Transcript
00:00:00When I was a CEO, I was an executive, I never worked less than 80 hours a week.
00:00:04It was a great job. I truly believed in the mission of the organization.
00:00:07I was an enthusiast for it, but I was burning out by the end of 10 years.
00:00:11From the early parts of the coronavirus epidemic to the direct aftermath,
00:00:15there's a pretty big increase from about half the population to almost two-thirds of the population
00:00:20that are showing some signs of burning out.
00:00:22When you're feeling like a desiccated husk of a human being and everything feels like an insurmountable task,
00:00:28despite the fact that at one point you were really good at your job.
00:00:31Where ordinary work is extraordinarily hard, it's hard to see how you can ever make things better.
00:00:37You just want to give up, quit, run away. You're fantasizing about just walking off the job.
00:00:42You don't have to live this way. Spoiler alert in this episode, you don't have to be overwhelmed.
00:00:53Hey everybody, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks.
00:00:57This is my podcast about how all of us can lift each other up and bring each other together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
00:01:05I've dedicated my career as a behavioral scientist to love and happiness, and I want to bring those ideas to you,
00:01:11in part because I want you to have more love and happiness in your life.
00:01:15But I have an ulterior motive, which is that I want you to join me as a happiness teacher.
00:01:19I want to arm you with the best facts, science, and data to help people understand that they can live better, happier lives.
00:01:27I want you to be a teacher, just like me, because that's how we scale this.
00:01:30This is how we make a better world.
00:01:31So thank you for being part of this movement, whether this is your first episode of the podcast or whether it's well into the first year of episodes.
00:01:40Many of you have been with us from the very beginning, and I thank you for that.
00:01:42Please do continue to share the episodes with other people.
00:01:45Pass them on.
00:01:46It's really good for the algorithms, the algorithms that rule our lives unhappily.
00:01:52They do rely on the replication that comes when you, by word of mouth, are sharing these particular ideas.
00:01:57So send a copy of this to somebody that you love, if you think that they can use it.
00:02:01Also, please do give me your comments and feedback and criticism and ideas for new episodes of the podcast.
00:02:07What would you like me to be talking about?
00:02:10Write to me at officehours at arthurbrooks.com.
00:02:12If you'd like to go a little deeper in these ideas, you can always get it from my newsletter.
00:02:17We have more than 200,000 people with a huge rate of readership right now.
00:02:23I mean, it's just, it's amazing how many of you are reading the newsletter.
00:02:26If you're not yet, you can get that for free, completely for free at arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter.
00:02:30And if you want to talk about these ideas in person with other people and occasionally with me as well,
00:02:36we are holding retreats now on the ideas that are in this podcast, on the science of human happiness.
00:02:41You can go to retreats.arthurbrooks.com to learn more about that.
00:02:47And as always, you can read my books.
00:02:48Here's my latest book.
00:02:50If you've been watching the podcast, you know I've been talking about it relentlessly.
00:02:52The meaning of your life.
00:02:54Pretty much everything comes back to the meaning of your life, doesn't it?
00:02:57Well, certainly all of my work does.
00:03:00Now, I mentioned a minute ago that I'm super interested in what you think I should be talking
00:03:03about.
00:03:04And many of you, the last time I asked about it, you wrote in the number one topic that
00:03:09people said they wanted me to write and speak about was topics as we age, interestingly.
00:03:15Second half of life topics.
00:03:17How can we mature and get happier as we get older?
00:03:20And maybe that says something about the demographics.
00:03:23Maybe what I should do is dedicate an episode to making kids get the hell off your lawn.
00:03:28Maybe I should do an episode on how it's too loud in restaurants.
00:03:32I'm kidding.
00:03:33I know a lot of you watching are not super into the old folks jokes.
00:03:36But the truth of the matter is that we are all moving out in years.
00:03:40Time is linear after all.
00:03:41And I will be doing more topics on that for sure.
00:03:43It's something I've thought an awful lot about.
00:03:45But the second most requested topic is what I'm going to be talking about here today, which
00:03:52is how can I engage in a different and more joyful way with my career and my work?
00:03:57Specifically, people have asked again and again for me to talk about burnout, the topic of
00:04:01burnout.
00:04:02Something that I've studied a lot over the years and teaching at a business school, I have
00:04:06a lot of colleagues who are doing it as well.
00:04:07Related to that is what I will do in a future episode, maybe even next week's, on workaholism,
00:04:13the addiction to work.
00:04:15So first burnout and then later workaholism, these are two very requested topics.
00:04:19And there's incredibly interesting research on this that's extremely encouraging.
00:04:23If you're suffering from burnout in your job, burnout in your career, burnout in your life,
00:04:28you're not alone.
00:04:28This is a very, very common thing.
00:04:30But it is something that we can actually remedy.
00:04:32With a little bit of information about the science, I promise you, your life can actually
00:04:36get better.
00:04:37And when you go on to different periods of your life, you can actually avoid this pitfall.
00:04:41So that's what we're going to be talking about today.
00:04:44Now, when I talk about burnout, the first thing that I'm interested in, or the first time I
00:04:49looked at it, is that who made that term up, burnout?
00:04:51I mean, I guess it's really descriptive, but obviously somebody had to put it into current
00:04:56parlance.
00:04:57And it turns out that there are two people that you can turn to, to arguably have coined this
00:05:05term.
00:05:06The first, believe it or not, is Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian existentialist novelist
00:05:11from the late 19th century.
00:05:12And his most famous novel, his greatest novel, maybe the greatest novel that's ever been written.
00:05:15And as a matter of fact, and if you want to learn more about psychology and the human
00:05:19psyche, you got to read this book.
00:05:21If you haven't read it yet, the Brothers Karamazov, AKA the Brothers K.
00:05:24And in Brothers Karamazov, there are three Brothers Karamazov that are grappling with their relationship with each other and with their father, who's a drunk and a pretty bad guy.
00:05:43Now, the Brothers all have different personalities.
00:05:46The youngest of the Brothers is Alyosha, who's a saintly, gentle figure.
00:05:51He's sort of the good guy of this.
00:05:53And originally, Dostoevsky was going to write three different novels for each of the three brothers.
00:05:58He only made it through the first one before he died.
00:06:00And this is the one that really focuses on Alyosha's life.
00:06:03As the very early part, Alyosha is trying to figure out how he can serve humanity better.
00:06:09And he wants to join a monastery and become a Russian Christian Orthodox monk.
00:06:14So he goes to his father and asks for permission.
00:06:17And his cynical, half-drunk father, he says, fine.
00:06:21But he makes a prediction about what's going to happen to Alyosha.
00:06:25He says, quote, you will burn and you will burn out.
00:06:30And that's where it entered the parlance in Russian, actually translated into English, which is this metaphor for flaming out.
