Now Is a Good Time to Take Care of Ourselves

AMY BERNSTEIN: You’re listening to Women at Work, from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Bernstein.

EMILY CAULFIELD: I’m Emily Caulfield.

AMY GALLO: And I’m Amy Gallo. 2020 has been a year of uncertainty. We probably don’t need to remind you, but we’re living through a pandemic, working under stressful – often unsustainable – circumstances. We’ve been worried about the outcome of the election here in the U.S. And all of this has meant sleepless nights and anxious days for many women.

EMILY CAULFIELD: We’re wiped out – and finding it tough to stay focused, present, and optimistic. So, we decided to revisit conversations that explore how and why we get worn out – and that have advice for building ourselves back up.

These conversations are from episodes where Nicole Torres was still a co-host, so you’ll hear her voice instead of mine. I’ll be back later in the show to talk with the Amys about how we’re managing burnout and taking care of ourselves.

AMY BERNSTEIN: First up, exhaustion is one of the signs of burnout. Mandy O’Neill explains what about work tends to break women down – and how to protect ourselves from physical or mental collapse.

Mandy’s a professor at the George Mason University School of Business. She’s also a senior scientist at the university’s Center for the Advancement of Well-Being. And she spoke to us in February 2019, from a studio in Berkeley, California.

MANDY O’NEILL: Hi!

AMY BERNSTEIN: Hi, Mandy. This is Amy Bernstein.

AMY GALLO: And this is Amy Gallo.

MANDY O’NEILL: Hi there!

NICOLE TORRES: Hi, Mandy.

MANDY O’NEILL: Hi!

NICOLE TORRES: This is my voice.

MANDY O’NEILL: OK, cool, yeah, this is fun.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, Mandy, let’s start by defining our terms. What do we mean when we talk about burnout?

MANDY O’NEILL: So, like most things, there are as many definitions as people who are interested in it. But for a lot of academics, we really look to Christina Maslach’s 30 years of research when we think about what burnout means: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a really decline in a sense of personal accomplishment.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Hmm. What are the particular workplace stressors that lead most to burnout?

MANDY O’NEILL: Well, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I think so, too, is stress. And the point there is that perceptions matter. So, something that’s extremely stressful to one person might be just fine to somebody else. But if we look at the stressors that kind of crop up again and again and again, a couple of things come up. One of them is resources. Resources include both the money and promotions and benefits. But they also include the psychological resources. And I have really seen this in my own work in healthcare, where I’ve studied hospitals and healthcare systems that are some of the most resource rich, and not surprisingly, these are also places where I see the least amount of burnout. So, it could be just a visionary CEO. It could be a wonderful client population. It could be just, you know, a great financial, bottom-line situation. But these are the organizations where the resources are there to support the staff. And that includes, by the way, not just pay, but it includes the ability to do things in your free time that matter for you. So, for example, time out of your workday to have a project around pet therapy, or whatever your interests are. So, it doesn’t necessarily include money. It includes time and autonomy. And then, in contrast, in organizations that are resource poor, or where things are bad, it’s some of the worst levels of burnout. And I really think the two are strongly related. So, this could be just terrible physical working conditions, not enough staff, not enough resources to just do the work and do it well. It could also include a cutthroat, bottom-line, results-oriented culture, where the funding’s not coming through, the innovations are not coming through, and so the CEO is cutting everything that he or she can possibly cut to just make the numbers with the bare minimum resources. I see burnout very, very strongly in those situations.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Hmm.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Let’s just turn for a second to your work with women and burnout. You’ve been working with a group of Berkeley MBA alums. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing there?

MANDY O’NEILL: Yeah. This was one of the most interesting and surprising findings that we came up with. So, this work is with Charles O’Reilly at Stanford University, and we had been studying a group of Berkeley MBAs since 1987. So, it was an amazing opportunity. We knew pretty much everything you could possibly know about these folks. And then we studied them over time. So, we were really interested in how their careers evolved and how it developed, and Charles and I were particularly interested in the case of women. So, as we were studying them, we had a little way to kind of predict who among them was going to the be most successful. And we defined success somewhat narrowly in terms of how much they were earning, promotions, things like that. So, the computer could actually, based on all that we knew about them, make some predictions about who was going to be the most successful. And the interesting thing that happened is that, initially, the people who we would have thought, based on our research on the cultures that they were prone to entering, the kind of work they were going to do, their own personality traits, the computer thought these were going to be the most successful people. And indeed, initially, they were the most successful. They were earning the most. But what we discovered is that, over time, as we continued to follow them, this group of women who were the most successful initially, and who the computer thought were going to be the most successful over time, were also the ones who were dropping out completely at higher rates. And this was very weird to us, because we said, wait a second. If we had stopped this study after only a few years, we would have said these women are just maxing out their career potential. But as we continued to follow them, something changed, something happened. And we think what happened is that they were experiencing burnout so severely that the so-called opt-out option was more attractive than trying to do something else, or trying to job craft, or all the things we know more about. We think they were just plain old dropping out.

NICOLE TORRES: Wow.

MANDY O’NEILL: So in terms of the burnout itself, we know, for example, that women are the people who are asked to do these kind of, you know, office chores, if you will, you know, cleaning the coffee pot, or being the emotional support for the colleague who’s going through a rough time. There are all of these invisible tasks that women both take on because of, in some cases, expectations about who should be dealing with it, but also, in some cases, kind of their natural proclivities. So, they’re taking on more at work, which you would say probably contributes to burnout in a more comprehensive way than it does for men. But at the same time, women have different opportunities for dealing with burnout, in the sense that it’s more acceptable for them to express vulnerability, sadness, depression, than it is for men. And interestingly, in terms of opting out, historically women have had opportunities outside of getting to the C-suite that are much more acceptable for them than men. So, they get to a certain point, and they say, you know what? I don’t have to do this anymore. I have a perfectly acceptable alternative, which is, name your alternative: Take on my own small business. Go work for a client company, maybe less pay, but better hours. Honestly, stay at home with my kids. You know, write a novel. Whatever it is, these pathways have been much more acceptable for women to explore than for men.

