Jonquin Hill (2:36)

Cause you have friends, you know.

Jonathan Malesic (2:39)

Don't give up. You still have friends, you know. In the video, Gabriel and Bush are just, like, in this embrace for six straight minutes with this, like, eclipsing sun behind them. It's extremely dramatic. I just needed to hear that over and over and over again. I'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 that something happened that researchers identify as a real phenomenon.

Jonquin Hill (3:35)

I'm Jaclyn 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.

Jonathan Malesic (3:56)

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.

Christina Maslach (4:19)

As their emotional resources are depleted, workers feel they're no longer able to give of themselves at a psychological level.

Jonathan Malesic (4:27)

I read one of her books called the cost of Caring.

Christina Maslach (4:31)

Burnout. The word evokes images of a final flickering flame of a charred and empty shell of dying embers and cold gray ashes.

Jonathan Malesic (4:41)

And I just couldn't get enough.

Jonquin Hill (4:44)

Why did you think what happened to you was burnout and not just like, ooh, this job not a good fit?

Jonathan Malesic (4:51)

One thing was that I took the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which is the standard research instrument for, you know, 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?

Early Burnout Researcher / Scientist (5:14)

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 colleagues make me responsible for some of their problems. I'm at the end of my patience. I feel full of energy. I've become more insensitive to people in

Jonathan Malesic (5:29)

the workplace, and I scored in the 98th percentile for exhaustion. I was so proud of myself. You know, this is like.

Jonquin Hill (5:39)

You're like, look at me. I'm sorry.

Jonathan Malesic (5:41)

I won. Exactly. You know, it's like, I aced this one.

Jonquin Hill (5:46)

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?

Jonathan Malesic (6:01)

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. Um, it's a kind of exhaustion that does not improve with rest.

Recent College Graduate (6:28)

The 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.

Jonathan Malesic (6:45)

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.

Recent College Graduate (7:01)

Constantly exhausted, irritable, mentally checked out, and never able to rest without guilt.

Jonathan Malesic (7:07)

The third dimension is a sense of ineffectiveness, a feeling that your work is not accomplishing anything.

Recent College Graduate (7:17)

Never feeling like, I'm caught up at work, no longer finding joy in my job. And I think it's almost inescapable these days.

Jonathan Malesic (7:28)

In American society, we. 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. 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 brilliant but extremely cynical Dr. House would be the classic example.

Jonquin Hill (8:09)

I was waiting two hours out there. Fascinating.

Jonathan Malesic (8:13)

Have you considered a career as a memoirist? And this is why I think that you gotta have all three dimensions to really understand burnout. People 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.

Jonquin Hill (8:29)

Mm. Yeah.

Jonathan Malesic (8:31)

So that's the. That I think is the key dimension.

Jonquin Hill (8:35)

Yeah. You know, I think a lot of people can get some of these feelings from work. I think of the movie Office Space.

Jonathan Malesic (8:41)

It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

Jonquin Hill (8:45)

I'm curious when it goes from just like work to like, oh, no, I'm burnt out.

Jonathan Malesic (8:51)

Yeah, I think it probably has to do with frequency. If you only feel like Peter in Office Space, just don't care once or twice a month. Things probably aren't all that bad if it's every day. Just don't care. Just don't care. Just don't care. 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, you know, work will fulfill us, or, you know, work is a way of proving our worth. And along with that can be things, you know, 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. The 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.

Jonquin Hill (10:43)

Coming up, how that mismatch of ideals went mainstream. Support for Explain it to Me comes from Starbucks. There's a palpable energy to storytelling, and it's an energy we harness to bring you a special series like this one. With that in mind, it's worth remembering the little things we do in community to energize ourselves, like sharing a cool, brightly flavored drink over conversation under the afternoon sun. It's a refreshing ritual that can be perfectly captured by the Starbucks new energy refresher. It comes in great flavors. Mango, dragon fruit, strawberry, acai, mango, strawberry, plus a handful of tasty variations with lemonade or coconut milk, like the pink energy drink. 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. It's explained it to me. I'm jq. Jonathan Malesic 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, Nixon resigns, and Bob Dylan records a song about searching for salvation. It's called Shelter from the Storm.

Early Burnout Researcher / Scientist (12:24)

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried

Jonathan Malesic (12:28)

in the hail, Burned out from exhaustion. And in Ambulance Blues, Neil Young also uses the term burnout.

Union Worker / Labor Representative (12:37)

Burnout stub their toes on garbage pail.

