Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 352: Why You’re Burning Out -- And How to Fix It | Leah Weiss

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Covid appears to have brought on a spike in burnout, especially among women, millions of whom have exited the workplace since the pandemic began. So what is burnout, exactly? How do you know if you qualify? How do you fix it? And can meditation help? That’s what we’re tackling today with Leah Weiss, who despite being a longtime meditator herself, has experienced burnout firsthand.  Leah is a researcher and author. She was a founding faculty member of the Compassion Institute at Stanford University, and she’s the co-founder of Skylyte - a company that specializes in using the latest science to help organizations prevent burnout. She’s written two books. The most relevant for our purposes is called: How We Work: Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind. In this conversation, we cover: the differences between anxiety, depression, and burnout; how to detect burnout; how burnout runs along a spectrum, and is a “full body experience;” why meditation can help but also make some people more susceptible to burnout; what can be done to protect women in the workplace; and her argument that burnout isn’t just a personal problem, but also a systemic one.  Also: If you don't already have the Ten Percent Happier app, you can download it for free here: https://www.tenpercent.com/?_branch_match_id=888540266380716858, or wherever you get your apps. Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/leah-weiss-352 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, COVID appears to have brought on a big spike in burnout, especially among women, millions of whom have exited the workplace since the pandemic began. So, what is burnout exactly? It's a word that gets tossed around a lot.

And how do you know if you qualify? And if you do qualify, how do you fix it? And one last question, can meditation help when you try to fix it? We're going to be tackling all of this today with Leo Weiss, who, despite being a long-time meditator herself, has experienced burnout firsthand. Leah is a researcher and author. She was a founding member of the Compassion Institute at Stanford University and she's the co-founder of Skylight, which is a company that specializes in using the latest science to help organizations prevent burnout. She's written two books, the most relevant

of which for our purposes is called How We Work.. Live your purpose, reclaim your sanity and embrace the daily grind. In this conversation, we cover the differences among anxiety, depression, and burnout. How to detect burnout, how burnout runs along a spectrum, and is, as she says, a full-body experience. Why meditation can help, but also make some people more susceptible to burnout. What can be done to protect women in the workplace? And finally, her argument that burnout is not just a personal problem, but also a systemic one. One quick order of business before we dive in here. If you're a long time listener, you've heard me talk many, many times about our companion meditation app. You might even be a little

sick of it. So you might ask, why does Harris keep talking about this? If I want to meditate, can I just go on YouTube and search for a guided meditation for free or sit in silence on my own or use another app? Well, first of all, yes, all of that. You can do all of those things. There are many different ways to learn how to meditate. And if you've already found one or more ways that works for you, that's great.

Keep going with it. However, I do think there's nothing special, if I do say so myself, about the relationship between what we do here on the podcast, interviewing world renowned experts, getting their take on issues that impact our minds on a day-to-day basis. And the app where we share practices specifically chosen to help you apply the lessons you learn here on the podcast. There's a kind of deliberate symbiosis. In our conversation a few weeks ago, the meditation teacher, Seb and A. Salaci, hit on something

key about this relationship. Let me just play you a quick quote from her. I'm a big proponent of what I would call integrating study and practice. So combined with our practice or what we call insights, that's why this tradition is called insight, is these aha moments and you're so great at articulating that and bringing people on to kind of discuss that, like what is it that we're learning and then how do we kind of re-incorporate that back into the practice? I will be honest it makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable hearing, Seb, praise my interview skills. She may or may not be right about that,

but what I do think she articulates brilliantly is why we're so gung-ho about the, before mentioned, symbiosis between the work we do here on the podcast and the work that we do over on the app. Practice and study work best in concert because you're working several parts of the mind at once. That's how I learned from my teachers, you know, engaging my prefrontal cortex through reading books or articles or having conversations. Many of those articles and books were recommended or sent directly to me by Seb. But then also doing the practices that helped me sort of integrate the wisdom into deeper parts of my mind and my body. And that's really the experience we're striving to bring you here at 10% happier. The wisdom of experts explained in a relatable way alongside practices that help you apply what you've learned.

So I encourage you to give it a try by downloading the 10% happier app for free wherever you get your apps. So end of pitch, but thanks for listening. We're going to dive in now with Leo Weiss. One quick thing to say before we dive in though, a brief content warning in this conversation about burnout, the topics of suicide and substance abuse are both briefly mentioned. So just heads up on that. Having said all of that, here we go now with Leo Weiss. Leo Weiss, thanks for coming back on the show. Thanks for having me. It's great to hang out again.

Yes, it is. So we're talking burnout, and I think maybe it would help to start with defining it. What is burnout? The go-to definition from the World Health Organization, I think, is the best starting place. It's emotional exhaustion, plus depersonalization, plus reduced sense of efficacy. And translating that into more straightforward language, I think the emotional exhaustion part is the most straightforward.

