BURNOUT

Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time

Are you addicted to work? Do you find yourself working even when you should be relaxing? Has your work–life balance become, well, unbalanced?

If the answer is "yes", then you need the advice of writer and podcast host Brigid Schulte, the director of the Better Life Lab at New America, who spoke during a live symposium at the Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) Connections Conference, being held Sept. 11-14, 2022, in National Harbor, Md., as well as in an accompanying podcast. The topic: how to cope when you’re pressed, stressed and overwhelmed.

“We live in a society where productivity is valued,” Schulte said during the podcast. “We get our sense of identity often from work, from how much we earn, so that so much of what we consider valuable and important is in that first kind of great sphere of life, work, and not in love and not in play.”  

This trend predates the pervasive omnipresence of smartphones and checking your messages 20 times an hour, according to Schulte.

“Many people think that once we started carrying iPhones in our back pockets, things got nuts. But it’s really not true,” she said, adding that work hours started ratcheting up in the 1980s. “Although this is a fairly new phenomenon, it predated our contemporary technology. That technology is just speeding things up even more.”

Many of us may believe performative busyness is almost the price of admission to demonstrate to colleagues and friends that we are valuable and worthy, but Schulte said this is not true. “My ongoing work is trying to show that we’re shooting ourselves in the foot if we keep on this endless wheel, running faster and faster and going nowhere,” she explained.

She pointed to research that spotlights the long-term health risks of ongoing work stressors, including meta-analyses that have identified psychosocial stressors in the workplace (Scand J Work Environ Health 2006;32[6]:443-462).

“This is not falling off a ladder or going into a coal mine. It’s working long hours, feeling like you’re not getting rewarded and so on—things we all recognize,” Schulte said. “So, these psychosocial factors lead to either an acute event like a heart attack, or they build up to where you get tired and burned out. It creates so much ill health, that work itself is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States. It’s about as dangerous as secondhand smoke, which is a known and regulated carcinogen.”

Schulte acknowledged that it’s hard to break away from workaholism on your own in a society where being in the office at 9 p.m. or answering a work text at 1 a.m. is the sign of a dedicated employee. “When you want to break away from that, it’s so important to find like-minded peers, a supportive network, because it’s really difficult to push back against the status quo just on your own,” she said.

She also offered several other tips:

Get out of the tunnel. “When we’re feeling overwhelmed, our brain goes into kind of a tunneling mode,” Schulte said. “And our IQ drops; we’re not able to kind of see very far ahead. So, instead of digging further into your email inbox, stop, pause, take a deep breath and get out of that tunnel. Take your time to figure out what’s really important and put your attention there.”

• Be intentional about what’s most important. Each morning, ask yourself, “What is the one thing I really need to do today?” Then create space and time in your calendar to make that happen, Schulte advises. “In overworked cultures, people are busy all day long, running, running, running, but then they get to the end of the day and they haven’t done the most important thing they needed to do, so they stay late or take work home or do it on the weekend, and get more and more tired and resentful,” she said.
• Don’t think you have to do everything on your to-do list. Instead of seeing the to-do list as a mandate, see it as a brain dump, Schulte said. “You’re getting it all out of your head so that it doesn’t live in your head, because if you don’t write it down, you’re constantly expending energy trying to remember stuff,” she explained. “You can set it up as, ‘Here are the things I really want to do, and here’s all the other stuff that I’m not going to get to today or even this week, but I want to keep track of them.’”
• Focus on connections. “We all know that human happiness is based in our connection with other people. I think that’s one of the reasons why the pandemic has been so hard. We’ve been so isolated and we’ve been isolated from loved ones,” Schulte said. “At the end of your life, you know, we are here for a limited time only. Time is a very precious and limited resource. Nobody ever wished they’d spent more time at the office. So, how to bring that sensibility into your day, as you start your day?”
• Make time for play. Leisure is not a waste of time, Schulte said. “I have newfound respect for play and leisure,” she said. “It’s incredibly important not only for our mental and physical health, but also for our souls, sense of self and our quality of life.”

If you’re a manager, director or in another leadership role, Schulte urges you to set the right tone.

“Change can burble up from the bottom or in the middle, but the most effective cultural change really comes from the top,” she said. “Creating burnout cultures is not just bad for the people that work for you, not just bad for employees, but it’s actually also bad for innovation and productivity. There’s research that shows that you can push people to work longer hours for maybe a few weeks. But after maybe two or three weeks of 60-hour workweeks, you get to the same productivity as if you just continued working that 40-hour workweek.”

Learning More

• Register ASAP for SHSMD Connections 2022 in-person conference to attend Brigid’s Opening Keynote on September 11 “Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love & Play When No One Has the Time”.
• To hear more about Brigid’s keynote session at SHSMD Connections, click here to listen her newly released SHSMD Rapid Insights podcast episode.
• Read this SHSMD blog post on Brigid’s keynote session.

image credit:  Hilary Clark from Pixabay