Burnout: A Practical Guide for Normal People

0:07Forrest Hanson: Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm here as usual with clinical psychologist Rick Hanson. So dad, how are you doing today? I'm good and thoroughly psyched about our topic. Same. Yeah, I've been really looking forward to this one. Today, we're going to be talking about burnout. And I've been thinking about this episode for a while, in part because it's personally relevant to me. I think it's probably relevant to you as well, Dad. I've definitely experienced burnout, but I've really struggled with how to talk about it, particularly on the podcast, because frankly, I think that most of the advice that's given about burnout is somewhere between not very good and worse than not very good.

0:47Forrest Hanson: Most of it focuses pretty narrowly on the person experiencing burnout. And it's also pretty generic. You're exhausted from work, so take some time off or change your relationship with work. take a vacation, do a little self-care. That all sounds great, but the reality is that the vast majority of normal people are just not able to do that. You can't take time off from a job you need to make rent. You can't take time off from rearing your kid or caring for an aging relative. And so there are these structural forces that we're dealing with that both create the conditions for burnout and make it very difficult for people to actually do anything about it practically.

1:21Forrest Hanson: And this means that most burnout advice comes across as, at least in my experience, wildly out of touch. So our focus during this conversation is going to be on both, for starters, giving you great advice about real things that you can do, even if your control over your work life is pretty limited. And then second, being real about those limitations and being frank about some of the broader issues that all of this is tied to. So does that sound good to you, Dad?

1:49Dr. Rick Hanson: Oh, it sounds great. And I really appreciate the fact that you're approaching this as both and. In other words, we are really affected by the circumstances of our life. People get burned out, not because they wake up on a Saturday morning and say, gee, I want to get burned out today. No, they get burned out as the result of the accumulating impact of situations that they're in with a particular focus on their work settings. So I'm really glad that you're including a piece of the puzzle that is often left out in mental health or self-help circles, the environment.

2:26Forrest Hanson: Yeah, for sure. So when I was digging into this, you asked me a really good question, which is, why isn't this just I'm stressed? You know, why isn't burnout just, oh, people experience stress. This is just another category of a way of talking about stress, which then gives us some advice on like how to deal with stress. So back in the 1970s, there was this psychologist named Christina Maslach, and she started studying people in really emotionally draining jobs. I think that most of the work on burnout, if I'm remembering correctly, comes from health care workers. Even today, that's the most studied population having to do with this stuff.

3:04Forrest Hanson: And she and another researcher, this woman named Susan Jackson, created a scale to measure burnout. And their definition was that burnout is a psychological syndrome that emerges as a response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. So it is a form of stress, totally right, but it's categorizing it, right, on the job. And then it has these three key dimensions that are associated with it. overwhelming exhaustion, cynicism and detachment from the work, and then a sense of ineffectiveness. So the sense that nothing you do really makes much of a difference. And if you think about most people's relationship with the kind of average job that somebody is doing, certainly in the United States, but I would imagine in many other parts of the world as well these days, man, it's got a lot of those features.

3:51Forrest Hanson: So it's not really a surprise that this is a very common an issue for people. People are pretty exhausted. They're pretty cynical. And they feel like they're just kind of pushing papers around or that they're staying on the hamster wheel. And they go to work to buy the groceries, which is great. You got to buy the groceries. But there's a sense for a lot of people, particularly younger people, that they're not really saving towards a long-term goal or going to be able to support their kids and going to college or whatever those kind of bigger picture things. So it's really easy under those conditions to start to feel kind of listless and detached and, you know, like you're burnt out.

4:26Dr. Rick Hanson: It's interesting. You know, I was just looking at one of these YouTube videos about why Norway's great. And well, Norway, by law, the work week is 36 and a half hours with, by law, five weeks of paid vacation every year. And by law, things like 11 months of paid parental leave. We don't have systems like that in America. You don't have to be a rabid socialist to recognize the fact that every country in the world that's an industrial democracy is kind of over here toward the pro-social, social safety net kind of dimension,

5:02Forrest Hanson: and the US is all by itself at the other end of things.

5:05Dr. Rick Hanson: That affects people, and yet are we going to change that in our country? It's not changing anytime soon. So I'm really glad about the ways in which you're willing to toggle back and forth between a recognition of how the world is, you know, leaning on us to, okay, what can you do about it? And we're going to be exploring that here. And I'm really psyched about that.

5:27Forrest Hanson: I think that just adding on to what you're saying here, dad, it was really validating to me that the World Health Organization put burnout into its international classification of diseases. And it framed it as a workplace phenomenon, not a mental health diagnosis. So the official framing of burnout positions it as a structural issue in the way that we're talking about, not an individual one. And the reason that I really want to emphasize this is it's so easy for people to take these kinds of experiences that they have or take the feeling of stress and fatigue and feeling not engaged with their work or other people or whatever's going on for them and go, oh, there's something wrong with me.

6:11Forrest Hanson: You know, it's really easy for us to internalize that. But burnout is the result of living in a world that burns a lot of people out, right? You're burnt out because the world is burnout-ing, and not because there is something that's really wrong with you.

6:23Dr. Rick Hanson: I think that a lot of that gets left out on a podcast like this.

6:26Forrest Hanson: Because if you think pragmatically, I can give advice to the person listening, but I can't talk to their boss right now. You know, I can't talk to the CEO of fill-in-the-blank company. I can just talk to the person. And so this then naturally pushes everybody towards these individual interventions, which sure might be helpful, but that then creates just like this vast silence about the core of the problem, which is how we set up work.

6:52Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. Much of your personal fatigue, weariness, depression, burnout, et cetera, is due to forces that originate outside your front door, that that recognition of the upstream sources of your downstream challenges actually can foster greater self-compassion. You can be more on your own side when you have a more objective and not self-blaming understanding of things. So let's just go through six major factors that are well-known, tons of research on factors of stress. One, total workload. Too much to do in the time allotted. If you're supposed to carry five quarts of water in a one-gallon bucket, and the only way you can do that is by always keeping one quart in the air as you walk across the bridge, that's going to be very stressful.

7:42Dr. Rick Hanson: Second major well-known factor of stress, even based in studies on non-human animals, poor little mice and so forth, control. Not having control over what comes at you. All the incoming emails, all the tasks, all the interruptions coming at you, lack of control. Third, minimal reward, not enough pay and not enough social reward. A lot of research shows that very often people, you know, their main issue at work is the lack of recognition and appropriate recognition, not just the lack of pay, but that they don't feel appropriately recognized and valued. Fourth, community, workplace settings with little connection or a sense of shared identity.

8:21Dr. Rick Hanson: You're not that close to your coworkers. There's not a sense of a we coming together to do something. I mean, who cares if your company hits its quarterly profit goals, whatever. Fifth, fairness. Sense that you are on the receiving end of injustice, that there's something unfair. Other people are getting advantaged. There's a glass ceiling for you, perhaps. There's something arbitrary, maybe, in the way your boss is dealing with you. It's unfair. And last, values. It's a known stressor to be drawn into situations in which there's a sense of moral injury. I mean, I'm doing things or I'm forced to support organizations whose actual impacts in the world is harmful, but I've got to do that to keep this job.

