The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Burnout and How to Avoid It

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

If you dread getting out of bed in the morning; if you are bad tempered with co-workers, clients or customers; if you leave work feeling an exhaustion that goes way beyond tiredness... it could be that you're burned out. Jonathan Malesic felt all these things as a successful academic, and reflected wistfully on his previous job working as a parking lot attendant. Could it be that taking a high status, high paying job was making him miserable and pushing him beyond the limits of his endurance? Jonathan shares what he learned about burnout while researching his bookThe End Of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us, And How To Build Better Lives.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought lots of odd new expressions and concepts into the public consciousness. Things like social distancing, variant of concern, flattening the curve, fomites. But the new post-COVID concept I want to focus on today is one that I find especially interesting from the perspective of thinking about our negative emotions. That concept is the Great Resignation. It's a term coined by Anthony Klotz, an expert in organizational behavior at Texas A&M University. He used the term to describe the massive and historically unprecedented number of people who've decided to quit their jobs just over the last few years.

Economists have been puzzled by many aspects of this resignation trend, especially when you take into account which workers seem to be bailing on their jobs in record numbers. Because research shows the massive exodus we're seeing isn't just caused by low-paid workers seeking a higher living wage, or employees in their 20s seeking something new in a wide-open job market. The Great Resignation seems to be driven instead by highly skilled and often well-paid mid-career workers, people in their late 30s and 40s. They're the ones, statistically speaking, who seem to be ditching their jobs and droves. But as a psychologist,

I'm more interested in the emotional states that are driving so many people to just up and quit a career that many of them have had for over a decade. And if we look at the reason why, it's because a lot of us are just not feeling okay at work. And I really mean us,

as in me too. As a busy professor, researcher, head of college speaker and podcaster, I definitely know what it's like to feel physically and emotionally overwhelmed at the end of the week. To have so much stress that you react to the people around you with less empathy than you'd like to. I know what it feels like to worry

that you're going to absolutely lose it if even one tiny new task gets added to your plate. And if you are feeling that way, please know it's not you. It's burnout. Burnout, this all-too-common, overwhelmed psychological state, is the feeling we'll be covering in this final episode on our series on difficult emotions. We're going to trace its origins way farther back in human history than the Great Resignation. But perhaps most importantly, we'll hear some strategies for navigating burnout, and ideally getting rid of it for good. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie

Santos. One of the suckiest things about burnout is that the science shows that it can sneak up on you when your life is seemingly going really well. That's what happened to Jonathan Molesik, author of the recent book, The End of Burnout, Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. Jonathan's burnout began soon after he got his dream job as a tenured college professor. I would wake up in the morning and dread having to go to work. My constant thought was, oh, not this again. Often I would get up and then a couple hours later, I would have to go back to sleep. I was just that tired. I had a hard time preparing for class. All that stuff that I had taught myself to do to be an effective teacher was just gone from my brain. I just was not thinking straight. And I wasn't taking much satisfaction in the work

anymore. At some point, I took unpaid leave because I was just like, something is wrong. And I didn't have a name for it. I didn't know what was wrong. But I thought, okay, if I take a semester away from the college, I can rest, I can recharge and get a new perspective. And after that semester, I came back and nothing changed. Absolutely nothing. I was every bit as exhausted. In this period, I stress ate, I stress drank, and I was just utterly miserable in my dream job. Eventually, my wife, who was also an academic, got a job offer far away from where we were living. And that was the perfect opportunity. I turned in my letter of resignation. And well, honestly, that was the end of the burnout. It was utterly tied to the job. So you actually figured out what was going on when you quit this dream job you had,

but that was when you got some real insight. How did you learn what was going on? So being an academic, being a researcher, being ultimately a nerd at part, I went and dove into the literature. And the name I kept seeing over and over again was Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at University of California, Berkeley, who had been writing about burnout for decades. I read her first book. It read like my professional biography. It was a revelation. I suddenly knew that it wasn't just something wrong with me. I was part of a whole cultural problem of burnout that had been ongoing for decades. And so these days we talk about burnout a lot.

