How to fight burnout

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0:43I'm stuck in this hard place of, I don't want to give up this job, but I don't really try enjoying it anymore.

0:52Jonquilyn Hill:Jonathan Molesic landed his dream job teaching at a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania. From about age 20 or so, I wanted to be a college religion or theology professor. And I got it. I got exactly my dream. He was publishing papers, earning tenure. He was really happy until he wasn't. So about eight or nine years into the career, I found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I started having weird, inexplicable pains in my torso in particular. I was constantly exhausted. I dreaded going to work. Everyone at the college had to take theology. Very few wanted to. So my class was, you know, somewhat resented by the students.

1:48The college itself was under a lot of stress. There was a budget crisis along the way. People were let go. There was just a lot of worry at the college.

2:01Jonquilyn Hill:Jonathan wasn't himself. I had a very short temper. I would find myself blowing up in meetings over very minor things. I was constantly frustrated. I felt sort of useless. I would find myself lying in bed in the mornings for hours, like watching over and over the video for Peter Gabriel's song, Don't Give Up.

2:30I also love Kate Bush and that song's a duet. Don't give up, you still have friends. In the video, Gabriel and Bush are just in this embrace for six straight minutes with this eclipsing sun behind them. It's extremely dramatic. I just needed to hear that over and over and over again.

3:01I'm fundamentally a nerd. So I solve problems in my life very often with research. And somewhere along the line, I had encountered this term burnout. I wasn't just a failure. I wasn't just bad at my job. I wasn't just tired. Something happened that researchers identify as a real phenomenon.

3:34Jonquilyn Hill:I'm John Gwlin Hill. And this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, we get into the reality of burnout. and what to do if you just don't have any more to give. Jonathan decided that he needed to quit that dream job. And as he started to think about what to do next, he wanted to understand what derailed his career. As I read more and more articles about burnout, a name came up over and over again, and it was Christina Maslach, who is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She's the sort of godmother of burnout research. You know, I read many of her early articles. As their emotional resources are depleted, workers feel they're no longer able to give of themselves at a psychological level.

4:27I've read one of her books called Burnout, The Cost of Caring. Burnout. The word evokes images of a final flickering flame, of a charred and empty shell, of dying embers and cold gray ashes. And I just couldn't get enough.

4:44Jonquilyn Hill:Why did you think what happened to you was burnout and not just like, ooh, this job, not a good fit? One thing was that I took the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which is the standard research instrument for measuring and classifying burnout. It's a 22-question survey asks, you know, how often do these following kind of bad experiences apply to you? I feel emotionally drained by my work. Working with people all day long requires a great deal of effort. I have the impression that my team slash colleagues make me responsible for some of their problems. I'm at the end of my patient. I feel full of energy.

5:27I've become more insensitive to people in the workplace. And I scored in the 98th percentile for exhaustion. I was so proud of myself, you know?

5:39Jonquilyn Hill:You're like, look at me. That's right. I won. Exactly. You know, it's like I aced this one. Of course, there's a big difference between fatigue and boredom and actual burnout, but I'd love for you to explain the difference from a scientific perspective. What makes burnout burnout? out. So there are three dimensions to burnout. So the first and the one that probably everyone is familiar with is exhaustion, sometimes called emotional exhaustion. And exhaustion is something that it has to be chronic. You can't be burned out for a week or probably even a month. It's a kind of exhaustion that does not improve with rest.

6:28The last time I was burnt out, it got to a point where I was struggling with cognitive abilities. I couldn't use my critical thinking skills without very quickly hitting what felt like a wall in my brain. The second dimension is called cynicism or sometimes depersonalization. So you treat people as not full persons that can manifest itself in anger, in gossip, a lot of frustration and so on. Constantly exhausted, irritable, mentally checked out and never able to rest without guilt. The third dimension is a sense of ineffectiveness, a feeling that your work is not accomplishing anything. Never feeling like I'm caught up at work, no longer finding joy in my job.

7:22And I think it's almost inescapable these days. In American society, we value work so highly. We put so much of our identity and self-worth into work. And exhaustion can be a kind of point of pride. Um, even cynicism can be a little bit of a point of pride too. The person who's highly competent, but kind of a jerk is also a cultural hero to us. The, you know, brilliant, but, um, you know, extremely cynical doctor, you know, House would be the classic example. I was waiting two hours out there. Fascinating. Have you considered a career as a memoirist? And this is why I think that you got to have all three dimensions to really understand burnout.

8:20People will brag about how exhausted they are. People sometimes brag about how cynical they are. No one brags about how they feel their work isn't accomplishing anything.