NICOLE TORRES: That’s so interesting.

AMY GALLO: It is.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So how does chronic stress fit into all of this? Is it the same as burnout? Does it lead to burnout?

MANDY O’NEILL: Stress is such an interesting concept. We also know a lot about stress. And one of the interesting things about stress is that it has a physiological profile that differs from burnout and is actually quite functional, if you think about it. So, what stress does typically, and you know, I have a cold right now, so I can tell you this, but when you have a lot of stress, your body usually starts shutting down or reminding you or giving you these clues that this is too much; you need to step back. So, you’ll often get sick, or you’ll often be super tired, and your body tells you, you need to get some sleep. This is actually a very helpful thing, because it’s your body’s way of saying, you need to change something here, and if you’re not going to change it, the body’s not going to be able to perform optimally. Burnout is a little trickier in a way, because, unlike stress, and they’re related, so people under stress will often experience burnout, but people keep going with burnout. And that’s something that’s a little bit unique about it, is that they’re not necessarily on the couch, sick all the time, or you know, their body is really telling them quite strongly that they need to stop. It’s subtler than that. And they can keep going, and they do keep going. Which is part of how it gets to be chronic.

NICOLE TORRES: So, have you felt burnt out before? Can you give us a sense of what it looks like?

MANDY O’NEILL: I have. It’s actually one of the reasons that I took my entire family and I from our home on the East Coast, out to University of California Berkeley on sabbatical. It was because I was feeling burnout. I started to recognize the symptoms in myself. It grew over time, and like any good researcher, I tried to apply it, you know, we call it me-search, to myself, and said, I’m feeling burnout. I probably need to do something about it.

NICOLE TORRES: What were some of the symptoms you were seeing?

MANDY O’NEILL: Yeah. I mean, in some ways it’s very close to the literature, which is kind of weird, because I started to look at my students. So, this upcoming year will me my 13th year as a professor, and we have wonderful students. And I’ve taught so many students, and so many wonderful experiences and stories and personal situations. But I had gotten to a point where some of the stories, and you might say some of the excuses, personal situations, like, “my dog ate my laptop” – I just couldn’t feel anything anymore. I started to look at all of my students and all of the personal circumstances and complicating factors as just one big blur. And I didn’t feel anything. It’s like my compassion valve had shut down. And my heart felt like coal. And I thought, this is not good. I’m a naturally warm, compassionate person, and something’s wrong here, when I can’t feel their pain anymore, and I look at all of what’s going on in their lives, and all their complications, and it just blends together. It’s really that depersonalization. That was the biggest symptom for me.

AMY GALLO: Two things seem noteworthy about your experience there. One, that you weren’t feeling compassion for people you normally did, so a lack of compassion. But then, also, that you weren’t feeling like yourself. And I wonder how much that feeling like you don’t even recognize yourself is part of burnout.

MANDY O’NEILL: You know, it’s such an interesting insight and one that I don’t think’s been really explored deeply. But yes, a big part of this is knowing yourself and what are your own triggers, if you will, and you know, someone who’s just not naturally compassionate, this could be the status quo for them. They don’t really have very strong emotional reactions to their work or to the people. And so, in some ways, burnout might look a little different. But for someone like me, who’s emotional and effusive normally and deeply compassionate, something was wrong when I couldn’t feel that anymore.

NICOLE TORRES: So, what have you done to build yourself back up? You know, are you feeling relieved of the burnout you were feeling before?

MANDY O’NEILL: So, it’s interesting. There were some learnings that came with this, because my first reaction was, this is not right, I’m recognizing the symptoms, I probably need to do something about it. In my profession, we have this wonderful opportunity called sabbatical. Some corporations have it as well. So, we did have an opportunity, in my case, for me to say, I’d like to go on sabbatical. I’d like to pull myself out of the classroom for a couple of months, really do a deep dive into my research, and into another aspect of work, where I could essentially recharge my battery, rebuild up the skills that I felt like were lacking a little bit when I was so overwhelmed with the experience that was causing the burnout. So, we came out to California, and, almost immediately, I mean, there’s something about being on Berkeley’s campus. It’s so gorgeous, and the eucalyptus groves, and the trees and the kind of intellectual climate, that almost immediately I started to feel those feelings go away. But it was also an important lesson, because when I would go back into the classroom and into the situations that were sometimes causing burnout, it would come back again. And so, what that triggered for me is that you can’t just run away and then come back again and expect it’s going to be different. You actually have to think through how you’re going to change some things about yourself and about the situation, so it doesn’t happen again as soon as you go back in that situation at work.

AMY GALLO: You left one work situation to go to another work situation. It’s not like you went to a yoga ashram, which I think is interesting that, you know, you were still pursuing your interests, even though you were feeling burned out. You weren’t pulling the cord.