The depersonalization happens in two directions. One is when we engage with the people around us from a kind of dehumanized perspective in a workplace. We see them as their role, kind of utilitarian eye on them. And then also towards ourselves that we see them as their role, you know, kind of utilitarian eye on them. And then also towards ourselves that we see ourselves as to doless ninjas as disembodied often. We don't view ourselves or others in the context of being human beings who are working. And then the efficacy piece is we feel over time like we don't have impact on our environment and that is draining, upsetting cynicism quickly falls in as a result of that as well. It's interesting to think about what burnout is and isn't by this definition. You know, I've had periods in my life where I have, since arguably this describes my whole life,

where I'm just pushing too hard on too many levels. But I don't feel like I lack efficacy. I feel like sometimes I, what I'm doing, quote unquote, succeeds sometimes it doesn't. Maybe some depersonalization, maybe some exhaustion, but not all of these three pieces are there for me. And yet I can find myself working seven days a week and just getting tired. And I suspect others may relate to this where they feel like, oh yeah, I'm working too hard. I am a to-do list ninja. I like that phrase, but I don't know that I meet the technical

definition of burnout. Yeah, I think a couple of thoughts that provokes for me. First is that thinking of burnout as a spectrum rather than a binary on off or a habit or I don't, I think is really helpful. And in terms of the research on the stages of burnout, one of the things that's really interesting is the early stages of burnout, which include things like having excessive drive and pushing yourself to work harder and harder than you start neglecting personal care and needs.

These all are like how we describe workaholism. I think it's when you get into the middle and later stages of burnout that you understand that it's not just about work habits. And then the other thing that your comment makes me think of is, I think often one of the biggest misimpressions people have about burnout is that it's just caused by working hard. Often it's about burnout is that it's just caused by working hard. Often it's about

the components that are, you know, have to do more with lack of fairness or poor relationships or frustration with values being transgressed that are the real drivers of burnout, not quote-quote just working a lot in hard. So that gets at a really important point. And I believe this is a really important point to you, which is it can be really unfair, perhaps to frame burnout as an issue of individual agency, because often it's not just that we have decided to work ourselves too hard. It's that we're caught in noxious structures. Yes, and I think that's critical.

And it's not to negate the role that we have as an individual, but it's to add in the importance of understanding our environment, the teams we're working in, the cultures that we're a part of, so that we don't put all of the blame and also all the onus on ourselves to fix it. We understand this is we are part of a system. So that is spot on. It's part of why it's such an important component to me. And I think a big part of my frustration with how burnout is presented often. And we're talking a lot about it because of COVID, many articles, many how-tos. And I think we broadly overemphasize the individual in that, which is counterproductive

for exactly what you're pointing out. You've just mentioned COVID. So what are you seeing as somebody who really looks at, professionally looks at, at burnout? How bad has it gotten during COVID? It was already really bad and it's gotten a lot worse for most people. The factors were already in place that we went into this pandemic already burnt out and it's not gotten better for the vast majority of people. And you know, when you think about some of the subfactors that were navigating home-new processes with how we work, whether we're doing work from home or

working, you know, out of the home. If we're parents, we're navigating a massive set of changes on that front that are not separate from our workplaces. And all these other kind of layers of mental stress or tolerating ambiguity is so hard for us as human beings, anxiety, fear, grief, lack of ability to sleep, you know, all of these components that can make us from the individual perspective and interpersonally more inclined to struggle. It's like the perfect storm. You mentioned anxiety that kind of reminds me of a question I wanted to ask you, which is, what is the difference in your mind between burnout and anxiety or depression? So it's interesting. The later phases of burnout, when you get to inner emptiness,

often depression, or collapse, those can look a lot like an intensive depression, or anxiety depending on the person. So some people cease to be able to function and do their work. Other people are working around the clock. Don't take care of themselves. Can't sleep, can't eat, but also aren't really being productive. I think some of the main differences are the context has a lot to do with burnout. So often a differentiator is, were you having these feelings or experiences

across the week or does this get worse when you start the work week or it's Sunday night and you start having anticipatory anxiety? Is it situational or across the board? But of course, once you have a high level of burnout, it does impact your relationships outside of work. It doesn't just stay within the work hours, but the causes differ. And those of us who struggle with anxiety and depression were more inclined towards a burnout. So we have to be particularly aware. I've been following some of what has been written publicly about just these really dramatic

departures from the workplace of women during COVID. How does that fit into all of this? Yes. Yes, I mean, we are at just a wild inflection point in the US, three million women as of February had left the workplace, were at the lowest levels of workforce participation since 1988. Women are twice as likely as men to say that they have more to do than they can possibly handle. And then when you look at why is it that women are exiting the workforce?

I mean, some of this comes back into caregiving needs and gender norms. Some has to do with the gender pay gap. So if you're a family and someone's got to take care of the kids and the women are in sless in the man, there's a calculus there on who's got to take care of the kids and the woman earns less than the man. There's a calculus there on who's going to be the one to step back from their job, but burnout is the other critical component of this. Just going back for a second, I have so many questions.

I just realized I forgot one and you may not have an answer to this, but we're talking about the differences between burnout and anxiety and depression. I saw an article that went viral the day before we're recording this written by a guy I'm friendly with who's been on the show a couple of times, Adam Grant, and it was in the New York Times, this article, I thought it was very, very interesting, and it was about a term I had heard in popular parlance,

but not as a technical psychological term, which was languishing. Did you see that article? Are you familiar with this term? Does it relate in any meaningful way to the subject of burnout? Yes, that's really interesting. I mean, it makes me think of a few things.

One is this exhaustion piece, and we talked about exhaustion being part of the definition of burnout. And it's also the term that I feel like is the most prominent one that people are using when you ask how people are doing if they give an honest answer. I think it also gets at some really interesting ideas from the perspective of like burnout and purpose can overlay. If we feel lack of purpose, that is a precipitant, we're more likely to experience burnout. So kind of the bore out dynamic

and in the sense that many people are describing of the days are bleeding into one another, they're so similar because we don't have kind of the typical things within the context of COVID that we would to remark one day from another one season from another vacation, all those components. And so I do think that this set of like the ideas around languishing or COVID burnout or COVID fatigue do factor in.

