Episode 188: You vs. Burnout
/“How we still talk about burnout is that it’s an individual problem to solve. You know, if you just do more yoga or engage in more self-care, we’ll solve for systemic discrimination or 70 hour work weeks.”
“I’ll be like, it’s okay for you to take some time off and spend time with your family...I think people need to hear that from their leaders. Otherwise they’re always kind of wondering, does she think I’m working hard enough?”
Two years into a pandemic many of us are overwhelmed at work, feeling we have little control, and dealing with a lack of support from our organizations. Burnout rates are up all over the world. But they were bad even before Covid-19 came along. So what can we do about it?
In this episode we meet three women who know burnout first-hand.
Danielle Fried works for a small business that exploded during Covid. It took a health crisis for her to realize she was a frazzle of her former self.
Jennifer Moss is the author of The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It and a longtime expert on happiness and unhappiness at work. She says it's up to leaders to solve this problem, and there is plenty they can do about it.
Jamie Hand is one such leader, managing her own stress levels while tackling burnout one team member at a time.
You can also read a transcript of the show.
Jennifer started her book on burnout before the pandemic hit, then rapidly revised it as 2020 unravelled. Like so many others she and her family bought a dog during Covid - a dog who wanted to make her presence felt during our interview, as you can hear below in this short clip.
Jennifer Moss with her pandemic pup and antidote to stress, maple
Further reading: Beyond Burned Out and Preventing Burnout is About Empathetic Leadership, both by Jennifer Moss on HBR.org.
Burnout and hustle culture are related, as one of my correspondents - mentioned in the show - noted. The U.S. embodies this culture. I enjoyed this piece from Business Insider, How hustle culture got Americans addicted to work.
My first episode on burnout aired in 2016 and I still think about some of Stacy-Marie Ishmael’s comments. Episodes 119 and 170 each concentrate on women in medicine and the need for more empathy in that profession, in order to prevent burnout.