00:06:37Now, a century after that novel's appearance, this was in 1880 that the Brothers Karamazov was published.
00:06:44Social scientists came up with a different definition.
00:06:48It was actually in 1974.
00:06:50A German-American psychologist by the name of Herbert Freudenberger, he supplied a definition of the noun burnout, which people are certainly using, but he actually defined it for the first time.
00:07:01He called it the state of being exhausted by making extreme demands on energy, strength, or resources from one's job, which could cause one to become ineffective in achieving the intents and purposes.
00:07:13In other words, you're pedaling faster and faster and faster on your bike, but your bike is going slower and slower and slower.
00:07:18That's the process of actually burning out.
00:07:20That's more or less how he talked about it.
00:07:22Now, what do we know?
00:07:24We know that the phenomenon is not a myth.
00:07:27It's really, really common in the literature.
00:07:30You can find it in places all around the world.
00:07:32One of the most interesting studies on this that's pretty recent from 2024 actually comes from the UK.
00:07:38There's no reason to think that this would differ in any meaningful way from American data that show that 63% of employees, of professionals, show at least one sign of burnout.
00:07:49And that's up 51% from 2021.
00:07:51So from the early parts of the coronavirus epidemic to the direct aftermath, there's a pretty big increase from about half the population to almost two thirds of the population that are showing some signs of burning out.
00:08:03It seems to have had something to do with the COVID pandemic.
00:08:06And I'm going to come back to this because there's a direct link for most people between burnout and remote work.
00:08:12Now, this is going to be counterintuitive, what I'm going to tell you, because most people think, look, if I could actually just go to remote work and set my hours and do more hybrid, then I would burn out a little bit less.
00:08:21But that's not always how your brain works.
00:08:23The neuropsychology actually is pretty counterintuitive in many, many cases.
00:08:28But you know, if you're a follower of the show, that you'll be rejuvenated almost always if you have more contact with people in real life.
00:08:36That's one of the ways that your brain works best is when you have direct eye contact and even physical contact with other members of the human species.
00:08:44Now, it has to be people that you like to be sure.
00:08:47But there's a production of neurochemicals like oxytocin, for example, when you're with your friends that you just don't get when you're isolated.
00:08:54Loneliness is unbelievably taxing and leads to burnout.
00:08:57Now, I don't want to get ahead here.
00:08:59I'm going to come back to this in a minute, but it's not a big coincidence that as we went from one kind of working to another kind of working on a mass scale, that burnout actually increased in ways that might be counterintuitive.
00:09:13According to the Harvard Business Review in 2021, in early parts of the coronavirus epidemic, 89% of their survey, this is at HBR, said that their work life was getting worse during the pandemic.
00:09:25Okay. So once again, this is when people were isolated from each other, more than three in five.
00:09:30So 60% admitted struggling to manage their workloads and said they experienced burnout often or extremely often in the previous three months.
00:09:38I'll put that into the, into the notes.
00:09:40This is an HBR article from 2021 on, on burnout.
00:09:44What's the definition that we're going to be working with?
00:09:46Yeah.
00:09:47There's the bicycle metaphor, but basically what I'm going to be talking about is when you're feeling like a desiccated husk of a human being and everything feels like an insurmountable task.
00:09:56Despite the fact that at one point you were really good at your job.
00:09:59Where ordinary work is extraordinarily hard.
00:10:03It's hard to see how you can ever make things better.
00:10:05You just want to give up, quit, run away.
00:10:08You're fantasizing about just walking off the job.
00:10:11I will not be seeing you Monday.
00:10:13You don't have to live this way is the main point that I'm going to get to.
00:10:17Spoiler alert in this episode.
00:10:19You don't have to be overwhelmed.
00:10:20You can actually solve burnout.
00:10:22This is not a permanent state of affairs.
00:10:24Um, if you understand how burnout cycles work and how your brain works, you can actually reverse it.
00:10:30And the changes aren't actually that hard.
00:10:32And so that's really, really good news, but you have to take control like everything else.
00:10:36If you want to make something better in your life, you need to understand it.
00:10:39I recommend understanding it scientifically.
00:10:41You need to make some habits, some changes in your behavior, and that requires some commitment.
00:10:46And it's even better if you understand it well enough to explain to other people, which is why teachers are the ones who get the greatest benefit from that which they teach.
00:10:53So that's what I'm going to ask you to do today in the case of burnout.
00:10:57Let's talk a little bit about the, about, you know, how it feels when you're burning out just from day to day.
00:11:03And, and I'll do this kind of from personal experience.
00:11:05You know, I've done a lot of different things in my career.
00:11:07For those of you who know a little bit about my professional background, because you've been watching the show.
00:11:11You know that the first 12 years of my career is a classical musician from 19 to 31 as a professional French horn player.
00:11:17And then I, you know, gave up music when I, when I went to graduate school, I finished my bachelor's degree when I was 30.
00:11:22When I was 31, I left music and I started my PhD.
00:11:25I studied, finished my PhD, be a behavioral scientist.
00:11:27And so, and then for a decade, I was a professor.
00:11:30And then for 11 years after that, I was a CEO of a big nonprofit organization, a big think tank in Washington, DC.
00:11:36That was before I'm doing what I'm doing now, which is writing, speaking, and teaching about happiness, about, which makes me blissfully happy.
00:11:44But the job before this, when I was a CEO, I was an executive.
00:11:48Um, I never worked less than 80 hours a week.
00:11:50I was on the road 50% of the time.
00:11:53It was a great job.
00:11:54I truly believed in the mission of the organization.
00:11:56I was an enthusiast for it, but I was burning out by the end of 10 years.
00:12:00I served as the president for 10 years and six months.
00:12:04And by about the ninth year, I was in serious stages of burnout, but I didn't know it.
00:12:11I mean, I kinda knew I'm a behavioral scientist.
00:12:13After all, I know how to read the literature, but I was paying attention to all my employees' lives.
00:12:18I was paying attention to what I was trying to do with my business.
00:12:20And I wasn't paying attention to the ultimate enterprise that mattered for my effectiveness, which was the enterprise of my own life, love, and career.
00:12:29And the result of it is that in retrospect, I was exhibiting all of the classic signs of burnout.
00:12:35There are three, according to psychologists, emotional exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization.
00:12:42I'll explain this in a second.
00:12:43And a negative view of personal effectiveness.
00:12:46So what's emotional exhaustion where you say you wake up in the morning and you're already tired and you don't know why.
00:12:52It's like, it's not like I'm sleeping less than I used to.
00:12:54I mean, I've never been a good sleeper.
00:12:55I'm a crummy sleeper, but, but six and a half hours was rejuvenating for me.
00:13:00And then it wasn't, it's just weird that you can rest and you don't feel rested.
00:13:04And so even at the beginning of a day, you start thinking like, I can't face it.
00:13:09You know, I love it.
