Today, Explained - The burnout economy

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

From special coaches to luxury sleep vacations, you can beat burnout — for a price. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Noel King. Producer Peter Balonon-Rosen with his recording equipment in his room at the Sleep Lab at Equinox Hotel in New York. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

100 years ago today, the Ford Motor Company adopted a standard for factory workers that would come to govern many of our lives, the five-day work week. Ford was losing exhausted line workers who typically worked six days, so he wasn't trying to be nice here. He wanted a more stable and productive workforce. He was a classic capitalist. If you own man makes him provide your work, there's no limit to what he can do. But we're still burned out, and we're still looking for solutions to burn out. Today, on Today explained, 100 years after Henry Ford said, said, take a day off, guys. We're hiring life coaches. We're neutralizing our shame, LOL. We're going on sleep vacations. We're literally going on a sleep vacation.

It's not going to be like when you have anesthesia and then you wake up. But you might feel a little mellow. And is it working? That's coming up. Support for today, Explain, comes from Starbucks. The Energy of Friday is unmatched with work winding down and plans powering up. And what better drink to reach for than the new Starbucks Energy Refresher with flavors like mango, dragon fruit, strawberry aside. mango strawberry, you can get the boost you need on this particular Friday. Try the all-new energy refreshers at Starbucks. You're listening to Today Explained.

Kelly Maria Corduckey is a freelance journalist who contributes to business insider for BI. She wrote this piece about a kind of life coach that claims to help people who are being run ragged by work and family with their executive functioning. They're called, no surprise, executive function coaches. So executive functioning is the brain's ability to kind of, manage tasks. It's sort of your internal project manager. The ability to manage time, to prioritize, to switch between tasks, to get started on a project, to get stopped on a project, basically the ability to kind of do the things that need to be done. An executive functioning coach might be doing pretty similar things to any kind of like work coach or career coach or life coach. But the way that

they're positioning what they're offering is a bit different. So they're really focusing on the cognitive framing of what's involved in in the whole process that they'll be working on with their client. I'm a certified executive function coach and my clients come to me all the time with questions on how to get started. Welcome back to episode 12 of what the F where we look at executive function strategies for the adult world. I am so excited to show you my very favorite prioritization tool. It is one that I use personally and times of executive function overwhelm. The coaches are often people who have worked in corporate settings as kind of accessibility staff,

who in many cases, those departments have been narrowed down and they've been layoffs, so they've gone on their own and taken what they've learned professionally into a private coaching setting. I would imagine that the people hiring executive coaches are white-collar professionals with some amount of money? Am I getting the demo right? Yeah, for the most part, it is white-collar professionals who work in what we would consider, yeah, knowledge work. So some organizational skills-dependent, cognitive skills-dependent, creative, managerial often. You did a couple sessions with one of these coaches, yeah?

So, yeah, I did two sessions with actually one of my sources just to kind of understand what this involved. And it was really interesting. We spent a lot of time talking about like very, very specific, very, very granular challenges that I was encountering in like ultra-specific projects and just distilling the first step down to like the smallest, least scary, like open this book literally. That was one of the steps like, okay, you need to open this book. So just open this book without judgment. See how it feels. You know you need to open the book. This is the great thing about procrastiners. You know exactly what you need to do. Why are you hiring someone to tell you to open the book when you know what you got to do? Or like, how does this actually help? For some reason, having this external accountability factor and also a gentle nudge. Because my internal nudge is not gentle. Like, I may be putting off opening the book, but I'm also like flagellating myself for not opening the book. And then the shame cycle just

keeps perpetuating and accelerating. And suddenly this very small first step becomes enormous miss in my mind. So the coach is sort of like a feelings neutralizer. Maybe the primary function of the coach is to help the client divorce their internal feelings and shame from the process of doing what they need to do. Our culture has places so much moral value on output, productivity, efficiency, drive. And that inevitably gets tied up. in our ability to do stuff and the way that we think about doing stuff and can make mountains out of molehills

sometimes in the process. It can be very counterproductive. Did any of the coaches have any, like, tips or tricks that really surprised you? No. It doesn't have to be surprising to work, right? The interesting thing for me was... was not so much the methodology, but the efficacy of the methodology. I wasn't expecting to become a

convert at all. I was expecting to feel like I was being sold a bag of goods. Like this is an unregulated industry of self-appointed professional helpers, right? I was surprised to find very satisfied clients and very invested coaches who are quite serious about putting together the research, figuring out the methodology, and doing what they can to be effective as helpers. I break down executive functioning in a way that actually works with your brain. Let's take a closer look at that three-step process for getting started on tasks. A lot of people find real benefit in seeking out coaches, and they kind of fill an ambiguous gap in the system. Our show's been doing a lot of reporting on burnout, which is fairly rampant at this point in