MANDY O’NEILL: That’s something that’s really great about work, and we have a much deeper understanding of, thanks to the work of Amy Wrzesniewski and others, on job crafting, which is that with any job, you usually have different aspects of the job. And it’s not the case that every single aspect of the job will be the one that’s really pushing you to the point of burnout. So, in my case, I think it’s a good example of how you job craft a little bit. You focus on another aspect of the job that maybe hadn’t been receiving as much attention. It’s still within the domain of your work, but it’s not the same one that might be causing you as much depersonalization, as much of that cynicism that comes when you start feeling the burnout. And I think that our job is a little unique as professors, because we go back and forth between teaching and research. But I think a lot of jobs have this, where maybe it’s a certain client who’s just really, really pushing you to that edge, and you can shift off that. Or maybe you can change the focus of your work, or even change where the work occurs in the day. You know, email, for example, is a syndrome that a lot of people are wrestling with. There’s a lot of ideas of how to deal with that and a lot of solutions for how you can mitigate against the feeling of just, I can’t handle one more email in my inbox that’s somebody asking for something.

AMY BERNSTEIN: How can you see burnout coming on and head it off? Because I know in my own experience of burnout, I don’t realize I’m burnt out until I am way burnt out. How can I avoid getting to the end of the burnout road? How can I just avoid the on-ramp altogether?

MANDY O’NEILL: Yeah, this may sound silly, but one of the things that we’re just now finding out about its important in the workplace is sleep. So, I think the sleep researchers are cheering, because they’ve been saying this for decades. But we’re just now realizing the importance of getting a good night’s sleep in terms of coming into the workplace and being your best self. So, having good interpersonal relations, doing your work, performing well. So, I think that’s one thing. A second point is, getting that colleague to come out and have a coffee with you early on. Because one of the things that happens, we have this metaphor called the “fish in water effect,” which is, you’re swimming in the water, and you don’t know you’re in the water. It takes someone outside of the fishbowl to look in and say, hey, that water’s really dirty. So, I think that’s where it’s really helpful to have what some people call a board of advisors, you know, sort of a personal board of advisors. And this could be colleagues at work. This could be friends in your personal life. This could be partners, family, who can look in and say, you know, I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen you go down this road, when you, yourself, can’t see it, again, because you’re that fish in water. You’re just swimming along, and another metaphor that’s kind of fun is the duck. Right? Like, you know, you look fine on the outside, but underneath, you’re paddling like you-know-what. I think it’s important for people to be able to look inside if you, yourself, can’t look inside, and say, hey, this is happening again.

AMY BERNSTEIN: OK, I’m never going to get the fishbowl out of my head.

MANDY O’NEIL: I know, I mean, what fishbowl are we swimming in?

AMY GALLO: And how dirty is it?

NICOLE TORRES: But on the individual level, so if you’re emotionally exhausted, if you feel emotionally exhausted, what do you do to not feel emotionally exhausted? Aside from sleep and, you know, find a group of people that you trust who can kind of rejuvenate you? Is there anything else that you should be doing?

MANDY O’NEILL: There are little things, and there are big things. One of the little things that I found most compelling lately is this notion of belly laughs. And it’s going to sound a little silly, but I actually saw some research by a health community epidemiologist researcher whose metric for how well people are doing is, when is the last time you had a belly laugh?

NICOLE TORRES: Oh, my God.

MANDY O’NEILL: And the audience, yeah, the audience kind of not quite belly laughed, but, you know, chuckled uncomfortably. And I realized, oh, this is genius, because belly laughs at work are a great indicator of a lot of things, including the strength of the relationships that you can draw on to really deal with some aspects of work that are just unpleasant, the kind that contribute to exhaustion, to depersonalization, to be able to laugh about it has this physiological and emotional response pattern that’s one of the best forms of medicine that is also, by the way, one of the cheapest. Another interesting kind of small thing that has a fair amount of research to it is gratitude. We’re learning a lot about it in the workplace, including the fact that it helps as just a form of emotion regulation. So, something that’s making you so angry. If you actually force yourself to reframe and say, “I’m so grateful for these students, because the fact that they are so curious, the fact that they are so interested in getting a degree allows me to do the work that I love. And I’m so grateful for that.” And yes, they’re frustrating, but to really reframe some of those negative emotions as gratitude helps enormously and is not the same kind of pitfalls that happen when, for example, you just suppress. You feel the emotions coming on, and you just put the lid on it, and hope it goes away. That never works out. Whereas I think reframing, honestly avoiding some of the situations, and this can include toxic colleagues. I mean, we haven’t talked much about the flip side of colleagues, which is, they’re not always the best source of support or fun. They’re actually quite annoying and frustrating and, it’s not even the clients, it’s the people down the hall from you. So, how do you deal with them? Well, one of the strategies is avoidance. So, you know, if there’s an opportunity to take an office a little far away, or if your organization is incentivizing people to work from home because they’re running out of office space, that may be a time when you raise your hand, even if you’re a really crazy extrovert like me and say, that’s something I could do to really reduce the exposure to the person who’s contributing to my burnout.

AMY GALLO: So, once you’ve done those things, you avoid the jerks, you get more sleep, you’re more grateful, have a few belly laughs, how do you know that it’s worked? How do you know that you’ve turned it around?

MANDY O’NEILL: For me, it was starting to feel compassion again. It was starting to feel the emotions that I recognize in myself when I’m not feeling burnout, when things are good, when the equilibrium is where it should be for me at work. So, I think starting to feel those emotions, starting to recognize yourself, and really starting to see the symptoms go down, whether that’s illness, whether that’s days that you just can’t get out of bed to go to work, whether it’s yelling at your children or your spouse, whatever those symptoms are that you start to recognize, and the people in your life start to recognize as symptoms of burnout, when they start going down, and you start getting – the flip side of burnout is engagement. So, when you start getting engaged in your work again, when you start getting excited to go to work, to see your colleagues, to dive into the projects, including the difficult ones, and the mountain of emails or case files or whatever it is, that’s, to me, a symptom of the burnout going down because the engagement is going up.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Alright, so you have, you know, stared down your episode of burnout, and you know, you’re reengaging and so forth. How do you make sure it doesn’t come back? How do you make sure that you don’t kind of lose your grip there?