And at the end of the day, the research around burnout, especially the survey, is they weren't developed with a pandemic in mind. Right? Nobody was expecting that the kinds of questions you would ask about how people perceive their work, their time, their team,

with a backdrop like the one we're facing now. So there is, I think, a really important reframe. There's an organizational psychology kind of framework of thinking about burnout, which has to do with, you know, demands on us, resources we have, and so forth. And I think it's a really important framework when we're trying to understand, especially looking at the person and the environment, how burned out they are, what's causing the burnout, how to solve it. But I think the components that are not as emphasized in that are the values, engagement, moral injury kind of components. And then also, you know, the more recent research on burnout is really focusing on the biology of burnout and how it impacts our bodies from our enlarged amygdala's to our changes in hormones and gastrointestinal problems and, you know, it's a full body experience when someone is severely burned out. So I think for me those are really important because it helps show the depth

and complexity. It's not just, oh are you, do you need to add more people to your team to fix this problem? It might be. But often when you really look at what's happening in high burnout context, it does involve more complexity than just like adding another staff to the head count. But just so I'm clear, when you said you had a slight disagreement, what were you disagreeing with? I think it's more than the job demands. It's more than what are your resources.

Those are a part of, but not the whole of what causes burnout. And the impact that it has on people who have experienced severe burnout, it sounds much more like trauma afterwards. It takes people a long time to recover, not just physiologically, but there's this, you know, real impact on self-worth and ability to function at even basic levels when you talk to people who have gotten into really extreme burnout. And then to kind of play this out to the most extreme levels, the relationship between burnout and death by suicide in the context of the pandemic, we already were experiencing a huge problem

in this country with physician suicide, and that's only increased during the pandemic. And I don't think that all comes back to lack of head count. I think when we look into the examples of what's happened for people who have experienced extreme cases of burnout, it goes really a lot deeper. And so that's where I think, you know, when we start overlaying this with

contemplative practice and mindfulness and really bringing self-awareness into this picture, I think we're doing ourselves a disservice to think of it as a functional issue alone. A functional individual issue alone, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's back to we have to look at the context in which burnout can take place. Yes. I believe, you know, in some notes that you sent over before the show, you used a very Buddhist term to describe the structural issues you described it as not self. In other words, it's not just you need to get a little bit more sleep It's actually you exist in a larger web of inter connectivity and if you don't look at that then nothing is gonna get fixed Yeah Well, it was interesting. I mean, you know not to flip it, but to flip it I was rereading your book recently and I was really curious from the perspective of burnout and the stages

of burnout and your experiences you describe in the early chapters of what led you into mindfulness practice ultimately and all the things you've been doing, even including, and I hope this isn't too much prying, but there's a strong relationship between burnout and substance abuse, right? That's like a well-established, is particularly within healthcare was one of the places that that started being researched and predominantly understood as a coping strategy. But I was really curious if you have used this lens to think about your own narrative at all and if that is illuminating in any way.

So you were talking about a period of time where I, this is back in the mid-Auts when I was covering war zones for ABC News and then got depressed and started to self-medicate with recreational drugs. I don't know if it was burnout. Maybe it was. I don't know. To answer your question briefly, I have not thought about it through that lens. I've always thought about it through the lens of sort of mindlessness, you know, being super ambitious without thinking about what the consequences of that ambition would be, you know, going to war zones and not really thinking through what that would mean due to my head and then coming home and not really knowing that I was depressed even though I was exhibiting the telltale symptoms, like having trouble getting out of bed and feeling like I had a low grade fever.

I kind of see it as, you know, a gumbo of late stage capitalism, individualism, you know, hyper ambition, maybe some of the negative effects of masculinity and needing to prove oneself. I haven't thought about it through the lens of burnout, but that doesn't mean that that lens isn't appropriate. haven't thought about it through the lens of burnout, but that doesn't mean that that lens is inappropriate. I certainly wouldn't presume to have a perspective on it for you, but I think some of the questions around how work impacts a person in what strategies for coping are in place, not just for them as an individual,

but for acknowledging burden on the person. So, going back to the example of physicians or clinicians working in the context of COVID, what are the resources in place that help a person, even though it's a person trained to do a role that's a necessary role, but help them as a person hold the impact on them. I think becomes a really important set of questions to ask.

In a way, builds on a lot of the work we do within mindfulness practice at the individual level, but we can start to think around the mindsets in system. So, you know, things like the mindsets that we have that increase the likelihood of burnout, whether it's a hero complex and believing it won't happen to us, or whether it's internalizing and being part of a framing that says busyness is a badge of honor, the busier I am, kind of the more important I am, and the more value I have, or industries that have burnout portrayed as a weakness as it sorts out, it's a sorting mechanism for people who can't hack it, who can't hang in there, and just normalize kind of churning those people out and replacing them with others.