9:07Dr. Rick Hanson: And even worse, I've got to put on a phony face and act like, you know, I agree with everything. So you just kind of think of those factors. They're real factors. Too much to do, little control, not rewarding, little sense of us, unfair. and goes against my core values. That's a prescription for the accumulation of what's also called allostatic load, stress load, which to make a key point, really affects your body, not just your mind. If you get increasingly burned out, yeah, you go away for a week on vacation, maybe, or a weekend by the lake. And yeah, it's nice, but you come back, you're still fried.

9:48Dr. Rick Hanson: That's because your physiology has been shifted in lasting ways.

9:53Forrest Hanson: That was great, Dad. And those six dimensions that you mentioned are also a big part of how people approach burnout in the more research literature or something like that. And it also speaks to a problem that people have when they engage with burnout-related content, where most of it focuses on that workload one, right? It focuses on, oh, okay, take time off of work, or can you talk to your supervisor about reducing your workload, all of that. if you have a reward problem or a fairness problem or a community problem and you try to address it through a workload vector, it might help it a little bit because, hey, doing a little less work could be helpful for that person.

10:27Forrest Hanson: But it's not going to be like the vitamin C that you like to talk about, Dad, in terms of finding particular things that tend to help our particular vulnerabilities. So just opening it up and broadening the lens in this way can help people think about this a little bit differently.

10:41Dr. Rick Hanson: It's really good.

10:41Forrest Hanson: One other thing I wanted to mention here before we get into the like what to do about all of this. All of this is really heightened if you are part of what I will call a burnout prone group of people. So we've all got a finite budget of energy on any given day. Even me, who's like a pretty extroverted, pretty energetic, pretty neurotypical guy, has got a finite budget of energy. And there's this thing that I bumped into a while ago that I think Elizabeth introduced me to called spoon theory. And this, I think, comes from like the chronic illness community, if I'm remembering correctly. Basically, we've got this budget of spoons and we spend spoons on different kinds of activities.

11:17Forrest Hanson: But if you are somebody who has, say, a chronic illness or has ADHD or autism spectrum, you're part of a marginalized population, whatever's going on for you, you are paying more spoons in just the flow of a normal day doing normal things than I am. And so it's natural for you to have less left in the backpack, even when you get to the starting line of going to work that day than somebody like me would. So all of these kinds of structural and environmental factors are going to weigh on that person more than they would on me. And that, A, it's helpful to acknowledge the fundamental unfairness of that, and B, could help somebody give themselves a little bit more grace about those kinds of experiences.

12:00Forrest Hanson: So I do want to, again, just mention that before we get into a little bit more what to do.

12:04Dr. Rick Hanson: I think also there's temperament. Like for example, if supposedly you're an introverted person, but the nature of your work puts you into a lot of contact with other people. I know introverts who are like this and they come home and they're just fried. They can't talk to anybody. They don't want to talk to anybody. They need to spend a few hours just recovering. On the one hand, flip the other way. What if you're an extrovert and you're forced to be all alone most of the day, just doing some kind of work of some kind. That's going to affect you in different ways. And then there certainly are people who come into certain situations with sensitizations around different settings from their own personal history.

12:50Dr. Rick Hanson: Maybe you grew up in a really authoritarian environment. You got bossed around a lot. People mistreated you who had greater power over you. Now, maybe you're in a setting where your boss is not a jerk, but they're kind of ex-military or something. They're used to just do this, do that, and they expect people just to jump to their orders. Yeah.

13:13Forrest Hanson: Problems with culture fit in general.

13:15Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, for sure. And maybe you've got a bunch of colleagues who are maybe also from that kind of background. They're fine with it, but boy, does it trigger you. So it's really okay to be quite personal about this and to frame this as really about fit and to appreciate that this is objective. These are objective forces that burn you out and that people are studying. And burnout is on the rise, certainly in the American economy, you know, over the last 10 or 20 years.

13:44Forrest Hanson: So from here on, we're going to try to focus a little bit more on what people can do in a context where they have some latitude here. So you've got some degree of influence or freedom or control. Not perfect, not zero, somewhere in that middle place, right? And the first thing that I wanted to talk with you about, Dad, was improving the quality of recovery. Because for me, this was a big one. So maybe that's why I'm inclined to kind of focus on it. Recovery isn't just about the quantity of time off that a person has. It's about the quality of that time off. And I can think for myself of so many times when I've got done working and I have enormous control over my work relative to the overwhelming majority of people.

14:31Forrest Hanson: So if this is a problem for me, it's probably a problem for a lot of people, right? I should be able to do something about this in a way that many people can't. But I would get done with work at 5.30, 6.30, whenever I got done that day. but I wouldn't stop thinking about work. Work would just be in the back of my mind for the rest of the evening. I would check my email at eight o 'clock. I would think about what I needed to do the next day. And I just wasn't recovering because I was still mentally burdened by work. Essentially, I was carrying it around even as I got off the clock. And this is based in part on research that's done by Sabine Sonentang.

15:10Forrest Hanson: I hope I'm saying that correctly. And she identified these four different dimensions of recovery. And one of them she called psychological detachment from work, which is what I'm talking about here. So how off the job are you when you're off the job?

15:24Dr. Rick Hanson: Have you ever had to deal with that, Dad? Was this something that as a self-employed person you wrestled with? Well, the joke about being self-employed is that you only work half time. And you even get to decide which 12 hours a day it is. Sure, yeah.

15:37Forrest Hanson: You're kind of constantly engaged. So it definitely is invasive, and you have to be really careful about that.

15:43Dr. Rick Hanson: I love this material about how to do recovery well, how to first create that separation. And one reason why people think in the research literature that burnout is on the rise is that because of our smart devices and expectations that you're always reachable, the line between home and work, on the clock, off the clock, starts getting really blurry. And I've known a number of people who are in managerial level jobs or professional level jobs where this expectation is that they're reachable 24 hours a day. Certainly reachable between other than the six hours a day they're allowed to sleep. And they're supposed to respond.

16:26Dr. Rick Hanson: And if they don't respond, it will become increasingly known in their team that they're kind of a slacker. and they're not part of that warrior ethic that everybody else is operating on the basis of. So that creates another kind of pressure to conform to all kinds of standards and expose yourself to all kinds of stressors that will inevitably gradually burn you out too. I don't know. Do you want to say more about how to promote psychological detachment before we get into some of the other factors of good recovery? Oh, sure. The other factors.

16:59Forrest Hanson: Yeah. So there's common sense advice that people will give here. One of the things is building some kind of a hard transition between work and not work. You go for a walk, you take a shower, you change clothes. Even if you work from home, you go to a separate area of the house. You don't play where you work, that kind of stuff. I think being very conscious about work creep in general, if you're the kind of person or you're doing a job where you can kind of be working whenever, which is increasingly common these days with various forms of work from home being fairly common for people, then to the extent you can, and this is all about, like you were saying, Dad, the culture of your team and what's available for you.

17:35Forrest Hanson: Checking email after fill-in-the-blank time, 7 p.m., 8 p.m., seeing if you can communicate around any of this to your boss or your team or do what you can to try to influence the culture of the group that you work with around always-on culture. The big one for a lot of people is some kind of mindfulness practice, and you're much more expert with that than I am, Dad. So I would sort of toss the ball to you there with that one. But I think that there are a lot of meditative practices that are based essentially on trying to drain the swamp of all of that.

18:05Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. So let's say you've left your job and you believe that you really need to stop thinking about it.