MANDY O’NEILL: At some point, I think everyone has to do some introspection and ask what’s really important and what you’re willing to do for a paycheck and for how long. There’s really good evidence that above a certain point, money doesn’t matter. And the certain point varies, depending on what part of the country or world you live in, but the money is not necessarily going to bring happiness. The other thing to think about is, what are your valued? We had this really interesting study we just published with Ken Mato and Xue Lei where we found that – we were looking at these people who described themselves as having toxic, abusive supervision and were in cultures that can best be described as win or die.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, my God.

MANDY O’NEILL: Yeah, so this is pretty, like, pretty tough. So, we were studying this group of workers, and what we discovered was that some of those workers also reported the highest levels of engagement. And we were shocked! We thought, this has got to be the worst of the worst. I mean, having a toxic boss is bad enough, but being in one of these cultures – but no, they reported some of the highest levels of engagement. And we looked into the data more and realized that for some people, they love this work so much – they are so interested, they are so engaged, they find so much meaning and purpose – that they’re willing to put up with a lot, including some very, very stressful work conditions. For other people, that’s just not going to work, and it doesn’t matter how much money they’re getting paid, and it doesn’t matter how interesting they find the work; they just refuse to be in situations characterized by this sort of toxic environment.

So, I think that – the metaphor that Jane Dutton at Michigan gave me once is, you have to follow your north star. And I like the metaphor for a couple of reasons. One is that the north star is not something you’re going to find tomorrow or next week, or maybe even in 10 years. But it’s what you’re gradually, consistently, purposefully moving toward. And I think that people sometimes don’t think about the north star because they’re surrounded by what’s in front of them, the endless task list, to-do list, the competing demands. But it’s important to step back a little bit and say, listen, this is working for now, because you know, something I have in mind is that I want to buy a house. That’s important to me, so I need to save up. Or, I need to get this experience, because it’s going to allow me to go off on my own and have so much more credibility. Or, at some point I want to give back to the community in a way, but I need the financial footing or the contacts. So, whatever the north star is, I think that it’s really important to look at that, and then at some point, if what you’re doing is not moving in the direction of your north star, it’s important to really take a very hard look at yourself and say, do I need to, do I want to keep doing this? Is it good for my health, my well-being, my relationships to keep doing this?

AMY GALLO: Mandy, I want to ask about talking to your manager when you’re feeling burned out. I can imagine that would be helpful on one hand, but I also can imagine that’s an incredibly difficult conversation to have. How common is it for people to tell their managers?

MANDY O’NEILL: It depends. It really depends on the manager the type of relationship. So, if you have a manager who is a toxic manager, or a narcissist, or someone who is just bleeding you dry for the corporate bottom line, this may not be the kind of person you want to talk to. If, on the other hand, you’re in a workplace culture that’s characterized by trust and psychological safety and strong, close relationships, then I think it’s very important to communicate this, and actually, they may be not only supportive, but actually going through it themselves, and that can deepen the relationship.

AMY BERNSTEIN: OK, Mandy, here’s a tricky situation for you. I’m a manager. One of my direct reports kind of seems to be burning out, is demonstrating all those symptoms. How do I bring it up? Do I bring it up?

MANDY O’NEILL: So, it’s really interesting, because generally speaking, the power research suggests that as you experience the psychological effects of power, which happens when you become a manager, you actually are paying less attention, and you’re missing a lot of things. So, I would say, generally speaking, it’s really important to give the benefit of the doubt and not assume, particularly as a manager, because again, if you think about the importance of your words, and the importance of your emotions, and how that might come off to the employee, I think a much safer route is just to be sincere and genuine and say something like, how are you? I think people are often quite surprised at how just a simple genuine gesture of concern and caring can really speak volumes and allow people to open up so that you don’t have to actually make any assumptions about what they’re feeling or thinking. You can just ask them about their experiences in a way that makes them feel psychologically safe.

AMY BERNSTEIN: That’s probably good advice on a lot of fronts.

MANDY O’NEILL: Yes. Again, because you know, imagine if they’re not burnt out at all, they’re just kind of an introverted, not very expressive person, and you’re completely interpreting their outward behavior with no idea about what’s going on internally. And that could be really distressing.

NICOLE TORRES: And what if you’re the boss, and you’re burnt out? Is the way you express burnout or talk about your feelings, does that have to change because you’re a manager?

MANDY O’NEILL: I mean, to some extent, being a manger has one of these unique advantages of everybody paying attention to you, and the emotions that you express are even more contagious than emotions expressed peer to peer. So, on the one hand, they’re probably noticing it a lot more than you think. But then there’s this other really interesting set of findings around the benefits of helping others. So, if you’re burnt out, there’s this really cool research by Jamil Zaki, and others on how being kind to others and having empathy for others actually helps you. Adam Grant is a real pioneer on this space as well on the benefits of helping. So, ironically, even though you’re burnt out, helping other people with their burnout may make you feel better, in addition to hopefully making them feel better as well. So it’s – one of my colleagues has this phrase that I like, reciprocal feedback loop – so it’s kind of one of these things where, you know, you’re feeling burnt out, but you help people, and it helps you, and it helps them, and it’s kind of the virtuous upward positive spiral that we like to see at work.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, this has been so interesting, Mandy. Thank you very, very much for all your insight.