So I think, you know, to the perspective of what is the relationship between mindfulness practice and at the individual level, what we can do about burnout, I've found, and in working with many other people, that looking at some of these mindsets, how we communicate them to one another. And then I've been hearing a lot of really interesting commentary from folks about, it's not just at the workplace, this busyness badge of honor. It comes into parenting and the arms race for, you know, having the most hardcore agendas for our kids. And it never ends even when we're not building this busyness up at work and watching that trickle into all of our components. And you hear a lot of people talk about in the context of COVID that actually having to push pause on a certain set of activities because they were all shut down, the silver linings of COVID, for many people

when they talk about them, was this reset moment of just looking at the relentless busyness and being forced to do days differently, do family differently and so forth. I do agree that for some people there have been salutary effects, but I still think your point about how the arms race is there among parents? Is a really good one? And it goes beyond parents,

because if you're on social media, you may be in an arms race with your neighbor or your buddies or your buddies or your college friends of who's making more money, who's dating life is better. Even in a pandemic, who's doing better at the soda-bread baking game, who's kicked off dances are more effective. It kind of never ends, as you said. Yeah, for sure. I think there's a particular trap that those of us who meditate can be susceptible to, which is, I know I was for years in my professional life when I kind

of stopped the phase of doing the hundred day and six month meditation retreats and entered the phase of being a working mom and finding myself in the most expensive region of our country trying to support a family, I believed that because I was a practitioner and I knew how to meditate that I should be able to cope and the failure that I experienced of managing pretty much everything, I just blame myself even more that, you know, I should not just meditate more, but having all these practices I trained in, if they didn't solve the problem, then that was on me.

And there's a kind of internal tyranny that I think gets emphasized when we're in communities of practitioners, too, if we're trying to make the point to one another, that like everything is how you perceive it. So, if you're struggling, that's kind of on you. And I think for me, actually hearing the framing of the systems level and thinking about that it didn't mean I was a failure as a practitioner that I was struggling so much. That was really helpful actually to just not believe anymore that I could meditate my

way out of it and really start looking at other solutions like changing the work environment. I was in changing my own approach to boundaries, learning new skills and putting myself in new professional environments, even though it was terrifying at the time. But it was kind of that like step one of like, you know, admit not only that you've a problem, but that the tools you're working with might not be the full set of tools you need to solve this problem. And so I think that's something I really wanted to say here because you have this incredible community of practitioners assembled around this podcast, and if anybody else is in that spin that I spent a lot of years in, I would love to just put this out there for them in hopes that it might be helpful. I've been in that spin so it is helpful.

I've definitely had the dialogue of, well, you're Mr. Happiness, you're Mr. Meditation Guy, and like, why are you so anxious? And then I sometimes come back to, well, I call the 10% happier. So perfection is not necessarily on offer and nonetheless, I'm very familiar with many visits to that tyrannical regime that you've described. I'd be curious to hear more about your situation.

So you kind of referenced that there are slightly obliquely that you found yourself having to manage a lot, and then you made some changes. Can you say more about how bad it got, why it got bad, and then what you did to remediate? Yeah. So, it got really bad. You know, I had a young baby in this period of time, I had three babies under five. I'd gained like 80 pounds. My husband and I had moved cross country and he was trying to commute up to architecture school in San Francisco from Palo Alto. I was working around the clock and And I felt like the mission behind the work I was doing was so important.

It was supporting compassion. Nothing more important to me. I'd spent my whole life caring about this, getting to do compassion education. Was everything to me. I was working with people who I had tremendous respect for, like the Dalai Lama's interpreter and interface, tupped in Jempa and interfacing with the Dalai Lama in this role, and kind of his vision was behind the work that I was doing. And this idea that we should embed more compassion into the way we educate and research the impact of that.

And I was running an operations role, which I was not at that time, especially qualified to Ryan. I had kind of the education component. So I was in over my head in terms of the work I was trying to do. I had this young baby. I had a very minimal kind of social support. My dad had just died a year before. It was a lot and I worked around the clock. I couldn't sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night after a few hours of sleeping and work.

I was working all the time and I just felt like none of it was good enough. Some of the folks who I worked with were in this project part of the time and then doing other things a lot of the time. So I would have to run things and make decisions, but then one of the real stressors that I now know is a big precipitant to burn out is that mismatch between responsibility and agency. So I had to make a lot of decisions and then, you know, all of a sudden kind of justify a whole set of choices I had made. It was hard. It was just, it was hard in every possible way.

And, you know, why it got so bad, I think, in part, you know, a lack of purpose is a real problem for burnout. But an overabundance of purpose can drive self-sacrifice, workaholism, you know, believing that the cause is so important. It's one of the reasons, you know, non-profit and healthcare industries have such a predominance of burnout issues. So I think those are definitely true for me. I think Stanford is an amazing place. It's my alma mater. It's a place I've loved working. It is wildly challenging work culture. There's just such a normalized workaholism. So there was a lot of kind of reinforcing features around me. And I was super hooked. Like, you know, that for me, I'm not like particularly

financially motivated person, but the currency that hooks me is a lot of the things around academia in accomplishment in that setting. I had a mentor and we were having breakfast one morning and she was like, Leah, you're a frog and a pot and you are dying. Like, we need to get you out of here. I was pregnant again at that time. And you know, she started asking me like, if you were to step out of this role, like, what would you want to do? I know the work you're doing at the business school

as one small fraction of what you're doing is super important to you, the work you're doing veterans. Like, let's talk about what your life could look like outside of this particular knot that you're doing veterans, like let's talk about what your life could look like outside of this particular knot that you're in. And that intervention really started a whole cascade of me understanding that I wasn't going to be able to change in that environment enough and deciding for myself, for my family, that I needed to, you know, whether it was totally stepping out of academia and going back to kind of being a social worker, that was going to be preferable to continuing on this track. And then I ended up getting some grants and doing other work that's unfolded into what I'm doing

these days. But it was kind of just deciding this isn't worth it. And I've seen that for a lot of other people now that there's almost a step that has to come first of saying no matter what happens, this isn't worth it. I'm gonna take this plunge and it was a financially terrifying plunge as well. I'm going to take this plunge. And it was a financially terrifying plunge as well. I mean, I did have a lot of privilege in the perspective I was confident I could find other work. But that was a big part of my anxiety of like, what was I stepping into?

