But it also has to entail a larger cultural conversation about the role of work in our lives. Well, given how many people complain that they're burned out, how many people I hear talk about, oh, I'm so burned out. It's really good to get a more specific definition of what it is, what causes it, and what you can do about it. Jonathan Malasik has been my guest, and the name of the book is The End of Burnout, Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Jonathan. Yeah, thank you. How many times have you heard the advice to go with your gut, follow your instincts?

Starting point is 00:46:53 Well, if you rely on your gut instincts, there are some scenarios where that could be a little off. Ray Herbert, author of the book On Second Thought, says, you should think twice about what your gut is telling you if, A, you're in a group. Most of us subconsciously mimic others, and that can influence behavior and decisions. Your gut may tell you to go along with the crowd, but that may not always be such a wise idea. B, you're financially strapped. Feeling deprived can increase appetite and desire until reason sets in.

Starting point is 00:47:32 And C, if you're cold. Most people are less interactive and a little bit more isolated when they're cold, so you shouldn't let your gut judge other people too quickly until you've interacted with them in a warmer environment. And that is something you should know. And now that this episode is over, there is no better time than to take a moment and leave a rating and review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. I'm Mike Kerr Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Starting point is 00:48:04 Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures. You got this.

Starting point is 00:48:45 No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one.

Starting point is 00:48:57 So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. Check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors,

Starting point is 00:49:33 and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes.

Starting point is 00:49:57 So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.

Something You Should Know - Your Incredible Sense of Smell & Overcoming Burn Out - SYSK Choice

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