18:16Forrest Hanson: But wow, is that a hard habit to break? And also that's a tough thought. Sometimes don't think of an elephant, right? I tell you not to think of an elephant. What do you think of? You

18:27Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, that's part of it. And a lot of it boils down to dopamine. The mind thinks that it will experience reward if it imagines something. And we get very caught up in the difference between becoming and being. So even I, with a lot of training, I can watch the degree to which my mind will start fiddling around some kind of goal-directed activity or some kind of problem solving or some kind of threat I need to respond to related to my different work activities. And it's really hard to stop that. It takes practice. And part of that practice is to train in regulating your attention. Mindfulness training is the preeminent way to train the muscle of attention so you get more control over what is actually the front end of who you are becoming.

19:17Dr. Rick Hanson: Because attention is like a spotlight and vacuum cleaner illuminating what it rests upon and then bringing it into you, gradually hardwiring what you pay attention to into your own being. Beyond that, I'll just say that part of what I find helpful as a fundamental attitude in dealing with burnout, I'm going to use some kind of abstract terms a little bit here, is basically, what is your property? And what I mean by that is that what you're reflecting on when they no longer have your body is your property. It's yours. You own it. And there can be really an attitude that says, bad enough that for all kinds of reasons, I've got to work in this place.

20:02Dr. Rick Hanson: All right. I'm not poisoning children. It's not evil, but still bad enough. I got to do that. But allowing that to to invade my innermost being, invade, and to occupy it like an invading army. I don't want to let that happen to my very mind, right? And so I think a certain feeling of moxie about that, a certain rebelliousness, even anger. I'd rather have people be angry than depressed in terms of coping with things in life. I just want to kind of flag that. What do you think about that aspect.

20:40Forrest Hanson: I think it's a good aspect. I also think that my tendency is to appreciate things like that and also to appreciate the limits of influence around that kind of thing, which is, I think, part why I tend toward, okay, what's the practice? What is the person doing? If that makes sense, as opposed to the meta thought pattern related to it. So I go back and forth about it. But I do think that to the extent to which we can, thinking of our fill-in-the-blank, our energy, our personhood, our deep nature as something that is truly yours, and therefore something that you have an influence over, is such an important dimension in all of this.

21:23Forrest Hanson: Because it gets right to self-efficacy, the belief that I'm the kind of person who can solve my problems. If we just feel out of effect all the time, yeah, it's going to be really easy to feel burnt out or overwhelmed because you sort of feel like there's nothing that you can do. And, you know, that's a tricky one for this conversation because we're talking so much about like the push-pull of how much can you do about this. But hey, I like to believe there's still some stuff that we can do. So I like that you're putting this on the table here, Dad. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

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24:40Forrest Hanson: So, you know, doing various practices that help a person truly relax their body. Another big one here, again, is mindfulness and meditation and related practices. So is there anything there that you would particularly mention that you think is relaxing or helpful for people? Well, there are levels to those. I was going to say, particularly if you don't have an extensive meditation background, yeah.

25:01Dr. Rick Hanson: Mindfulness essentially is present moment awareness. So simply being aware of your preoccupation with work. So we're talking about how to do recovery well, right? And we're starting with differentiation between home and work, where now we're talking about relaxation. So you're starting to literally reduce allostatic load and stress chemistry by moving into what Herbert Benson and others back in the day have talked about as the relaxation response. So how do you actually do that? Well, step one is self-awareness, which is essentially mindfulness. Self-awareness in the present, this is what's going on with me.

25:41Dr. Rick Hanson: It actually reduces the impact of what's going on with you to be able to name it to yourself, right? Burned out, name it to yourself, fried, exhausted. I want them to take this job and shove it. Feeling desperate, trapped.

25:58Forrest Hanson: Frustrated. Yeah, just name it.

26:00Dr. Rick Hanson: Or numb, or spacey, or I just want to cry. I need a cuddle. Just whatever is going on in your fundamental property, if you will, of who you are, naming it for yourself. That's really helpful. also helps to get a sense of distance from it. Maybe like you're witnessing what you're experiencing, tension in your body, weariness, irritation. You're looking at it from, let's say, a bird's eye view. Or a kind of a trick is to imagine that you're witnessing it through the wrong end of a telescope. So it's sort of like maybe happening way over there on the other side of the valley on some giant billboard that's very far away, what's going on.

26:44Dr. Rick Hanson: and there's a sense of distancing from it. That's really helpful.

26:47Forrest Hanson: There are certain things you can

26:48Dr. Rick Hanson: do with relaxation. Maybe you can talk about some of these relaxation techniques. I'll just leave with one more element that does come out of, it emerges from a lot of mindfulness practice, which is to disidentify from what's happening. You know, literally with thoughts like, I am not my job, or I am more than my job. I am more than this project. I am more than this deadline. Or even further, I have this stress, but I am not this stress. I have this anxiety, but I am not this anxiety. So the sense of identity gets bigger and broader and more spacious. And that goes to finish to this, for me, top five neurological hack I know, which is to go wide.

27:38Dr. Rick Hanson: any time we go wide. In other words, get a sense of our body as a whole, or lift our gaze to the horizon, or imagine the big picture, get a sense of the totality of situations. As soon as we do that, good things happen in the brain that reduce rumination and bring you into the present, and reduce the sense of taking things so personally. Just that alone. And in mindfulness, there's often a sense of spaciousness of awareness, vastness of awareness, in which these particular experiences are occurring, kind of as small clouds in a vast, vast sky.

28:18Forrest Hanson: I love that. And thanks for doing that with people, Dad. I think that that's helpful just as an introduction to relaxation-based mindfulness practices or things like that. One thing that I want to mention here, this is a painful personal experience one for me, is to be very skeptical of not relaxing relaxation activities. So this could take a lot of different forms for people. My version of this is that I would get done with work and then I would roll up to my computer and I would play some mentally demanding video game that's probably competitive in nature where I'm like battling it out with some other person, you know, in some pretty focused way.

28:55Forrest Hanson: And yeah, that scratches a certain kind of itch for me or it was rewarding in other ways. But I would not really describe it as being relaxing in nature. I think that that's fair to say. And if you think about how do most people spend their relaxation time these days? Well, often it's with their phone. Often it's engaging with social media. There's a lot of stuff on social media that people do not find tremendously relaxing. There's a lot of stuff on TikTok that people do not find tremendously relaxing. There's a lot of evidence that when people engage with social media, it actually activates a kind of stress response in them or it increases anxiety the next day.

29:28Forrest Hanson: This could also get to different kinds of consumption practices that people have. You know, you come home from work and you fill in the blank. You smoke a cigarette, you smoke a bowl, you drink a couple beers. Like, you understand why a person does that, and I'm not trying to, like, fire shots on anybody who does that. But in general, these different kinds of things that people think of as being, oh, this is how I relax, well, a lot of these things are going to put an additional stress load on your body, actually. There's a lot of evidence that if you drink the night before, the next day people are more anxious, more irritable, more strung out, they get worse sleep.

30:01Forrest Hanson: So all of these different practices that we have that we think of as being relaxing might not actually be that relaxing for us. And I've had to do a real inventory for myself of like, what actually relaxes me? Turns out for me, it's like reading fantasy books. It's like sitting on the couch with my Kindle and just jam it out or with the paperback and just having a great time. So what's that for you? I would ask a person. Is it like walking in nature? Is it going for a walk with your dog? Is it taking a bath? I don't know. You tell me. People are going to really vary with this stuff.