American society. And I wonder if you think that these coaches better address the kind of exhaustion that many of us feel than, I don't know, maybe the advice that we're used to. No, not necessarily. I mean, I think that to a large extent, all of these remedies are Band-Aid solutions for systemic challenges in the way that work is set up these days. And many white-collar workers, and I think workers in general, are kind of expected to always be available. And, you know, that's very, very taxing on our executive functioning. But also, yeah, our mental health, our ability to be rested and recharge and feel like we're completely present in every aspect of our lives and effective in every aspect of our lives. A lot of people don't really have any options to opt out. Like,

you need to make a living and this is the system we're working with. And as nice as it is to imagine the ability to opt out, you know, if that were so easy, wouldn't we all be doing it? I would love to opt out, but I unfortunately cannot. So, yeah, I think that coaches fit into this toolkit of strategies and approaches that can help make the whole big mess a little bit more workable. Kelly Maria Corduckey is a freelance journalist who contributes to business insider. Coming up, you want proof that we're really exhausted and that we'll buy just about anything? People are going on vacation just to go to bed. Sleep tourism is a multi-billion dollar and growing industry.

Peter Balanon-Rosen goes on Sleep Safari when we return. This is advertiser content from Starbucks. Claire, it's Friday. I'm excited. Are you excited? I'm so excited. I'm so energized. There's so many people I'm going to see. There's so much I'm going to get done. I'll say it. Thank God it's Friday. You should say it. I mean, speaking of TGIF, have you heard the TGIF effect? It's a real psychological phenomenon.

Tell me more. In a study at the University of Rochester, they found that adults between the ages of 18 and 62 reported higher energy levels. and better moods between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. Well, your team at Today Explained is reporting on the news five days a week. I'm sure it's really nice to get that break over the weekend. Is there anything else behind the TGIF effect? They attribute it to the big break that you get on the weekend, but also the freedom to choose your activities and to hang with your faves.

Well, and on that note, I'll see you on Monday. Peace. Embrace the weekend's energy with Starbucks new energy refreshers. They're a refreshing way to stay present through the moment. moments that matter most. Try the all-new energy refresher at Starbucks. I'm Peter Ballin-on-Ozen, and I'm a producer with Today Explained. Beautiful. Okay, so the people who do marketing have been marketing a solution to burnout, a sexy new solution, and the sexy new solution is go to sleep.

Indeed, indeed, yes. Sleep is very important, but it can be really hard to get. Right? Like, I've got a one-and-a-half-year-old, so this is what. Bedtime can sound like at my house. It's okay, bud. I'm just changing your diaper. But hotels are now offering these luxury sleep vacations. Taylor made packages designed for sleep tourists. The growing number of people who say they're going on vacation, not to go shopping or

see wildlife, but just to catch a fusees. This makes sense to me. Although I always thought of the catching of a few zies a part of the vacation. Like, yes, I will go and see the tigers or whatever, but I would like to get eight hours of sleep when I'm on vacation. You're telling me that they're saying this is something new. Yes, sleeping on vacation has been around as long as vacations have been around. But these new things are specific hotel packages designed to be all about sleep. And it's actually for this new global sleep tourism industry that's worth about $600 billion. $600 billion. $600 billion is a lot of

money. Yeah. Part of that is because they're offering these luxury sleep packages designed hand in hand with sleep scientists. Right? So now we've got sleep tourism options in Fiji, Portugal, Hawaii. I couldn't make it to Fiji myself, but I did go to one in New York City, where I live, at Equinox Hotels, the luxury hotel cousin of the luxury gym. This is your first time staying with us in the hotel? It is, yes. We're happy to have you. Happy to be here. And Katie Tardiff, who's their head of marketing, she was ready to drop some marketing jargon about what they have to offer. We basically took luxury hospitality, and we deconstructed it, and we've rebuilt something entirely designed around human potential and human performance within a 24-hour day. They are ready, willing, and able to

sell you a package to help you sleep. It is engineered to provide deep restorative sleep, solid REM sleep, and leave you feeling more refreshed. Okay. Now, as an intrepid sleep reporter and a sleep-deprived dad, I wanted to understand the mechanics of this. And to know if being a sleep tourist could unlock better ways to sleep in general. Like, could I take any of my tourism home with me? So I approached my sleep journey in three legs. And in the first leg, I asked, could I, a sleep tourist, get as relaxed as humanly possible? So I hit the equinox spa to get what they call a sleep ivy.

