February 21, 2022 • 33 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The COVID nineteen 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
(00:37):
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 Clots,
an expert in organizational behavior at Texas A and M University.
He used the term to describe the massive and historically
(00:58):
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 is not just caused by low paid
workers seeking a higher living wage or employees in their
(01:20):
twenties 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 thirties and forties. They're the one, statistically speaking,
who seem to be ditching their jobs in droves. But
as a psychologist, I'm more interested in the emotional states
that are driving so many people to just up and
(01:41):
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,
(02:04):
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
(02:26):
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, doctor Laurie Santos. One
(02:52):
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 Mollssic, 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 we got his dream job
as a tenured college professor. I would wake up in
(03:14):
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
(03:36):
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
(03:58):
that semester I came back and nothing changed, absolutely nothing.
I was every bit as exhausted in this period. I
stress eight, 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.
(04:21):
I turned in my letter of resignation and well, honestly,
that was the end of the burnout. Was utterly tied
to the job. To actually figured out what was going
on when you quit this dream job you had, But
that was when you get some real insight, you know.
So how did you learn what was going on? So
being an academic, being a researcher, being ultimately a nerd
at part, I went in a dove into the literature,
(04:43):
and the name I kept seeing over and over again
was Christina Maslac, a social psychologist at University of California, Berkeley,
who had been writing about burnout for deck Gades. I
read her first book. It read like my professional biography.
It was a revelation. I suddenly knew that it wasn't
(05:07):
just something wrong with me. I was part of the
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
(05:28):
across a not very scientific survey. Let's at ninety six
percent 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. If you're working,
(05:49):
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. So with the
caveat there are a lot of different misconceptions about this concept.
(06:12):
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 Maslack 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.
(06:39):
After I quit my job, I took the Maslack burnout inventory.
I feel emotionally drained from my work every day. I
scored in the ninety eight percent time on exhaustion and
pretty high on the other two measures. I feel exhilarated
after working closely with my students once a month. I
(07:03):
feel like I'm at the end of my rope a
few times a week. I have to admit like I
felt kind of out of myself for that. So four
or five years later, when I was working on the book,
I took the masle borout inventory again. I feel emotionally
drained from my work once a month. I feel exhilarated
(07:25):
after working closely with my students A few 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 had changed
radically because so much of my working life had changed.
(07:46):
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 to 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 you're tired.
(08:07):
While you're tired just 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
(08:28):
can cure. In my case, I took five months and
it didn't make a dent in my exhaustion. As soon
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
(08:50):
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 to. So that's the second part
(09:10):
of burnout, according to the scientific definition, is this idea
of depersonalization or cynicism. You know, 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
(09:34):
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
(09:56):
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
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. You know. I perceived the
(10:19):
students is 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.
(10:43):
She thought I was generally doing a good job, but
I just couldn't see it. You've talked about the specifics
of this phenomena of bran out 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, you know,
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,
(11:07):
so the people who know ever calls a hero. The
people who don't get applause at seven pm 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
(11:29):
think that burnout research needs to take a closer look
at the nuances of how people in different professions experience burnouts,
because the overlooked administrative worker is likely to experience it
differently than the nurse who is on her feet for
(11:49):
twelve hours a day running around dealing with the 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 the understanding
the history of this condition might be the key to
mixing it. The happiness lab will be right back. These days,
(12:18):
it can feel like so many of us are reaching
the point of burnout, but author Jonathan Molessek 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
(12:43):
has roots in ancient Greek medicine, and you know the
theory of the Four humors, and acida, which particularly was
thought to afflict Christian monks, and a later version of
melancholia that appeared in the Renaissance thought to afflict artistic elite.