30:30Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. For a while, I would crank on political Twitter. And that was definitely not relaxing. Oh, yeah. Nice relaxation practice there, Dad, for sure. That's good.

30:39Forrest Hanson: Not relaxing, no.

30:40Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, I think it's also important around relaxation is to really engage the body. And I guess there's a kind of maybe a small drum I'm going to keep banging on throughout this conversation, which is it's the body. It's the body that gets burned out and then shapes the mind, which follows after the body. And so if we're getting stressed and tense and the emotions that we're feeling at work have a sensory somatic component, which emotions do, all emotions have a somatic sensory component, and the residues of those sensory processes of contraction and sensation get lodged in implicit memory. That's what we carry with us.

31:28Dr. Rick Hanson: In terms of relaxation, really important to engage physiology, including in practices like what's called the physiological sigh, in which you would take a long inhalation through the nose. And then right at the top of that inhalation, you kind of pump it a step further with a kind of a short, topping off the tank's breath through your nose to expand your lungs. And then slowly breathe out through the mouth. I think there's a bonus if you make the exhalation longer, even twice as long as the inhalation, because as you exhale, you're engaging the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, which naturally slows your heart rate at the time, encounters chronic sympathetic activation, fight, flight, freeze, appease, which is the hallmark of stress and the accumulation of allostatic load leading to burnout.

32:21Dr. Rick Hanson: right you could do this practice for five minutes in a row realistically you might do just three of these breaths even just one breath and you'll notice a big reset and there's some really cool physiology about how the pump at the top works totally i thought that this was such cool stuff

32:38Forrest Hanson: when i when i bumped into this yeah it's a cool practice i did it for like 30 45 seconds in a row and went, this is surprisingly demanding. Actually, if you like really do it where you are fully breathing in through the nose, like all the way that you feel like your lungs can do. And then that little pump at the top is actually like kind of intense. And the idea behind it is that under chronic stress, you have these air sacs in your lungs and they can actually kind of like collapse or stop working. I don't know the exact reason why, but apparently this is a thing that happens. And then when they're collapsed, that the gas exchange of like carbon dioxide to oxygen gets less effective for people.

33:15Forrest Hanson: So carbon dioxide builds up in your blood. And that buildup is part of what people experience as like feeling a sense of tension in the body or like feeling kind of air hungry in different sorts of ways. And then that little extra inhale you're doing at the top is basically forcing your lungs to work extra, work more than they're used to, which then recruits those air sacs that have deflated, then improving your lung function. So super really cool physiology stuff, right? I think if you did it for five minutes, I'm sure you'd get a real experience out of it. That might be a little bit hard to me.

33:46Forrest Hanson: I might have to build up to that.

33:48Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, you might be doing some holotropic breath work at that point, who's to say.

33:52Forrest Hanson: But I'm sure that people would get some value out of it. So, okay, I do want to go on to these two other dimensions of relaxation. Maybe a little quickly here, just because we've got a lot to get to, and only so much time to get to it. The first one is mastery. Feeling like you're good at stuff. And thinking about this as a dimension of recovery was really interesting to me, right? But it maps right on top of that kind of low efficacy dimension of stress that you were talking about, Dad, right? And this could also help with issues related to cynicism. You know, you're putting yourself in contact with something that feels more meaningful.

34:26Forrest Hanson: Mastery is not about becoming the best at something. I want to be really clear about that. It's engaging with something that you care about in a way where you feel like you can improve. You know, you're picking up a hobby. you're being a beginner. For me, dancing, I think, is my big vertical for this. I'm engaged with it pretty seriously, but end of the day, it's something I do for fun. So yeah, it matters to me if I do well or do poorly in a contest, but I'm not sweating bullets about it when I get home, right? It's not adding to my stress load. It's something I do for fun. Then control. Having a say over how you spend that non-work time that you've got.

34:59Forrest Hanson: This, of course, can be really difficult for busy people, but to the extent that you can, protecting some amount of discretionary time, I think it'd be really helpful. Is there anything you want to throw in here about either of those, Dad?

35:11Dr. Rick Hanson: One of the things that I think is really fundamental to recovery is a boundary. In all these four areas, right, of differentiation from what you're doing, relaxation, you know, mastery and control, you're basically saying, I am not my job.

35:31Forrest Hanson: not me.

35:32Dr. Rick Hanson: And I think that people get very caught up in identifying with their job. And we haven't really talked about this yet. I think we're going to get into it. They take it really personally. They feel like they're personally invested. So if things don't go well at the job, that somehow deeply reflects on them. And I think there's a lot about the job that tries to make people identify with it because that's a great way to control them and to make them work really, really hard. And that's why I think going back to what I said about property, the precious property of your own innermost being, the fundamental property of your own life, you own your life.

36:10Dr. Rick Hanson: You're loaning it temporarily for a finite number of hours a day to your employers, right? Or to your own business, let's say. And then you're taking it back, but it's only on loan. They don't own your life. They don't own your consciousness. You own it. and that internal stand I think is really helpful and you get to make that call yourself. They can't stop you from quietly declaring in your own mind and putting a stake in the ground in your own mind. That is not me. This is me and I own me.

36:47Forrest Hanson: Totally and I think just picking up from where you've left off here that really gets to this idea of protecting our own I don't know agency, self-worth, self-efficacy, all of these different things that we talk about on the podcast all the time. Because this is the part that I think, again, a lot of burnout content doesn't talk about, which is that we're not built for this stuff. The world is very artificial. It is not really what our brains are kind of designed to do. And there's even research on things like Like how many hours of dedicated focus can a person give a day and feel like their brain works at the end of that day?

37:25Forrest Hanson: And most of the research suggests it's about four to six hours a day of like real dedicated task focus, typically broken up into blocks, like a 90-minute block here, a nice little break, a 90-minute block there, nice little break, maybe a little top off at the end. That's kind of what we've got. So if you're in a work environment where you're really expected to do eight to nine hours of focused on-the-clock effort, I think about medical professionals or things like that, you know, that's naturally asking you to do something that a very small percentage of people can probably do and feel like a functional human at the end of it.

38:04Forrest Hanson: So again, we're just trying to kind of protect our sense of who we are from all of these unnatural impositions by properly contextualizing it. Like this is not a natural thing we're being asked to do. Of course, it's difficult for us.

38:16Dr. Rick Hanson: There's something that you're getting at that I think is very intimate and deep. And it has to do with the difficulty we often have due to our own virtues in planning a stake in the ground and saying, this is not my fault. How I feel when I get on that bus at the end of a workday is not my fault. It's the understandable, lawful, in some sense, objective result of a whole bunch of environmental factors wearing hard on a nervous system that did not evolve, given that we have hunter-gatherer nervous systems in which people were kind of wandering around and taking care of all their basic needs at about four hours a day while yakking with their friends.

39:09Dr. Rick Hanson: We did not evolve to do that. So I think there's something very intimate to stand up for yourself inside that says, you know, it's not my fault. It is something I need to deal with, but what I'm dealing with is not my fault. I think that's actually really important. And related to that, the other side of that coin of it's not my fault is that I'm an honorable, a worthy person who's dealing with this stuff that's not my fault.