MANDY O’NEILL: Thank you guys. This was a lot of fun.

EMILY CAULFIELD: Mandy pointed out how not having enough time for the people and things that are important to us can lead to burnout. So many women have found themselves in right now – they’re stretched thin, distracted, and barely keeping up.

AMY GALLO: But finding and protecting time for the activities and people we love is, to Ashley Whillans, a form of self-care. Ashley’s a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of the book, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Nicole and I spoke with Ashley in October 2019. Back when we recorded interviews inside our office studio – and when going to the gym was a regular part of my self-care.

Ashley, thank you for joining us. We’re so happy to have you here.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Thank you so much for having me today.

AMY GALLO: Can you talk to us about what self-care even means?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: So, I mean, I’m a subjective wellbeing researcher, I study happiness. And so, when I think about self-care, I think about really the predictors of happiness. Do I have enough time to spend with people that I care about? What are the qualities of my social interactions? Am I on my phone the whole time? Am I rushing from point A to point B, meeting A to meeting B, spa appointment one to lunch date two so that I’m not actually deriving any satisfaction from my social interactions? Do I have meaningful work that feels purposeful? What are the kinds of things I’m doing at work? Do I feel like I have control over my time, over my schedule, over the tasks that I’m completing? And do I feel optimistic about where my life is going? So, when I think about self-care, I think really about the outcome of self-care, which is well-being and meaning in life. And then I work backwards from there to think what are some of the predictors of well-being.

NICOLE TORRES: I think that’s a really helpful view of self-care as like this holistic thing that also includes work and interactions with people. It’s not just a marketing concept, it’s not just all face masks and massages. Self-care is a lot bigger than that. And that’s helpful for me as I think about, you know, how does self-care fit into my life? Why is it even important? I’ve always thought of work and self-care as being kind of separate. Even though I don’t think, I think maybe that’s wrong. I’ve wondered like, isn’t prioritizing my career and spending a lot of time at work and trying to advance, isn’t that taking care of my future self?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah. And so, you’re thinking about kind of the fact that we all have multiple goals, needs and motivations in life. So, the way I think about it, and because I’m a time use researcher also, I really do think about the structure of our whole days and how we’re spending our time. Does it map onto the things that we care about? The more that the way that we spend each and everyday maps onto all of these things that you’re talking about – having a productive and fulfilling career, feeling like you’re moving forward in it, having productive social relationships, having me time – those all kind of fit within buckets or kind of different categories, different things that you care about, different values that you have, different goals that you have. And I think about it, the extent to which you spend your days in a way that’s consistent or aligned with these goals, values, and aspirations, create this feeling of self-care generally, this general feeling of well-being, of everything being coherent. So, then your work isn’t necessarily in conflict with your personal life, it’s part of a greater whole. It’s one motivation fulfilled, and fulfilling that and being fulfilled in one area, and having a diverse set of motivations will make you happier and healthier as a whole person.

NICOLE TORRES: You’re really speaking to me.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: There’s good data to back this up, too.

NICOLE TORRES: Does this like map onto how you think about self-care, Amy?

AMY BERNSTEIN: It definitely, what you’re saying, Ashley, really does resonate with me, and I’ve learned, you know, that I need to figure out what helps me function happily in the world. And if it means going to the gym and cutting into the nine-to-five workday – and I’m curling my fingers ironically around nine-to-five – you know, that’s okay, that’s actually, that’s what I need and it’s the only time I can do it. But it means I’m going to be healthier and my head’s going to be on straight, and I’ll be able to function better. I also think as a manager I need to communicate that and particularly to women in the office because it gives them permission as well to take care of themselves.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah. That’s where, exactly as you’re saying, managers, especially to groups – junior people, women especially – we need to start communicating and having very clear guidelines for how do you ask for more time in the workplace. What does that look like? How do you ask for personal time?

We find in some of the data that I’ve collected that asking for more time on adjustable deadlines at work, unsurprisingly people, employees who do it and feel like they can, are less burned out, they’re happier, they perform better because they asked for more time and they turn in higher quality work. But the problem is junior people and women, who could stand to benefit most from additional time – women on average take on more tasks at home so that can cut into time that they need to spend at work – that they are the ones that are least likely to ask because they’re the most likely to think that they’re going to be penalized. Even though in my data we don’t show different penalties based on gender or based on junior-senior status. So, I think this communication, these clear organizational structures for how do we ask for more time, how do we have self-care and us not be secretly judging the person who’s taking it – which is what’s running through everyone’s mind is this fear of evaluation. Well, if I take that time off, if I’m the person that’s going to go to the gym in the middle of my workday, triumphantly, I still have this sneaking suspicion that that promotion might go to the person who’s working all the time. So that’s the question, you know, we know what to do to get to self-care, but how does it operate in practice?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Right. But really, the other thing that I think we need to bring in is this notion of the ideal employee. So, I think that some of that is just re-setting our expectations and also articulating goals that are more human for everyone.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: And it has to be from the top down.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Totally.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: So, there’s research showing that if managers truly disconnect on their vacation, then employees are more likely to do that too, of course.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And it’s why you don’t send emails after a certain hour, you know, that’s closer to 6 o’clockl than 11 PM. And it’s why you don’t send emails on the weekend.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: It’s sad though – in American work culture to get employees to take these kinds of benefits, to actually truly disconnect, the best data suggests you have to regulate people taking time off if they’re not going to spontaneously do it because they still have this idea in their mind of this ideal employee. Then say, well too bad, I’m forcing you to, if you check Slack, if you check email, I will dock you pay. We need to set a cultural norm that that’s not okay, that’s not what the ideal employee looks like. Actually, the ideal employee works really hard when they’re in the office and then goes home at a reasonable time and has a really great fulfilling, self-care filled life outside of the office. Because when you have a whole self, that’s not just work, you perform better.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, what other processes and messages can a manager put out there to keep us from getting to, I’m not going to pay you if you don’t take a week off.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah, so in some of our data and our ongoing research, we’re doing small things like giving employees, mandated from the top down, two hours of time where they get to plan their week uninterrupted – we’re not going to schedule meetings during that time – where you can think about what’s urgent versus what’s important, both at work and outside of it, and we’ll keep that part of your schedule clear. And that’s a pretty simple intervention. And we find that employees who take time every week to prioritize their own work and their life outside of work, when given that permission by a manager, self-report being 30 to 40 percent more focused on tasks at work, much happier, less stressed, feel less of this goal conflict that we were talking about earlier between work and life demands.