Have you ever done an IV before? Like at the hospital maybe? Okay, never like recreationally. No. But there I was sitting by a window, classical music floating through the air, sipping my lemon water, about to pump myself full of this bright, yellow Gatorade-looking cocktail of things like magnesium, torrine, vitamin C, B, zinc, all these things, they said supposedly prime my body for good to sleep. Of course, I'm pulling with a needle, so you're going to feel a little bit of a pinch. All right, I'm a little freaked down my needles. You do this all the time, right?

I hear that all the time, and I do in fact do this all the time. Freaky needle aside, an hour and a hang in the sauna later, I was feeling pretty zonked. I am fighting to keep going right now. But I knew I couldn't stop yet. I had more relaxation to do. Which brings us to leg two of my journey. Now that I had found relaxation, could I squeeze the most out of it? So I did this thing called the Wave Table.

It's marketed as a way to get the equivalent of three hours of sleep in just 30 minutes, where you basically lie on this waterbed under a weighted blanket and listen to these sounds that are supposed to help slow down your brain. To me, it just kind of sounded like this ambient ocean scape. Because I'm a nerd rather than napping, I was focused on the sound design of it all. Wave, after wave, after wave. But then...

I can't believe this. I have to pee again. So, yeah, it's all a bit woo-woo. And all that water, maybe not the best thing for getting some enhanced disease. Okay, yeah, no, you got stuck with a needle, terrifying yourself. You had to pee. Peter, you will recall that the point of this was to get some sleep. Did any sleeping actually happen? Yes, the sleeping part of the journey.

I wanted to see if the tools of science could help with that. So I entered what they call their sleep lab. What does that mean? It's a hotel room which promised a full-on scientifically tailored premium sleep experience. Like this room, it's got a room bar, but instead of Diet Coke's and chips, it's full of supplements and juices and patches to help you sleep. It's got a smart mattress that adjust things for you overnight. And it came equipped with all these activities and exercises that help you get good sleep. So I set out to do every single thing they recommended.

And it played out just like KDR Equinox rep, said, It would. You have a set of AM and PM rituals on the table. Number one, let go of the tension by inhaling for a count of three and then exhaling. Number two. Mentally note one moment. There were breathing exercises. Color therapy.

In this 30 minute color meditation session, we invite you to un-worn. Number three, lie flat on your back, take six deep inhales and exhale. We also walk you through a series of very specific breath work. Breathe out. Number seven, lower stress-inducing cortisol levels by closing your eyes. Lower your arm and thread it under the opposite arm. More breathing exercises. Number nine, for an added libido boost.

We'll skip that one. Drink our proprietary equinox sleep-inducing teas. Drink dark tart cherry juice. Drink something else? I'm going to have to pee all that. Taking a steam shower. Hot. Almost two hours of activities later, I was finally done. And the room goes to sleep with you.

The shades automatically drop. The room cools off, the mattress does two, and then darkness. It is literally so pitch black in here. Okay, so they claim that this is scientific. I'm willing to believe it. Scientifically, what was happening with all this? Well, to figure that out, I spoke with Dr. Matt Walker. He was a professor of neuroscience and biomedical engineering at UT Dallas.

Now, this guy, he's not just a professor. He is like the face of sleep in America. today. He teaches the literal masterclass, you know, like masterclass on how to sleep. And he helped design this room. So it's a whole theatrical sort of thermal and sensory ballet, all of which is designed around the biology of what your body needs. To get sleep, your body needs to do a ton of dancing, it turns out. Matt tells me, temperature is a huge part of that. You need to drop your brain and body temperature to fall asleep and then stay asleep. So that hot, hot, hot, steam shower I took. It draws all of the hot trapped blood in the core of your body out to the

surface and your core body temperature after a hot bath actually plummetes and that's the reason you fall asleep and stay asleep more soundly. Huh. Fascinating, right? Yeah, yeah. And then they have this whole special mattress in their room, remember? We keep cooling the mattress as you're going into the middle of the night into the deep stages of deep non-room sleep to get you there and keep you there. And then to wake up, your body kind of has to do that whole dance again, but in reverse. Warm the body back up again because it's become cool. And the wake up was honestly really nice. The room came alive around me.

The room and mattress had warmed. Shades lifted. These ambient alarm clock sounds floated through the air. And there I was. Soft light, pleasant feelings all around. So you did it. You got to sleep. Were you, did you wake up well rested? I kind of wished I'd had like one of those video game health measures floating above my head. So I could tell where my levels truly were at. But it was a lot of work to go to sleep.

