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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio. Okay, so, a little over a decade ago, Candy Ween found herself at her doctor's office for what she thought was a routine checkup. But routine it was not. Her blood pressure clocked in at two hundred over one ten. It's what's referred to as hypertensive emergency and leaving it untreated, Carol, can lead to a stroke, heart attack, organ failure, and even death.
It's unbelievable. She was ordered immediately to go on bed rest for three days, start xanax and blood pressure medication.
Given that she had a.
Lot of work to do, she was reluctant to go home, and that she found was the issue. It was the beginning of understanding what would become an incredibly important chapter in her life. And I have to say, getting ready for this, this book, we've been kind of passing it around to colleagues and just talking about it and stress and kind of managing work.
Well, we got doctor Candy Ween's with us right now. Senior fellow and director at the Master's in medical Education program at the University of Pennsylvania. She spent many years since then researching burnout and stress resilience. Doctor Ween's welcome. Before we get to that doctor's appointment that was so pivotal, pivotal in your life, take us earlier to your childhood, because you've got a really interesting story and it's certainly related to your book.
Yeah, thank you, and thanks for having me on. Yes, So my story is maybe perhaps unique to everyone else's story, but we all have a story about our childhood and the ways in which we learned how to deal with stress and the ways that we learned how to cope and potentially what might make us vulnerable today. So in my case, I was raised on an Indian reservation by a single mom. My parents divorced when I was five.
I had a number of adverse childhood events when I was younger, which contributed to some of the things that I experienced. But one of the things that is really foundational to my pattern of coping with stress is that I grew up very much as an insecure overachiever. Insecure meaning that because we lived on welfare and Medicaid and
food stamps and often suffered from food insecurity. I was very, very insecure about my future, my financial future, and I was aware enough to know that if I needed to work hard to break the cycle of poverty in my family. And so I knew that I wanted to go to college. I was quite motivated intellectually to want to learn, but I wasn't in the right circumstances. Long story short, I moved in with my dad when I was twelve, and
the conditions changed. I went from getting almost absent school because I wasn't in the right environment to getting straight a's living with my dad, and so that started another pattern for me, which was this need for external validation. I really I thrived getting recognition for the hard work
that I was doing. I learned that the harder I worked, the more I got recognized for my work, and that set me on a path to potentially overachieve my way through things, including having three jobs in college while I was going to school full time paying for it myself. All of that set into motion this pattern of overworking and trying to protect myself from going back to the life that I once lived when I was younger. So that's all of what kind of contributed to this workaholic
kind of approach that I had to work. And then when I had that life threatening health crisis that woke me up in twenty eleven, that was really the result of me working on overdrive almost all the time. For me, and I hear from many of the people that I interviewed today, burnout was the baseline. We didn't use the word burnout a whole lot back in the nineties and early two thousands, but I think that's what I was experiencing. I just wasn't aware exactly what it was and what it was doing to me.
You know, It's interesting. We live in a culture and I feel like I grew up in a family where it was like, yeah, work hard, that's what it's supposed to be at You're a workaholic. It's a good thing, Like.
Like that was a thing until like a few years ago.
Well that's a really good point, right, And I do wonder you know, we thought with COVID that maybe we were thinking balance, Yeah, look at what we can do. We can actually have a better life. I want to get to what you know, part of your title is about emotional intelligence and helping us out when it comes to being burned out. What exactly is emotional intelligence?
Yeah, emotional intelligence is a set of competencies that have to do with our awareness of ourselves, mostly our emotional self awareness, but includes other awareness aspects, the ability to regulate or manage ourselves, our behaviors, our thoughts, our emotions, as well as our ability to understand the social environment that we work in. Like so, for example, understanding the politics of the team that I might be working on
or within my organization. But it's also being able to work very effectively in that social or in that political environment. So it's self awareness, self management, and then social awareness and relationship management.