NICOLE TORRES: But what is the role of a manager then if you are, if you tried to model good behavior, you don’t send emails late at night, you don’t check emails on vacation. What if you have an employee, and I am definitely guilty of this, who emails you late at night, who you can tell is working more than they should and not taking care of themselves. What do you do as a manager? Is it your job to say something or do you just roll with it?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: I think you do need to have this conversation. I’ve had this happen with students who I feel like are just working too many hours. I kind of sit them down and I say, “Look, I’ve got a few more years of experience than you. If you keep going at this pace, it’s going to be counterproductive in the long run.” That’s what all the best data shows as well, in addition to anecdotal evidence.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And in the moment a manager can say, “Why were you up working at 11 o’clock at night?” And the answer could be because I was busy doing something I needed to do for myself or my family during the day, in which case, you know, we’re adults, we make these decisions. That’s flexibility. But sometimes the manager’s job is to say, you know, not every pot needs to be on high boil. Right?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah. Helping employees prioritize and being very clear, if you do send an email at night at a strange time, you have to provide a justification for why since it’s outside of the normal job requirements. Unless there’s something very urgently due, there should be no reason to work past X amount of time or to work these many hours. I think very clear communication is helpful.

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah, key.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, everything you’re talking about makes a lot of sense for the kind of work that you do, for the kind of work that we do. If you are in retail for example, and it’s important for you to be at the shop at 10 a.m. and not leave until 6 p.m. How do you do that sort of thing?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: I think small breaks. So, I have a dataset that a collaborator shared with me of a large call center. So that’s, you’re sitting on the calls for eight, ten hours a day.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Right, and a very measured existence, metrics for everything.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: And they found that one of the best predictors of customer satisfaction and employee burnout was the top performers took a little bit more time on each call and took a little bit more of a break before they picked up that next call. Not a lot, we’re talking kind of 30 seconds, a minute. But even trying to encourage small, you know, the literature calls it like micro-breaks – even in these fast-paced environments, reminders, situational cues that it’s okay to take your lunch, it’s okay to take a step back to stretch, that even these small micro-moments can, at least in this one data set that we have, play a really important role for things like customer satisfaction and employee success.

I mean, my partner is an emergency room physician, and you know, he hears me go on my soapbox about having more free time and focusing on time. He’s like, I am a burnt-out ER doctor. Like I have way more patients than I can manage. There’s one doctor on, 40 patients in my ER at any given time. And how am I, you know, your studies sound nice and everything, but how am I supposed to – it’s exactly what you’re talking about. And it is, it’s almost like the self-regulation of not taking minutes, taking moments back, taking a deep breath, assessing the situation, making sure that you take time, you ask for help, you delegate tasks to others if you need to, to have a break.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, before this conversation, I had imagined that self-care was about, you know, that it was about massages and going to the gym and making sure that you make time for you. But what I’m now understanding from you is that it’s doing what you need to do to feel whole. And that includes maintaining your personal relationships, taking care of who matters to you in addition to what matters to you. Right?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah. It’s about spending the minutes, moments, hours, and days of your life in a way that’s consistent with the things and people you care about.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And sometimes it’s stuff that may not be fun in the moment, but it’s absolutely necessary to you.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah. And there’s good research on this that, sure – sometimes taking care of our kids, taking care of people that we care about that are sick, those things feel stressful in the moment. But they’re exactly the kinds of things in our lives that give us meaning and purpose and a sense of belonging.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And sometimes they’re the things that if you don’t do them actually add to your stress.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Exactly. Because then you’re thinking about the fact that you’re not doing them.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, and you feel guilty. I mean, so how does guilt factor into self-care?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: It comes up all the time in my research about why people don’t engage in self-care enough. They feel bad. So, when we’re thinking about buying things that help us deal with the demands of everyday life – I’m getting a house cleaner, having groceries delivered, sometimes taking an Uber instead of driving every once in a while, so you can take that conference call, so you can spend a little more time with your kids or taking care of someone that you care about – that we don’t engage in these kinds of behaviors because we feel so guilty. We have been so ingrained that we need to be the perfect parent, the perfect spouse, the perfect employee, that even though we’re going to the market economy with our hard-earned money and having solutions to some of these daily hassles, we don’t actually follow through. We don’t actually make those purchases, or we try to take on everything ourselves because we feel guilty. We feel lazy. We take on the burden of other people doing our tasks for us. When we want to outsource at work, we think about it not as an opportunity to help someone more junior get experience on a project. We think about it as offloading something we don’t want to do to someone else. So, we’re always constantly monitoring and thinking about, too much like to a too high degree, the extent to which we’re burdening other people. And it goes with self-care. If you can’t make that space in your life by delegating tasks at home, delegating tasks at work, you’re never going to get to self-actualization. You’re just going to be going from point A to point B, task A to task B forever. And a lot of what prevents us from getting there is we don’t want to ask for help. We worry about burdening other people.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. Well, learning to delegate is also part of advancing.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Exactly.