And one of the things you talk about in the book is the fact that we kind of use this term sloppily. So tell me what you mean here and give me some examples. An example is that I ran across a not very scientific survey that said 96% of millennials are burned out, which is just a nonsense number. And part of the problem is that in a culture that really values work as one of the highest activities that a person can do, like if you're working, if you're working hard, you simply are a meritorious person, then claiming that you're burned out is kind of a status marker. It's a badge of honor. And this is the kind of thing that I think some scientists are really looking at, right? Like trying to come up with

more of a scientific definition of burnout. You know, so with the caveat that there are a lot of different misconceptions about this concept, you know, what do the scientists say? You know, what are the kind of parts of burnout we should be paying attention to? Yeah, the three main parts of burnout that Christina Maslach and her many co-authors have been working with for decades are exhaustion, sometimes called emotional exhaustion, cynicism, sometimes called depersonalization, and a reduced sense of effectiveness. After I quit my job, I took the Maslach burnout inventory. I feel emotionally drained from my work every day. I scored in the 98th percentile on exhaustion and pretty high on the other two measures. I feel exhilarated after

working closely with my students once a month. I feel like I'm at the end of my rope a few times a week. I have to admit, I felt kind of proud of myself for that. So four or five years later, when I was working on the book, I took the Maslach Burnout Inventory again. I feel emotionally drained from my work once a month. I feel exhilarated after working closely with my students a few times a month. I feel like I'm at the end of my rope. times a month. I feel like I'm at the end of my rope. Never. The percentile scores were much, much lower, you know, single digits. And on that scale, things had changed radically because so much of my working life had changed. So let's kind of jump into each of these elements because I think they're kind of important to understand. Maybe starting with what might be the most obvious one culturally, which is this idea of exhaustion, right? So talk about how exhaustion manifested in your situation.

Exhaustion is not just tiredness. We all know what tiredness is like. At the end of the day, if you've been working hard, you're tired. Well, you're tired just from being awake. At the end of a project, you might feel like you really need a few days off in order to recharge and get back to work again at your normal capacity. The exhaustion of burnout is much more chronic than that. It isn't the kind of thing that a little bit of time off can cure. In my case, I took five months and it didn't make a dent in my exhaustion. As soon as I was back in the context of my job, the exhaustion returned. And that's because burnout is something that has to do with your relationship to your job. It is caused by

being stretched between your ideals for work and the reality of your job. It is caused by being stretched between your ideals for work and the reality of your job. If you just remove yourself from that situation, well, the exhaustion is eventually going to go away. But if you go back to that situation and your job hasn't changed, well, no surprise, the exhaustion is going to return too. So that's exhaustion. The second part of burnout, according to the scientific definition, is this idea of depersonalization or cynicism. How did this play out in your own job? In my case, I found myself getting irrationally angry at very minor perceived slights. My temper became very short. I had less patience for ordinary obstacles that students face. And yeah, I mean, I saw the students as a problem. I saw the students as unwilling to learn. And that felt offensive to me.

It felt like an attack on my personhood. And then the final way that burnout manifests beyond this idea of being emotionally exhausted and all the cynicism that comes up is this idea of a reduced personal accomplishment. Again, what is this sort of in terms of burnout and how did this manifest in your own case? In general, this means that you feel like your work is not effective, that you're not doing a good job. And that's a feeling that can be totally detached from reality. In my case, I felt like a complete failure. I perceived the students as not learning and simultaneously was frustrated with them, but also turned that frustration back on myself. And it's like, well, what's wrong with me? It seemed like the students were learning nothing

from me. That probably doesn't line up perfectly with reality. I probably was doing a better job than I realized. I continued to have a sympathetic department chair. She thought I was generally doing a good job, but I just couldn't see it. This phenomenon of burnout playing out in other kinds of jobs where you're not even seeing that. I'm thinking about the paper pushers and the box tickers. Talk about how this can play out in the context of those kinds of jobs. In a large study of workers in a hospital system, it was found that administrative workers, so the people who no one ever calls a hero, the people who don't get applause at 7 p.m. to honor their work, they're more susceptible to the feeling of ineffectiveness than, say, their colleagues who are physicians or nurses, who are more susceptible to the feelings of exhaustion. And I think that burnout research needs to take a closer look at the nuances of how people in different professions experience burnout. Because the overlooked administrative worker is likely to experience it differently than the nurse who is on her feet for 12 hours a day running around dealing with severe illness.

