Everybody Burns Out Eventually. Here’s How You Can Fight It

out of this thing. But it's actually a specific thing with a history and a meaning. There was this great episode of Planet Money that went into the history of burnout that talked about this man, Herbert Freudenberger, who coined the term. Okay, so what is it if it's not

this general term that we all use. According to him, it's a response to stress and frustration and a demand on yourself that you feel like you can't ever meet, like a perfectionism and a drive, and you feel like you're you can't get there, so you feel burnt out. And there are you were saying, there are certain professions that are more prone to burn out. I think doctors

are really prone to burnout. There was a business Seek article from a few years ago about doctor burnout and the dangers of it, because obviously you don't want like a surgeon, you don't want out. You don't want to burntout doctor. No. No, there's a fifty percent chance then a doctor is burnt out, which is ten percent higher than the general working population. That's terrifying. And you can see why, Like they're in a high stress field and they want, you know, they always want to do the

best for their patients ideally, right. It's associated with not only people who work hard, but people who are in fields where they work a lot with people, right, and have kind of a lot of emotional investment in their job. Yeah. Another example in that Planet Many episode was customer service workers. I guess I know there's a very high turnover rate at call centers because it's a really high stress job and you're failing you right, Your whole job is just

to hear people's file and anger at you. And if you think about it's kind of these jobs where you can't ever do it perfectly. There's always going to be somebody who's mad at the customer service person. There's always going to be a problem and with a patient. It's not just like you know, you're filling out some spreadsheet and you do it and you're done and yeah, you finished.

Although that's a nice segue into the more general use of the term, because you can feel burned out in in any kind of job, right Like, you don't have to be a humanitarian on the front lines or service employee who's dealing with people all day. You can you can get burnt out of that spreadsheet job. Is there something you'd like to share with that ever in a

moment you felt burnt out? I have. I definitely feel like I usually just like hit a point in time after being at any job for about like two years where I hit some kind of wall and I start to feel a little burnt out, even if the job hasn't changed that much. I think, especially if the job hasn't changed that much, and then you know, you either push through it or you kind of re evaluate whether that's the job for you. But it does seem to be like a creeping thing that happens to me over time.

I don't know, do you do you ever feel burnt out? So I think people who work in online media, like we do do get burnt out pretty easily because the Internet is so all consuming and stressful and you feel like there's always a news story that you have to

be responding to and the internet doesn't sleep. Yeah, it's very demanding, and you're you're like only as good as your last I mean as a reporter or an editor, you're kind of only as good as your last story, the last thing that you produced, and so it's not like you can ever really rest on your your laurels. Yeah. I felt the most burnt out in my first writing job,

which was one of those like NonStop blogging jobs. Um, that was just like you wrote sex posts today and went home and did it all over again, and that seemed unsustainable. Yeah, it's really hard, And I think that the thing about burnout is that it's to me, it's

like a feeling. You know, it can lead to other things that can lead to you not being as good at your job, or you're not trying as hard, or you know, because that lack, you know, you can feel less committed to it and then less inclined to try

really hard at it. But it starts as just like kind of like a nagging feeling in the in the back of your mind where you used to be more excited to get up in the morning and go to work, and then it slowly builds up, Like the longer you go without dealing with it, the more it's likely to actually affect your work. And that's the problem, right, Like the problem with the doctor burnout, for example, is you know, then they make more mistakes and nobody wants to be

in that position. But yeah, and then I want to turn out doctor or airline pilot. No, but and then like the stakes are lower for someone like us, but yeah, then I start writing less. My stories are not as good ideas or anybody in any office. You know. There's the this term that hr people love engagement, which I hate that term, but yeah, it's it's a buzzy word for just like how emotionally invested in your job you are, and the more people are engaged, the better companies tend

to do. So I imagine if you're burnt out, your engagement is pretty low. Right, Engagement is important, and so is not doing more than you can handle doing. And sometimes it's really hard at jobs because so many demands are put on you. But then there's like a type of person that puts a lot of demands on themselves and ends up burnt out. And it's actually what our guest today has written extensively about and done tons of

research on. Yeah. So, Adam Grant as our guest today, and he is a wark and professor and the author of a super popular book from a few years ago, Give and Take and and It. He talks about the two general types of people at work, the givers and the takers. The givers tend to be better workers and better for companies. And you can imagine they're the type of people who give in an office, Like you said, they might be prone to burn out because they overextend themselves.

