Much Ado About Burnout

Alison Green from Ask A Manager stops by to discuss all things burnout, and advises you to take a vacation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, this is Annie, and you're listening to stuff Mom
never told you. M M. And today we're joined by
another guest, co host, Alison Green, of the podcast and

(00:27):
website Ask a Manager. Hey, Alison, thank you so much
for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I've
been a fan of your website for a while now.
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself for
those um that might not be familiar with you and
about your show. I ran the advice column Ask a Manager,

(00:47):
which is both a website and a podcast, and I
answer questions that pretty much everything related to life at work.
So everything from my boss is a micro manager to
my coworker told me that I smell l and I
don't know what to do, to my boss is dating
my dad. Those are all real letters that I've gotten.

(01:08):
And originally Ask a Manager was just the website, but
the podcast launched about eight months ago, I think, and
it's been really fun to actually talk to the people
who are asking questions and be able to have back
and forth with them on the show that you don't
really get when I'm just writing an answer for the website. Sure, yeah,
and I bet oh man, I'd love to just pick

(01:30):
your brain about all of the things that you've people
have written in about, because I'm sure there is quite
the spectrum. Um. And today we're going to be talking
about burnout, which is something that I thought would be
a something that you could speak to pretty well. Um,

(01:50):
And it's something that's been on my mind lately after
I I recently attended this conference called work It, which
is a podcast festival for women, where Bridget gave a
brilliant talk and there was a whole session there on burnout.
And I think it is something on a lot of
our minds lately. Um. More and more work is bleeding
into personal life, and we're always on, We're always connected,

(02:13):
we're always on our phone, on our laptops, and I
think this is a big reason why so many of
us are experiencing burnout, are perhaps barely keeping it at bay.
Emily and Bridget did a whole episode on burnout about
a year or so ago, so check that out if
you want more info and speaking more info. It has

(02:35):
been in the news a lot lately, a lot of
studies around burnout, specifically looking at job sectors. We touched
on one of these studies briefly in our Tokyo Medical
University episode, Women in the medical field are more likely
to burn out as compared to their male counterparts. Another
study just came out looking at the digital demands on

(02:55):
modern journalists and how quote seemingly endless sources of potential
verses is causing journalists to feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and anxious,
which are all hallmarks of burnout. And we'll get into
that a little bit, but first, Alison, what is burnout?
Burnout is a very specific type of stress where you're

(03:19):
drained and you're not performing the way that you would
want to, and it usually results well when we're talking
about it in a work context, I should say it
usually results from a long, sustained period of high workload
and stress and pressure where you eventually reach a point
where you just feel tired all the time and like
you don't have the energy to keep going. And for

(03:40):
some people, they become frustrated and cynical about their jobs,
or they become frustrated by pretty routine workplace frustrations much
more easily than they used to. Some people will start
making mistakes because their energy and their focus has just
been used up. Some people start feeling like they're not
motivated to get up in the morning and go to work,
or to put in much effort once they're there, and

(04:02):
pretty much always it just makes you exhausted, both physically
and emotionally. Yeah. Um, one of the things that I
kept running into when I was doing the research on
this episode is people would describe this feeling of numbness,
of feeling like they had no motivation, they were constantly exhausted,

(04:22):
and they felt ineffective and pessimistic. Although interestingly, men experiencing
burnout typically don't report feelings of ineffectiveness and like you
kind of were alluding to, one thing to know is
burnout generally means work related burnout, but you can't experience
non work related burnout, for example taking care of children

(04:43):
and or aging parents, especially if you're doing that on
top of a job. Yeah. Absolutely, have you ever experienced burnout? Allison, Well,
this topic is near and dear to me to my heart.
I feel like, as as someone who works for myself,
I think freelancers and people who work for themselves are

(05:04):
at a really high risk of burnout because it's so
easy to just work all the time because you feel
like you things might be fine now work wise, but
in a couple of months, Who knows what your workload
will be like, maybe it'll be much less, which means
your income could be much less. So I think when
you work for yourself, there is serious built in pressure
to just work as many hours as you physically can

(05:25):
do it, and that is not sustainable in the long run.
But I feel like, like many people who were for themselves,
I have been trying to navigate that for years. But
you know, when I was listening to you talk about
other contexts where you can get burned out, I was
actually thinking about a situation that I had about a
year and a half ago when I moved. I moved

(05:46):
into a much larger house, and I hate moving. Everyone does.
No one likes moving, but I really hate it. I
can't stand living out of boxes. It makes me feel
like I'm camping, and I don't like camping, and so
I always want to get unpacked immediately, like I don't
want a week after I move in. I want everything done,
And so I took on an insane amount of work