NICOLE TORRES: So, if you, if I feel like I need more time for myself, if I feel like I’m just too like hyper-focused on work right now, I’m not taking any time for me. How do I communicate that to my boss? How do I ask for more time to focus on me and my self-care?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Depends on who your boss is, I think. We have some data showing that you need to provide some justification about why you need more time. Just saying you’re busy, I need more time is not a good strategy. Our best data suggests that you can be penalized for saying, I can’t do this because I don’t have time. We all have the same amount of it. And it signals, how we spend our time signals what we care about in life to other people. So, we need to be a little bit careful if we need more time at work that we’re very clear about why. And we’re also clear about when we’re going to get things done. And we ask well ahead of when something is due. If you ask for more time in advance, your boss, in my data, sees you as more thoughtful, more caring, more considerate because you’re looking to the future, you’re realizing you can’t get something done without it costing you personally in terms of your health or well-being. And you’re doing the adult thing and asking for more of something you need. And so, managers actually really appreciate that. The only trick of this is you have to give yourself enough time each day to know you’re not going to have time in the future. And that’s where those kind of planning blocks become really important, where you’re not just focusing on urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent, 55 emails in my inbox, but you’re able to take a step back for yourself, no email, no communication, and think not only what is urgent, but what’s important that’s on the horizon that gives you that extra time to plan.

NICOLE TORRES: Okay, so we’ve talked about how managers can better model self-caring behaviors. We’ve talked about how managers can encourage their employees to take better care of themselves. But what if you work for someone who does not take care of themselves, who eats lunch at their desk, who works late, who emails you at all hours, who does not prioritize self-care in the least? Like what do you as their employee do with that? How do you manage up? How do you take care of yourself?

ASHLEY WHILLANS: You do not try to manage up. Do not try to fix a sinking ship. I think it’s really hard. I mean I think it’s really hard to change someone’s ingrained behavior. It’s really hard to change our own behavior and we live in our own bodies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it’s hard to make small tweaks around the margins to help ourselves have happier and healthier lives. I think trying to slip in yoga passes or trying to get them to, you know, not bug them every time they send an email probably is going to be counterproductive to your cause. But you can set boundaries, and you can try to protect yourself. And if this is really negatively impacting your performance and well-being, maybe you look elsewhere. It’s really hard to work for a toxic boss. It’s really hard to work for someone who has really high expectations all the time. And if you take your self-care seriously, happier people are more likely to quit situations that make them feel bad. Sometimes you have to, there’s know when to fold in. You have to know when to get out of a bad situation. So, you know, in the absence of being able to set your own personal boundaries, you might need to just slowly start looking for someone else to work for who shares more of the similar values and goals that you do.

AMY BERNSTEIN: All right, Ashley, let’s bring all this insight home. How do you practice self-care? Talk about how that’s evolved for you.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Yeah, so I used to joke in grad school with my colleagues, do what I say and not what I do. You know, this has been a journey for me. Just as my research has progressed, my own personal experience with self-care has also gone through some progression over the years. And I have definitely done it wrong and definitely struggle like so many of us to prioritize multiple competing demands, stressful job market, demanding job, having a personal life and family responsibilities, it seems impossible, right? And for me, my research really says small shifts around the margins, do small things every day. Doesn’t have to be when things get hard, think about quitting your job. I don’t think about it in like long stretches, like I’m going to defer all of my relaxation to one week, five months from now when I can take a week off of all of my responsibilities and just lie as a vegetable on the couch. I think of: how can I build in some self-care into every day? If it’s not answering email in the morning – so before I came here, I did three hours of work in the morning, writing, the intellectual stuff that’s hard that I don’t want to be constantly pinged on my email before my day starts. So, I get up early, I do some work, and then I spent an hour and a half lounging around on the couch with my boyfriend. I would have never done that before for the record. I would have just filled that time with meetings and work and emails and whatever else. But over time I’ve tried to take seriously the idea that, if my partner and I have an hour off together – obviously we have hard to coordinate schedules – then we should both be capitalizing on that hour. Because we might feel like we’ll have another hour in the future, or like a day off sometime, two weeks from now. But really, it’s about that hour. And how do you get more of those like 30-minute stretches with the people you care about, more of that, taking back those hours to go to the gym, go for a walk, spend time with your friends and family.

And I study time, money, and happiness and how it’s so important to prioritize time and quality time with people you care about. And first year on the tenure track, I got a divorce. My partner of 10 years left me, and I think it’s because he didn’t think that there was any space in a new life here for him. And that was probably true the way that I was working – working all the time, head down, didn’t make time. So even when I was present in the moment, I was always on my phone. I was always, even if I wasn’t on my phone, I was cognitively thinking about the next thing I was going to do. I was not present in the moment trying to cultivate a relationship with this other person. So, when I moved here for work, he didn’t want to move with me. And I thought, you know, I was like, how dare he not want to move for my career? Like, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. And upon reflection, I realized he didn’t want to move because he felt like there was no life here for him, for us together. Because we hadn’t made that space. I hadn’t made that space in our relationship. And again, it’s not about taking nice vacations. We did those things, but that doesn’t fix day in, day out, minute in, minute out conflict that happens when you’re not fully attending to the people in your life that you care about. So, my research suggests small, simple changes around the margins. Can you outsource something? Can you cancel a meeting? Can you move something so that you have a little bit more time today, right now, not five months from now, not when you get your next promotion, right now. How can I capitalize more on the opportunities in my life to do the things I care about in each day? And I think that’s what I’ve really learned in thinking so much about this topic is I actually take that a lot more seriously now. I used to kind of just say it because my research shows it. And now I’m like, no, when I’m doing something, I’m trying to do it. And if I need more time, I ask for it. It’s hard and I still feel a little bit of that guilt that we were talking about not putting work so central in my life. But I’ve already experienced the cost of doing it in a short period of time. And I’m certainly not going to perpetuate that work focus into the future. I think life is worth enjoying now in the moment while we have it, no matter what else we’re trying to do or accomplish.