And that is what Adam has done follow up research on that we are going to talk about with him today. Thanks for joining us, Adam, Thank you for having me. Yeah. So, you've found that givers tend to be better workers than takers. But after you published your book, you've got a lot of feedback from givers who suggested it wasn't that simple. Can you tell us some of the things that you

learned from the people who reached out to you. Yeah, you know, it's it's funny because I guess at some level it's an indication that people don't always read a book from start to finish. Oh yeah, we're familiar with that phenomenon. Never happened to anyone here, right, of course, we read your book from start to finish, but others

other people do that. Um. You know, it was funny because I originally read the book, you know, with this paradox as the as the hook, and I said, look, you know, if you compare givers and takers, and you know, most people falling somewhere in the middle, as as matchers saying, you know, I try to trade favors evenly, and I'll

do something for you if you do something for me. Um. What I'd found across studying engineers and salespeople and medical students was that the givers were actually the worst performers and the best performers, and they tended to be overrepresented on both extremes. And I started the book with that paradox, and then, you know, originally had written the second chapter

about why so many givers burn out? And the consistent feedback then was that it's that people read to be inspired and uplifted, and they really don't want to open a book talking about burnout. So I moved it to chapter six, and then a bunch of people didn't read chapter six, which was all about the differences between you know, why some givers burn out and others are on fire. So when that feedback came in, I was like, please skip ahead a few chapters, so can you tell us

why givers burnout? I think there are three systematic mistakes that the givers make, and this is where my thinking scotten refined quite a bit since writing the book. So if I had been clear about it, then I would have said, basically, the differences are about who you help, how you help, and when you help. So what we see with with failed givers is that they want to be generous and they end up helping all the people all the time, with all the requests, which is a

great way to exhaust yourself completely right. You never have time to get any of your own work done. You're overextended. As you start helping, you get a reputation for being a nice person, and then pretty soon no goodtied goes unpunished. And so what we see with successful givers is that they make thoughtful choices about who they want to help. So they say, look, you know, I'm not gonna help

everybody equally. There are takers out there, and they're willing to take as much as I'm willing to give, regardless of whether that's fair. So if somebody has a history or reputation of selfish behavior, I'm going to be more cautious with them and reserve. You know, my biggest act of generosity for people who are generous are fair themselves. And that's kind of the first distinction that's critical, right,

don't help everyone equally. I was curious if it matters, because it sounds like, you know, one of the key things is deciding whom you want to give to. Um. Does it matter why you give? Like, does it matter if you're doing it for totally altruistic reasons, if you just love the idea of helping other people, or if you're if you're doing it like, will you be more burnt out if you're giving for one reason versus another? Yeah? So this actually is a nice segue to the second factor.

So the people who give out of a sense of obligation or out of a sense of altruism are much more likely to burn out than the ones who who give because they enjoy it and because they care about the people that they're trying to help. And so, you know, I think that that altruism turns out to be a huge mistake because people just end up sacrificing themselves for others and they say, yeah, you know, I realized that this might hurt me, but it just it helps other

people so much. And the sad reality is that the more altruistically you give, the less you're able to give, because you end up exhausting yourself. And the people who gave the most consistently were the ones who said, look, I'm gonna zoom in on the two or three ways of helping that I enjoy an excel ad so that giving becomes more energizing than exhausting, but also so that I'm making a unique contribution and I'm helping in a way that's it's meaningful and effective relative to my knowledge

and skills. And when they did that, they were able to sustain their energy, they had more to give, they gave in ways that had a bigger impact, and they also had a different reputation because instead of being known as a jack of all trades, somebody that you could bother any time, they got known as somebody who had really specific expertise, and you only wanted to go to them when you were seeking something that they could offer that was really valuable. In a regular work environment, it

seems like you can get pigeonholed. And it's not even necessarily about selfness. Listen, like, if people realize that you're good at something, they're going to ask you to do more of that thing that you're good at, and that might not be your favorite thing to do. So how can people in their jobs make their jobs more about doing what they want to do and there thereby steer themselves away from burnout? But I think the key is to figure out the overlap between what you enjoyed giving

and what other people need. And it's not always the first set of request that you get right. So you know, especially if you look at the data, women are particularly likely to get stuck with the office, housework, the taking notes, the planning meetings. And the sad reality of that is that I don't know very many people who enjoy doing

that work. But when you're new and you come in and you know maybe you're the lowest status or most junior person in the group, you know that that has tense to fall to you and then people find that you're organized and meticulous, and then you just get stuck with it. Right. There's also like a sense of obligation to sometimes when you see something isn't being organized, well, you just want to go in and fix it. And