(13:04):
All of these disorders were thought to afflict the elite
into 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 a hundred years
prior to Maslac and Freudenberger identifying burnout. What neurasthenia looked
(13:29):
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,
(13:55):
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
(14:18):
if we don't get clear on what scientists are saying
about it. And in that case, we'll just repeat the
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
(14:40):
more historically what's going on, you know, so talk about
where this idea came from. Burnout was first theorized in
the nineteen seventies. And at the same time that Maslac
and Friedenberger are theorizing burnout, Bob Dylan is singing about burnout,
Neil Young is singing about burnout. So there's something culturally
(15:00):
in the air. And I think what it was was
these massive changes in the American workforce that were underway
that began in the nineteen sixties and really came to
a head in the mid nineteen seventies. An old understanding
(15:21):
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 a 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, to
(15:44):
talk about what this shift was and kind of how
it affected sort of increases and burnout. If you look
at a chart of workers productivity and their wages beginning
in nineteen forty five, you see that as productivity increased,
wages increased in exact proportion. Then you very suddenly see
(16:08):
in nineteen seventy three or seventy four, productivity continuing to rise,
wages become flat. 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
(16:32):
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
(16:55):
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. You know, like the Wall Street Journal
isn't going to report on the ending of a thousand
workers contracts the way it would report on ten thousand
people laid off from an auto plant in Ohio. So
(17:18):
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 even a 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,
Like you know, you got to kind of get over
(17:39):
the fact that service work can be emotionally exhausting. You know,
talk a little bit about how this plays out. The
six season seventies was when more workers were becoming college
educated and going into service professions. You think about a
psychologist or a social worker, or today virtually any kind
(18:00):
of office worker. They're kind of always on the clock.
The means of production for them is their own psychology,
their own emotions awful. 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
(18:24):
of lofty ideals. I think it's to the second thing
that might play out in the service procession, which is that,
you know, we like to think that, you know, 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? Bullshit jobs is a term was coined
(18:48):
by the anthropologist David Graver, who very sadly passed away
about a year ago, and Graver 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.
(19:12):
So people whose job is to 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 bulshit job would
feel a sense of ineffectiveness. And one of the ideas
that's pretty hollow is just this notion that we are
(19:33):
what our work is. You know, in some sense, we
don't work to live, We wind up living to work.
You know, did this kind of play out in your
own case of feeling burnt out? Absolutely? Being an academic
was a huge part of my identity for almost two
decades of my life. So the time that I spent
in graduate school and then the eleven years that I
(19:55):
spent as a college professor, and I wouldn't have known
what to do about myself. Are 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
(20:17):
was a very satisfying identity to have. And so when
the job kind of started to bill 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, will
(20:37):
learn that Jonathan didn't always have a job that caused
a crisis of identity or a purpose. Before he became
a professor, he enjoyed a workplace that was so remarkable
for its non burnout vibes that there's 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 Molessing burned
(21:11):
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
(21:33):
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. Please, 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,
(21:55):
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
ringtoss 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.
(22:17):
The pay was better than I had expected it would be.
I had great co workers, I had a really wonderful boss,
and I think most significantly, the job did not occupy
my entire being. It was not all of who I was,
and it didn't follow me home at the end of
(22:40):
a shift that wasn't exhausted because the job didn't demand
that I put my entire being into it. No one
looks at their newborn child and things, boy, I hope
that my son or daughter grows up to be a
parking lot attendant. No one dream that's no one's dream job,
and the fact that it's no one's dream job actually
(23:00):
helps make it a really good job, at least 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.
Some ways maybe ironic that you know you are now
(23:22):
the poster child for burnout and then the fact that
you went through this, and so 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
(23:43):
outside of my whole value system that I had been
cultivating 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 of 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
(24:05):
insight about the kinds of things that really can help
us develop better work. Culture is elsewhere too, and so
talk about this idea of finding different ways to get
dignity in your life and dignities that come from outside
of work. One of our noble lives in the United
States culture is that you only count, you only have
dignity if you have paid employment, and if you don't,
(24:30):
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 know 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 line is the first step towards building
(24:52):
a better culture where work plays more of a supporting
role in our lives, and then you know, we can
have greater sense of flourishing beyond our jobs. What I
think we need to replace that noble lie with is
the idea that you everyone whoever we meet has dignity
(25:12):
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 they're newborn is lacking dignity. We rightly
cherish young children. We see them as having incredible value. Well,
(25:33):
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.