00:13:10I believe in it, but I just can't face it.
00:13:12I can't face it.
00:13:13That's a, that's a sign of emotional exhaustion.
00:13:15And for sure.
00:13:17I was feeling that I was feeling that I would come back from a vacation with my family and I would feel tired as I was coming back from the vacation.
00:13:25Every time I thought about actually going back to work, despite the fact that I really believed in my organization.
00:13:30The second was cynicism or depersonalization where you start to see yourself from the outside and in a distorted way.
00:13:38I would say, you know, I don't feel like people there like me.
00:13:41I don't feel, I don't feel well liked.
00:13:42I don't feel, it's not just unappreciated for Pete's sake.
00:13:45I mean, I'm not just a baby about it.
00:13:47I just don't feel like they like me is the whole thing, which is weird because in retrospect, you know, I was very well liked.
00:13:52I mean, I was just a person that I am.
00:13:53I was doing the best that I could for the organization.
00:13:55I mean, not everybody liked me, but, but in general, it was going really well with respect to the personalities.
00:14:01But I, as, as, as time went on, I was really burning out.
00:14:05I couldn't see that every little thing made me feel awkward and uncomfortable.
00:14:10And last but not least was this negative view of personal effectiveness.
00:14:13I started feeling like that wasn't doing a good job.
00:14:16And, and that, that was weird too, because if you looked at the numbers, we would say we had to raise money from philanthropy.
00:14:21It's how we supported this nonprofit organization.
00:14:23And the numbers were going up and up and up and up and up.
00:14:25We had no trouble hiring people.
00:14:27You know, we would have a hundred applicants for every person that we hired and we hired the very best people in Washington, DC.
00:14:34And we had lots of access to policymakers.
00:14:36And by all the metrics that I was keeping on the dashboard on my computer, it was, I felt like I'm just.
00:14:42I kind of, I've lost my edge, man.
00:14:44I've just lost my edge.
00:14:45And those are the classic signs where you're exhausted emotionally.
00:14:50You're cynical about what's actually going on.
00:14:53And, and, and, and, and you're negative about your own performance in the face of all the evidence that might be to the contrary.
00:15:01And sure enough, I was feeling that.
00:15:03And, and, and in retrospect, I see that that was the classic signs of burnout.
00:15:07Had I stayed in that job, what I would have needed to do is to take a little time off.
00:15:10Quite frankly, I would, I, what I would have done is in retrospect, ask for a sabbatical of a month or two, gone away.
00:15:17And I'll tell you some things I would have done when I went away, but we got away for that.
00:15:21And that's going to come a little bit later in the episode, because I'm going to talk about how to treat burnout if you actually have it.
00:15:26Okay.
00:15:26So there, but for the grace of God, go I, I'm going to give you a bunch of advice on this, but even I was mistaken in not seeing this in a, in a previous incarnation of my career.
00:15:37When you're burned out, you feel, um, a weird, weariness about not being able to face your work demands, even though you can absolutely do your job.
00:15:46You're good at your job, but you just can't face it.
00:15:49It's like, I can't face that thing anymore.
00:15:51Um, you lose enthusiasm for your work, for doing your work in a high quality way.
00:15:56You lose confidence in your ability and your competence.
00:16:01Now, before I continue, um, you might be asking yourself, do I fit these criteria?
00:16:07Am I actually in burnout?
00:16:09And it took me years of retrospect to figure out that I was, I could have actually used a survey for doing so.
00:16:15So I've actually looked for a couple of good ones and I'm going to put one in the description below actually comes from psychology today.
00:16:20That's a pretty nice survey that will help you understand if you're burning out on your job.
00:16:24So, you know, look in the, in the show notes and you'll actually find a click on it.
00:16:27It's not dispositive.
00:16:28It's not perfect, but it'll give you a good concept of whether or not this is the case in your life.
00:16:33Now, what's actually happening physiologically.
00:16:35I like to talk about the neurobiology of how this works.
00:16:38When you're in burnout, there's actually telltale signs, um, in generally in the adrenal system.
00:16:44So there's dysfunction in your adrenal system, your adrenal glands sit above your kidneys.
00:16:49They, they produce stress hormones, classically cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine.
00:16:54Epinephrine, AKA adrenaline is a fight or flight chemical.
00:16:57That's what gives you butterflies and makes it possible when you hear a twig snap behind you to go run and climb a tree.
00:17:04So a saber-toothed tiger doesn't catch you and eat you.
00:17:06Cortisol is a, is a slower hormone that's produced after time.
00:17:13Usually the it'll kick in after more like 20 minutes after something happens to keep you in a more continuous state of alert.
00:17:19When you need to be alert about something, cause there is danger, cause there is threat.
00:17:22You have cortisol in your system to suppress other things, to suppress digestion, to suppress your immune system.
00:17:29So that all of your energy alertness, all of, um, you know, um, your sort of your life force can be, can be oriented, can be directed towards staying alive right now, which makes perfect sense.
00:17:41That's what it's good at.
00:17:42The trouble is that when it's chronically elevated, you'll be chronically suppressing these other things that you need for your health and wellbeing.
00:17:48And that's one of the reasons that people actually talk about chronic stress.
00:17:51Not surprisingly, burnout implicates your adrenal systems in all sorts of ways.
00:17:57To begin with, it gives you a chronically high overproduction of cortisol.
00:18:02This third, um, stress hormone from the cortex of your adrenal glands that keeps you in sort of the, the, the low grade state of alert.
00:18:11I'll put, uh, a nice article in this, in the, in the show notes that actually comes from the psychological bulletin entitled,
00:18:18"Burnout and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease Evidence: Possible Causal Paths and Promising Research Directions" that shows that there's a lot of disease that can come from that, uh, more in a second.
00:18:28But it comes from this permanently or, or chronically elevated state of cortisol production.
00:18:33Because of that effect, sustained burnout does all the sorts of things that you always hear about when your cortisol is elevated, when your stress is too much.
00:18:41When you're living with stress for a long period of time, you get systemic inflammation.
00:18:45Uh, inflammation is implicated in all sorts of problems from diseases like arthritis to, um, early onset dementia.
00:18:54Uh, immunosuppression, meaning you can get, you get sick when you've been super stressed out for a long time.
00:19:00You might notice you get cold after cold after cold.
00:19:03Metabolic syndrome, meaning that you're, you know, the metabolism of calories doesn't, goes haywire, doesn't work right.
00:19:08You might find that you put on tons of weight, even though you don't feel like you're eating very much or you're exercising as much as you once did.
00:19:13Because metabolically you're not working at an efficient rate.
00:19:16You're, you're, you know, the way that you process glucose isn't going to be right, et cetera.
00:19:20I've talked about these mechanisms, um, biologically in, in previous episodes.
00:19:25Their cardiovascular health will be problematic.