(06:07):
and stress, and I remember feeling after about a week
like I had just hit a wall, Like I literally
felt like I physically I could not get up to
do another moving related task. And I think that is
obviously a much lower stakes kind of burnout than when
it's with your job or when it was with something
like taking care of kids or parents. But I think

(06:27):
we all experienced burnout in some context or another, even
if it's not work. Oh absolutely. I remember when I
moved into my the place I lived now. It was
the middle of summer. It was probably ninety seven degrees fahrenheit,
and I was trying to it's been a long day.
I had people helping me, and they abandoned me. I

(06:48):
don't blame them. That air conditioning wasn't working. And it
was on the second floor. It was very narrow staircase
and it curves around, so there's a lot of like
pivoting that you have to do. And I it was
really late at night, and I was trying to hang
these drapes so that I'm a very light sleeper, and

(07:10):
like any light comes in, I won't sleep. So I
was determined to hang these and then I was going
to go to bed and my mom called me. I
don't remember what happened, but the drapes fell over and
I just said, I have to go mom. I cannot
talk right now it was awful. I had a drape
related emergency as well and in my move, so I

(07:31):
completely understand. Have you heard from a lot of folks
on your website and through the podcast now that are
experiencing burnout? Yeah, I think it's really common, and I
think it's my sense and this is just anecdotal, but
my senses that it is increasing. And I suspect it
is what you alluded to earlier, that we're all plugged

(07:53):
in all the time. We're always connected to work. People
can always reach us for many of us, not for everyone,
But that's increased only the case for people. And everyone
always seems to feel busy. Everyone's always talking about how
busy they are, and I don't think that was the
case twenty years ago. Um, it is increasing. I suspect
technology as the culprit that technology. Again, going back to

(08:16):
a phone call with my mom, I feel that every
time I speak with her and she asked me how
are things I have? I take a long pause and
then I say, you know, still stressful. It's I'm embarrassed
to keep saying it, but it is still the truth. Yes,
that's like a transcript of a conversation with my mother. Yeah,

(08:37):
And I feel like I'm becoming boring because that's my answer, right,
And I'm always hoping I've got to come up with
a better answer than still stressful, but I can't. Yes,
we need to resolve to come up with something better. Yes,
more interesting conversation for our mothers. When I was looking

(08:57):
into factors that lead to burnout, I found this article
from Dr Sarah Cotton, who is an organizational psychologist and
director at the consultancy Transitioning Well, and she listed six
primary factors. Expectation, misalignment the job isn't what you expected,
unsustainable workload, mission exposure risk or work associated trauma. Working

(09:22):
on autopilot so you know an employee is disengaged from
the work if it's mindless or something like that, passive
aggressive workplaces. This can lead to everyone thinking they're on
the same page about changes, but nothing ever changes. And lastly,
poor work life culture. Would you would you agree with
those Allison? That's interesting. They actually wouldn't be the first

(09:45):
ones I would have named. I agree. They can all
lead to burn up. The thing I see most commonly
is just really high overwhelming workload and unreasonable expectations, and
either a manager who will not act with any urgency
to change that, or a very commonly, maybe more commonly,
a person who has not been as sort of and

(10:06):
had a conversation with their manager about it, so they
feel that it's not an option to change anything about
their workload, but they haven't actually explored that, and there
may be options that they haven't taken advantage of yet.
Mm hmm, yeah, yeah, I would. I would agree with that.
And UM, here's the thing. Women in their thirties and
forties are at the highest risk of burnout. And this

(10:28):
could be because of life changes like having a child
or a child care or money, or it could be
the type of jobs women are more likely to hold,
or both. And that's at all. We have some numbers
for you. We've probably heard that, Um, women are more
likely to report feelings of anxiety or stress when compared
to men. We've done entire episodes on it, if you're interested.

(10:52):
And researchers think that contributes to a higher burnout rate
among women. And a survey from Osmopolitan magazine that almost
holy of research institutions found that of the seven d
and fifty female respondents, seventy reported experiencing panic attacks. Are
anxiety and said they sought out medical help because of

(11:16):
these things. Half said they check work email every day,
and over said they feel a lack of motivation, leading
some scientists to dub this as generation burnout. And I
can say I have difficulty not checking my email. That
is something that I am trying to get better about. Um,

(11:38):
it's hard to take vacation when a part of your
brain is always kind of checking into work. So I
relate to a lot of this stuff that we're talking about,
and it's I see it and a lot of my
friends and a lot of my coworkers. Something else the
study found is that a third of the women described

(11:59):
their jobs as stressful, and in general reported taking pore
care of themselves, not getting enough sleep, over under eating,
drinking too much to cope with the stress and burnout.
Um and yeah, again, I can relate to a lot
of that stuff and it might go without saying, but
stress and burnout take a physical toll, possibly manifesting and

(12:20):
being more prone to cold chest pains, higher rates of
heart disease, headaches are g I problems. It can manifest
in these physical ways that also impact how well we
can do our jobs and how well how well we
feel and how well we can be in our social lives.

