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.”

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.”

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image credit:  Hilary Clark from Pixabay