39:39Forrest Hanson: You can also be on your own side about it, to use a classic Rick Hansen. Not my fault. I'm dealing with it. Here we are. What am I going to do about it? And that gets to some of the recommendations and advice that we're giving inside of this episode. Another place for standing up for yourself gets to this idea of job crafting, which I've got kind of mixed feelings about because this is, again, another way where people often kind of blame the victim in this whole thing, in my mind. But stepping back from it a little bit and maybe interpreting it more generally, it's true that we don't just passively receive a job most of the time.

40:13Forrest Hanson: Within whatever room we have to influence it, which could be very limited, we can reshape it a little tiny bit so it fits us better. And this could include these three different verticals that people talk about. The first is task crafting. This is what you're doing. Then relationship crafting, who you're doing with. And then third, cognitive crafting. This is how you frame the meaning of your work. And if you think about those different dimensions of stress we were talking about, these could all influence those different dimensions of stress, right? Like the relational stuff could bring us to a greater sense of community.

40:48Forrest Hanson: The task stuff could help us with the overworked side of the coin. then the cognitive stuff connects directly to more like values and purpose and meaning and all of that. Now, the reality is that for most people, they've got pretty limited influence over work tasks. You might be in a job where you can have some influence over that, but most people can be pretty limited. But most of the time, you don't need approval from management to decide who you go to lunch with. You know what I mean? You don't need approval from your boss to frame how you think about your relationship with work internally.

41:21Forrest Hanson: including thinking about it in exactly all the ways that you're talking about, Dad. This is a thing that I do. I'm selling these eight hours of the day or 10 hours of the day or whatever it is for you. And then guess what? I'm me at the end of all of that.

41:34Dr. Rick Hanson: That could be a form of cognitive crafting.

41:36Forrest Hanson: You know, I do want to be a little careful about the cognitive crafting part of it because there's a version of it that could become like toxic positivity pretty rapidly here. It's got to be authentic in order to be meaningful. but there are ways of interacting with our work environment that could potentially be easier for us or lead to less burnout.

41:54Dr. Rick Hanson: I had the experience a long time ago when I first moved up to the Bay Area. This would be very early 1980, 81, 82, long before you were born. And I heard about San Francisco Zen Center had a bakery. So for some reason, friends and I were going to the Zen Center bakery. And it was kind of a hole in the wall with a line out the door because what they made was really yummy. And it was a typical bakery. You walk in and you smell the muffins. You see the coffee machines and the milk and the sugar and the dirty dishes and people bussing them and working the cash register. And then you started to recognize that all the people who were working there came from the Zen Center.

42:36Dr. Rick Hanson: Typically, the men had sort of like shaved heads. They were sort of distinctive, even though they were wearing T-shirts and jeans and things. And what really struck me was that I could just tell watching them completely clear-eyed, utterly present while they bust their dishes, moving it from point A to point B, interacting with people at the cash register, they could care less about the muffins. They were there as an expression of their practice. And they could have been knitting. They could have been doing brain surgery. They could have been doing computer programming, whatever they were doing.

43:12Dr. Rick Hanson: It was an expression of their practice. And so it had a whole set of meanings for them that were independent from what they were doing. And I had a sense that that independence or that reframing of what they were doing in their own terms and forms of value and meaning made it stressless for them. It was like, there's no stress in breathing. There's no stress in bussing dishes. It's just chop wood, carry water, be zen. So we've hit three headlines so far, right? Headline number one, have recovery that helps you recover as much as possible. Second, don't take it so personally, you know, pay a lot of attention to how this is affecting your sense of yourself and your self-concept.

44:00Dr. Rick Hanson: And then third, we talked about, you know, tune your work as best you can, if only in how you frame it and how you interpret it. So we've got those three ideas so far. And then we have a fourth big idea, which is to reduce vulnerabilities inside yourself to the extent you can for the way that work is landing on you. And I wonder if you could say more about that.

44:24Forrest Hanson: Totally. So when I was taking a look at the research on this, I found something really interesting, which is that there's a relationship between the big five personality traits, these five dimensions that are pretty well studied in people's personality, and burnout, and particularly the dimension of neuroticism. So people who were higher in neuroticism were more likely to report relatively high levels of burnout. Now, this makes total sense because neuroticism is basically a measure of stress reactivity and emotional stability more broadly. So people who are higher in neuroticism might be more anxious, they might overthink more, they might experience negative emotions more strongly.

45:02Forrest Hanson: They might have more intense swings from positive emotions to negative emotions. And if you look at that package, well, yeah, that feels like the kind of person who might be hit by drop stress more acutely. But even if you're fairly low in neuroticism, like when I take the big five test, I'm fairly low in neuroticism. But man, I got my own tendencies towards anxiety and overthinking and some other things that I might mention on that list. And it has definitely contributed to my experience of burnout, right? I want to emphasize a couple of things here. First is that all of the studies that look at this stuff focus on what workplaces can do to support people with those tendencies, as opposed to placing the blame on the individual for having a given personality tendency.

45:42Forrest Hanson: This, again, emphasizes the issue of fit over saying like something's wrong with you here because you tend a little bit higher in neuroticism. Okay. Still, if we're going to focus on what we can do about it, how do you change a personality trait is a big question. We've done full-on episodes about it, right? And most of the evidence about changing trait neuroticism suggests a couple of things. First, therapy is generally pretty good for this. Two to three-month course of pretty much any decent evidence-based therapy, particularly more mainstream types that are aimed at learning how to deal with different kinds of stressors, so this kind of nudges us into CBT-ish territory can be pretty helpful for people.

46:26Forrest Hanson: And there's a lot of evidence that suggests that this is pretty helpful for people. There's also some evidence that it kicks in faster than you might expect. Like you don't have to do a year of therapy to get some real value at it if you are focused narrowly on developing certain kinds of skills, right? Now, of course here, we bump into an obvious problem, which is that therapy is expensive. and also therapists tend to work when you're working, right? So a lot of people can't see a therapist for a whole bunch of different reasons. So I would love to give some people advice about neuroticism that isn't just go see a therapist.

46:58Forrest Hanson: And I would love to start with you, Dad. Do you have any working with neuroticism trait advice for people here?

47:05Dr. Rick Hanson: That term is such a term. It is. And it's a thorny one. Yeah. Yeah. So let's just kind of deconstruct it into certain elements. One element is sensitivity. You're just easily affected by things. And sensitivity is a great gift. So we have, again, that running theme here that it's a problem of fit. A person whose sensitivity would really serve them well in a different time and culture may be really just a bad fit to a very loud, interrupting, clamorous, disruptive, emotionally invasive kind of environment. So there are different things you can do to reduce trait sensitivity. There's some research on things like literally tactile type things like doing scrubs with loofah brushes, things like that.

47:59Dr. Rick Hanson: Because of my own background and interest, I am really quite interested in things like developing greater equanimity. so you're able to be with what is unpleasant without getting upset about it or bothered by it. It's unpleasant. It's loud. It's noisy. They're talking to you in a hurtful way, but it doesn't feel so invasive. And with equanimity training, you can actually cultivate a greater sense of resilience in the face of that. That's an effort you make over time, but it's definitely effective. So you have a greater sense of that. A second thing that strikes me about so-called neuroticism is the degree to which it's self-referential.