Jonathan Malesic (12:41)

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.

Early Burnout Researcher / Scientist (12:52)

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.

Jonathan Malesic (13:04)

Burnout was just kind of like in the Air.

Jonquin Hill (13:07)

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?

Jonathan Malesic (13:15)

I think they're just catching the same vibe. They're just, you know, finding it on different frequencies.

Jonquin Hill (13:24)

Jonathan says this was a massive shift. Just a generation earlier, Americans were feeling pretty optimistic about work.

Jonathan Malesic (13:33)

The years after World War II. In particular, unions had a lot of power.

Union Worker / Labor Representative (13:38)

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. The United Steel Workers of America and Canada. With the union came dignity and recognition.

Jonathan Malesic (13:51)

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

Union Worker / Labor Representative (14:22)

on poverty in America.

Jonathan Malesic (14:25)

People believe a war, we can do this. So 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.

Union Worker / Labor Representative (14:48)

While 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.

Jonathan Malesic (15:02)

Terms like stagflation, where prices go up, wages don't whoop.

Jonquin Hill (15:07)

Well, yeah, that's right.

Jonathan Malesic (15:10)

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 in reality meant that, well, the conditions were ripe for high levels of burnout for workers to start to name their situation.

Jonquin Hill (15:38)

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?

Jonathan Malesic (15:46)

Oh, definitely not, no.

Jonquin Hill (15:49)

Dang,

Jonathan Malesic (15:52)

yeah. I mean, it was at the end of that decade that President Jimmy Carter gave his so called malaise speech.

Union Worker / Labor Representative (16:01)

It is a crisis of confidence.

Jonathan Malesic (16:04)

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.

Union Worker / Labor Representative (16:22)

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

Jonathan Malesic (16:32)

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.

Union Worker / Labor Representative (16:47)

This morning at 7:00am the union representing those who man America's air traffic control facilities called a strike.

News Reporter (16:55)

President Reagan told the air traffic controllers to be back in the towers Wednesday morning or they'd be fired and face prosecution.

Jonathan Malesic (17:02)

One of their first listed grievances was the problem of consistent burnout on the job.

News Reporter (17:09)

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.

Jonathan Malesic (17:20)

Reagan's response to this was to fire the air traffic controllers.

Union Worker / Labor Representative (17:24)

They're terminated.

Jonathan Malesic (17:25)

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.

Jonquin Hill (17:37)

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 2000 and tens with this one viral article, right? What is that article and what happened?

Jonathan Malesic (17:53)

It's a buzzfeed news article by Anne Helen Peterson about millennial burnout.

Anne Helen Peterson (17:59)

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.

Jonathan Malesic (18:19)

The article did go extremely viral.

Danielle Roberts (18:23)

I related to it a lot as a millennial myself.

Jonquin Hill (18:26)

People are saying, I'm burnt out, I'm exhausted, I've got nothing left like it us.

Jonathan Malesic (18:32)

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, 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.

Jonquin Hill (19:13)

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.

Jonquinn (Host) (19:30)

This is advertiser content from Starbucks. Jonquinn. I think of you as the queen of answering questions.

Jonquin Hill (19:37)

Oh my gosh. Thank you. What question do you have for me today?

Jonquinn (Host) (19:40)

Okay, talk to me about energy levels. Why is it that it's sometimes I feel total ways of exhaustion.

Jonquin Hill (19:46)

So like you can't focus, you're falling asleep, that kind of thing.

Jonquinn (Host) (19:50)

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?

Jonquin Hill (19:57)

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 and it controls things like metabolism, hormones and energy.

Jonquinn (Host) (20:14)

So that's like the reason I feel tired before bed and well rested in the morning.

Jonquin Hill (20:17)

It's our circadian rhythm. It's a totally natural biological response.

Jonquinn (Host) (20:22)

So when I want to just close my eyes and put my head down on my desk, what can I do about that?

Jonquin Hill (20:26)

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.

Jonquinn (Host) (20:35)

That sounds really nice right now.

Jonquin Hill (20:37)

You want to go do it?

Recent College Graduate (20:37)

Yeah.

Jonquin Hill (20:38)

Yeah.

Jonquinn (Host) (20:39)

Long story short, we all need moments throughout the day to refresh. And Starbucks has you covered with their new energy refreshers. Your go to lift. To help you stay energized throughout the day, try the all new energy refreshers at Starbucks.

Recent College Graduate (20:58)

I 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 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.