00:19:28Um, as I just mentioned in the article that I just cited and, and believe it or not, premature death, people who are super stressed out, they just don't live as long.
00:19:35And, and that might because be, because they're burned down their jobs, but other things as well.
00:19:39It's one of the reasons that people who have really unhappy, tense marriages, they tend to die young is because they have elevated levels of stress hormones, which is why you need to deal with your problems and not be living with a person who completely freaks you out and stresses you out all the time.
00:19:54I'll put an article on this on called a prospective study, the association between obesity and burnout among apparently healthy men and women, which is really on this metabolic syndrome.
00:20:05Um, which shows very clearly when you're burned out of your job, you tend to gain weight and it's really, really hard for you to lose weight.
00:20:11Okay.
00:20:12So what causes it, what causes this, you know, these feelings of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, depersonalization, negative view of self and inability to get up and go when you, things that used to be easy, feel hard.
00:20:26Things that used to feel hard, feel impossible.
00:20:29You're exhausted at the beginning of the day instead of the end of the day, what causes it?
00:20:33And that's what we really want to look at.
00:20:34If this is you, what are the reasons?
00:20:37A very interesting, very nice article from the Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health from 2022.
00:20:44Spanish researchers were able to identify the seven big causes at work of burnout this and, and, and many of these are overlapping.
00:20:53So you don't just have to pick one.
00:20:54This is not a mutually exclusive list.
00:20:56You can have all of them.
00:20:57Um, lucky you.
00:20:58Um, but the seven big sources are, are number one, what they call work overload.
00:21:03And that's just basically crushing demand.
00:21:06So work overload is different than, than working super long hours.
00:21:10So work overload is that you're just trying to carry too much stuff.
00:21:13The, the demands on you are simply too high.
00:21:16That's kind of a cognitive load.
00:21:17I got to do this and this and this and this and this.
00:21:19I can't even figure out what to put on my to do list.
00:21:21There's actually so much.
00:21:23That's really what that refers to.
00:21:24And you all know how that feels.
00:21:25I bet everybody watching me knows has times in their life.
00:21:28Burnout happens when that's chronically the case.
00:21:30That's number one.
00:21:31Number two is what they call emotional labor.
00:21:34When it's just emotionally hard to be, um, in the workplace.
00:21:38The main reason for this is HR problems.
00:21:40Actually, the main reason for this is that you have, um, human interaction issues.
00:21:46You have, you have colleagues that are difficult to deal with.
00:21:50You're managing employees who are obstreperous.
00:21:52You have a really, really horrible boss.
00:21:54Whatever happens to be.
00:21:55It's human relations problems that you're having at work.
00:21:58That's what, that's what creates a lot of emotional labor and no joke, man.
00:22:01You can have the best job in the world.
00:22:03But if you don't get along with your boss, you can get, don't get along with your colleagues.
00:22:06You're going to burn out.
00:22:07So sure as I'm talking to you here, you're going to be, you're going to be burning out.
00:22:10That is so unbelievably stressful because people live in society.
00:22:13I mean, there's even a non-human studies on, on, on chimpanzees and, and, and gorillas and, and troops of monkeys and baboons.
00:22:24That shows that they get chronically high stress levels when there's a lot of conflict inside their troop, inside their social living situation.
00:22:33And they die young.
00:22:34They exhibit all of the burnout signs actually that are happening just because people don't get along in their troop.
00:22:39You need harmony in your human relations to not burn out.
00:22:43That's number two.
00:22:44Number three is a, is what they call a lack of autonomy.
00:22:46And that's really control over your work situation.
00:22:50Um, if you go back, I think the second episode of this, of this podcast that I, that I, I recorded, or it's, it's one of the first five that I, I, I recorded was happiness at work.
00:23:00And this comes from the, from the, uh, I'll put it in the, in the notes here, or we'll have a link to that episode.
00:23:06That irrational capital or research from a wall street did this work that talked about the things that you can do to make a happier workplace if you're a boss.
00:23:14And one of the clear ones is giving people more of a sense, a sense of autonomy and control when people feel like they're in control of certain aspects of the workplace and their work day, et cetera, et cetera.
00:23:23It is so important because when you don't have control, when your work day and everything that you do is in the hands of another person that, that raises stress, raises cortisol, raises the likelihood of burnout.
00:23:36Number four is ambiguity or conflict about your role.
00:23:40You don't know what you're supposed to do.
00:23:43It's not clear what you're supposed to do.
00:23:46Um, when people don't have clarity, they, they, they don't have control.
00:23:49And, and, you know, there were times that I was a CEO that I had to learn this the hard way where, you know, I would do something like, I'm going to bring in this unbelievably talented person.
00:23:57I met somebody in a job someplace and.
00:24:00They were so great.
00:24:01And, and I wouldn't really have a job for them.
00:24:03I would say, just come work for me.
00:24:05And, and it'll be so great.
00:24:07Why?
00:24:07Because I just have a sense that you're so good.
00:24:09I want you to kind of create your own job.
00:24:11that turned out to almost always be a mistake because it would feel like they're sort of set up for failure because they don't know what they're supposed to do.
00:24:18So there's no metrics for their success.
00:24:20For most people.
00:24:21That actually looks like maximum control, but it's actually minimum control for them because of the lack of autonomy, because of the ambiguity, because of the conflict about their role.
00:24:32Now, for some people, it's great for me.
00:24:34It's great.
00:24:35I mean, I always want to create my own job.
00:24:36I want to do my own thing for sure.
00:24:38I mean, I'm a, I'm an academic.
00:24:40Um, if I wanted a boss, I wouldn't be an academic because I like to be in creative control of what I do for sure.
00:24:47But most people don't want that kind of ambiguity.
00:24:50And the result is that, that, that living in ambiguity actually makes it feel like their job is never defined and their job is never done.
00:24:57And that leads to burnout.
00:24:58If you're like me, you got to be drinking when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that will actually give your electrolytes and all the good stuff.
00:25:07For me, that's Element.
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00:25:24I like it.
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00:25:32Anyone who sweats.
00:25:33So, how do I use it?
00:25:34I use it in the morning, 4:45 in the morning.
00:25:37I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later.
00:25:43Element is just the ticket that I need.
00:25:46Give it a try yourself.
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00:26:02There's an old saying, often attributed to the Dalai Lama himself, that sleep is the best medicine.
00:26:09The older I get and the more I study human happiness, and if I'm being honest, the worse my own sleep tends to get with age, the more I know that he was exactly right.
00:26:19Here's what the science actually shows.
00:26:21Poor sleep doesn't just make you tired, it can actually make you less happy.
00:26:26You can't build a meaningful life on frequent, chronic, broken sleep.
00:26:31So, I take my sleep seriously.
00:26:34One of the best investments I've made in this area is my Helix mattress.
00:26:38What I like about Helix is that they recognize something obvious, but important.