These symptoms may make burnout seem like it's a recent phenomenon. But when we get back from the break, we'll see that this awful feeling isn't brought on by post-pandemic life or even the modern workplace. We'll see that understanding the history of this condition might be the key to fixing it.

The Happiness Lab will be right back. The Happiness Lab will be right back. These days, it can feel like so many of us are reaching the point of burnout. But author Jonathan Molesik argues that the phenomena of burnout itself isn't all that new. Some kind of exhaustion that is more than physical tiredness has been part of the human condition for a very long time. One of the early documented exhaustion disorders is melancholia, which has roots in ancient Greek medicine and the theory of the four humors. And acedia, which particularly was thought to afflict Christian monks, and a later version of melancholia that appeared in the Renaissance, thought to afflict artistic elite. All of these disorders were thought to afflict the elite. The kind of exhaustion that gets the attention is the exhaustion of the elite. So a great parallel

with burnout is neurasthenia or nervous exhaustion, which was first identified 100 years prior to Maslach and Freudenberger identifying burnout. What neurasthenia looked like was this very broad array of potential symptoms from dyspepsia to, I think, baldness. And it became kind of a cultural phenomenon. Many writers both were diagnosed with neurasthenia and also wrote about neurasthenic characters. Virginia Woolf, Henry James, the social theorist Max Weber, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust. You know, neurasthenia kind of went off the rails. It became considered so widespread as to become meaningless, and the cultural understanding of it went way beyond the scientific understanding. And my concern is that we could do the same with burnout if we don't get clear on what scientists are saying about it. And in that

case, we'll just repeat this cycle over and over. We'll just never properly deal with this kind of exhaustion that causes people a lot of pain. And so I think really kind of coming to terms with this definition of burnout requires looking a little bit more historically at what's going on. So talk about where this idea came from. Burnout was first theorized in the 1970s. And at the same time that Maslach and Freudenberger are theorizing burnout, Bob Dylan is singing about burnout. Neil Young is singing about burnout. So there's something culturally in the air. And I think what it was, was these massive changes in the American workforce that were underway, that began in the 1960s and really came to a head in

the mid-1970s. An old understanding of work was dying and a new understanding of work was being born. And then this new idea of work really had elements where interesting things were shifting before companies kind of dealt with their risk of what was going on by kind of putting that all at risk in kind of the capital, right? But there was kind of a shift to thinking about this risk for the workers, right? It was kind of the workers' responsibility, you know? So talk about what this shift was and kind of how it affected sort of increases in burnout. If you look at a chart of workers' productivity and their wages beginning in 1945, you see that as productivity increased, wages increased in exact proportion. So there's an increasing gap between what workers are producing for their employers and what they're getting in pay and benefits.

That is one huge marker of a shift in economic thinking and business doctrines. And subsequent to that, companies began an official policy where there's a core of long-term salaried employees and then a periphery of contractors, part-time workers in academia, adjuncts like me, who have very little job security, often lower wages. But because they're not official employees, if you just let them go, no one notices. The Wall Street Journal isn't going to report on the ending of 1,000 workers' contracts the way it would report on 10,000 people laid off from an auto plant in Ohio. So that was a big historical change in the way we think about work. But another one is that there was also kind of a historical change, maybe an even longer term one,

from workers mostly doing manufacturing to kind of shifting to service work. And you've argued that this has some like pretty important psychological effects that might be related to burnout. You know, one is this idea of depersonalization. You got to kind of get over the fact that service work can be emotionally exhausting. Talk a little bit about how this plays out. The 60s and 70s was when more workers were becoming college educated and going into service professions. When you think about a psychologist or a social worker or today, virtually any kind of office worker, they're kind of always on the clock. The means of production for them is their own psychology, their own emotions often. And so when your emotional life is on the line like that,

when it's your tool for getting your job done, you're more and more exposed to those tensions between ideals and reality. And this notion of lofty ideals, I think, gets to the second thing that might play out in the service profession, which is that we like to think that as educated workers, we're going to have this really meaningful job. But another trend over history is the proliferation of so-called bullshit jobs. You know, so what are bullshit jobs and how can this contribute to a sense of ineffectiveness on the job? the anthropologist David Graeber, who very sadly passed away about a year ago. And Graeber defines bullshit jobs as jobs that no one can really say what you're doing, including the worker themselves. So you as the employee can't even exactly say what the point of your job is. So people whose job is to, you know, assess the assessment protocols of some other industry, it seems like that work doesn't necessarily need to be done. So it's very easy to see how someone who is in a bullshit job would feel a sense of ineffectiveness.

