Bye, Burnout with Dr. Laurie Santos

Psst. (mouse clicking button) (theme music) Headspace Studios. (whispering) (meditation music begins) Hey everyone. It's Dr. Laurie Santos here, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday. As you know, this week is all about finding ways to be happier. I've done a lot of research on the science of happiness. I even teach a course on the subject at Yale, and one of the big things we talk about, is burnout. It's so prevalent in the workplace right now, and it can potentially ruin your relationship with something you truly love to do. In fact, I'm so serious about it that I decided to take some time off from teaching, just to recharge my batteries. I think we've all experienced burnout at some point. Maybe you're dealing with it right now. And the best thing you can do is nip it in the bud, before it becomes a real problem. So today, I thought it would be good to share some of the warning signs of burnout and to explain how you can manage it, even if it's hard to take time off. Burnout has a very specific clinical presentation that is worth understanding. This is how scientists think about it, and it has these three features. The first feature of burnout is one that we often think about, which is the idea of being physically and emotionally exhausted. But again, this physical exhaustion isn't in the way we think. It's not just that you need a good night's rest. It's that even after a good night's rest, after a good week of rest, after a long vacation, you're still feeling just emotionally drained, like you can't even have the physical energy to go into work. The second part of burnout, though, is interpersonal, and that's what researchers call 'depersonalization.' You just are at an incredibly short fuse when it comes to dealing with other people, and you often interpret their intentions as bad. Someone will ask you for a completely reasonable request and you feel really frustrated with them, really pissed at them. That's this aspect of depersonalization. And the third aspect of burnout is what researchers call, 'a sense of personal ineffectiveness.' You just feel like you're no longer able to do your job well, either because there are structural forces that make it difficult, or even if you were able to do your job perfectly, it would feel like it kinda just didn't matter anymore. You stop seeing that your job is meaningful. And it's worth remembering that these three constructs are separate. You could be really high on the depersonalization, but maybe not feel so personally ineffective. But as each of these three constructs kinda gets worse and worse over time, as you're feeling more depersonalized, more exhausted, more ineffective, that's when you're moving towards burnout. As a professor who teaches about the science of happiness and the host of the Happiness Lab Podcast, we talk about burnout. I was pretty familiar...