then everyone's like, oh, that person is the organizer. But it could just be that kind of that kind of obligatory selflessness you were talking about that you you kind of want to avoid. Yeah, I think that there there are a few ways to try to get around that. One is it's always easier to say no when you have another offer to make, right, So if you if

you follow Adam's lead. You know, I see this really frequently in my own daily inbox, which is, you know, people will reach out all the time for career advice and I'll write back and say, look, I don't I don't even feel comfortable giving advice to people that I know. And you know, I think that if you're interested in help, here are the three ways that I feel like I

have something to offer. And if you have that list, handy people respond pretty favorably, you know, because because you're not being rude, you're not being unwilling to help, You're just trying to redirect what you have to add. I think a second thing you can do is you can go to the people that you've helped in the past

and ask them to pay it forward. So you know, all too often we end up, you know, if you, let's say you get known as the organizer, you end up, you know, doing that for a bunch of people, and then you get more and more of those requests piling up. Well, the first thing you should do is you should go to the people that you've helped organize things in the past, and you should ask them then if you know, if they're willing to step up and pay it back, if not,

pay it forward. Um. I think maybe a third thing that that I would like to see more people do is when requests come in, you should start looking at at trying to batch them together. So you might have seven or eight people ask for your insight on the same topic, and instead of having one on one conversations with each of them, you should invite them all to

lunch and answer all their questions. And not only are you then having the conversation once as opposed to many times, you're also connecting them together and trying to build a community of people who are interested in, you know, in tackling the same problem which can help them even more. One thing that interested me from your work is that you talk about how sometimes that type of giving that we like to do and that we do a lot of, can actually lead to bad outcomes. And you did a

study on that with teachers. Can you get into that so short version of the story is Red Reveilly and I did this study with that with a group of teachers across the United States where we served them on how selfless they were. And the general assumption and teaching is the more selfless, the better, right, That's that's what this job is all about. You're supposed to put your students first. It's all about service, and you're there to

make a difference. And yet we found that of course, you know, most teachers are givers, they're passionate about helping and they care a lot about the success their students. But the more selfless they were, the worst their students did unstandardized achievement test and that was particularly true for

teachers whose students had struggled the previous year. So what happens is, you know, when when teachers are really motivated to help students um And it's especially when there's students have been you know, underperforming, they end up doubling down and saying, I will do whatever it takes to make students successful and to help them solve their problems. And that means that they do all of this one on one helping and firefighting. Sometimes they end up helping students

who aren't even in their classes. Sometimes you know, they're burning the midnight oil handling requests from you know, administration, and that takes away from time that they could invest in energy they could put into improving their lesson plans and helping their students as a group. And yeah, the sad reality of that is when we track what happens to the teachers, then they're less engaged in their everyday classroom work when coaches come in to observe them and

evaluate them and give them feedback. And so, you know, I think that that this is how so many people justify it being generous, right is well, you know, but the benefits to you know, to my students outweigh the cost to me or the contributions that I make to the school, you know, are are worth all the sacrifices

I'm making and our data show that's not true. Actually, that that if you can set some boundaries right and sort of take the airplane analogy as far as it can be stretched and say, look, if you can take the advice we're always given on an airplane seriously and secure your oxygen masks before helping others, you feel like you're contributing less, but you're actually doing more good that way.

The teachers who were able to put their own lessons plans first, who focused primarily on making sure that their students as a group were able to learn everything they needed to know, we're less likely to burn out, more likely to stay engaged, and had a greater impact that way. And I think that's a lesson we can probably all apply to our work lives. Yeah. Sometimes I think we like doing the things that make us burn out. I know I do, like I'm think, and then I convince

myself that it's good for my job. But I think your research is really interesting to show us that it's it's not the best way to get your work done always. Yeah, And I think I think for most people that just means taking a step back and saying, you know, what impact to my trying to have and then making sure that I'm not just doing the things that I enjoy,

uh that you know that divert from that. That's that's another trap that we see failed givers running into, is they forget to think about organizational goals and about who they're really trying to help um. And you know, if if you make sure that what you enjoy is better aligned with what you're actually trying to accomplish, it becomes

much more sustainable that way. One thing I'm curious about, and I don't know if your research has really gotten at this that much, but can you It seems to me that burnout is something that most people experience at some point or another in their career to some extent. And I wonder if you can still get burnt out even if you do make all the right choices about how to allocate your time and whom to help and not to help, Like, is there an element of burnout