48:42Dr. Rick Hanson: It's about me. There's a beleaguered sense of self. There's a sense of being maybe let down by others, heightened clinginess to others to support you. So one way I think to reduce so-called neuroticism is to repeatedly internalize the felt sense of being cared about again and again and again. So you start building up, you know, inner resources that fill that hole in your heart. And at the same time, what's under your control is to deliberately lean into a cariness toward others in, you know, appropriate ways, not pathological altruism, but ordinary appropriate ways, if only just to wish others well.

49:24Dr. Rick Hanson: May you not suffer. May you be safe. May you find what you're looking for. You know, may your heart's desire be fulfilled. Just ordinary kindness. Notice that it feeds you and helps you become less, quote unquote, neurotic as a result. So I really love that approach, actually. Tapping into the power of social emotions as stress buffers. Lots of research on them as stress buffers. I think probably burnout buffers as well.

49:49Forrest Hanson: Back to the show after a quick break. This episode is sponsored by Huel. Out of every sponsor we have ever had on the show, I think that Huel is the one that Elizabeth and I have used the most. It's always been tough for Elizabeth to eat enough protein, and she's been trying to build some muscle recently. And while we're both busy during the day, it often feels easier to just grab something rather than taking the time to make something that's actually healthy. But what if you could do both. Huel, that's spelled H-U-E-L, has solved that problem for us. Their Black Edition powder is a complete meal you have instead of food, not a shake on top of food.

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51:13Dr. Rick Hanson: Now, back to the show.

51:16Forrest Hanson: Neuroticism is such a thorny word and such a broad topic that you could look at 70 % of the episodes in our catalog and go, this has something to do with neuroticism, if you want to kind of position it that way. The recent episodes that we've done on avoidance and expectancy violations and going from knowing to insight to action around something are extremely relevant for this topic because a big part of neuroticism is how am I appraising threats? So people who tend to be higher in neuroticism tend to appraise ambiguous things as threats and then experience real threats if they're, say, a four on the one to 10 threat scale as an eight or a nine on the one to 10 threat scale.

51:58Forrest Hanson: And this is for a lot of really understandable reasons. Maybe that person had anxious parents and they were told that things were very spooky, the world was a scary place. maybe they themselves had real experiences of the world being a place. And of course, particularly if that happens repeatedly or when a person is younger, that gets really kind of baked in to how we relate to the world in general. If you are in an environment these days that is genuinely safer than the one that you used to be in, though, it can be helpful to start to test some of those beliefs. And we talked about how to do that inside of those episodes, doing small, tolerable versions of the things that you avoid, which also then helps you develop the belief in yourself that you can do those things.

52:38Forrest Hanson: You know, each time that we avoid something, we're essentially affirming to the brain that that thing was scary, I should have avoided it. You know, so it's kind of this like constantly reinforcing thing. And we're trying to break that cycle a little bit. Exposure therapy is kind of the number one approach to this. Exposure has really modernized over time. It is not what it used to be. It used to be quite intense. It's still quite difficult for people. But thankfully, they've become much more, I don't know, understanding in the approach or gentle in the approach. I've talked with people like Anxiety Josh and Kimberly Quinlan on the podcast about how to do exposure, particularly for more OCD-ishness.

53:14Forrest Hanson: Another thing that I would mention here is forms of meditation, again, could probably be helpful. Meditation, present moment awareness, that's more directed on, oh, what is the thought that I'm having? Like, oh, I'm experiencing fill in the blank. I'm experiencing anxiety, just like some emotional labeling. I'm experiencing some anger. I'm experiencing some sadness. And this gets to the being with dimension that you tend to really talk about, Dad, just being with something as opposed to trying to work with it as this first step of both self-awareness and appreciating the realness of our experience.

53:47Forrest Hanson: So we're not just emotionally numbing. Dissociation is something that people often experience related to burnout. That feeling of distance from the self or even going up to depersonalization, like things are just kind of happening, but they don't feel like they're happening to me. Well, this is a way to kind of get back in touch with your actual emotional experience, your actual experience of your body. So those are all things that I could think of that might help with somebody who's dealing with some of the things that we're talking about.

54:12Dr. Rick Hanson: That's really cool. And to take a page out of, you know, fourth wave or fifth wave or 10th wave therapies around mindfulness approaches, that the place to start is to to accept and allow burnout is to allow and accept the cynicism dimension of burnout or the exhaustion dimension or the slumping in mood or the sense of helplessness. Just to, they're there. We're not trying to fix them. We're not trying to immediately change them or make them go away. We're allowing them. And actually, interestingly, very often when you really allow experiences to just arise and be what they are, they tend to start dissolving or deconstructing some and becoming more like clouds and less like bricks and have more of a sense of kind of fading and spreading inside your consciousness.

55:08Dr. Rick Hanson: So that's really worth trying. I think that's true. Imagine two people dealing with this objectively same job, just side by side. and in one person's mind is a lot the experience of, I don't like this. They are having a lot of negative emotion, a lot of aversion to the conditions of their work. In the other person's mind, they're in the same setting. They're getting yelled at by this or that, a short order cook in a restaurant. They've got to run around, their feet hurt. All the unpleasant sensations and events are occurring, but they're not adding aversion to it. They're not grumbling in the back of their mind about how crummy this all is.

56:00Dr. Rick Hanson: They're not adding that. They're not adding disliking to the actual facts and the direct experience.

56:07Forrest Hanson: The first person is in acceptance essentially. I get what you're saying.

56:10Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. And so at the end of the day, or then now imagine a thousand of those days, otherwise the person who's really aversive, really not liking, really grumbling, really mad about it, is going to be more burned out than the person who did not add that allostatic load. The stressors were there, but they were not so invasive. They didn't add negative affect to it. Now, obviously, much easier said than done, but that said, it is actually possible. And you can see that there's a range of people in similar settings, some become more burned out than others. And maybe one of the hallmarks of neuroticism is another way of talking about aversiveness and amplified aversion to certain conditions.

56:58Dr. Rick Hanson: I'm not saying any of this to minimize the yuckiness of the conditions. I think we ought to have laws like they have in Norway, and they ought to be universal. So corporations are not penalized by adopting those policies compared to their competitors. All right. That said, but what we bring to our circumstances really affects how they affect us. It really shapes and influences how they affect us.

57:24Forrest Hanson: Yeah, I think that I agree with you mostly and certainly agree with, I think, the point under the point, which is that our relationship with things matters. A total big cosine there. I would throw a few different ideas into the pot here. The first one being that, yes, when we're faced with suffering, we have two options fundamentally. We can either change it or we can accept it. The third option, which is neither change nor accept it, is usually the one that maximizes your suffering. Just as a general broad principle in life, right? If you think about constantly ruminating over something, I think about myself as a real resentfulness is absolutely my drug of choice inside of relationships, my ability to bottle or stew and not communicate around some kind of an issue that I've had in the back of my mind with somebody for X period of time.

58:18Forrest Hanson: This used to be much more of a problem than it is these days. Thankfully, I've done a lot of work on this. But Elizabeth and I have talked a lot, even on the podcast, about this as being kind of a tendency of mine and how I needed to get more comfortable expressing myself inside of the relationship. Now, it's important to mention that this is a warm and loving relationship where it's really quite easy for me to do that. And instead of your work life, it might not be. And that's the kind of twist that I would put on all of this, is that it's easier to have that kind of disposition of, okay, I either accept or I change around things where you feel like you have more utility to change it.