(12:43):
It's it's got I think, more impact than we realize.
And Cosmo is not the only entity looking into burnout.
Montreal University looked into it as well, and a four
year study that followed over two thousand people, of them
women across ultiple workplaces, and the researchers were tracking things
like cynicism, effectiveness at work, and emotional exhaustion, those hallmarks

(13:07):
of burnout we talked about earlier, and they found women
were more likely to experience burnout. One of the reasons
behind this, researchers speculate, is because of the different conditions
women might encounter at work because of them being women.
The low levels of authority and decision making opportunities that
women are more likely to experience at work when compared
to men might lead them to higher levels of burnout,

(13:29):
which has to do with the types of positions men
are more likely to hold. That's interesting to me. I
don't have any research on this, so I am just
going on what I see anecdotally, but I see plenty
of burnout among women who have lots of authority and
lots of decision making opportunities. In fact, if anything, I
think I see it more among women who have those things.

(13:52):
So if I had to take a guess, I would
say that women might experience burnout more than men because women.
This is just a wild speculation here, but I'm going
to say it anyway. From what I see, I think
women tend to invest in their work in different ways
than men do. When women are conscientious of out their
jobs they get they often get very emotionally invested in

(14:14):
the details in a way that men don't do as much.
And obviously i'm speaking in generalizations here, so this isn't
going to be true of every man or every woman.
But from what I see, conscientious women are more likely
than men are to take what happens at work personally
and to feel a higher degree of obligation to kind

(14:36):
of hold everything together and keep things running smoothly. And
I think you see that same dynamic in homes as well.
And so in the same job, a woman might be
walking around with a higher stuss level than a man
just because of the way that she invests, and I
would bet that is part of why there are higher
burn at rates with women. I could totally see that.

(14:58):
And I also there's so many things probably at play here,
and one of them, I would say is we did
an episode on emotional labor at work and how often
times women are expected to do these sort of extra
social tasks at work, and I'm sure that's that's a thing.
And then also I do think a lot of women

(15:23):
in general, but probably in UM, in positions that do
have a high level of authority, feel a set of
expectation they think they have to meet UM. So maybe
they're always trying to prove themselves. I don't know. I
just feel like there's this pressure to be really really

(15:46):
good UM that perhaps men don't experience it the same way.
And again that is generalization too. No, I think you're
absolutely right. It's it's harder to be a woman, particularly
as you get more and more authority and responsible at
your job, the expectations on you are more intense. You
have to be perfectly pleasant to everyone all the time

(16:07):
or you'll be seen as abrasive. But you can't be
too pleasant or you won't be taken seriously. There's all
of these conflicting expectations that are intention with each other
that men don't have in the same way. And I
think you're absolutely right about the emotional labor component as well.
And it's not just they're really tangible emotional labor stuff
like you're expected to help clean up after meetings and

(16:27):
be involved in the party planning committee. It's also more
subtle stuff, um, like your demeanor at work and never
looking piste off even when you're frustrated, And there's something
about how we're socialized as women. There's actually a piece
of this, even separate from all of that, there's a
piece of this that feels similar to me to how

(16:48):
like there's research showing that if there's a pair of
socks lying on the floor at home in a lot
of households, it's the woman who's more likely to be
the one who a notices it and be is more
bothered by it and see pay sit up. And I
think there's something similar to that that happens at work too,
where women just feel more personal responsibility for making sure

(17:08):
that things run well and that people are happy and
that things feel harmonious. And we take that burden on
ourselves in a way that men don't. Again generalization, some
men do, some women don't. In general, I think that's true. Yeah, yeah,
that's um. I would agree with all of that. And
I mean, we've we've spoken so much on this show

(17:32):
before about that whole kind of tight rope that women
have to walk where you can't you can't be too
much of this, are too much of this, you have
to be exactly that. And I think it does come
into play and meetings and in like the closed choices
that you you make. Just so many things that are

(17:52):
always in the back of our mind that are exhausting.
It's exhausting thinking about that stuff. And um. Going back
to that stud the one out of Montreal University, it
also found that low self esteem and poor work life
balance are very important factors into why women burnout UM

(18:14):
at higher rates compared to men. And if we step
back and we ask, well, why does all of this matter?
Aside from it sucks UM and it costs the economy
and lost productivity, it has those ripple effects to your
social life, to your overall health, and to a feeling
of fulfillment in I would hope that workplaces want to

(18:38):
be want to be somewhere where employees feel like they
can be effective and they can be productive. It's better
for everybody. Yeah, I would say from the manager side
of thing, if I've got an employee who's burning out
or in danger of burning out, that should really concern
me because that's someone who is going to be less

(18:59):
engaged with the word. They're more likely to make mistakes,
and they're more likely to up and quit one day.
You know. So often managers aren't willing to step in
and help with say an overwhelming workload, because they think, well,
there's no one else who could do this, or she's
so good at what she does, we really need her
to be the one doing it. That if you ignore
burnout at some point, that person is going to leave.