8:30Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah. So that's the that I think is the key dimension. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people can get some of these feelings from work. I think of the movie Office Space. It's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't care. I'm curious when it goes from just like, uh, work to like, oh, no, I'm burnt out. Yeah, I think it probably has to do with frequency. If you only feel like Peter in office space once or twice a month, things probably aren't all that bad. If it's every day, there's a bigger problem. Burnout is the result of a long-term mismatch between our ideals for work and the reality of our jobs, including this kind of sense that work will fulfill us, or work is a way of proving our worth.

9:31And along with that can be we have expectations for salary and benefits and schedule and so on. So all those count as ideals or expectations. And then there's the reality, which is the day-to-day and structural kind of, well, reality of the jobs that we actually do. What is our caseload? What are our hours? What are our actual salary and benefits? who are our customers, clients, and so on. And when those things get out of alignment, then you kind of stretch between them. You're trying to stretch across this gap. And that feeling of trying to stretch across that gap is burnout. Our metaphor for burnout is burning, like you have a tank of fuel and you burn through it.

10:27The experience is really more like stretching, I think, because you're trying to fill this gap with a self that's not quite big enough to do it.

10:43Jonquilyn Hill:Coming up, how that mismatch of ideals went mainstream.

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11:30Jonquilyn Hill:The point is, nobody is immune to a little slump in energy, especially in the afternoon. The science is clear on that. The key is remembering there's always a path forward to feeling renewed and re-energized. Try the all-new energy refreshers at Starbucks.

11:49Jonquilyn Hill:It's Explained It to Me. I'm JQ. Jonathan Melesic left academia. But he wasn't done with burnout. Because he's an overachiever, he wrote a whole book about it called The End of Burnout, Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. He says the idea of burnout as we know it first showed up in 1974. Picture it. Flower powers out, disc goes in, nicks and resigns. And Bob Dylan records a song about searching for salvation. It's called Shelter from the Storm. I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail. Burned out from exhaustion. And in ambulance blues, Neil Young also uses the term burnout.

12:37Burnouts stub their toes on a garbage trail. That song was recorded, I think, also in 1974, at the exact same time that the first papers on burnout were appearing in psychological journals. When a staff member in an alternative institution burns out for whatever reasons and becomes inoperative to all intents and purposes, the burnout manifests itself in many different symptomatic ways. Burnout was just kind of like in the air.

13:07Jonquilyn Hill:Was there ever a crossover between these artists and these scientists or they just happened to sort of be catching the same vibe that is going down in the country? I think they're just catching the same vibe. They're just, you know, finding it on different frequencies. Jonathan says this was a massive shift. Just a generation earlier, Americans were feeling pretty optimistic about work. The years after World War II in particular, unions had a lot of power. It was a marvelous tribute to the people, the way they showed this company, that they could stick together when the company pushed them to the wall.

13:44The United Steelworkers of America and Canada. With the union came dignity and recognition. The American economy was very strong across many, many sectors. And this kind of implicit social contract is like, your wages are going to keep increasing. Your hours even may keep decreasing. Conditions are going to keep getting better. So long as you don't go on strike, as long as you don't cause trouble, basically. And, you know, coming out of the sort of idealism of the 60s, our expectations for work were pretty high. You know, President Johnson. declares unconditional war on poverty in America. People believe, well, we can do this.

14:27So there was a greater expectation that our work could, number one, solve huge societal problems and fulfill us. So the ideals had grown. At the same time, in 1973, 74, the conditions of employment started getting worse. Well, unemployment in the United States now is at its highest level in 13 years. Our normal expectations of getting ahead are being reduced to hopes of holding on. The average worker will continue to lose spending power for some time to come. Terms like stagflation, where prices go up, wages don't.

15:06Jonquilyn Hill:Well, yeah. That's right. Good thing that's safely in the 1970s. Safely in the past. The conditions of work started to erode. The power of unions had started to erode. So there's the gap, culturally speaking, between our ideals and reality meant that, well, the conditions were ripe for high levels of burnout, for workers to start to name their situation. Does that lead to any actual change in the workplace? Like, I don't know. Are people like, all right, let's make this better? Oh, definitely not. No. day. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, it was at the end of that decade that President Jimmy Carter gave his so-called malaise speech.

16:01It is a crisis of confidence. Carter kind of diagnosed the country with an exhaustion, with a sense of ineffectiveness, a sense that we were no longer attaining our national ideals. He kind of diagnosed the whole country with a collective case of burnout. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America. Carter lost the election in 1980, and one of Ronald Reagan's first acts as president in his first year was to break a strike of air traffic controllers. This morning at 7 a.m., the union representing those who man America's air traffic control facilities called a strike.