58:54Forrest Hanson: It's tough to be in acceptance when you truly have no ability to change something. That's hard. It's a big ask for people. Also, for a lot of people, sure, this job is not you, but you're framing there of, I forget the exact language you used, but it was something like, I don't need this, or in that kind of a way. A lot of people are very dependent on their work, and it's very unclear of what's going to happen if they lose that job or whatever it might be. So there is this feeling of the double bind of it. I need this thing, and I hate this thing. And I think inside of that feeling, it's very, very hard to get to the acceptance place.

59:32Forrest Hanson: So I guess I would say that I agree with you in general about, yeah, absolutely, relationship matters, and acceptance is a great place to be able to get to. And I'm also just flagging, man, this can be tough.

59:43Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. And to be really clear -

59:44Forrest Hanson: Which I think you agree with.

59:45Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah. People do need their jobs. For me, it's a form of respecting people to encourage them to do what they can inside their own minds. And going all the way to Viktor Frankl and some of your own existentialist heroes.

1:00:04Forrest Hanson: My existentialist background, is that what you're, yeah?

1:00:05Dr. Rick Hanson: Yeah, the more your environment is f***ed up, the more important it is to cultivate your own inner strengths in the face of it. Totally.

1:00:14Forrest Hanson: Yeah.

1:00:15Dr. Rick Hanson: It's just f***ed up. Full agree. Yeah.

1:00:17Forrest Hanson: Full agree on that, for sure. I also think there's a dimension of this that's a little interesting around suffering where a lot of people frame suffering as this motivating thing. If you're really suffering inside of a situation, that'll give you the incentive that you need to change it. I think that inside of like, so maybe an argument that a person would make about what you were saying before is like, oh, if that person really dislikes something and really feels their dislike of it, it'll be more motivating for them to find a better work environment or something like that. And I don't know, I'm skeptical of that as a position, is I guess what I would say.

1:00:47Dr. Rick Hanson: I think one thing that we're really talking about too is a critique really of hustle culture and those who would sort of downplay the accumulating impact of stress. I mean, from my own background as a psychologist, just because there's a stressor does not innately mean you have to feel stressed. And second, we do grow a lot through challenge. We also grow in many ways that have nothing to do with challenge. You know, challenge is not the only way to grow. And so we face challenges. But as we're dealing with challenges, if we're just flooded with negative affect and helplessness, we're not growing through the challenge.

1:01:29Dr. Rick Hanson: And even if we got through the challenge and it was pretty horrible, what helps us grow on the other side of the challenge is typically positive emotion, including often social support from other people. So I think it's really important to ask yourself, what are you bringing home from work every day? And the more that you're able to leave it on the job and to disengage from it, and while you're at the job, not add those second darts, you know, that of your own reactivity to the job, then you're carrying less of it with you because burnout is accumulative. Most of us can, you know, we could stand one day.

1:02:05Dr. Rick Hanson: We're watching the pit recently. Now we're in the second season.

1:02:08Forrest Hanson: And yeah,

1:02:10Dr. Rick Hanson: like a 12-hour shift in the ER in Pittsburgh in a public downtown city hospital, whoa, 12 hours. But most of us could handle 12 hours. But day after day after day after day, year after year, even the head guy who has a lot of control over it all, Robbie, he's getting burned out. And he knows that and he needs a long, long, long time of recovery. So it's that accumulation that really gets you. So accumulate as little as possible and be real with yourself because burnout, stress is a major health risk factor in all kinds of ways. You matter enough to really take the burnout into account and do what you can about it.

1:02:52Forrest Hanson: Right on. Totally agree. And as we get to the end here, I'll just give two other things to kind of cover our bases. First, all the good common sense physiological advice that you could go to many other podcasts to receive. Sleep really matters. Diet can matter here for people. The problem in all of this is that, of course, if you're somebody who's working really hard or you're dealing with your kids or you're burnt out at the end of the day, it's harder to do these things. It's harder to sleep enough. It's harder to eat healthy. This is the double bind of the whole thing, right? But again, even so, I do want to mention that these are important things.

1:03:30Forrest Hanson: And if you can get to bed a little earlier, be a little bit more conscious about what's going into your body, good things to think about, right? The second thing that I kind of want to leave people with is that as you're listening to all of this, I can imagine somebody still getting to the end here and going, man, I don't know how much of this stuff I can actually do for whatever reason. Or man, I don't know how much of it is actually a fit for me. But I'm still dealing with this thing. I think this is where we leave practical behavioral world and we go to existential land, essentially. And this becomes a values question, I think, for people.

1:04:10Forrest Hanson: Like, why are you doing this? What's your why? Are you really supporting somebody who you really care about? Are you working hard to achieve a kind of dream that you have for yourself? What's your reason for being? I wish I could pronounce the French word, but I can't. But it's a beautiful phrase, right? What's your reason for doing this day after day in the way that you're describing that? How can you have a kind of values orientation with it? And when all else fails, I think that can be a helpful thing for people.

1:04:41Dr. Rick Hanson: It's helpful also to reflect on how expectations can really be a factor in despair. I mean, throughout history, throughout history, many, many people lived in situations in which they were being controlled by the local warlords or nobility and so forth. And the work they did didn't particularly move their life forward. They needed to do it to keep raising the food that would enable them to get through the winter, and then they had to reset and do the same thing the next spring over and over again, right? And they did it. They slogged through it. They kept going. What they did often was physically uncomfortable.

1:05:25Dr. Rick Hanson: They were often forced to do it with people they didn't really particularly care for. They got through it. And I don't say any of this to minimize things. It's more to put it in a broader perspective. How have people throughout history. You're not alone. If you feel like you're stuck in a kind of a work that's a grind, doesn't do much for you personally, you don't see any escape from it. It is what it is. And eventually you're going to die. What do you do about that? And that's a really joyful

1:05:54Forrest Hanson: ending to this one here, Dad. I like that. Reminder, eventually you're going to die.

1:05:59Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, what I'm trying to get at is Viktor Frankl.

1:06:03Forrest Hanson: For the record, I'm so right there with you. Yeah, I get where you're coming from here totally.

1:06:08Dr. Rick Hanson: And I think in the modern era, there can be a kind of preciousness about, oh, it's all supposed to be so great, and because it's not, I'm endlessly disappointed. Well, I'm not trying to minimize the suckiness of a lot of situations. And I hope it's clear in my politics. I think a lot of those sucky conditions are created to profit the few at the cost of the many. They're not fair. And still, if you're stuck in them, you can't change them. If you cannot change them, what's at least the best you can do? It's to find your own meaning. Redefine what you're doing in terms of a movie or a game you can win at.

1:06:50Dr. Rick Hanson: You know, such as orienting toward the task of your day, like the Zen bakers, as intrinsically meaningless activities, in a sense, that you're just moving through as gracefully and contentedly and mindfully and lovingly as you can. That's the game you're defining. So then your success is in reference to your values, getting at the word values that you're bringing up here. Yeah. And for me, there's a part about this that's very rebellious, which I love. You're really sticking up for yourself in this way of doing things that I'm talking about, none of which are about minimizing the yuckiness of late-stage capitalism.