(19:19):
I mean everyone's going to leave at some point anyway, presumably,
but that person is going to leave earlier than they
might otherwise. And so it makes no logical sense if
if you invest in preventing burnout with someone who's great
at their job, you're going to have them around doing
that great job for a lot longer. Absolutely, And we
are about to talk about prevention, but first we're going

(19:42):
to take a quick break for word from our sponsor,
and we're back, Thank you, sponsor. So the best medicine
is prevention, right, That's what we always hear. How do

(20:02):
we prevent burnout? And we can look at this on
two levels. Um on a personal level and more on
a managerial level. Right, um, So, one thing is recognize
the symptoms. If you catch yourself thinking things like I
have to be perfect good moms, don't do insert whatever

(20:23):
it is here, I can handle this on my own,
then you might want to step back and maybe reassess, uh,
look at if maybe you're going through burnout. Another thing
is having a good social support system that helps in
so many ways, so many different things. Me time, find

(20:44):
something that is just for you, a way to unplug
once a day. It can be a short thing or
a long thing, whatever you can fit into your schedule.
Another one is exercise, whatever that is for you. It
could be a walk, yoga, stretching. I actually try to
do so thing outside once a day, and I find
that this has been so beneficial for me, to the

(21:05):
point that sometimes if I feel a headache coming on
or I'm feeling extremely stressed, I can go outside for
a bit, like literally minutes, and it helps relax me.
Sometimes it could all be in my head and that's
an unintentional pun, but it makes the headache go away.
And I know this is not an option for everyone,
but if you can, I highly recommend being outside at

(21:27):
least once a day. Make time for sleep, good sleep.
I am terrible at this, but I think a lot
of us are terrible about about getting good sleep. But
it is important. And another thing is setting clear boundaries.
And this one has been a real challenge for me too.
But I try not to work once I get home

(21:48):
at nights or on the weekends or on vacation. I
have gotten better. I don't do social media if I
can avoid it, which in this line of work is
it's difficult to avoid, but it's something that's always on.
So if I can't avoid it completely, then I try
to set like these are my social media hours. An
hour before bed, I stopped looking at my phone. Uh.

(22:11):
And this is something the journalist in that study at
the top said they did as a way to try
to manage their workload. Some of them said they deleted Facebook, Twitter, snapchat, Instagram.
If email is something that overwhelms you, and I have
so many friends who say their inbox is a source
of huge amounts of stress for them, to the point
that they won't even check it, and then it becomes

(22:33):
more and more stressful because more and more emails keep
coming in inbox rules or something that helps. Some folks
having rules where where what emails get priority. Some go
to a folder that you never see again. I remember
a friend called me once and she was in the
midst of a panic attack, and I knew it was
serious because most people who know me know I will
go to amazing lengths to avoid talking on the phone.

(22:57):
I helped her make a list of small, bowl accomplishable
things and we went through her inbox one at a time,
and it really helped her. So these are some ways
to prevent burnout. Do you have any any other suggestions, Alison,
I think those are great. One I would add is
just really paying attention to yourself and how you're feeling

(23:19):
and not ignoring signs of stress. If you've had week
after week or month after month of feeling exhausted and stressed,
recognize that as a huge morning sign, because I think
some of us tend to just keep going even after
months of stress and exhaustion, and that is asking for trouble.
I'm guilty of those. So this is very much like
the doctor who doesn't take her own medicine. But when

(23:42):
you start first noticing yourself feeling that way over a
sustained period, pay attention to it, Schedule a vacation, get
some time off, disconnect from work, and figure out what
is at the root of it. If the way that
you're feeling is a sign that whatever is causing it
isn't sustainable, you've got to come up than other approach.
Maybe not for next week, maybe not even for next month,

(24:03):
but you've got to get something in motion that's going
to address that situation. And I think the other thing
is to not assume that just because you can work
crazy hours for months on end that you should. Just
because you can do it does not mean it's a
wise long term strategy. It might be a very bad
long term strategy, because if you burn out, you're going
to do a worse job, and you might end up

(24:24):
in a place where you can't do much of anything
at all. So just do all the things, even if
it exhausts me is not a sound strategy for work
or for life. And I think to building in time
for breaks, real breaks where you disconnect from work, You
go on vacation, you just lounge around on your couch,
whatever it is, you do stuff that relaxes you and