What about the idea of I don't know, perfection being the enemy of good, Like the idea that when something is done, it's done. And I think that that's what a lot of people struggle with at the workplace. I think is and it really can burn people out because it takes so much time and energy. Is these incremental changes that are not that important to a certain project that people are working on.
Yeah, so perfectionism is one of the traps that I write about. I write about a number of self inflicted stress traps also known as thinking traps or in the sciences, we call them cognitive distortions. It's meaning that we think about something that causes us to overwork or causes us to put more effort into something than we need to. Perfectionism is one, Imposter syndrome is another. Having overly high expectations of ourselves, having overly expectations of other people, even
being overly engaged in our work. All of these things are stories or assumptions that we operate under and that cause us to feel more stress or amplify the stress that is caused by whatever we're experiencing and sets us up to be prone for burnout.
What's the balance, though, because man, you're going to have First of all, media is a stressful industry. The clock is ticking, You got to hit deadlines. It's just the way it is. Stuff is thrown at you last minute, or news develops, and you just got to kind of roll with it. I would say that there's a fair amount of us who kind of thrive on that, and
that's part of the fun of the industry. Having said that, what's the balance between a stressful situation that leads to burnout to Yeah, you're going to have days where you're stressed and that's just part of a job and a work life. So how do you kind of get your head around what's good and what's bad.
Yeah, you know, in professions like yours, where you have pretty much high intensity almost all the time and a lot of things coming at you unexpectedly, that those type of jobs do require quite a bit of recovery time. Recovery in the form of sometimes it's micro recovery, so shorter breaks throughout the day, reconnecting with your family or friends, even for a couple of minutes, if you can, going outside, whatever it is for you that helps to renew your
energy levels and your spirit. For other people, it's taking extended periods of time. So if you think about recovery, though, one of the things I encourage people to focus on is when you're recovering, watch what you're doing to comfort
yourself versus really renew yourself. Comfort yourself as in like you know, binging on some program or eating junk food, or doing something that feels good in a moment but doesn't necessarily really renew your energy levels, like a good night's sleep with an hour or two of deep sleep.
So you know, I recently said to somebody, I feel like I walk in the door and I'm always behind, and they're like, that's a good thing. They mean to get lot going on. Having said that, I do think about leadership and all of this and how a leader needs to look at Yeah, hey, gang, we're going to have a tough week. We just need all hands on deck, if you will, Versus wait a minute, this is too much for my team and they're going to break. So
advice to leaders are what they need to know. We have about a minute or so left.
Yeah, I call it the sweet spot of stress. We all need to know what our personal sweet spot of stress is. And for a leader recognized for the team, how much can we push the team to really perform under intense conditions without them slipping over into the distress zone where it's going to negatively affect their performance. So it means tuning into your employees having open conversations around stress levels are going to escalate in these high intensity periods,
and we're going to take recovery breaks together. We're going to do things to support each other so that we don't all slip into distress at the same time and potentially burn out.
Hey, doctor, weens, we do have time for one more question. Now, what's your strategy, I mean, what do you do? How are you going to you know, decompress after the work day this weekend.
Oh that's a great question. Yeah. So I haven't seen my son for a couple of days. He's been busy with soccer in school, and even though I've had a lot going on, I am just so excited to see him and hug him. Honestly, like that's one of the things that renews my spirit. And just being able to look him in the eye and hear about his week. That to me reminds me of why I do the work that I do and helps me just really renew my spirit.
Tim and I were just talking and we said, that's the one thing like in the middle of the day off like all of a sudden, you know, your kid calls, or there's pictures or something you look at, like it really kind of recharges you in a big way.
Nice reminder of like really important stuff out there.
Yeah, exactly.
Absolutely, you gave us some great respective.
You gave us some great things to think about as we go into the weekend. Doctor Wiens, thank you so much. Doctor Candy Weens, Senior Fellow and director of the Masters in Medical Education program at the University of Pennsylvania, joining us there from Philadelphia. Her new book it is called Burnout Immunity. How emotional intelligence can help you build, resilient and heal your relationship with work.