And one of the ideas that's pretty hollow is just this notion that we are what our work is, you know, in some sense, we don't work to live. We wind up living I spent in graduate school, and then the 11 years that I spent as a college professor. And I wouldn't have known what to do about myself. I was like, I wouldn't have known how to identify myself in the world without that job that I had become so attached to. I was a college professor. And when things were going well, that was a very satisfying identity to have. And so when the job kind of started to go sour for me, that led to great questioning of who I am and what my whole purpose as a person was, what my identity was. When we get back from the break, we'll learn that Jonathan didn't always have a job that caused a crisis of identity or purpose. Before he became a professor, he enjoyed a workplace

that was so remarkable for its non-burnout vibes that there is an entire documentary about it. We'll hear more about this workplace and what it can teach us about reducing burnout when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Long before Jonathan Molesik burned out as a tenured professor, he was an employee in a very different kind of job. One that brought him more inner peace and a brief brush with fame. My film debut was in a small documentary called The Parking Lot Movie. It is, as the title indicates, about a parking lot where I was an attendant after I finished graduate school.

about a parking lot where I was an attendant after I finished graduate school. I'm in it for just a few seconds, just talking about the weird obsessions that as a parking lot attendant, you can have with license plates. If you haven't seen the film and hot tip, you totally should because it's incredibly charming. The premise is pretty simple. The movie follows a group of parking lot attendants, including young Jonathan, as they go about their normal day-to-day tasks, seemingly having an amazing time. In between dealing with customers, they read books,

they make up goofy games like playing ring toss with traffic cones, and they spend a lot of time kicking up their heels and pondering the human condition. In other words, pretty much the opposite of burned out. It was the best job I'd had to that point. The pay was better than I had expected it would be. I had great co-workers. I had a really I was. And it didn't follow me home at the end of a shift that wasn't exhaustive because the job didn't demand that I put my entire being into

it. No one looks at their newborn child and thinks, boy, I hope that my son or daughter grows up to be a parking lot attendant. No one dreamed, that's no one's dream job. And the fact that it's no one's dream job actually helps make it a really good job, at least at that particular lot, because you don't have these wild expectations about it. You don't expect to be totally fulfilled. You know, having seen the movie and having seen, you know, the kind of chill vibe of all the attendance and sort of the wonderful message of work that comes from that movie, it's in some ways maybe ironic that,

you know, you are now the poster child for burnout and then the fact that you went through this. And so, you know, what's that irony like? I guess what happened? I think that I didn't take the lesson of the parking lot seriously enough. I think that I probably just saw it as this break in my academic career. You know, this brief moment where I'm outside of my whole value system that I had been cultivating in graduate school. in graduate school. And then when I left the parking lot, I just picked up on that value system. And I shouldn't have done that. I should have taken more of the lesson in the parking lot with me to my academic job. And I wish I had.

And you've argued that this job kind of gives us some insight about the kinds of things that really can help us develop better work cultures elsewhere, too. And so talk about this idea of finding different ways to get dignity in your life, dignities that come from outside of work. One of our noble lies in United States culture is that you only count, you only have dignity if you have paid employment. And if you don't, if you've been laid off, or if you have a disability that keeps you from working, or you're caring for children full-time, then you're sort of looked at with a little bit of suspicion. Why aren't you working? Why aren't you contributing like everyone else? And getting rid

of that noble lie is the first step towards building a better culture where work plays more of a supporting role in our lives. And then we can have a greater sense of flourishing beyond our jobs. What I think we need to replace that noble lie with is the idea that you, I, everyone, whoever we meet, has dignity before they ever work. And even if they never work, like, let's think about that newborn who may or may not grow up to be a parking lot attendant. No one thinks that their newborn is lacking dignity. We rightly cherish young children.