So you found yourself in a situation, frog and boiling water as your mentor used that phrase that you were loving what you did. You felt it was really important, but you had a bunch of kids at home, a husband who was commuting a long way and not making any money. In fact, probably doing the opposite, spending money on a degree. You were piled in a thousand different directions and you realized with the help of somebody wise looking over your shoulder that it was too much and it sounds like you basically rearranged your professional responsibilities so that you had more sort of air in the room. Yeah. Did it work? I mean, yeah, ultimately it did, but there's been a lot of like risky periods along the way, I guess,

that it felt hard, but worth it. I think my life today is very different than it was then, and I'm much better off, and a much better mother, and I think I'm adding a lot more value into the world and to myself and my kids and everything. So I guess so. So it's interesting in a little bit counter-intuitive by doing less, you can have a larger impact. Yeah, yeah, in letting go of this one idea of what success meant in coming back to,

I mean, some of the conversations that I've had with the women MBA students that I've worked with over the years, we spend, some of the conversations that I've had with the women MBA students that I've worked with over the years, we spend a lot of time, you know, on this question of what is having it all mean to you? What's the life you want to set up for yourself and how do you want to define your impact, your success? Because if you try to have it all from the perspective of a career that is the most desirable from someone else's perspective and you forget about the relationships and all the other components of your life you want, you're not going to feel like you've created the life

that you want to live. And I think that's definitely been true for me that there's a lot of life beyond academia and pursuing an academic career in that kind of traditional way. Much more of my conversation with Leo Weiss right after this. Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean?

How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions, like, what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others.

And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs. And sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times, but if I'm being honest,

it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like, if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is Short, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to Add Free on the Amazon Music, or Wondering App. I want to talk about solutions for a second.

Let's start on the issue of women in the workplace. I know a lot of our listeners are women and if you're not a woman you may be married to one or in a relationship with one you may work with some, you may manage women. So I think this is a really huge issue. What can be done to reduce what is clearly a pandemic of burnout among women? So I think helpful to think of it from a few different perspectives. One, within the home, having discussions

and really looking at how caregiving and housework are distributed on average, women are doing 20 hours a week more than men. But I think starting that conversation from a place of curiosity, what are we doing here, what's actually happening, Who's doing what? How do we feel about what we're doing? Because it's not just about time. And we want to pay attention in the workplace to questions around flexibility.

A lot of workforces have adjusted targets, performance reviews, metrics in the context of the pandemic. So finding out is that something that's happening in your workplace, advocating for it, if not, has a big impact. And then, you know, there's these more systemic issues that we all need to continue to work on over time, access to caregiving, access to child care, and other caregiving. We have it on both sides, right now in my house, I have three young kids who have two hours of school a day in person, and then my mother-in-laws in hospice, so caregiving in all directions,

and what resources are we putting in place. And then the gender pay gap, you know, when we were talking about earlier in our conversation, when a family has to make the choice, if someone is to step back, there's a logic to it being the person who's making less money. But if that's not random who the person is making less money as in each family, that's something we can really continue to work on, more from a systemic perspective. And then there's more kind of like hacks and learning-based solutions. So how to stay in the workforce if that's what you're trying to do, how to re-enter the workforce. There's great research on return ship programs

that existed prior to the pandemic for women who had stepped out of the workforce to parent. And then coming back into these kind of internship type positions, and then 85% of those positions would turn into jobs. Resources that if you've stepped out not to feel like you have to stay out, if what you want is to go back, a lot of college placement centers have resources now available, not just for recent grads, but across the professional span.

And understanding what the signs of burnout are, what they look like, addressing them in the workplace on the home front. I think a big component that is really helpful is know what is frustrating you, know where your values are transgressed, know where you feel a lack of agency, but then don't stay stuck there. Focus on the things that you can influence, the things you can control. And so that means you might need to vent and look at all the components that are super frustrating to you about your environment, whether that's unconscious

bias or whatever you're experiencing. But then having peers, having people you can talk to, to triage, now that I've laid all this out, what do I want to pay attention to and prioritize and act on, not just myself, but within my team, within my advocacy and my organization and so forth, so that we are not beating our head against a wall that's not gonna move. But in terms of moving the wall, I have a few female mentees, and I also have a lot of female colleagues

who I talk to about their professional experiences. And there's a lot of fear that speaking up won't go well. And so what do you say to people who are worried about calling out these structural issues? Yeah, I think you need to be wise. And I think having a mentor to get feedback to if there's an issue that's really important to you and you feel like it is your monkey, it is your circus that you want to get involved with, but then not reacting,

but rely on your practice to get a sense of space in understanding of what's happening within you. So when you do come forward, you're not doing it from a reactive defensive place in practice. Proactively, you know, figure out strategically how you want to say it, when you want to say it, what you want to say. And this is a great place to get feedback from mentors and more experienced folks. And then, you know, we all have to make our own decisions about what is worth fighting for for us and what are the consequences we can live with. And it doesn't mean we're going to fight every battle, call out every microaggression real time, but there's a lot of ground between feeling compelled

to be the arbiter and the spokesperson and the upstander all the time. There's a lot of ground between that and doing nothing. And doing nothing has a cost on us, it takes a toll on us as well. And it's in that spectrum, I think, having community and mentorship. And also folks to help predict and give feedback to us.