Jonquin Hill (21:27)

We're back with more Explain it to me. I'm jq. 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,

Danielle Roberts (21:45)

I think we are 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.

Jonquin Hill (21:59)

She says burnout isn't just something millennials feel.

Danielle Roberts (22:02)

I grew up in a very blue collar family. I'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.

Jonquin Hill (22:50)

I'm curious, what do you notice about how Gen Z is approaching burnout differently?

Danielle Roberts (22:56)

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. So I think they are looking at everything that other generations have done and saying, no, thank you. It's really important for Gen Z to have clarity going into the workforce. Not just what do I want to do, what jobs do I want to apply for, but how do I want to feel and how do I want to operate in the workplace. It all starts in the interview process and being mindful of what to look out for, the language that your team uses. So if people are describing their company like we're like a family here, run, that is a red flag because I don't know about anybody else's family, but mine is full of dysfunction. And you're expected to give a lot always and not get a ton in return all the time. And then when you are in the onboarding process, start talking about what you need early on. There's something called a working styles worksheet and it includes questions like, when I'm stressed, what I need most from my co workers is blank. The best way I receive feedback is blank. My meeting participation style is blank. And that will give you a lot of agency and autonomy in how you show up in your work and how you allow other people to treat you. We teach other people how to treat us.

Jonquin Hill (25:14)

You know, these days it's just hard to get a job in the first place. You know, on top of the cost of housing and health care and so many things that are just constantly going up. And that makes leaving a job or even having boundaries at the job you have now really, really hard. If you can't afford to quit your job, are there steps you can take to sort of prevent or stop that burnout?

Danielle Roberts (25:40)

Yes, that's a great question. I just want to validate that the world is a dumpster fire right now and the job market is trash. That said, you do still have agency within your days. There's also something called an energy management audit where for a week, if you were to track your time from the moment you woke up to the moment you go to bed and you figured out what your energy patterns were, what can you do to either redesign your time or change up your environment to sustain your energy levels? So in a workplace that could look like I'm gonna take a meeting with my camera off or I'm gonna take it on a walk, or if I know I have a particularly draining meeting at 12pm every single day, I'm gonna take a five minute block and I'm gonna get up and just like shake out my nervous system, do some jumping jacks, put on my favorite song and just like close my eyes and give myself that rest for 30 seconds. I can set a reminder on my phone to do a breathing exercise just to get back into our bodies a little bit more.

Jonquin Hill (26:59)

Is there anything you'd recommend not doing? Maybe something that feels good now, but ultimately in the long run is going to make it harder.

Danielle Roberts (27:08)

Pushing when you have no more capacity or resources to push and thinking that you need to do it all by yourself. We live in a highly individualistic society and I mean especially women, we take on so much emotional labor on top of just the day to day. So I would say if you are feeling safe stuck on a problem at work or you're feeling super stressed, the solution is not to push through and put in more hours. That is going to be not only a disservice to the work itself, it's going to be a disservice to you. We can't self help our way out of systems of oppression or burnout. And I think sometimes we really just need to let some of the plates fall and break. Because if we continue to take on everything and our employers see like, oh, you know, Danielle's got it, she can keep doing all of this and it's fine, then they're just going to continue to expect that out of me. But if I say I'm letting these two things fall and break and it's the company's responsibility to fix them, then maybe I will actually finally get some help.

Jonquin Hill (28:19)

That's it for this week. We have an episode coming up about weddings. Getting married can get super expensive. Did you ball out or did you keep it small? If you have a wedding coming up, what's the price tag? Tell us about it at 1-800-618-8545 or email us at askvox vox.com

News Reporter (28:41)

if you

Jonquin Hill (28:41)

want to support this podcast and all the work we do at vox, consider becoming a VOX member. VOX members get access to things like our Patreon, where there's bonus content from your favorite Vox reporters and hosts. Check out Vox.com members to learn more. This episode was produced by Peter Balanon Rosen and Danielle Hewitt. It was edited by Ginny Lawton, Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and engineered by Patrick Boyd. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. I'm your host, Jonquin Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Support for Explain it to Me comes from Starbucks Burnout can happen to anyone. But there's always a way to get your flow back. Take your afternoon slump, for instance. It's a phenomenon we all know too well. Sometimes all it takes is a reassuring word from a friend or a sip of a refreshing drink. So the next time you're looking to refocus and re energize, you can hit up a friend and grab a Starbucks New Energy Refresher together. Try the All New Energy Refreshers at Starbucks.