that just has to do with time? Like you do something long enough and you start to feel burnt out? Yeah? I think so, I think it depends. Let me let me think about actually what the what the data would say about this? So in general, people don't burn out because they're giving too much. Time wise, they tend to burn out when they feel like they're giving a lot, but they don't think it's having an impact. So I saw this, for example, with with fundraising callers, people who

are trying to raise money for their university. So this is you know, not the easiest or most enjoyable job for for a typical fundraiser, but it is really meaningful. And the consistent finding was that fundraisers didn't know where the money they were raising actually went, and they had no sense of what good they were doing, and so

they were dropping like flies. And I found in a series of experiments that if we just connected them to one scholarship student who benefited from their work and got to see, you know, here's where this money is really making a difference, there was a dramatic spike in their motivation.

So we saw a hundred forty increase in weekly minutes on the phone and a hundred increase in weekly money raised caller by caller, And you know, in some ways you could say they were already making all the right choices.

They were making the calls they were supposed to do, they were applying the strategies that were most effective for collect connecting with alumni, but they just didn't feel like they were able to connect the dots and answer the question of you know, why is this important and how is this work really going to influence other people's lives? And once they saw that, you know, it's not like

they they actually approached their calls differently. It was just that they were able to think about the purpose of their work differently. That instead of harassing alumni, now they're getting on the phone and thinking about this is making

scholarships possible for students who are in need. And yeah, I think that's that's a shift that that applies to so many different jobs, right, Yeah, that's that seems like you could make that work for you in almost anything, Like even if you don't have the data to prove that what you're doing as a direct effect, you can just sort reframe your thinking even a little bit too make your day to day job connect to some larger cause. If you just remind yourself of that, it might help

with burnout. Yeah. That was actually a follow up experiment that Jane Dutton and I did. We had people just keep a journal for four days, fifteen minutes a day about the contributions they made that day, So who did you help? How did your work have an impact? And after that, we saw a major increase in the amount of effort that people brought to their jobs and they ended up significantly increasing in the sense that their work

was valued by others. And you know that's not just clients or customers, right, It could be the co workers that benefit from the work that you do. It could be your boss's boss that you don't see every day. Um. Sometimes those small reminders of of why you're doing what you're doing and who it ultimately helps can be a huge factor in helping to prevent or overcome burn up. So I follow you and your work, and I know that you do a lot. I'm wondering if you learned

anything about yourself this research and how you avoid burnout? Me? Yeah, or maybe you're burnt out and you want to talk it out on the show. Well, I think I think burnout is definitely something that will acts in weighns in my life, and it's it's largely a function of whether I've been careful about following my own advice, which I don't always do. So you know, I think I think for me what matters most is this this third choice

that we didn't talk about yet. So we we talked about, you know, being careful about who you help and how you help. I feel like I've gotten pretty clear about my priorities there. So you know, I put family first, student second, colleagues third, and everyone else fourth. And you know that's led to some hard choices, right If if you ask some of my colleagues, they'd probably say I

was less of a giver than my students would. And you know, I had to realize that I don't have enough hours in the day to help everybody who asks, and so, you know, when I have to make the choice. I didnt become a professor to help other professors. I became a professor because I wanted to have an impact on students. Um So that part is clear, you know, in terms of how I help, I've you know, I

basically identified two things that I love to do. One is that I really enjoy sharing knowledge about work in psychology, and I spend way too many hours reading esoteric journal articles about you know, studies. And I feel like if somebody has a question like has anybody ever done research on if that has to do with work or human behavior, there's a good chance to run across it at some point, and it makes me feel like I'm not wasting my time reading, you know, reading these arcane pieces of data.

Um and then the others. I also really enjoy making introductions. If there are two people that can help each other, I feel like I get to you know, I end up connecting with a lot of industries, and very frequently I can find somebody in you know, in a field or in an organization that somebody else is excited to learn from and vice versa. The place where I feel like I often struggle is the question of of when

I help. So you know, I've learned over and again in my own research, and there are lots of other scholars who have documented this as well, that successful givers set aside blocks of time where they're going to get their own work done and they don't allow interruptions, right, no no calls, no meetings, no answering email during periods where they're trying to be productive, and then they have separate when windows set aside to try to be helpful.