And I think it's another component that those of us, as we are more senior in our careers, I do believe that there's an obligation we have to be upstanders on behalf of the younger and maybe the folks who hold less power in the situation. And so now I'll give you a very practical example. Like I try to be much more transparent about what I need to shuffle things because of child care, or if I see things happening that from a gender perspective, or me, I was in a virtual conference recently, and it was a group of male physicians and me as the speakers is on physician burnout. And the men were designated

keynote and I was designated presenter. And I shared the information out with my sister as a surgeon and some of her a group of folks that are women physician leaders. And multiple of them texting me back like WTF like why are you a presenter quote unquote. So that was an example of a time that I like now do I care that much? It was annoying, but I told the person the organizer I was like not cool. And here's why in my why behind it was actually largely around if I'm not speaking up about these things now, then who's going to win? Like that's kind of one example, but it's super tricky.

I definitely appreciate that. And I'm not saying people should self-sacrifice disproportionately or do things that don't make sense for them, but important to reflect on, push one another, support one another and thinking this stuff through. You talked about practicing conversations. If you decide you're going to speak up about a gender issue, it could also be a race issue, any issue in the workplace to practice that conversation.

I'll just say that in my own life, I've really gotten into that, practicing what I'm going to say. It could be if I'm trying to call attention to inequity or it could just be some personal conflict, but practicing the conversation, in my case, I have some communications coaches, but sometimes I'll practice my wife or whatever. I have found that to be incredibly helpful. What does the practice look like for you when you've done it? Well, I've talked several times about these communication coaches I have, and they will actually, like, really, they'll roleplay with me.

But sometimes I'll just practice it in my head. I had a conversation recently with two of my co-sort of members of the leadership team at the 10% happier app that was potentially gonna be a little sensitive and I really ran through in my head. What am I gonna say? How am I gonna frame what my positive intention is? That's a big focus of my communications coaches

rather than wallowing in the complaint, and that is in no way to diminish the complaint, but to state clearly what my positive intention is, meaning that in this case, I really care about the people I was talking to, and I could see that there was a dynamic developing that could be damaging to them and to the overall culture. And I wanted to say that to them. And I found practicing this in my head and making sure that I was emphasizing not just the critique, but also the desire to help steer toward a solution. Things just go better when I do this.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think one of the opportunities maybe is we think about mindfulness to really extend it into this domain of communications and teams and interactions really explicitly. And I think it's a massive opportunity for practice and understanding what are our assumptions or fears, getting into how we perceive others, how we perceived by them, emotional reactivity, how our decisions

made. There's just so much fodder there when we start bringing mindfulness beyond what's happening within me. So, say more about that. We can use our practice, our mindfulness practice, which often is thought of as a kind of self-awareness exercise to build our powers of perception as it pertains to the mental and physical states of people around us so that we can calibrate whatever message we want to deliver appropriately. Yeah, and have awareness of their experience, which might be very different than ours. And I think so this topic of self-awareness,

when we think about that interpersonal, let's say in a workplace environment, it's going from understanding my own values, understanding what energizes me and depletes me and frustrates me into my team and I support each other in identifying how triggers and values and purpose factor into our work together. How comfortable are you in expressing your triggers, your needs, your opinions, and how comfortable are you insoliciting those from the people around you and what's happening for them?

And so it becomes a whole other kind of dimension of practice to get into when we start applying our self awareness, not just my experience of you, but trying to understand how you're seeing and responding to me and how you're tuning and your patterns and habits and emotional traumas factor into how you have difficult conversations and what you need for them to be psychologically safe for you.

You know, it's like exponentially more complicated, but very much a zone of practice that builds off of the self awareness where our mindfulness practices need to start about how all that's happening within me alone. How would we go about practicing these skills? I think most people listening to this show have at least a passing familiarity with developing mindfulness internally. How would we go about developing it externally and both internally and externally to get a little, those phrases, by the way, internally, externally and both internally and externally,

those are taken from a classic Buddhist text called the Satyipatana Sutta. So in your view, how could we build these muscles? I think there's kind of two ways of talking about it. One is if you're a practitioner already titrating your attention between your physical, emotional, cognitive experience and your perception and observations of another person's physical cues, emotional state that they're communicating,

the kinds of concepts that they're expressing, in practicing, like, titrating your attention, moving it back and forth as you're having a conversation, noticing the habits of where we tend to notice, how we tend to listen, are we very tuned into the words and the thoughts, but maybe we don't automatically pay as much attention to the physical or emotional cues in what they're putting out or internally within ourselves. Do we live in the domain of emotions predominantly and do we need to expand that vocabulary to notice what's happening physically and the patterns of thinking? You know, this is not just stuff that I'm making up. As you're pointing out, there's long tradition

within Buddhism of practicing with perception and interaction, but also more recently within research on emotional intelligence, that mindfulness supports all of the components of emotional intelligence, whether that's internally understanding and regulating my own emotions, or interpersonally understanding and modulating to respond to yours.