(24:46):
makes you happy. That is a really key thing, because
when we're busy, that is often the stuff that we
cut out because it feels more cutible than everything else.
But in the long run, it's really not not if
you want to sustain whatever it is that you're doing.
Yeah so much, I can't tell you how many times

(25:06):
I've had to just resign myself too. I know I
could do better than what I'm doing, but I don't
have the energy anymore. And that is not a good
approach to have at a job, especially when I'm I
love my job, and I care about my job, and
I wanted to the best that I can. But I

(25:30):
do feel this pressure, and a lot of it is
pressure I'm putting on myself. No one is asking me
to do these things, to keep pushing and to do
all the things, and I've had to step back from
from this schedule that I made for myself. I remember

(25:50):
having a conversation with a friend where I said I
felt trapped in my own life. It was because I
just had scheduled everything out and I had no free time,
and that is not a sustainable model to happen. Like
and so often, just as you're describing, we are the
ones doing it. To ourselves to some degree, and I

(26:11):
think if you are a conscientious person, and that's a
wonderful trait. We should all be conscientious, right, But this
is the dark side of conscientiousness, is that we will
do this to ourselves and we will create these traps
of our own making. Mm hmmm. And something I wanted
to go back to that I think that you could
speak to more than I can, is um work related

(26:32):
burnout doesn't just happen to folks in the office. I
think we have this vision when we hear burnout and
it's somebody at a cubicle or otherwise in an office,
but it impacts remote workers as well, people who work
from home, people who are their own bosses. And one
of the reasons when I was researching why is that
people feel a need to do more work to thank

(26:54):
their employee for giving them the option of flexible work
hours and working remotely. But the number one thing was
feeling a pressure from within to just keep working. Has
that been your experience, Yes, I think it goes back
to again conscientiousness. If you are conscientious, you want to

(27:16):
make sure that people know that you're on top of
your work. You're not taking advantage of working remotely to
just play with the cat and do laundry all day.
You feel like you want to prove to people that
you're just as much on top of your work as
you would be if you were in the office, and
so you end up putting pressure on yourself that no
one else would be putting on you. In many cases,
it actually reminds me. This is going to sound like

(27:37):
a tangent, and maybe it is, but it actually reminds
me of something that you see with companies that offer
unlimited vacation time. That sounds great, unlimited vocation time. You
can take as much time off as you want. Who
wouldn't want that, right? What you actually see in companies
that offer unlimited vacation time is that people take a
little bit less on average than they took when the
company was offering a specific set number of days per year, because, again,

(28:00):
conscientious people don't want to look like slackers, and they
get really worried about what kind of perception there's going
to be about their time off, and so they air
on the side of caution and they take less time.
And I think that there's something in there that's very
similar to this thing that happens to remote workers where
they feel like they need to prove no, look, I
am really working hard, absolutely, and I have noticed at

(28:26):
at my job when I've had these conversations with co workers,
none of us, hardly, any of us, a big percentage
of us, don't really take vacation days. We get to
the end of the year and we have all of
our vacation days. And I think part of the problem
in our case is we love our jobs. And so

(28:49):
it's been for me defining yes, I love my job
and I love researching everything, and it's hard to untangle
that sometimes from uh, this is still work, and it
is work, and it is stressful, but I do love it,
and so I've had to be very firm with I know,

(29:12):
you want to know everything there is to know about
chewing gum, You've got to go home. Yeah, this is
a piece of it. I think that doesn't get talked
about very much because if you love your job, that's great.
Everything must be happy all the time and and fulfilling,
and that's not the case. And often loving your job
does drive you to work crazy hours that feel fine

(29:33):
for a while because you're doing something you really enjoy,
but it tends to entangle you with more and more commitments,
and then you wake up one day and you've committed
yourself in all of these different directions and there's no
space for relaxing anymore. Mm hmm. And as we record this,
if we go back for a minute to non work

(29:54):
related burnout. It's the holiday season and this morning, the
hashtag uh signs Santa's burnt out was trending. And the
never ending list of of errands, of the gift wrapping
and finding the gifts, the cooking, the decorating, the social obligations,
the extra workload that you might take on so that

(30:14):
you can take time off. It's a lot. And this
is a big time of year four burnout in part
because of that. One casual survey found that one third
of respondents reported festive burnout. I love that. Yeah, it's weird.
There's like a there's a weird tension and all of

(30:36):
these activities that we really like, jobs that we love,
holidays that we're presumably celebrating because we enjoy celebrating them,
and all that comes along with that. But again, especially
for women, I think there's a burden associated with them too.
I was discussing with a friend the other day about
how as I've gotten older, the holiday is have become