00:26:43Different people sleep differently.
00:26:45Their website has a short quiz that asks about your sleep position, firmness preferences, and other sleep habits.
00:26:52Then they match you with one of more than 20 mattress models designed around your specific needs.
00:26:57Once that choice is made, the mattress ships directly to your door.
00:27:00It's a simple idea, but it's surprisingly rare.
00:27:03Start with the person, not the product.
00:27:06If you're serious about improving your sleep and your happiness, visit helixsleep.com/brooks for 20% off site-wide and additional offers.
00:27:18Invest in your sleep.
00:27:20Everything else works better when you do.
00:27:22The next one, number five, is inadequate supervision.
00:27:25And that's sort of the bad boss effect.
00:27:27So, bad supervision or inadequate supervision, where the job demands are changing all the time or the boss is arbitrary and capricious.
00:27:35So, the boss is really, really absent and then comes in and, you know, barks orders down the hall.
00:27:40And no, it's just not good.
00:27:42So, bad bossing is number five.
00:27:45Number six is a lack of social support.
00:27:48And this is really important.
00:27:49You know, Gallup has done all this cool polling that shows that number one predictor of you staying in a job is having a best friend at the job.
00:27:57It's so important to have friends at work, it turns out.
00:28:00And being lonely at work is the worst.
00:28:02It's almost as bad as actually not getting along with your colleagues.
00:28:05So, 55% of people in America today say they wouldn't leave their job for a better paying job because it would mean leaving their friends.
00:28:12And they want to be with their friends, having a lack of social support, inadequate social support, no social support is unbelievably stressful for most people and actually leads to burnout.
00:28:24Now, why is this important?
00:28:25Because if you're running a company and you're in a position of authority, create the conditions where they can love each other or at least like each other, where they can collaborate and have fun with each other.
00:28:36You know, I used to think we all have to get along and have a good time.
00:28:39But I also realized later on that looking at time use studies that people actually don't like hanging out with their boss.
00:28:44They like hanging out with each other if they like each other, but they don't like it when the boss is there.
00:28:48As a matter of fact, that's one of the things that the lowers quality of life for most employees is spending time with their boss.
00:28:54Not that their boss is a jerk, but because people don't like being bossed and evaluated even in their relaxed moments.
00:29:00And so I had to, I had to recognize that one of my jobs as a, as a CEO was creating a great workplace for people wanting to work together and then get the heck out of the way, which was important.
00:29:10And number seven for burnout.
00:29:11And this is one of the really big ones that I'll talk about in a minute is that people burn out when their working hours impinge on their personal life.
00:29:18And that happens when the hours are just too insane or people are, are expected to be on all the time.
00:29:25So all hours of day and night, um, that you're on.
00:29:28So, you know, you're hanging out with your friends and your phone beep and it's your boss.
00:29:32And okay, I got to go do this thing.
00:29:33I got to go send this file.
00:29:35Sorry, I got to go home.
00:29:36I got to work on this PowerPoint presentation.
00:29:38Ah, honey, I know I wanted to watch.
00:29:40Whatever, you know, Mrs. B and I are, we're in, I'm recording this, um, right now.
00:29:45And, um, as cycling season has started and she, my wife's a huge cycling enthusiast and we watch races, cycling races at the end of the day.
00:29:53And, and, and, you know, when I'm actually, I don't have good boundaries between my, my work life and my non-work life.
00:29:58The phone will go off and I'll look at it and I'll say, I got to go send an email and it's not great.
00:30:03Then if I let it happen too much, it'll actually learn to lean to burnout in my life and in your life as well.
00:30:07So those are the big seven work overload, emotional labor, a lack of control, ambiguity about your job, inadequate supervision.
00:30:14A lack of social connections and, and work that impinges on your personal life.
00:30:19Those are the big seven, right?
00:30:21Now, once again, you might have multiples, but think about your own life.
00:30:24Which one do you suffer from?
00:30:26Certain workplaces and industries are more liable to burnout than others.
00:30:30And, and, and this is a point that I really wanted to make.
00:30:32It's a really interesting point.
00:30:33As far as I'm concerned, there is almost no burnout, very little burnout in blue collar professions.
00:30:39You almost never see the signs of it.
00:30:41And people almost never complain about it in blue collar jobs, in manufacturing and utilities and construction.
00:30:47And I mean, I've read about this, but then I've seen it too, because I, you know, I have a son who's been involved in a lot of manual labor and skills and, and, and trades.
00:30:57You know, my son was a, was a, um, an infantryman in the Marine Corps, then did mortars.
00:31:02And finally it was a sniper in the Marine Corps.
00:31:04And then when he came out of the scout sniper platoon in the Marine Corps, he went into construction.
00:31:08He was working in construction.
00:31:09Now, now he was a supervisor, but it wasn't an office job.
00:31:13He was on site pushing jobs all the time.
00:31:16And it was a lot.
00:31:17He worked super long hours, but he never exhibited any of the signs of burnout that I actually see from people working a fraction of the hours, but in, in service jobs and white collar jobs.
00:31:27Most burnout occurs in white collar jobs.
00:31:29And I dare say that most people who are watching me, but not all are in a lot of these white collar service jobs.
00:31:35And you're probably not working 16 hours a day.
00:31:37I hope you're not, but you might be exhibiting burnout despite the fact that you're not, you're not coming home and saying, oh, my feet hurt so much.
00:31:45The problem is that white collar jobs have all of the characters, many of the characteristics that I talked about in that list of that Spanish study of the big seven.
00:31:54And they have one more thing that's critical.
00:31:57When you look at the literature that was not in that list, but I have to talk about that leads to tons of burnout.
00:32:04Here it is meetings.
00:32:06Meetings will burn you out virtually.
00:32:09Everybody hates meetings.
00:32:11Um, people holding meetings, hate them.
00:32:13People in them, hate them.
00:32:14Usually it's a small minority of people who actually like meetings.
00:32:16And those are the people who are dominating meetings.
00:32:18People who are following Sullivan's law that, that a meeting will expand to use the time, which it's allotted.
00:32:25You know, I, I've been in academia for, you know, in and out of academia for the past 30 years.
00:32:30And faculty meetings always work the same way for the person, the department chair, the dean, or somebody says, well, okay.
00:32:35So, you know, we have 90 minutes for this meeting.
00:32:37I bet we can finish up in 30 minutes.
00:32:39Cause it's a pretty limited agenda.
00:32:41No, no, no, no, no.
00:32:42It's gonna take 90 minutes because you get to the end of 30 minutes.
00:32:45You've done the business at hand.
00:32:46And then the dean of the department chair says, you know, anybody else have anything on their mind?
00:32:51And the same three or four people put their hands up and pretty, pretty soon is 90 minutes.
00:32:56And everybody else has stuff to do and places to go and deadlines and a personal life.
00:33:03And, and that leads to a ton of burnout.