So, you know, working on this stuff as a team and really understanding each others, tuning triggers, and what are the triggers within the context of a workplace? Like, if it drives you nuts when people show up late, and you know, do you have an ability to talk about, this is a real thing for me. Here's why it's a thing for me. Here's what I would like to ask from you because we work together so closely. Just as an example, right? Or even pointing out blind spots and group dynamics

that we always hear from the same people first or what can we do to bring more self-awareness to the way a team works. Like, you can build a sense of belonging and inclusion by changing up instead of just, you know, the extroverts who are quick on the draw, talk first. You can do around Robin and intentionally go around for a few rounds, draw in some of the folks who are less inclined to come in early to a conversation and just experiment with what happens when you see these tendencies now within the folks, the team environment or family environment just as much. Yeah.

Yeah, I've had to work on this a lot myself as somebody who's like a loud mouth and really to kind of change the way I show up in group dynamics to use the phrase psychological safety as a term of art, it means just the comfort people feel to speak up. And it's been shown to be one of not the most important variables in the successful functioning of teams. And just a quick note for anybody who's interested in this idea of sort of applying mindfulness externally, we had a conversation recently with a great meditation teacher named Bart Van for anybody who's interested in this idea of sort of applying mindfulness externally. We had a conversation recently with a great meditation teacher named Bart Van Melek on

this show. If you just scroll back a few episodes in the feed, you'll find it. And he talks a lot about this. But just going back to this subject of burnout and staying with women in the workplace for a second, if you're a man and you either work with, work for employee or married to in a relationship with, in a friendship with women in the midst of this crisis, clearly, of women leaving the workplace,

what can we men do that would be helpful? I mean, I think the first thing to do is ask the women in your world that question and open the dialogue from your side, I think, is a great starting place. Looking at who's doing what in a home environment and not just, you know, kind of a tit for tat, but it's not just who's doing more, but who's feeling drained by what they're doing. And I think it becomes an opportunity to know each other better support one another, switch things up, bring in external resources if possible to change how some of the basics are getting done. And especially as things start opening up, that's been one of the challenges with the pandemic, right?

That if we, whatever child care or support we had to run the home for many people that just ground to a halt one day, but finding what those resources are, what's really draining your partner, what would be most helpful to them. And I think, you know, understanding the frustrations that women feel that build up over time of the gap and pay, the gap and visibility, the whole, you can't be what you can't see, invisibility, the whole, you can't be what you can't see, idea of if there's not women leaders. One of the big problems with women leaving the workforce is that women leaders are six times more likely to bring in other women.

So this is going to be an issue for a while to come. So what is the emotional impact of that? I just had a great discussion with my older brother who was now retired from running a hedge fund, and my company just completed our first round of pre-seed fundraising. There were a lot of frustrations I felt in trying to sort through our experiences, women co-founders, and just knowing the statistics, like 2.3% of venture capital money goes to companies run by women.

And so every time there's kind of an interaction that seems really off, there's always a question mark of like, where is this coming from? And you know, talking to my older brother who has a lot of experience in this whole world of investing and so forth. It was just to hear him kind of validate how awesome it was that we had succeeded in just even doing what we've done. And also hearing him push back on some of the things that I was attributing to gender and he's like, no, I don't know. I mean, maybe it is.

Maybe it isn't. Here's examples of similar frustrations. I had just having all of those conversations with people who are close to in your life so helpful. Okay. Let's talk about just general burnout. How can we self-monitor to see if we're in trouble? Yeah.

So know the phases of burnout. We recommend having a diving buddy as a metaphor, because it is so hard to self-diagnose. So having people in your workplace and your life who are keeping an eye on you is actually very skillful. But in terms of self-awareness, know that the early phases of burnout look like workaholism, excessive drive, pushing yourself harder, neglecting your personal care, your needs. You know, these are all the early phases of burnout. When you start getting into displaced and conflict where you're snapping at your partner, your kids, your family, because of frustrations coming out of the workplace, you start withdrawing all these kinds of behavior changes happen,

knowing that these can be signs of burnout, and also understanding the physical components of it, gastrointestinal problems, hair loss hormonal changes, a lot of people actually get throat kind of voice issues, which is interesting symbolically, right, from the perspective of speaking becomes challenging. And I think if you're experiencing kind of moral injury or your values being transgressed as part of your role, make sure that you have a place to process through that, because bottling that stuff up really leads into more burnout.

And if you can find a good outlet for that through your practice, through expression, just anything but suppression is important to pay attention to. Is there more to say about what role mindfulness can play here? I think, you know, the mindset piece that we were talking about earlier is, you know, we have the opportunity through our practice to have meta awareness, be aware of what we're aware of, of patterns of thinking. And so when we start finding that our coping strategies for feelings stressed about work or just anxiety about life are leading us to throw ourselves back in our work over and over and over again, those are things to pay attention to. Being thoughtful about how purpose is factoring in, are we someone who is very high on purpose

and inclined towards self-sacrifice? Or maybe we're low on purpose in a kind of boreout is more of a risk for us. And then with increased self-awareness, we can also pay attention to our coping strategies, whether that's the glass of wine that turns into four, whether that's dropping off kind of fulfilling self-care activities for ones that are less productive.

In paying attention to all of these other kind of subtle components of health, like sleep, community, all of those kind of keeping an eye on them and understanding that these are part, if we stop noticing, then we become ourselves more likely to be the frog in the pot. People often ask me when I give speech at publicly, like, what do we do about the fact that this is a really stressful period of time? And I always kind of sheepishly say, you know, setting aside the structural issues for a second, the areas where you have the most agency are all pretty annoying.