(31:02):
this huge stressor where it's almost a joke, right that
that's what you see in in SNL are even in
commercials that this holiday season get rid of some stress
by doing this, or it's just kind of assumed that
there's gonna be all this drama and stress with them,

(31:23):
and I that is both kind of funny and kind
of sad. I don't know how we've reached this point,
but I do think that we have. And that is
something else in our office is it is really when
the holidays come around, it's very stressful because you don't
really stop publishing podcast, so you have to figure out

(31:44):
how you're going to get around that. Um but they're
supposed to be this fun, relaxing time of year, and
of course we found a way to make it very stressful. Yeah,
I'm curious if that is universal. I feel that way too,
But now I'm wondering if my husband feels that way,
and I suspect that he doesn't, so I'm going to
ask him later today. But I suspect there are some

(32:07):
people who don't, and I want to find out what
their secret is. My hunch is that they're just not
taking on the sort of internalized pressure and obligations that
some of us take on. Well, report back what your
husband says, and listeners, if you have a different experience,

(32:28):
please right in, because I cannot think of anyone in
my personal sphere that I mean, we're excited to go
eat food and stuff, but generally prettyted out about the
whole thing. Yeah, I feel like there's a long to
do list that's associated with the holidays. But I'm going

(32:48):
to check in with my husband on this. I he
has a very happy, good like the attitude about the holidays,
and now I'm wondering what his secret is. Well, definitely
let us know. One thing that I saw Harrison pop
up over and over and over again is that burnout
is like the frog and the boiling water. A lot
of people don't realize that they have it until they

(33:09):
reach this crisis point, and then what do you do?
What do you do if prevention didn't work and you
are burnt out? We will get into that after one
more quick break for word from our sponsor and we're back,

(33:31):
Thank you sponsor. So say we didn't take all of
these prevention steps, or we did, but nothing else changed
and we are experiencing burnout. What do we do? Allison?
I think first figure out where it's coming from. If
it's workload, which it is for a lot of people,
then you've got to step back and figure out where

(33:53):
to cut. And depending on your job, that might be
a conversation that you have to have with your boss.
People often feel like there's nothing that they could realistically cut.
It just all has to get done, and so there
must be no point in having that conversation with their boss.
But if you are good at your job, your and
your boss is even halfway decent, your boss doesn't want

(34:14):
to lose you, and so if she hears that you're
burning out and that she is potentially at risk of
losing you entirely, a smart boss is going to find
ways to help you manage your workload so that she
can keep you rather than lose you all together. Now,
you might have a bad manager who is no help
in this regard. Lets with people do, but it's still
worth initiating that conversation so that you know for sure,

(34:37):
because managers sometimes surprise people. I've had the experience myself
of thinking there's nothing here that can possibly be cut
out there are no options. But then my boss heard
the situation, took it seriously and helped me move things around.
You don't know until you try. And actually been on
the other side of that too, where I've sort of
had to drag out of an employee what was going on.

(35:00):
They weren't bringing it up because they figured there were
no options, what was the point and even talking about
it maybe they would just look like a complainer. But
once I pulled it out of them, we were able
to move things around. So you don't know until you try.
But if you do try and it goes nowhere, your
boss is no help. You're still stuck with all the
same work that is good information that is not. Don't
feel like that's a failure. That is still a very

(35:22):
useful conversation to have had, because if your boss tells
you nope, nothing can change. You have to keep this
unrealistic workload. Now you know that that is not where
the solution lies, You're going to need to take steps
of your own to change it, which usually is going
to mean deciding if you want to look at other
job options. But don't jump straight there until you have
the conversation first. And the other thing it sounds so obvious,

(35:44):
but take a vacation, a real one, not a few days.
When you're really stressed out. It takes more than a
few days to unwind. I think it can take a
few days just to stop thinking about work. I think
you need a minimum of a week, two weeks or better,
and it should be a time where you completely unplug.
No checking emails, no taking work calls. You've got to

(36:05):
not think about work for a good solid amount of
time so that you can start getting back to your
baseline of feeling normal. And sometimes if you do that,
that can make a real difference. Sometimes that break will
be the thing that makes you realize, oh, okay, the
situation is actually untenable. I need to take steps to
change it, and it gives you the resolve to do it,

(36:26):
or maybe you realize, oh, I need to get out.
But it's nearly always going to give you some kind
of clarity about where to go next, and it's very
hard to get that kind of clarity when you're in
the middle of the stress. I know some people sometimes think, yeah,
I mean I'd love to take a vacasion. That sounds great,
But part of the problem here is that I literally
cannot make the time to do it, you just have
to find a way, and that I think the way