1:07:34Forrest Hanson: I think this was great. I totally appreciate doing it with you here today, Dad. I thought that we did as good a job as you could do navigating this one, which is obviously a very thorny topic. And I hope that people got to the end of this and heard one or two or three things where they went, hey, okay, I'm gonna give that a shot. You know, whether it's some of those relaxation techniques that we were talking about or recovery techniques, even more broadly, that we were talking about or thinking in terms of, hey, how could I interact with my work in a different kind of way? Are there traits that I can alter inside of myself that would make my work life more approachable for me?

1:08:11Forrest Hanson: Or even, again, at the very end, just framing it in terms of broader values, like what can I connect with? How can I keep my mind clean of this stuff? I thought it was really great stuff, and I appreciate you taking the time today.

1:08:20Dr. Rick Hanson: Same. Back at you, Forrest.

1:08:47Forrest Hanson: in a context where for so many people, the problem gets in the way of any kind of real solution. Most of the advice that people give about burnout focuses on taking time off or doing a little self-care. And we talked to some extent about self-care during this episode, but the reality is that most people cannot just take time off if they're paying rent or they're caring for somebody else or they're living just a normal life. And this means that most of the advice about burnout starts to sound pretty out of touch. So we talked about what people can actually do in a context where they don't have a ton of influence over their work lives.

1:09:25Forrest Hanson: We started by defining what burnout was. Burnout is work-related stress to really simplify it. And it has these three key dimensions for people. The first one is exhaustion, the feeling of the tank being empty. The second is cynicism. You're going cold or you feel kind of detached about the work that you're doing or the people that you're doing that work with. And the third one is reduced feelings of efficacy. In other words, the sense that nothing that you do makes much of a difference. When you think about people's work lives, they include a lot of that pretty often these days. And this is why burnout is framed by the World Health Organization as a workplace phenomenon, not a mental health diagnosis.

1:10:03Forrest Hanson: This is a structural issue that then individuals are being forced to pay for, essentially. If a business, for example, understaffs and then offers a resilience training to their employees, you know, that resilience training might legitimately help them. But it's a bit of a we're all trying to find the guy who did this situation, right? They've constructed the circumstances that led to the burnout and then been like, oh, you should seek help for this burnout that we've created. This all gets even worse if you're part of a burnout-prone population of people. If you're dealing with just about anything, particularly things like ADHD or autism spectrum disorders, complex PTSD, chronic illness, if you're part of a marginalized population.

1:10:44Forrest Hanson: We could go on and on here. So okay, even after saying all of that, as we also talked about toward the end of the episode, man, the way that we relate to our work does matter. And even if the work that we're doing feels kind of fundamentally meaningless, or it feels very meaningful, but extremely stressful also, I mean, raising a kid is one of the most meaningful things that a person can do in their life. And that still is immensely stressful. And there are a lot of moms and dads out there who are incredibly burnt out. They don't have a value problem. They've got an everything else problem going on.

1:11:17Forrest Hanson: So given those kinds of circumstances, and particularly focusing more on workplace circumstances where you've got a little bit of control, but not a lot of control, what can people actually do? Rick started by talking about these six different dimensions, workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values, and how essentially the the wrong things being present in each one of those places can lead to problems for people. And this also means that we can look at different solutions that might help you feel a greater sense of control or more reward from what you're doing, or feeling like a better sense of community inside of your work environment.

1:11:51Forrest Hanson: And the first thing that we talked about was improving the quality of recovery, and particularly these four dimensions for people, psychological detachment from work, relaxation, mastery, and control. Rick talked a good amount throughout this section, because I prompted him to, about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation and different ways of controlling our intention and being the one who chooses in terms of what we're focusing on at any given moment. I talked a little bit about having a sharper line between work and not work and doing everything that we can to be truly off the clock when we're off the clock.

1:12:27Forrest Hanson: We also talked a bit about avoiding stressful activities that we think of as being relaxation activities. If you're scrolling through a very political TikTok feed, that might not be very relaxing for you, even if it's the thing you do to relax. Throughout the conversation, we talked about different ways to protect self-worth. One of the big ones was just the framing we did on this. There's nothing wrong with you if you're burnt out. You're burnt out because the world is burn-out anger, however you want to put it right. And I think that this is one of the dimensions that most burnout content really misses.

1:12:59Forrest Hanson: It makes people very responsible for this thing that, in essence is happening to them. And that just seems kind of unfair to me. Another part of this is the amount of work that people are expected to do on a daily basis these days just doesn't line up with the way that our brain works. Our brain has probably about four to six hours of dedicated, focused energy in a day. Sure, things like email or meetings or, you know, routine stuff doesn't necessarily drain us in the way that I'm describing if we're doing like focused, dedicated work. But if you're really on the clock for much longer than six hours, not a lot of people are able to do that very effectively.

1:13:34Forrest Hanson: This then took us to the third idea, which is job crafting. This is the one that we mentioned that is going to vary the most person to person in terms of their ability to do this kind of thing. We talked about three dimensions of job crafting. This is task crafting, relational crafting, and cognitive crafting. Most people are going to have the most control over their relationships and their own cognition, what's going on inside of their mind while they're at work. But hey, if you're able to, task crafting means leaning into the aspects of work that you're the most interested in or finding opportunities to bring what you're interested in into your work.

1:14:06Forrest Hanson: Lack of social support, lack of connection is one of the major drivers of burnout. So feeling any kind of a sense of on the same team with the people that you work with is going to be a pretty big deal here. So what, if anything, can you do to get to that feeling? Like, is there a particular person in the hierarchy who drives you nuts? And is it possible to work with other people? Is there somebody who you really enjoy working with? Is it possible to work with that person more frequently? Again, a lot of people don't have control over that, but you might. We then talked a little bit about lowering trait reactivity, which we discussed through the lens of neuroticism.

1:14:39Forrest Hanson: That could be its own whole episode. Rick had a lot of good ideas there. One of the things that I mentioned is I referred back to the episodes we did recently on avoidance and going from insight to action. I think there's a lot of good stuff in those episodes that could potentially be helpful for a person here. Then finally, we talked about checking the obvious physical boxes. If you can, try to get enough sleep, try to eat a relatively healthy diet, be conscious about what you're putting into your body. This is another place where the things that people do to recover can become kind of their own problems for people.

1:15:13Forrest Hanson: If you're the kind of person who goes home and uses a particular substance, drinks a few beers, whatever it is for you, these are very normal activities, but they do also increase the amount of stress on a body. My version of this is coffee. I'm a daily drinker of coffee. I like coffee a lot. I also switched from caffeinated coffee to half caffeinated coffee, which probably doesn't sound like a lot to most people, but it was a lot for me because my anxiety was getting revved up in the morning pretty much every day. And I was like, man, I like this thing, but I got to kind of do something different.

1:15:43Forrest Hanson: So obviously that's a very mild version of what I'm talking about here. But hey, if you can do other little things to support yourself, why not?

1:15:49Dr. Rick Hanson: I hope you enjoyed today's conversation.

1:15:51Forrest Hanson: I really loved talking with Rick about it. If you made it this far and you haven't subscribed yet, if you could take a moment to subscribe, we'd really appreciate it. You could leave a comment, a rating, a positive review. That really helps us out. You can find us on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on basically all of the places. And if you would like to support the podcast in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. Hey, it's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return. So until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.