Grappling with Burnout, with Liz Fosslien

(air whooshes) (computer mouse clicks) (ethereal music) ♪ Headspace Studio ♪ Hi, my name is Liz, your guest host this week, and welcome to "Radio Headspace" and to Thursday. Today, we're going to talk about burnout. I've had burnout, your boss has had it, your coworker has had it, and most likely, if you are living in the modern world, you've had it too. So today, we will discuss what leads us to burnout, how we can actually turn it around, and what we can do to prevent it from happening again. Burnout, I would say, especially when the pandemic hit, began to be this term that everyone threw around to describe so many different states of being, and so in our book, "Big Feelings," Mollie and I returned to the clinical definition of burnout, just because it's really useful to pinpoint what you're feeling, because that helps you better determine what actions you can take to feel better, and so the clinical definition of burnout actually has three dimensions. The first is exhaustion. The second is cynicism or disengagement, so you feel super detached from your job and from the people around you. There's a third component, which is ineffectiveness. This is the feeling that the effort you're putting in is not getting you anywhere. Burnout, again, the clinical definition, is actually you feel all three of these things, but you can feel them individually. It's sort of a shade of burnout. Interestingly, the biggest way that burnout manifests in our lives is initially through these, like, seemingly small signals that we tend to ignore. Examples of these small signals, again, that we tend to ignore. Basic activities feel super overstimulating. So, a couple years ago, I thought I was doing great. I actually felt superhuman because I was working my job, I was seeing all my friends. I just felt like I had everything under control. And then I remember my husband, he walked by my desk and he asked me to send him a Google Calendar invite for this dinner we had coming up, and I burst into tears. I was full-on sobbing at my desk, because just the thought of one more task was totally overwhelming. And another really common one is something called revenge bedtime procrastination. This is you go to bed, you're exhausted, and instead of sleeping, you take out your phone and you get on TikTok, or you start doomscrolling, or whatever your vice is, and that's a clear signal that you're trying to claw back some control, that you probably need to take more mini-breaks throughout the day. That kind of thing. So again, I think these are really the ways that burnout tends to first manifest itself in our lives and our work lives, but we don't pay attention to them enough, and so that's why we're only really conscious of it when we've hit rock bottom. The first thing to do is to get more comfortable living at 80%. So, I would...