(36:48):
to look at this is if you got really sick tomorrow,
you would somehow find the time to be out. It
would be an inconvenience, but you would find a way
to do it. It's doable when it absolutely has to be.
And I think you have to see this situation as
one that is a situation where that needs to happen,
just as if you had like a really bad flu,
Because if you don't treat it that way, you are

(37:10):
eventually going to get so burned out that you won't
be able to stay in that job at all. And
if you think they can't spare you for a week
or two, what is going to happen when you wake
up one day and can't face ever going back. So
getting yourself a week or two now helps ensure that
that doesn't happen. So time off take it absolutely. I
know that vacation can feel frivolous, and I'm definitely someone

(37:35):
I love traveling. It's strange, I love traveling, but um,
I don't really take vacation. But recently I one a
trip to Disney World and part of this package was
I won, but I had to go and sit through
a time share meeting. They were trying to sell me

(37:59):
a time share, and one thing I really took from
that is they had a thirty minute presentation on the
importance of vacation, and of course they were motivated and
trying to get you to go in on this time share,
but I did kind of walk away thinking, huh, yeah,

(38:19):
I haven't really put vacation in terms of like overall
health and productivity. So I, you know, I learned something
from that time share meeting. Did you buy the time share? No?
But they were very deterring, and I texted my friends

(38:40):
and I was like, oh, I bought it into the
time share because I was kidding, and they all believed
it in panicks. I didn't know they were panicking. And
I came back and like, you know, why did you
do it? That's great. I do think there is a
mental shift that people have to do that we there
are certain things that we feel are optional, vacation time

(39:04):
for ourselves, some of our sleep time. It feels like
those are the things that can be cut, and so
we cut them. But I think there's like this long term,
longer term perspective that we need to have, which is
that in the long term those things should not be cutable.
And going off of that, Ariana Huffington's of Huffington Post

(39:24):
she founded this thing called Thrive Global and as a
part of that, she's been digging into ways to end
this culture of stress and burnout. And part of that culture,
particularly here in the US, has for a long time
been lauded. I think it was good to be a
workaholic if you weren't stressed out by work, you weren't
working hard enough, or you didn't care about your job enough.

(39:45):
And so we need to change that mindset and start
prioritizing health and well being. That's one important step of that. UM.
And it's good for the bottom line too. Yeah, I
think there is a thing where, on some level sometimes

(40:05):
people feel like, well, they're busy because they're important, and
so it gets all tied up with I don't know,
questions of merit and virtue and and that's so unhealthy.
And there that is a cultural shift that we need
to make, and I don't think we're we're at all
close to really making it in a real way. No,

(40:25):
I don't think so either. UM and another thing that
we really need to work on that you mentioned earlier
is communication, because I can say personally, I feel, or
I have felt in the past, that someone will give
me a job to do and then they don't give
me a deadline, and they don't ask how long it'll take.

(40:48):
They just give me a deadline, and they clearly have
no idea what goes into what they're asking me. UM.
So I think having a realistic expectation and to get
that you have communication. UM check in with people that
you're working with, see how they feel about their workload.

(41:09):
And even earlier I read in a lot of places
during the interview process, be clear about expectations and the
job description so people know what they're getting into. Yes, absolutely,
And I love your point about the deadlines that people
give with no real communication or or understanding of what
might go into it, because so often you can push back,
but people don't realize that they get a project with

(41:32):
the deadline and they think, well, I guess I just
have to find a way to make this work, even
if it's going to be a great hardship. But so often,
like one or two sentences can change everything. You can say, oh,
it would be really hard to get that to you
by the end of the week with two weeks from network,
and so often you'll hear, yeah, that's fine. So if

(41:52):
something feels like it's going to be really onerous, or
it's going to keep you at work late, or it's
going to interfere with you just being able to have
a reasonable week, you can just ask to change it
and not The answer won't be yes every time, but
it will be yes a lot of the time. Yeah.
And I think a little bit at what what might

(42:13):
prevent you from asking that is you want to look
like you're really good at your job and you don't
want any questions of your productivity uh to come back
after this exchange. But I do think that sometimes the
person on the other end just doesn't realize. And if
you are clear about you know, I think it would
be better if it has more time, I could put

(42:35):
in more work into it. Then I believe that most
people would be reasonable with that and would want that. Yeah.
And if you put yourself in their shoes, you know,
if you imagine sending a product off to someone and
you're thinking it would be nice to have it by Friday,
I'll tell them Friday. If that person then comes back
and pushes back and says, actually, what about the following Wednesday.