We see them as having incredible value. Well, that child is going to grow up and become an adult, and they didn't lose that value along the way. And the question is if everyone in society can recognize that dignity, regardless of if the person is working or not. What are some structural changes you think might help us get that notion of dignity back? You talk about a lot of these in your book, but I'm wondering if you have, you know, your top couple structural changes that you'd love to see kind of help reduce burnout at work. Well, the first thing is, I guess, like that intellectual shift, beginning to see that each one of us has dignity and then we can build the structures that will honor and recognize that dignity. So when it comes to work, for example, seeing that because everyone before they even go to work

already has dignity, then, well, as a dignified person, they deserve a living wage, regardless of the kind of work they do. They also deserve reasonable hours and a predictable schedule. I'm also an advocate for a certain measure of basic income. Again, to recognize that as a living human being, you deserve some ability to support yourself, whether you work or not. So those are kind of on the policy level

ways that I think we can better honor the dignity that we all have, regardless of our work status. You know, this whole mini season is really about how we can productively use a lot of the negative experiences we have. And of course, I put burnout in one of these categories. You know, it seems like you've learned so much from this experience, but it seems like the solution here isn't necessarily to do something different yourself. It's really to develop a new mindset or to make some pretty radical individual changes. So does that kind of fit with your interpretation of burnout and what you've learned from it? Yeah. I mean, burnout is not the kind of thing that I think we should make peace with. Though I think that getting over burnout as individuals and as a culture will require us to make peace with our finitude.

I recently read this wonderful book by Oliver Berkman called 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. And the message there is recognize your finitude. You literally cannot do everything in the time that you have. And I think that one thing that drives burnout culture is a belief in our infinitude, is a belief that we can do more, that this productivity hack will allow us to do more, or learning to say no can allow us to concentrate on the work that is more meaningful to us, or if we rearrange our meal prep, then we'll be able to get more done or something. And Berkman's message is that we simply will never be able to do it all. We won't even be able to do a fraction of the things

that we might like to do in our lives. And so I think that recognizing that finitude, recognizing that we will die, is a great discipline to help us overcome burnout culture. Lives are limited. And that is something to carry with you. And so then what strategies do you think we can use kind of at the individual level? Because I agree those policy changes are going to be important, but many of the folks listening

to this might be experiencing burnout like right now, right? And so what are some changes that they can make locally to improve the situation? That's pretty tough because burnout, the causes of burnout are not just in you. The causes of burnout are in our culture, which is where we get our ideals for work. And we grow up with those from an early age. The other side of the causes is in our work environment, in our workplaces. So unless you are a sole proprietor, you don't have total control over your working conditions. Even if you are a sole proprietor, you may not have total control over your working conditions. But in order to prevent and heal and get over burnout, the changes have to be more than just individual because the causes are

more than just individual. You know, think about one common piece of advice that is given to people who might be suffering burnout is, well, learn to say no. That was certainly something that I heard in academia. Me learning to say no to other people's demands doesn't reduce the number of demands in the world. It just shifts that burden onto the next person over. So if we're going to really deal with burnout, it's going to take a recognition, not just of our common dignity, but also of solidarity, recognizing that my burnout and also my flourishing are linked to your burnout and your flourishing. And we're not going to, unfortunately, you know, we're not going to get rid of burnout without more collective action. Our culture's expectations around work can be pretty merciless.

And changing these expectations is not something that any one person can do alone. But each and every one of us can start to make a difference in the local work cultures we take part in. I'm going to try to notice the things I do that unintentionally perpetuate burnout culture, so that I can try to break the cycle. For example, I bet my students and colleagues would feel better about keeping more sane work hours if they saw me doing that too. I'm also going to keep an eye out for touchstones, like the parking lot movie, that I can return to when my identity and sense of purpose

are getting a little too defined by my career. I'll use them as a needed reminder that another way of relating to work is possible, and that we can all make positive changes to make our work-life balance a little bit healthier. Thank you so much for joining me for this season of the Happiness Lab. Nobody likes sitting with uncomfortable emotions, and even with all the new strategies we've learned to support ourselves, it's still going to take time and practice to put these into effect. So be patient and kind with yourself along the way. You and your well-being are worth it. The team and I are already hard at work on the next full season of The Happiness Lab, as well as some exciting bonus episodes along the way. So I hope you'll stay tuned. In the meantime, let us know

how you like this season. Find me on social media and let me know how you're using the strategies you've learned in your day-to-day life. We always love to hear your insights too. Until next time, stay safe and stay happy. If you like this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. To check them out, look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additionalane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan,

Brant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.