00:33:06Uh, that's called meeting fatigue and it's no joke, a real thing.
00:33:10I've, I've actually written about it.
00:33:12I'll put one of my columns about meeting fatigue and the research that the neurocognitive effect of meetings into the show notes.
00:33:19People joke about it, but it's actually no joke.
00:33:21You know, the best meeting is, is one that gets canceled.
00:33:23Quite frankly, the occupations that typically suffer the worst burnout rates are the ones that function as meeting factories, inefficient places that have people in meetings that don't need to be there in meetings that actually last too long.
00:33:34If there's one thing that you can do as boss, it's have fewer meetings and you will actually help a lot along the lines of what we're talking about in many other ways as well.
00:33:43Here's an interesting finding from the literature.
00:33:45People go from enthusiastic to burned out.
00:33:49One of the key characteristics is something about their job that they used to like.
00:33:52Now they don't like.
00:33:53So it's not like they went from neutral to unhappy about something or from happy to neutral.
00:33:58No, they go from, I love doing this thing to I don't like doing this thing.
00:34:02And we know this from a pretty interesting 2016 article from the Journal of Psychology, which is an apex journal in psychology that looked at employees who were engaged and not burnt out and those who were burnt out colleagues.
00:34:15And it turns out that their burnt out colleagues used to like the same things that the non burned out people currently like.
00:34:21They just stop liking them.
00:34:23So this is a characteristic that I want you to be paying attention to.
00:34:25Is there a part of your job that you used to think was fun and interesting and now it's a grind that in and of itself is not just because you got tired of it.
00:34:32That is actually a pretty clear sign that you burned out per se, which means that you're having these adrenal loads and a lot of the physiological and psychological things that we're talking about here.
00:34:42It's not just like I got bored maybe, but look out that's red flag.
00:34:48As always, what do we do in the show?
00:34:50I give you advice on what to do.
00:34:52So I hope that you're pretty well versed on recognizing burnout, understanding the prevalence of burnout, understanding the where it came from, how you can see it in other people, all that stuff.
00:35:03But what you're really want to know is what do you do about it?
00:35:06I'm going to give you two pieces of advice.
00:35:07Number one is if you're supervising people, if you're a boss, what can you do to avoid it?
00:35:12And trust me, you want to avoid it.
00:35:15You want to avoid burnout because burnout will wipe out your organization and make it really, really ineffective.
00:35:21And when people are unhappy, they don't do a good job.
00:35:23And then I want to talk about what you can do if you are burning out.
00:35:26Okay, so I'm going to give you both sides of this thing.
00:35:28Let's first start with employers.
00:35:30Now, who are the employers who miss this the most?
00:35:33Who are the employers who are most likely to burn out their employees?
00:35:36It's not the biggest jerks.
00:35:38It's not the people who are, you know, barking out orders and insulting in people and being abusive.
00:35:44It's actually not.
00:35:45It's what we call the pace-setting leaders.
00:35:48In the literature, this actually comes from the work of Daniel Goleman, who does work on workplaces at Harvard Business School.
00:35:55And Daniel Goleman talks about pace-setting leaders as leaders who think they're really inspirational.
00:36:01Look, I ask people to work long hours, but nobody's going to work longer hours than me because of one for all and all for one.
00:36:07It turns out these people burn out their employees.
00:36:10Many times they burn themselves out too.
00:36:12But pace-setting leaders are the ones who are always on.
00:36:15You know, you send them an email at 4:30 in the morning at 4:35, you get a response.
00:36:19You send them an email at 11:00 PM.
00:36:21They're still on.
00:36:22They're just on all the time.
00:36:24That's weird.
00:36:25Why doesn't the boss have a life?
00:36:27Maybe not.
00:36:28Pace-setting leaders are the worst offenders, even if they're the nicest people.
00:36:32So, fellow employers, are you a pace-setter?
00:36:36Are you inadvertently burning people out?
00:36:38If you think you are, here are the five things I'm going to ask you to do.
00:36:42Number one, don't ask people to sacrifice all their time in their relationships for their job.
00:36:47I know that you are.
00:36:48Just because you are, is not right for you to ask other people to do it.
00:36:52As a matter of fact, you should hope that people are not doing that because they deserve ethically to have good lives.
00:36:58And you want them to be in it in the long haul with you if they're good.
00:37:01Second, let people say what they feel at work within rational limits.
00:37:05It's important that people have a sense of voice and a sense of control.
00:37:09When they don't, it'll bottle up and that bottling up per se will lead to the physiological manifestations of burnout,
00:37:16a.k.a. high adrenal activity, mostly in terms of cortisol.
00:37:19Number three, give employees more control.
00:37:22Let them have more control over what they're doing.
00:37:24This is very strongly associated with, once again, as I mentioned before, workplaces that don't have high levels of burnout.
00:37:31Number four, make sure your employees know what their job is and that they feel supported.
00:37:36That kills a couple of birds with one stone.
00:37:38Getting back to the study I mentioned a minute ago about the sources of burnout.
00:37:42And last but not least, get rid of as many meetings as possible.
00:37:45Meetings, meetings.
00:37:46And again, I know this is like my bugbear and I'm, you know, harping on it like crazy, but it's really important.
00:37:51Kill the meetings, kill the meetings, kill the meetings, watch, morale, grow.
00:37:55I mean, maybe you need some, but only at the base level.
00:37:58I'll do a whole show on meetings so you know actually how to do this.
00:38:01Now, more challenging to put into practice is what you can actually do if you're, if you're burning out, because if it were easy, you would have avoided it already.
00:38:09So what do you do?
00:38:10Here's the big idea.
00:38:11You need more space between the part of your life that's your work and the part of your life that's not your work.
00:38:19Now, once again, I'm not talking about work-life balance because I think work-life balance is largely nonsense.
00:38:23It suggests that your work is not part of your life.
00:38:26And so there's work and there's life.
00:38:28No, you don't need to balance work and life.
00:38:30You need work-life integration where your work makes your non-work better and your non-work makes your work better.
00:38:37And to do that, you actually need both, which means that you need space between them.
00:38:42You need to actually be not working when you're not working.
00:38:45This is the critical idea.
00:38:46And so I want to tell you about ways to actually do that, which is hard.
00:38:50If you're a workaholic, if you're a success addicted individual, and I'm looking in the mirror here, it's hard to do to get work-life integration because it just turns into work, work, work, work, work.
00:39:02The reason you may be burning out is not because you've got a jerk boss.
00:39:06It may be because that you're a boss to yourself and you're an unrelenting, unforgiving type to yourself.
00:39:12You may be the culprit here.
00:39:14So I'm not suggesting that you need to stick it to the boss.
00:39:18It may be that you need to stick it to yourself.
00:39:21How do you get more work-life integration?