And so, what are some structural changes you think might
help us get that notion of dignity back. You talk
(25:53):
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 producer
and out work. Well, the first thing is, as 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
(26:16):
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 in a predictable schedule. I'm also an advocate
(26:39):
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 steps. You know, this whole
(27:02):
mini season is really about how we can productively use
a lot of the negative experiences we have, and of
course I put burnout and 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 you know, pretty radical individual
changes here. So does that kind of fit with your
(27:23):
interpretation of burnout and what you've learned from it? Yeah,
I mean it's 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
(27:47):
four Thousand Weeks Time Management from Mortals, and the message
there is recognize your finitude. You can't 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 belief that we can do more,
(28:11):
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 Berkmann's message is
that we simply will never be able to do it all.
(28:34):
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 affinity, recognizing that
we will die is a great discipline to help us
overcome burnout. Culture lives are limited, and that is something
(28:56):
to carry with you, and so that's trying to us.
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 changes that they can make locally to
improve the situation. That's pretty tough because burnout, the causes
(29:16):
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
(29:39):
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
(30:02):
people who might be suffering burnout as well, learned 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 those that burden onto the next person over. So
(30:23):
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 burnout and your flourishing, and
we're not going to unfortunately, you know that we're not
(30:44):
going to get rid of burnout. Without more collective action,
our cultures 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
(31:05):
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
(31:25):
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
(31:49):
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 mean time, let us know how you like this season.
(32:11):
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
(32:33):
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
(32:59):
by Ryan Dilley, Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our
original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing,
and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mialabelle Heather Faine,
John Schnars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haines, Maggie Taylor,
Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent,
(33:21):
Ben Davis. That Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your podcasts,
Pushkin. The COVID nineteen 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
(00:37):
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 Clots,
an expert in organizational behavior at Texas A and M University.
He used the term to describe the massive and historically
(00:58):
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 is not just caused by low paid
workers seeking a higher living wage or employees in their
(01:20):
twenties 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 thirties and forties. They're the one, statistically speaking,
who seem to be ditching their jobs in droves. But
as a psychologist, I'm more interested in the emotional states
that are driving so many people to just up and
(01:41):
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,
(02:04):
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
(02:26):
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, doctor Laurie Santos. One
(02:52):
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 Mollssic, 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 we got his dream job
as a tenured college professor. I would wake up in
(03:14):
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
(03:36):
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
(03:58):
that semester I came back and nothing changed, absolutely nothing.
I was every bit as exhausted in this period. I
stress eight, 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.
(04:21):
I turned in my letter of resignation and well, honestly,
that was the end of the burnout. Was utterly tied
to the job. To actually figured out what was going
on when you quit this dream job you had, But
that was when you get some real insight, you know.
So how did you learn what was going on? So
being an academic, being a researcher, being ultimately a nerd
at part, I went in a dove into the literature,
(04:43):
and the name I kept seeing over and over again
was Christina Maslac, a social psychologist at University of California, Berkeley,
who had been writing about burnout for deck Gades. I
read her first book. It read like my professional biography.
It was a revelation. I suddenly knew that it wasn't
(05:07):
just something wrong with me. I was part of the
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
(05:28):
across a not very scientific survey. Let's at ninety six
percent 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. If you're working,
(05:49):
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. So with the
caveat there are a lot of different misconceptions about this concept.
(06:12):
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 Maslack 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.
(06:39):
After I quit my job, I took the Maslack burnout inventory.