16:54President Reagan told the air traffic controllers to be back in the towers Wednesday morning or they'd be fired and face prosecution. One of their first listed grievances was the problem of consistent burnout on the job. In this profession, they say you're burned out at 35, that the hypertension and stress of the job becomes too hot to handle. So hot to handle, you either quit or end up talking to a shrink. Reagan's response to this was to fire the air traffic controllers. They're terminated. And, you know, that was, of course, a huge blow to organized labor, you know, across the country. Burnout was kind of at the core of that.

17:37Jonquilyn Hill:You write that burnout kind of fades as a buzzword after the 70s and 80s, but then it comes kind of roaring back in the late 20-teens with this one viral article. Right. What is that article and what happened? It's a BuzzFeed News article by Anne Helen Peterson about millennial burnout. The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there's no solution to it. You can't optimize it to make it end faster. You can't see it coming like a cold and start taking the burnout prevention version of airborne. The best way to treat it is to first acknowledge it for what it is. Not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease.

18:19The article did go extremely viral. I related to it a lot as a millennial myself. People are saying, I'm burnt out, I'm exhausted, I've got nothing left. Like, it us. It named this kind of experience that had somewhat been forgotten in the intervening decades. Not necessarily not felt, but for whatever reason, particularly these millennial workers, Whereas the, you know, a generation that had high ideals for work that was told that it could accomplish great things. And now that they kind of hit their 30s, we're encountering kind of like the harsh reality often of American working life.

19:12Jonquilyn Hill:So millennials are finding themselves stuck in that same old cycle of burnout. But the newest generation of workers may have found a way out. That's next.

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19:33Jonquilyn Hill:Jonklin, I think of you as the queen of answering questions. Oh my gosh, thank you. What question do you have for me today? Okay, talk to me about energy levels. Why is it that it's sometimes I feel total waves of exhaustion? So, like, you can't focus. you're falling asleep, that kind of thing. Exactly. And then at some points, I'm just totally fine. Why is that happening? And is there anything I can do to help it? Yeah. So the peaks and slumps throughout the day, we have all been there. So that's mostly because of our circadian rhythm. It's basically the cycle our body goes through in a 24-hour time period.

20:09Jonquilyn Hill:And it controls things like metabolism, hormones, and energy. So that's like the reason I feel tired before bed and well-rested in the morning. It's our circadian rhythm. It's a totally natural biological response. So when I want to just close my eyes and put my head down on my desk, what can I do about that? According to my research, one of the best things you can do is get up and walk around. Get your blood flowing. Maybe call up a friend and grab a coffee or a tea. That sounds really nice right now. You want to go do it? Yeah. Yeah. Long story short, we all need moments throughout the day to refresh.

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20:58I recently graduated from college a few years ago. I think with the state of the world, it can get a little bit, I guess, depressing because it feels like AI is taking all the jobs and like you do get this job. You're so thankful to have it, but then you're kind of overworked and undervalued And it can, yeah, lead to feelings of burnout because you just kind of feel like you're stuck in this hard place of, I don't want to give up this job, but I don't really find joy in it anymore.

21:27Jonquilyn Hill:We're back with more Explain It To Me. I'm J.Q. Danielle Roberts also knows burnout firsthand. After a layoff during the pandemic, she started to look for balance and she found it. Now she helps other people find it, too, as a career coach. Or as she likes to say, an anti-career coach. I think we're at a point where dream jobs don't exist. And we have to start questioning the systems and the structures that are causing burnout in the first place, rather than making it a personal problem or a professional weakness. She says burnout isn't just something millennials feel. I grew up in a very blue-collar family.

22:04I'm one of five kids. And my dad did tile and marble for a living. For 40 years, he just retired. And what he got for a lifetime of hard work was a broken body and a pin to say thank you for your service. Our older generations, our family, their burnout often looked more physical. Gen X, their burnout often looks more mental. And then millennials and Gen Z, our burnout often looks more emotional and existential because we were taught that our work equals our worth and to pour so much of ourselves into it. So I think it's not that one generation is more burnt out than the other. It's just that it manifests differently based on the world in which we grew up.

22:49Jonquilyn Hill:I'm curious, what do you notice about how Gen Z is approaching burnout differently? We can learn so much from Gen Z and what they are teaching us about modeling the boundaries that would have prevented all of us from burning out in the first place. They are incredibly wise. We hear often that they're lazy and entitled and that nobody wants to work anymore. But think about what they witnessed growing up. They saw their parents or their friends' parents be loyal to companies that laid them off. They saw millennials put themselves through college and get a tremendous amount of student debt just to be laid off or have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet and label it like the gig economy and have it be this super fancy term of, oh, this is just we need to work multiple jobs without benefits to survive.