00:39:24Number one is you actually need to take seriously and algorithmically and specifically the balance that you're trying to achieve in your hours.
00:39:34Again, I said balance.
00:39:35What I really mean is integration, but here's how we do it.
00:39:38Is work within your defined hours for work.
00:39:41I periodically had to do this where my work sprawled into all hours of the day and I've had to cut it back.
00:39:47So I'm specifically not doing work during certain hours, which enriches my relationships, but also refreshes me a lot more.
00:39:53Especially with the spread of mobile technologies, it's very easy for your work to creep into every nook and cranny, like a colorless, odorless gas.
00:40:01It's horrible for you.
00:40:02And what that means is actually having boundaries and putting down your devices, locking up your devices.
00:40:08At very least, as much of the first hour of the day as you possibly can, always the last hour of the day.
00:40:14This gets to the protocols episodes that I've done in the past, always during meals.
00:40:19But I actually recommend having these boundaries where you say, look, if I'm going to work on the weekends, it's going to be a total of four hours on the weekend.
00:40:25For example, two hours on Saturday, two hours on Sunday, four hours on Sunday afternoon, four hours on Saturday afternoon, depending on what kind of Sabbath you keep, if you like to keep Sabbath.
00:40:34But, but not all day.
00:40:36I mean, you, you, you need to actually make decisions not to work.
00:40:40You know, some people, probably nobody watching this podcast have to tell them to make the decision to work.
00:40:45Most of you have to make the decision to not work and to circumscribe it very specifically across hours is a good, is a good first practice.
00:40:52Second is especially not even to check in or to, to, to get reminders of work.
00:40:58So work.
00:40:59One thing is like, you know, working on a report and putting together a PowerPoint.
00:41:02I'm making calls to clients, whatever it happens to be.
00:41:04But really what a lot of people don't consider to be work is checking their texts and emails.
00:41:08And so this is number two is setting times when you resolve not to write or check work, email or text messages, any communications as well.
00:41:16Now that might just be in the first category.
00:41:18You might say that's just work, but, but for most people that isn't work, that's just, you know, keeping up to date is what it comes down to.
00:41:24But, but specifically not communicating about it is a really, really healthy thing to do.
00:41:30Um, and it's a, it's a, it's a really good practice.
00:41:32The breaks where you're actually not on any electronic communications at all.
00:41:36As a matter of fact, that's a little Sabbath.
00:41:39And if you Sabbath keep, you, you know, how refreshing that can actually be.
00:41:43You know, I have colleagues and I have friends where I know I'm not going to be able to text them between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday.
00:41:50I just not going to be able to do that because they're, they're serious about practicing their, their Jewish faith.
00:41:55I know other people who are pretty serious about Sabbath keeping on Sundays because they're, they're Christians, but they also know how good it is for them.
00:42:02Meaning I'm not going to get an answer to my emails on Sundays.
00:42:05If I send them an email, if that's what you do, that's great.
00:42:07But if, even if you don't do that, then the four hours that you decide not to do that at the end of the day, or, you know, certain parts of the weekend, no electronic communications feels like a, like a little Sabbath.
00:42:18Um, third, uh, speaking of that is, is developing more of a metaphysical life.
00:42:24When I was super burned out in 2019 and I stepped down as president of the think tank in Washington, DC, um, I did what people have done for thousands of years.
00:42:34Um, religious people, I'm a traditionally religious person.
00:42:37I'm a Catholic, very important part of my life.
00:42:39Most important part of my life.
00:42:40Um, and, and what I decided to do is I decided to go walk the Camino, which is the Camino de Santiago.
00:42:46I've talked about it multiple occasions on this podcast, which is, you know, hundreds of miles across Northern Spain, just walking, walking, walking.
00:42:53That's your only job.
00:42:54It's unbelievably rejuvenating.
00:42:56Ambulation is the quintessential human exercise.
00:43:01It's ergonomically so sound.
00:43:04Almost everybody can walk.
00:43:05Not everybody, but almost everybody actually can.
00:43:07And, and doing so when you're doing so without, when you're, when, when you have a spiritual purpose, that's particularly meaningful and rejuvenating for me.
00:43:17That's a spiritual kind of activity.
00:43:20I also, when I left in 2019 is I ramped up my, my commitment to the, not to my faith, but to the practice of my faith.
00:43:27I started praying more earnestly every day.
00:43:29I started praying my rosary more, which is, uh, an ancient Catholic meditation, Catholic prayer, um, that uses prayer beads and, and, and repeated prayer.
00:43:37I started going to mass every day.
00:43:39I've been going to mass almost every day since 2019, as a matter of fact, game changer, game changer for me.
00:43:44And, and again, if that's your thing, that's great.
00:43:46If it's not, there is a thing out there that metaphysically can sustain you in ways.
00:43:51And, and there's a ton of research out there that shows that when people become more spiritually, meditatively, or religiously adroit.
00:43:58And again, that covers a lot of territory, whether you're religious or not is doing something systematic for the transcendence of your spirit.
00:44:07That this is one of the absolute best ways that you can deal with burnout.
00:44:11So those are three ways to do it.
00:44:12Now here's how to not do it.
00:44:14Here's what to not do.
00:44:16A lot of people, when they were burning out, when they've been burning out, they're like, if I can go to remote work, that would be a real solution for me.
00:44:23Maybe, probably not.
00:44:26In a 2022 survey data really coming out of the worst part of the coronavirus epidemic.
00:44:31So that found that 86% of fully remote workers experienced some degree of burnout in their job, which is much higher than the in-person workers before the coronavirus epidemic.
00:44:42There was something about going hybrid and especially going fully remote that was isolating that made the stress hormone production worse with respect to work.
00:44:51It probably had to do with the separation from other people and the loneliness.
00:44:5581% of hybrid workers experienced burnout.
00:44:58And that's much higher than fully in-person workers, it turns out.
00:45:01Now, this finding is consistent with the idea that blue collar jobs, they don't tend to see very much burnout.
00:45:08And white collar jobs tend to see a ton of burnout, despite the fact that blue collar jobs can be crushingly long hours.
00:45:15So it's not about the hours per se.
00:45:17It has to do with the fact that you're out there doing stuff, seeing people, et cetera, et cetera.
00:45:22So moving to remote work is not a solution to burnout for the vast majority of the people, despite the fact that it probably looks good.
00:45:31It sort of makes sense.
00:45:33So I don't have to go in there.
00:45:34I don't have the commute.
00:45:35And I'm so tired of that thing.
00:45:37I'll get a change of pace.
00:45:39Well, I'm not so sure.
00:45:41That's not probably how you should think about it.
00:45:44So the bottom line is basically this is you need to separate work from non-work.
00:45:50Number one is to put your specific work into defined hours.
00:45:53Number two is setting times when you're not in communication.
00:45:56Number three is to work on your spiritual or philosophical life.
