How We Take Care of Ourselves (Interview with Ashley Whillans)

A conversation with Ashley Whillans

It can be a challenge to take care of ourselves when we’re on deadline, traveling too much, or reporting to a boss who emails at all hours. Hosts Amy Bernstein and Nicole Torres spoke with researcher Ashley Whillans, who revealed how managers can model healthy habits and how employees can make time to practice them. She also highlighted the importance of spending time doing things that give us meaning, purpose, and a sense of belonging.

ASHLEY WHILLANS: I’m a subjective well-being researcher; I study happiness. When I think about self-care, I think about the predictors of happiness. Do I have enough time to spend with people that I care about? What is the quality of my social interactions? Am I on my phone the whole time? Am I rushing from point A to point B, meeting A and 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, my schedule, the tasks that I’m completing? Do I feel optimistic about where my life is going? When I think about self-care, I think about the outcome of self-care, which is well-being and meaning in life. Then I work backward from there to think about the predictors of well-being.

NICOLE TORRES: That’s a helpful view of self-care as a holistic journey that also includes work and interactions with people. It’s not just a marketing concept; it’s not just face masks and massages. Self-care is a lot bigger than that. That’s helpful as I think about how self-care fits into my life. I’ve always thought of work and self-care as being separate. Isn’t prioritizing my career and spending a lot of time at work and trying to advance taking care of my future self?

ASHLEY: We all have multiple goals, needs, and motivations in life. I 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 we spend each day aligns with 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 fit within buckets or categories of things that you care about, your values, and your goals. The extent to which you spend your days in a way that’s consistent or aligned with these goals, values, and aspirations creates this feeling of self-care and everything being coherent. Then your work isn’t necessarily in conflict with your personal life; it’s part of a greater whole. It’s one motivation fulfilled in one area. Having a diverse set of motivations will make you happier and healthier as a whole person.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I’ve learned that I need to figure out what helps me function happily. If it means going to the gym and cutting into the nine-to-five workday, that’s OK. That’s what I need and it’s the only time I can do it. It means I’m going to be healthier, my head is going to be on straight, and I’ll be able to function better. As a manager I need to communicate this, particularly to women in the office, because it gives them permission to take care of themselves as well.

ASHLEY: That’s where managers need to start communicating, especially to groups—junior people, women—and having very clear guidelines for how you ask for personal time in the workplace. In some of the data that I’ve collected on asking for more time on adjustable deadlines at work, employees who do it and feel like they can are, unsurprisingly, less burned out, are happier, and perform better because they asked for more time and turned in higher-quality work. The problem is that junior people and women, who could benefit most from additional time, are the ones who are least likely to ask for it because they think they’re going to be penalized, even though my data doesn’t show different penalties based on gender or on junior-senior status. If I take that time off, if I’m the person who’s going to go to the gym in the middle of my workday, I still have a sneaking suspicion that a promotion might go to the person in the corner office who’s working all the time. We know what to do to get self-care, but how does it operate in practice?

AMY: The other thing to consider is the notion of the ideal employee. Some of it is just resetting our expectations and articulating goals that are more human for everyone, starting with the corner office.

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

AMY: It’s why you don’t send emails after a certain hour or on the weekends.

ASHLEY: In American work culture, to get employees to take these kinds of benefits and truly disconnect, data suggests you have to regulate people taking time off if they’re not going to spontaneously do it. They still have an idea in their minds of the ideal employee. We need to set a cultural norm that it’s not OK to constantly check Slack and email; that’s not the ideal employee. The ideal employee works really hard when they’re in the office and then goes home at a reasonable time and has a self-care-filled life outside the office. When you have a whole self that’s not just work, you perform better.

AMY: I had imagined that self-care was about massages and going to the gym and making sure that you make time for you. What I now understand is that it’s doing what you need to do to feel whole. That includes maintaining your personal relationships and taking care of who matters to you in addition to what matters to you.

ASHLEY: 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. Sometimes taking care of our kids and people we care about feels stressful in the moment. But they’re exactly the kinds of things that give us meaning, purpose, and a sense of belonging.