Like, they're the stuff that your parents probably told you, you know, you should make sure you're getting enough sleep, exercise, eat well without being fanatical about it, meditate, and make sure you have really strong community ties. And also, by the way, exposure to nature is super helpful. Does that all sound right to you? Yeah, I think so. And just being attentive again to the mindsets

that we buy into and the sources of our motivation, because I think that's where a lot of the blind spots can seep in. So if we have a tendency towards busyness as a badge of honor, really pay attention to how many times we start a conversation being proud of how busy we are. And also, what motivates us from the perspective?

I think a lot of people who are high performers believe we need to be self-critical in order to be productive. So, if you're someone who has that tendency to think you need to self-flagely, because you expect more of yourself, and you want other people to have compassion and self-compassion, but for you, you beat up on yourself to get things done. Those are the kinds of tendencies that are really important. Perfectionism is a massive precipitant. Finished is better than perfect.

All of these kinds of don't let perfection be the enemy of living a life that is outside of just up leveling by micro improvements to optimize your work, is it worth it? Like make sure that things become worth it because we get sucked in for those who are wired that way. So a comment and a question, the comment is that I have really embraced a more self-compassion and an approach to productivity listening to like just like the ultimate, one of the ultimately shades here listening to like, this is like the ultimate, one of the ultimately shades here listening to the body.

But, you know, the, the, you have the, you're walking around with this barometer that will tell you a lot about how you're doing. And if you just pay attention to, oh, yeah, I'm feeling really tired right now. I probably shouldn't try to power through this next thing. Maybe I'll take five minutes and light out on the floor or like, you know, motorboat, a cat's belly, or something, you know, enjoyable. And then get back to it. And also even like just reprogramming my inner dialogue of occasionally stepping away from the computer where I'm trying to write something I'm trying to write a book, stepping away from the computer and noticing, oh yeah, I'm in a whole spiral around this book sucks. And man, I could just say, well, actually, you know, you're doing the best you can. Actually, you're making good progress,

and you can show it to other readers and get their feedback, but right now is not the time to over evaluate that. Let's just finish this bit, you're trying to work on. There are a bunch of techniques that I have found that have been really helpful, that have really helped me with my burnout. So that's a comment.

The question is, if you combine the sort of areas of individual agency that we've been dwelling on for the last few minutes with the fact that many of these problems are really structural, that people are caught in systems where there's discrimination or the power imbalance or you're being asked to work harder than you possibly can or you're being asked to do things that are contrary to your values. A lot of these people, you know, we've been telling them, you know, speak up if you think you're, if you can, but like a lot of these people may feel like they can't speak up and they may be right and they may not have some other, you know, you had the luxury of being able to rejigger your personal career, but your professional responsibilities, rather,

some folks may not have any of that. So what do they do? It's such an important component that we have to understand that making decisions about how much to work internally versus to agitate for change or, you know, everybody's their own best witness on what they can do in their environment. I do think that, you know, if you're listening this and you're pretty clear, you're in a toxic work environment and it's not going to be worth beating your head against the wall to try to change that environment, it doesn't make sense if you don't have the resources to quit your job and then go find the new one, but it might make sense to start asking yourself the question

of, are there other environments that I could strategically over time look to put myself into and just start taking steps in that direction to pragmatically make yourself aware of what other choices you have. And I think the self efficacy piece of we may be stuck today, but what step can we take to allow for changes in the future, whether that's a different organization, upskilling ourselves in our career? I mean, ultimately, we all have to kind of make the decisions within the framework of what we've got, which is really hard. And I think part of what we can also do is if the bottom line is we're not going to change anything externally, then when we've got left is what we're going to work on internally and make the best of it.

And that's where, you know, might say, oh, right. Well, I'm staying in this toxic environment, but I'm going to really double now and on the mindset and finding joy in my life outside of this or in the spaces between or in relationships that I might find even in this workplace. But I think staying stuck is the wrong solution for the long term that even if getting unstuck means starting to think through what other choices might I have and talk to people about exploring those, I think that at least you don't feel like you're jammed in and stuck in. There's nothing you're ever going to be able to do about it.

Leah, unsurprisingly, you've done a great job with this. Before I go, can I push you to plug everything you've got going on for folks who want to learn more from you or about you? Sure. So, Skylight is the company that I co-founded and we work on resilience and burn out at the team and organizational level. We've got a bunch of resources on our website. A lot of them in this space of self-awareness

and community and also things around autonomy and being an advocate in your organization. And my personal website, the OIS PhD, I love answering and being in touch with folks by email. Last time we did an episode, I made some friends as a result and heard from some incredible people about their experiences.

So definitely welcome that again as well. Also, Liam, we should remind people you've written some books. The one I recommend starting out with is called How We Work, live your purpose, reclaim your sanity, and embrace the daily grind. But there's also a book called the Little Book of Bavana. Yes.

There is a book called the Little Book of Bavana, and it's a daily kind of strategies for building resilience. Leah, thank you so much. Excellent job again. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks again to Leah, learned a lot there. This show is made by Samuel Johns, DJ Cashmere,

Kim Baikomar, Maria Wertel, and Jen Poient with Audio Engineering by Ultraviolet Audio. And as always, a big, hearty shout out to my guys from ABC News Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.