NICOLE TORRES: Ashley, thank you so much for joining us in the studio today. This has been great.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: Thank you so much for having me.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Alright, Emily, Amy G., this past Tuesday was election day here in the United States, and our employer­ gave us all the day off as a wellness day. And they encouraged us to take care of yourselves, take time with your family, go get the flu shot, etc. So, how did each of you spend your day?

AMY GALLO: I actually was really happy to have the day off. But I didn’t do any of the things they suggested, partly because I was so nervous about the election, I didn’t feel like I would really be able to relax into anything focused just on myself. For me, the self-care was taking action. I worked at a poll in my town that had been closed and had helped people who came to that poll to find the new poll, so they could vote. To me, that was the self-care – doing something that I felt could ease my anxiety or could affect the outcome of election day.

EMILY CAULFIELD: And so, what I did –I was really grateful to get this day off. It was kind of unexpected, and I really appreciated that they did this for us. In the morning, I was like, I’m really going to use this as a wellness day, and try to work out in the morning, just because I know that puts me into a better mental space, when I actually get up to do it. So, I started to work out in the morning, I went on a walk with a friend. And then, later on in the evening, I got together with a few friends and my sister – kind of like our little quarantine pod – we ordered food and watched the news, and in between, watched more enjoyable things. So, trying to make it as enjoyable as possible because we knew it was probably going to be a difficult night, and a difficult next couple days, I guess, it turned out to be. What about you Amy? What did you do?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, I did something similar to what Amy G. did. I worked at a poll in my town, and I was really happy to be able to do that, partly because if I hadn’t, I would have parked myself in front of cable news all day and all night, and that would have been very, very bad for my mental and emotional health.

AMY GALLO: You know, listening to the three of us talk about what we did, I feel like we really took the advice we just head and put it into practice. You know we all did different things, but we were doing things that were focused on the people and the activities that we cared about – that were aligned with our values. And so, while traditional forms of self-care, and I’m using air-quotes here – while traditional forms of self-care, like getting a massage or going to the gym aren’t available to us right now, it feels like we’re taking this advice to heart and working toward staying out of burnout, taking care of ourselves, just staying sane.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I totally agree with you. And I hadn’t even thought about it, but one thing I found myself doing on Election Day, and actually even Monday – the day before Election Day – was reaching out to my nearest and dearest, and just sort of connecting. Ashley said that part of self-care is attending to the relationships that matter to you – hearing people’s voices, seeing their texts, it gave me a sort of visceral comfort, even as the rest of me, well, I was kind of losing my mind.

AMY GALLO: My mom sent the sweetest text to my brother and me the day after the election, and just said, “Just so you know, no matter what happens with this election, we’ll always have each other.” It was just so sweet, and just a reminder that in a world where we can’t control outcomes – we can do the best we can, but ultimately at some point, things will be out of our control, and we just have to focus on what matters to us. And Amy B., is there anything you heard from Ashley or Mandy in these interviews that you really want to focus on as we navigate our way through the rest of 2020 and beyond?

EMILY CAULFIELD: I think I probably just want to laugh more. And I think it would be nice to take time to focus on just the good feelings and focus on surrounding myself with experiences and positivity that do that for me, as opposed to seeking out things that are difficult and challenging.

AMY GALLO: It can be so easy to forget to have fun when things are so hard. And yet, it’s absolutely permissible, and it’s absolutely necessary that we do that. And distraction for me is so helpful right now. They’re so many intense, important, critical things happening, and yet, if you stick with thinking about only those things, you will be burned out. You will be stressed out. I think both of you know that I love “The Great British Baking Show,” as does Amy B. And those episodes will just be on an endless loop for me, I think, in the next months, maybe year, maybe for the rest of my life.

EMILY CAULFIELD: Yea, it’s so relaxing. I love that show too. What about you, Amy?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, I think the underlying advice that is really all about knowing what matters to you, and who matters to you. And keeping that front of mind is really helpful – that kind of focus keeps you from getting whipsawed as much as we all have been whipsawed lately. And by the way, I think it’s going to go way beyond 2020, and it’s great advice for life.

AMY GALLO: Yea. That’s our show. I’m Amy Gallo.

EMILY CAULFIELD: I’m Emily Caulfield.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And I’m Amy Bernstein. Our editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Adam Buchholz, Rob Eckhardt, and Tina Tobey Mack.

EMILY CAULFIELD: One of the actions Mandy O’Neill suggested taking to prevent burnout is expressing gratitude. So, over the next two weeks, we welcome you to call the Women at Work phone line and leave a voicemail message, telling us about an aspect of your work that you feel grateful for right now. The number is 617-783-7843. We’ll feature some of those messages in our November 23 episode.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Thanks for listening and take good care of yourself.