00:46:00And number four is not getting into the pattern of thinking that if you step away from your in-person workplace, that that's going to be a panacea.
00:46:07That's actually going to help you.
00:46:08So those are the big ways to actually be dealing with burnout.
00:46:10Okay.
00:46:11I hope this has been really, really helpful.
00:46:12The follow on to this is people who are burning out because they're addicted and that's workaholism and addiction to success and winning.
00:46:21I'm going to leave that for a future episode.
00:46:23Matter of fact, I'm going to record that episode right after that one because I've got these ideas in my bones right now and I want to share them.
00:46:29But you can watch it perhaps even as soon as next week, but certainly in a future episode.
00:46:34And you'll know when it comes out because it will, as always, be announced.
00:46:38Close with a couple of questions here.
00:46:41You're not broken.
00:46:42You're meaning-starved.
00:46:44I talk to people all the time who are, by any external measure, successful.
00:46:49They've built careers.
00:46:50They have families.
00:46:51They've checked the boxes.
00:46:53And yet something feels off.
00:46:55Life feels thin.
00:46:57Like you're going through the motions.
00:46:59Like you're watching yourself from the outside.
00:47:02And here's what I want you to know.
00:47:04That feeling is not a personal failing.
00:47:06It's not ingratitude.
00:47:08It's not something wrong with you.
00:47:10It's a meaning problem.
00:47:12And it's an epidemic.
00:47:14The modern world is extraordinary at giving us comfort, achievement, and distraction.
00:47:19It's terrible at giving us meaning.
00:47:22And no amount of success will fix that.
00:47:25I've seen it in my research, and I've seen it in my own life.
00:47:28That's exactly what we work on at MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, in a program I've developed called The Meaning of Your Life.
00:47:37It's not a lecture.
00:47:38It's not a quick fix.
00:47:39It's several days of real work in a small group on the questions that actually matter.
00:47:45If what I'm describing sounds familiar, I hope you'll come take a look.
00:47:53First question is written in by Claire McMurray, who writes into the website.
00:47:58How do you maximize happiness when you don't have a choice to create your calling because it's been thrust upon you?
00:48:04Claire says that she left academia to be a full-time caregiver to her daughter, who has a rare genetic disorder.
00:48:10That's beautiful, Claire.
00:48:11Thank you for what you're doing for your daughter.
00:48:13But I know it can be really, really hard.
00:48:15It can be hard because when you didn't choose it, even though I know it's probably unbelievably meaningful,
00:48:21it might not be the calling that you love so very much, and you might be grieving the fact that you're not able to do that work.
00:48:26And that'd be really hard for you, hard for your happiness, maybe even hard for your sense of meaning in life.
00:48:32Let's remember that the institutions of meaning are manifold.
00:48:36It's not just about your career calling.
00:48:40I know it's important.
00:48:41I know the vocation, work vocation is critically important to a lot of people, but we tend to overemphasize it in the meaning and the happiness calculus.
00:48:49On the contrary, the happiest people have a diverse set of practices that they follow almost every day, only one of which is actually finding meaning in their work.
00:49:00The first three are faith and family and friendships.
00:49:03So love of the divine, love of your family and love of your friends.
00:49:07And looking for sustenance and meaning and happiness in those three things is really critically important.
00:49:12As a matter of fact, people who are very workaholic, they tend to burn out and not find meaning anymore because they undernourish those first three sources of happiness and meaning.
00:49:22And so for people who are in the in the position of doing something that's really, really, really important, but isn't their work calling is looking more to the non work parts of the meaning and happiness calculus.
00:49:33Largely having to do with faith, spirituality or philosophical life of looking toward family relationships, perhaps besides the one with the person for whom you're the full time caregiver.
00:49:45And friendships is looking to cultivate deeper and deeper friendships.
00:49:49Those are ways to think about it.
00:49:50I know you're highly trained.
00:49:51I know.
00:49:52I know.
00:49:53And it's your dream.
00:49:54And at some point you'll be able to pursue that more.
00:49:55I promise.
00:49:56But in the meantime, it's looking in other directions.
00:49:59Second here, this one comes from Josiah Kennedy.
00:50:02I love optimizing my life and using your protocols.
00:50:05Thank you, Josiah.
00:50:07But as a young university student, I'm finding that building these routines is making me increasingly isolated.
00:50:12Oops.
00:50:13How can I better incorporate leisure and social time?
00:50:15How can I get better at spending time with people?
00:50:17Okay, got it.
00:50:18Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good.
00:50:20I tried to emphasize that in my protocols.
00:50:22My protocols are unbelievably hardcore.
00:50:25But remember, Josiah, I'm not 20.
00:50:28I'm 61 when I'm taping this.
00:50:31My circumstances are different than yours.
00:50:33You need to actually adapt these ideas.
00:50:35This is nothing more than a template for your adaptation to your own particular life.
00:50:41And you shouldn't be neglecting your social life.
00:50:43On the contrary.
00:50:44I can go through my morning protocols starting at 4:30 in the morning and going through all the things that I do.
00:50:50And no small part because my life is organized socially in such a way that I'm doing some of it with other people.
00:50:55You know, I get up.
00:50:56I exercise.
00:50:57I go to Mass with my wife.
00:50:58I come back and have coffee and breakfast with my wife.
00:51:01I'm, you know, working and writing all morning if I'm working at home.
00:51:04And, you know, every 45 minutes or so, I say hello to my family.
00:51:08And, you know, my grandsons come up the stairs when they wake up.
00:51:10And I say, hey, good morning.
00:51:11And have a little wrestling session and a couple of jokes.
00:51:13Then I go back to work.
00:51:14So the truth of the matter is that I have, you know, plenty rich social life.
00:51:19If you're in university, you're going to have to do it in a different way.
00:51:22So don't be rigid.
00:51:24Conform to the things that will actually give you the greatest happiness while sticking to the kinds of protocols that will also protect and maintain your biology as well as you possibly can.
00:51:37Hope that helps.
00:51:38Well, we're done.
00:51:39Let me know your thoughts.
00:51:40Give me all the questions that you want and more suggestions for topics like today's and direct response to your desire to hear more about burnout.
00:51:48And you can do that by writing to officehours@arthurbrooks.com.
00:51:50Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, any place where you get your podcasts.
00:51:55Recommend this to just, you know, a couple million of your close personal friends that will help us out an awful lot.
00:52:01Leave a comment.
00:52:02I promise I'll read them.
00:52:03I like to hear the criticism.
00:52:05I mean, the trolls don't turn me on so much, but but boy, oh, boy, even if it's a negative idea on negative criticism on this, I want to know it.
00:52:13Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms.
00:52:16Get the newsletter and read the book, The Meaning of Your Life.
00:52:18And I hope all of this is being really useful to you because that's why I do it.
00:52:22Thanks for staying with me this week and look forward to seeing you next week.