I feel emotionally drained from my work every day. I
scored in the ninety eight percent time on exhaustion and
pretty high on the other two measures. I feel exhilarated
after working closely with my students once a month. I
(07:03):
feel like I'm at the end of my rope a
few times a week. I have to admit like I
felt kind of out of myself for that. So four
or five years later, when I was working on the book,
I took the masle borout inventory again. I feel emotionally
drained from my work once a month. I feel exhilarated
(07:25):
after working closely with my students A few 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 had changed
radically because so much of my working life had changed.
(07:46):
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 to 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 you're tired.
(08:07):
While you're tired just 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
(08:28):
can cure. In my case, I took five months and
it didn't make a dent in my exhaustion. As soon
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
(08:50):
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 to. So that's the second part
(09:10):
of burnout, according to the scientific definition, is this idea
of depersonalization or cynicism. You know, 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
(09:34):
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
(09:56):
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
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. You know. I perceived the
(10:19):
students is 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.
(10:43):
She thought I was generally doing a good job, but
I just couldn't see it. You've talked about the specifics
of this phenomena of bran out 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, you know,
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,
(11:07):
so the people who know ever calls a hero. The
people who don't get applause at seven pm 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
(11:29):
think that burnout research needs to take a closer look
at the nuances of how people in different professions experience burnouts,
because the overlooked administrative worker is likely to experience it
differently than the nurse who is on her feet for
(11:49):
twelve hours a day running around dealing with the 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 the understanding
the history of this condition might be the key to
mixing it. The happiness lab will be right back. These days,
(12:18):
it can feel like so many of us are reaching
the point of burnout, but author Jonathan Molessek 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
(12:43):
has roots in ancient Greek medicine, and you know the
theory of the Four humors, and acida, which particularly was
thought to afflict Christian monks, and a later version of
melancholia that appeared in the Renaissance thought to afflict artistic elite.
(13:04):
All of these disorders were thought to afflict the elite
into 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 a hundred years
prior to Maslac and Freudenberger identifying burnout. What neurasthenia looked
(13:29):
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,
(13:55):
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
(14:18):
if we don't get clear on what scientists are saying
about it. And in that case, we'll just repeat the
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
(14:40):
more historically what's going on, you know, so talk about
where this idea came from. Burnout was first theorized in
the nineteen seventies. And at the same time that Maslac
and Friedenberger are theorizing burnout, Bob Dylan is singing about burnout,
Neil Young is singing about burnout. So there's something culturally
(15:00):
in the air. And I think what it was was
these massive changes in the American workforce that were underway
that began in the nineteen sixties and really came to
a head in the mid nineteen seventies. An old understanding
(15:21):
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 a 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, to
(15:44):
talk about what this shift was and kind of how
it affected sort of increases and burnout. If you look
at a chart of workers productivity and their wages beginning
in nineteen forty five, you see that as productivity increased,
wages increased in exact proportion. Then you very suddenly see
(16:08):
in nineteen seventy three or seventy four, productivity continuing to rise,
wages become flat. 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
(16:32):
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
(16:55):
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. You know, like the Wall Street Journal
isn't going to report on the ending of a thousand
workers contracts the way it would report on ten thousand
people laid off from an auto plant in Ohio. So
(17:18):
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 even a 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,
Like you know, you got to kind of get over
(17:39):
the fact that service work can be emotionally exhausting. You know,
talk a little bit about how this plays out. The
six season seventies was when more workers were becoming college
educated and going into service professions. You think about a
psychologist or a social worker, or today virtually any kind
(18:00):
of office worker. They're kind of always on the clock.
The means of production for them is their own psychology,
their own emotions awful. 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
(18:24):
of lofty ideals. I think it's to the second thing
that might play out in the service procession, which is that,
you know, we like to think that, you know, 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? Bullshit jobs is a term was coined
(18:48):
by the anthropologist David Graver, who very sadly passed away
about a year ago, and Graver 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.
(19:12):
So people whose job is to 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 bulshit job would
feel a sense of ineffectiveness. And one of the ideas
that's pretty hollow is just this notion that we are
(19:33):
what our work is. You know, in some sense, we
don't work to live, We wind up living to work.