(42:56):
It's very unlikely that you're going to think, oh, what
a slacker, you know, I mean, unless you have some
experience with them already that has told you that they
are in due to slack. But assuming that's not the case,
normally you're not going to think anything unflattering about them.
You're you're gonna be very matter of fact about it
and just think, yeah, that's fine or or it's not,
and you'll tell them that it's not. But usually you're

(43:18):
not going to be drawing pejorative conclusions about someone because
of that. And despite that, despite knowing that that is
how we would react if we were in their shoes,
so often we still don't feel comfortable pushing back. And
we should. We should. And AEN survey found that of

(43:41):
companies in this sample provided burnout prevention programs, so companies
are starting to look into ways to prevent this, and
s offered reintegration programs, which I'm really interested in. Do
you know anything about those? No? I don't, And I'm
so curious because my initial reaction is, I bet that's

(44:01):
something that's put on b HR and it feels like
lip service to everyone else because I think to to
do it really well, you would have to make sure
that your culture and your managers were really bought in,
because I mean, you could have the greatest anti burnout
prevention education program in the world, but if you still
have managers overloading people with work and not being proactive

(44:22):
about helping people and sure they have a manageable workload,
it won't mean anything. Right. It is interesting to me
that it feels like burnout has become sort of a buzzword.
I think last year, a couple of years ago, I
was trying really hard to pitch the show where the
company would send me to Antarctica, and I had this

(44:45):
whole power point presentation and it was going to be
through this scientific research company, uh, And they provided me
with some slides that they were like, your boss will
love this. There's no way they'll be able to turn
it down. And one of them it was just said
burnout in big letters, and it said it had all

(45:06):
these statistics about it. And then you know, giving giving
me this opportunity would help me prevent burnout, and I
just thought, how interesting. So wait, what happened with the
Antarctica show. I I feel like it was a success,
and I even I had a partnership and we were
planning it, and then they wanted me to do this

(45:28):
whole food show. I haven't given up on it. I
could be an. I am determined. This is like I've
been trying to make this happen for years. So no,
I would go for the food show. I don't even
know what that entails, but that always already sounds good. Yeah.
When they were like, well, you probably get to travel

(45:49):
and eat and drink a lot of things, I was.
I was in Okay an article. I'll come back for you. Yes,
it'll still be there, hopefully. One other part of this
conversation as we close here comes up in every episode. UM,
but dismantling the structures of sexism and racism that put

(46:11):
added stress on women and people of color and LGBTQ
folks other marginalized folks that lead them to burnout at
higher rates. That's a huge thing. But it does impact
so much of what we talk about, and burnout is
not immune. Yeah. Absolutely, I think it goes back to
what we were talking about earlier. UM, we talked about

(46:34):
it specifically for women that conscientious women tend to a
take more emotional labor and responsibility on and be face
more pressure to just like get the one sweet spot
that's going to be acceptable for them at work. And
I think people of color, and particularly women of color,
face something very similar, if if not more difficult to

(46:56):
deal with, where only a very narrow range of emotions
acceptable to display at work, for instance, And that's exhausting
to function like that all the time. It is so exhausting.
And this pretty much brings us to the end of
this episode, but I would really love for listeners to
write in if they've experienced this, and Allison, please report

(47:18):
back if you find out that your husband doesn't stressed,
are burnt out about the holidays, and quis him. Thank
you so much for joining us. Where can people find you?
I am online at ask a Manager dot org and
my podcast is ask a Manager, and my book is
Ask a Manager How to navigate clueless colleagues, lunch stealing bosses,

(47:42):
and the rest of your life at work lunch stealing bosses,
that's the same, they're out there. I had to tell
that person to buy a locking lunch box and that
solved it. Actually, really, what if it had escalated and

(48:02):
the boss had taken the lunch box. Yeah, I know,
or brought in some kind of like I don't know
what that equipment is that they break locks with. Yes,
I know. This boss was determined. And actually my letter
writer had all of these dietary restrictions, so it wasn't
like she could just go out and buy herself lunch.
After her lunch was stolen, she had to eat what
she brought in and he was stealing it, so the

(48:22):
lock was the way to go. People are so rude,
I do are bizarre that it's pretty strange. I do
love the politics around the office kitchen, in our in
our office, It's led to some hilarity. Some conversations I've
overheard that have given me a chuckle. Oh it's yeah.
There's I mean, there's lunch staffs. There's the fact that

(48:43):
no one will clean the crumbs off the counter. There's
the disgusting things that people cook in the office microwave.
It's an endless source of drama. Oh. I had such
a conundrum last year because I brought in a dish
that had fish in it and I was like torn
all day and I didn't I just ate it. Yes,
I get a lot of complaints about fish microwavers. I

(49:04):
knew I would never people would never look at me
the same again, It's true. Anyway. You can find Allison
online and you can find us online as well. We
would love to hear from you. You can email us
at mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com. You
can find us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast and
on Instagram at Stuff Moon Never told you. Thanks as

(49:27):
always to our producer Andrew Howard, and thanks to you
for listening.