Manage Your Burnout (Interview with Mandy O’Neill)

A conversation with Mandy O’Neill

Working long hours won’t necessarily burn us out, but getting too little sleep or feeling unappreciated might. Women commonly face extra stressors, like office chores or doing a “second shift” at home, that can leave us exhausted. And once we’re burned out, it usually takes more than a few coffee breaks or going on vacation to feel like ourselves again.

Amy Bernstein, Nicole Torres, and Amy Gallo talked to Mandy O’Neill, an expert on workplace well-being, who explained the causes, symptoms, and repercussions of burnout. She suggested several ways to protect ourselves from experiencing it in the first place and antidotes (including laughing with your colleagues).

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

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

AMY B: What are the particular workplace stressors that lead most to burnout?

MANDY: Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is stress. Perceptions matter. Something that’s stressful to one person might be just fine to somebody else. If we look at the stressors that crop up again and again, a few things come up. One is resources, which include money, promotions, and benefits. But they also include psychological elements. I’ve studied hospitals and health-care systems that are resource-rich and, unsurprisingly, are also places where I see the least amount of burnout. There could be a visionary CEO or a wonderful client population. There could be a great financial bottom line. But these are organizations that have the resources to support the staff. This includes not only pay, but the ability to do things in your free time that matter to you, for example, taking time out of your workday to participate in a project involving pet therapy or whatever your interests are. It doesn’t necessarily include money; it includes time and autonomy. In contrast, organizations that are resource-poor have some of the worst levels of burnout. The two are strongly related. This might entail terrible physical working conditions, not enough staff, or not enough resources to 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 aren’t there, and the CEO is cutting everything possible to make the numbers with the bare minimum resources.

AMY GALLO: Can you talk about focus problems and how that might lead to burnout?

MANDY: Women have always had a second shift. They’ve gone home to more work. They’re often the people who are responsible for the household finances and the childcare. This creates well-known problems with distraction. In the literature, we sometimes call it “cognitive load.” It’s knowing you must do something, but you’re asked to memorize five numbers while doing it. Necessarily, that’s going to cause a focus problem. Being aware of the second shift that happens outside of work and the extent to which women are taking it on might explain why you sometimes see focus problems.

NICOLE TORRES: What about the thing that everyone links to burnout—long hours.

MANDY: Long hours are definitely not all created equal, because you can have long hours filled with work that you love and long hours that make you feel like you have nothing in life besides work and it’s draining to the bone. It depends on whether you’re into it. Long hours per se are not the problem. It’s a contributor, particularly if what you’re doing in those long hours is taking you away from other things that are important to you—friends, family, relationships, health, working out—or it’s work that you just don’t enjoy and that you can’t finish during work hours.

NICOLE: Have you felt burned out? Can you give us a sense of what it looks like?

MANDY: I have. It’s one of the reasons I took my entire family and I from our home on the East Coast to the University of California, Berkeley, on sabbatical. I recognized the symptoms in myself. They grew over time, and like any good researcher, I tried to apply what we call “me-search,” to myself and said, I’m feeling burnout. I probably need to do something about it.

NICOLE: What were some of your symptoms?

MANDY: In some ways, they’re very close to what the literature says. I’ve taught so many students and had so many wonderful experiences, stories, and personal situations. (This upcoming year will be my 13th as a professor.) But I had gotten to a point where I just couldn’t feel anything anymore. I looked at my students and the personal circumstances and complicating factors as just one big blur. My compassion valve had shut down. I’m a naturally warm, compassionate person, and something was wrong when I couldn’t feel their pain anymore. I looked at what was going on in their lives and their complications, and it just blended together. Depersonalization was the biggest symptom for me.

AMY G: Two things seem noteworthy about your experience. One, a lack of compassion. But also, that you weren’t feeling like yourself. How much is that feeling as if you don’t even recognize yourself part of burnout?

MANDY: It’s an interesting insight that hasn’t been explored deeply. But, a big part is knowing yourself and what your own triggers are. For someone who’s just not naturally compassionate, this could be their status quo. They don’t have very strong emotional reactions to their work or to people. Burnout might look a little different for them. But for someone like me, who’s normally emotional, effusive, and deeply compassionate, something was wrong when I couldn’t feel that anymore.

AMY B: Do you think women experience burnout differently from men?

MANDY: Like most things, the internal, psychological, and emotional experience of burnout is probably pretty similar between men and women. What differs, though, is how people deal with it. We know that men and women mostly feel the same emotions and, for the most part, to the same extent. But they express them differently, and there are some emotions that are not as appropriate, let’s say, for men and women to express. This is one aspect in which women actually have an advantage in that, historically speaking, it’s been more acceptable for them to express a wider range of emotions in general than men. When burnout happens, women are more likely to be able to express it than men. There’s another question about what happens in the workplace when they do express emotions. That’s where we see a much narrower band of acceptable behaviors. But, what do you do with those emotions when you start feeling them? Men tend to suppress emotions more than women do, which is one of the worst things to do, particularly for negative emotions, because not only do they not go away, but they also crop up in other ways—in memory, interpersonal relationships, health, well-being.

NICOLE: If women can express a wider range of emotions, then what leads to women experiencing burnout differently?

MANDY: It has something to do with the burnout itself and with what they do with the burnout. We know, for example, that women are asked to do office chores like cleaning the coffee pot or being the emotional support for the colleague who’s going through a rough time. There are invisible tasks that women take on because of expectations about who should be dealing with them but also, in some cases, their natural proclivities. They’re taking on more at work, which probably contributes to burnout in a more comprehensive way than it does for men. At the same time, women have different opportunities for dealing with burnout because it’s more acceptable for them to express vulnerability, sadness, and 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 for men.

AMY B: How does chronic stress fit into all this? Is it the same as burnout? Does it lead to burnout?

MANDY: Stress has a physiological profile that differs from burnout and is actually quite functional. When you have a lot of stress, your body usually starts shutting down or reminding you or giving you clues that you need to step back. You’ll often get sick or tired, and your body tells you that you need to get some sleep. This is actually a very helpful thing because it’s your body’s way of saying that you need to change something, 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 because, unlike stress, people keep going, which is partly how it gets to be chronic.

AMY B: How can you head off burnout? In my own experience, I don’t realize I am burned out until it’s severe. How can I just avoid it altogether?

MANDY: Getting a good night’s sleep before coming into the workplace is important, and being your best self (having good interpersonal relations, doing your work, performing well). There’s a metaphor called the “fish in water” effect. When you’re swimming, and you don’t know you’re in the water, it takes someone outside the fishbowl to look in and say, “Hey, that water’s really dirty.” That’s where it’s helpful to have a personal board of advisers. They could be colleagues at work, friends in your personal life, partners, or family, who can say, “You know, I’ve seen you go down this road,” when you can’t see it, because you’re that fish in water.