You know, did this kind of play out in your
own case of feeling burnt out? Absolutely? Being an academic
was a huge part of my identity for almost two
decades of my life. So the time that I spent
in graduate school and then the eleven years that I
(19:55):
spent as a college professor, and I wouldn't have known
what to do about myself. Are 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
(20:17):
was a very satisfying identity to have. And so when
the job kind of started to bill 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, will
(20:37):
learn that Jonathan didn't always have a job that caused
a crisis of identity or a purpose. Before he became
a professor, he enjoyed a workplace that was so remarkable
for its non burnout vibes that there's 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 Molessing burned
(21:11):
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
(21:33):
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. Please, 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,
(21:55):
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
ringtoss 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.
(22:17):
The pay was better than I had expected it would be.
I had great co workers, I had a really wonderful boss,
and I think most significantly, the job did not occupy
my entire being. It was not all of who I was,
and it didn't follow me home at the end of
(22:40):
a shift that wasn't exhausted because the job didn't demand
that I put my entire being into it. No one
looks at their newborn child and things, boy, I hope
that my son or daughter grows up to be a
parking lot attendant. No one dream that's no one's dream job,
and the fact that it's no one's dream job actually
(23:00):
helps make it a really good job, at least 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.
Some ways maybe ironic that you know you are now
(23:22):
the poster child for burnout and then the fact that
you went through this, and so 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
(23:43):
outside of my whole value system that I had been
cultivating 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 of 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
(24:05):
insight about the kinds of things that really can help
us develop better work. Culture is elsewhere too, and so
talk about this idea of finding different ways to get
dignity in your life and dignities that come from outside
of work. One of our noble lives in the United
States culture is that you only count, you only have
dignity if you have paid employment, and if you don't,
(24:30):
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 know 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 line is the first step towards building
(24:52):
a better culture where work plays more of a supporting
role in our lives, and then you know, we can
have greater sense of flourishing beyond our jobs. What I
think we need to replace that noble lie with is
the idea that you everyone whoever we meet has dignity
(25:12):
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 they're newborn is lacking dignity. We rightly
cherish young children. We see them as having incredible value. Well,
(25:33):
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.
And so, what are some structural changes you think might
help us get that notion of dignity back. You talk
(25:53):
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 producer
and out work. Well, the first thing is, as 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
(26:16):
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 in a predictable schedule. I'm also an advocate
(26:39):
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 steps. You know, this whole
(27:02):
mini season is really about how we can productively use
a lot of the negative experiences we have, and of
course I put burnout and 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 you know, pretty radical individual
changes here. So does that kind of fit with your
(27:23):
interpretation of burnout and what you've learned from it? Yeah,
I mean it's 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
(27:47):
four Thousand Weeks Time Management from Mortals, and the message
there is recognize your finitude. You can't 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 belief that we can do more,
(28:11):
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 Berkmann's message is
that we simply will never be able to do it all.
(28:34):
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 affinity, recognizing that
we will die is a great discipline to help us
overcome burnout. Culture lives are limited, and that is something
(28:56):
to carry with you, and so that's trying to us.
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 changes that they can make locally to
improve the situation. That's pretty tough because burnout, the causes
(29:16):
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
(29:39):
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
(30:02):
people who might be suffering burnout as well, learned 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 those that burden onto the next person over. So
(30:23):
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 burnout and your flourishing, and
we're not going to unfortunately, you know that we're not
(30:44):
going to get rid of burnout. Without more collective action,
our cultures 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
(31:05):
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
(31:25):
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
(31:49):
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 mean time, let us know how you like this season.
(32:11):
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
(32:33):
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
(32:59):
by Ryan Dilley, Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our
original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing,
and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mialabelle Heather Faine,
John Schnars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haines, Maggie Taylor,
Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent,
(33:21):
Ben Davis. That Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your podcasts,
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.