But once I did wake up, I did feel pretty nice. One thing that is striking me in this moment is that none of this sounds particularly cheap. How much did this cost you? Well, to get one of these rooms, depending on how far you book in advance, it'll run you about $2,000 and that's just for the room, not even the Gatorade colored IV that I did. Okay, you and I have talked about this. I am not a sound sleeper. I have not been since, I don't know, for many years. I don't have $2,000 a night.

What are the lessons for those of us who were not lucky enough to have experience this with you? Give me some tips. Sure, sure. I think there's things like keeping their temperature cooler, taking a hot bath or shower before bed, keeping things as dark as possible. You can do that even if you're not out on a sleep vacation. Another thing, though, doing all those sleep activities actually did keep me off my phone before bed. Huh? And that's pretty good for sleep too.

Best you can, 20 minutes before bed, digital detox. But I actually asked Matt about whether this could help someone like you who has bad insomnia or someone else who might be so burned out that they can. can't sleep. And he says a sleep vacation, even in his carefully designed lab, it's not necessarily going to change things. Think of us, perhaps, as a really good sports coach who can help with optimizing your sleep performance versus, let's say that you're an athlete and you've got a broken ankle. Well, there's no amount of my optimizing tips that are going to help you. We need to get you to a doctor and fix your broken ankle. I trust him, but I will tell you that even if you're I had $2,000 a night to spend on this.

I would not do it. I am too skeptical. However, you said this is a $600 billion industry, which means lots of people are willing to spend the two grand a night. What do you think that's telling us about where we are at the moment? I'll say as I was looking into all of the sleep tourism, there did seem to be some more branding than substance at times. Like, you would see a place boast about their sleep tourism option on their website. And then I'd go and look and it'd be like, oh, they offer you a sleep mask and a comfy pillow, but not necessarily anything like that seemed super-sciencey.

But I think overall we're at a moment where we're thinking about sleep maybe a little differently than we have in the past, right? Like the grindset mindset is out. Pamper yourself. Take care of yourself. That's in. Sleep maxing is a thing that's all over TikTok with people offering tips on how to hack your sleep. Considering the fact that you spend one thing.

of your life sleeping, it would make sense that you learn the best way to sleep. Welcome to sleep maxing 101. Cold room. 67 is ideal. No light. Matt Walker told me that the fact that there's a tourism market for this, it proves something he's known for a long time. Sleep has had this stigma of laziness, that if you're getting and giving yourself the chance to get enough sleep, that you're slothful. But it's almost as though people are now having this allergic reaction against the idea of this sleep machismo attitude because there are certain sectors, particularly of the workplace, where there's this almost competitive undersleeping that we're seeing. But now people are actually saying, I am so burned out, I'm so tired that I'm going to go

away to a hotel, not for a vacation, but just to try to recharge my battery. Because in the modern era, I think most people worry more about charging their phones to full at night. than charging their brains to full. Did you take anything away from the hotel? Like, not did you steal anything, but the stuff that they taught you, did you keep doing any of it? Right. That's kind of what I went in looking for. Like, could I, as a tourist, take any of this home with me?

And honestly, only some of it. Like, I don't have a fancy bed, but I can breathe at home or try to keep my room cool. But all those exercises they prompted me to do in that room, just not realistic to do all the time. Because life is busy. It's messy. It's full of friction and challenges. Things that aren't great for sleep, but are part of having a full life. All right. Should we say our good nights?

Go to sleep and good night. That was Peter Balinan-Rosen. Today's show was co-produced by Peter and Danielle Hewitt. It was edited by Janet Shaw and Bridger Dunnigan. Gabriel Donatow is our fact-checker. The rest of the team includes Heidi Mawagdi, Miles, Brian. and Patrick Boyd, Kelly Wessinger, Ariana Espudu, Dustin De Soto, and Sean Ramosfirm. MGMT is Avishai Artsi Amina El Sadi and Jolie Myers. Our EP is Miranda Kennedy, and we use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Tomorrow, America actually takes a look at 250 years of America in the feed in the AM. You can also watch it on Vox's YouTube channel. Today, Explain, is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, Podcast.network. Podcast.com.com. You can listen ad-free by signing up at Vox.com slash members. I am Noel King, and it's Today Explained. Support for Today Explain comes from Starbucks.

Perhaps you're clocking out today with TGIF on your lips. You can keep the good vibes going with an energy boost with Starbucks new energy refreshers. Their handcrafted energy refreshers can be the perfect thing to round out your Friday afternoon with flavors, such as strawberry assayi or even mango dragon fruit. Try the all-new energy refreshers at Starbucks.