And the way that that I've tried to manage that is, you know, I basically only go into campus when I'm teaching or I have an event, and the other days I work from home and that helps a lot, but even then there's still lots of requests for you know, for phone calls, for interviews, for podcast interviews, yeah occasionally, and then there's also you know, the challenge that when I am on campus, there are more requests than I

have time for in the day. So what I often end up doing is just expanding office hours on those days, and that means, you know, after our kids go to school, I leave the house, so you know, I might head in to campus around eight am, and I'll stay there into the afternoon, and I don't even have a minute free, um forgetting any lunch. I have a minute free to like to check my email or find out if there's

anything I need to catch up on. And so I get home at night after our kids are asleep, and I have three or four hours of emails to answer and then you know, I basically playing catch up the whole next day as opposed to doing the work that I was supposed to do. And so I think what I need to do moving forward is is be more proactive about saying, look, I need to schedule you know,

stop times as well as start times for meetings. I need to make sure that you know, I have time set aside even during those you know, busy days Paul Graham would call them manager days as opposed to make your days, you know where you're back to back in meetings. I need time to check email, um, and to you know, sort of firefight day by day. And then I probably also need to have like some calibration on how many hours in those days I can handle for meetings, which

I'm not good at forecasting at all. That all sounds very stressful and I am shocked that you're not more burnt out, um, And really thank you for taking the time to make time for this. Yeah, this was really helpful. One thing that really struck me about that interview was Adam talking about how useful it can be to write down who you helped that day. I feel like that resonated with me because that's something that you can do even if nothing about your actual job is going to change.

Like for me, I can feel burnout creeping in, you know about jobs that I was once really excited about, and it's just like the passage of time and doing them every day, you know, you get more and more removed from the rewards of the job. And if you just make a little point of doing this exercise where you're saying, oh, I I helped like three people the following way, I feel like that could really benefit almost

anybody who's feeling burnout. It's funny because when I heard him talking about that, in my head, I was like, oh, so, basically, you're just telling me not to become synuncle about my job, which that sounds great, but it's really hard. Yeah, that's totally impossible. Yea. And not everyone's job has purpose. But

that's the thing. It's like, you can you can probably find it, and most people aren't taking the time to look for it that hard, and it might not be in the obvious ways that you're thinking of, Like, yes, you're gonna keep having the frustrations that you have about your job, and your job is not always going to feel that important, and not every job is as important

as every other job. But I could sit down and write down like today I helped another editor come up with a headline for a story, and I don't know, probably two of those things, but then they wouldn't have been things that I normally think about at the end of the day. And like pat myself on the back. Four. So maybe just like building up those little bits of self feedback over the time would be enough to to

kind of reset my thinking about it. I don't know, I haven't tried it, all right, I'll try not to be so negative about this Strategyca, be more like Adam, Be more like Adam. All right, and now it's time for hat big takes, happy fake takes. All right, Francesca, what is your not fully formed idea for this week? Okay, my half big take is a modest proposal. Perhaps you've heard of summer Fridays. I have, yeah, the leeway some people get during the summer months to take the occasional

Friday afternoon off. Well, I have a possibly even better idea than summer Fridays. It's called winter Mondays go on for many many professionals were now entering a stretch of the winter that is not only like the bleakest time of the year weatherwise, but it is this long period where President's Day has just passed and we don't get any real like federal holidays off until um Memorial Day. Possibly some people get good Friday out, but anyway, it's it's a bad time, there's like a lot of cold,

a lot of hours to work, and no holidays. If you have vacation days, use them for at least two Mondays during the stretch, and you will reward yourself with a couple of long weekends you can look forward to during this very sad time of year. And they should be Mondays and not Fridays, because that's a double reward. You get back to work and you only have to work four days winter Mondays. Think about it. I think you could really take off what Pecca is your decent idea.

That's not that great. I love your half big take, by the way, thank you, because I love vacation. My half big take is um an amendment on an old half big take that I did already. Okay, so I don't remember if you were around for this, but I had a half big take about how you have to have a strategy when choosing a stall in the bathroom

remind remind us. So basically I was like, if you have a stall, like I have a strategy where like I'll go to the end one on certain occasions, in the middle one on other occasions, and try to space it out. My amendment is that it is rude. If you are going into the bathroom and there are many stalls available to sit next to me, right next to me in the stall that I picked, pick ustall, that's at least one away. Yeah, that's a it's an invasion. Yeah,

don't do that. So that's my like the buffer stall up. Yeah, the buffer st all you need to have, you mean a buffer stall. So that's my I guess, like refining of a hat pick take. Yeah, you're becoming quarter. It's dangerous, like getting close to a take. Yeah, okay, I'll stop. You'll stop right there. No more on that, otherwise you're gonna have to actually write a story about it. Oh man, Okay, And that was half big Takes, half Baked Takes. Thank

you for listening to another episode of game Plan. You can find me on Twitter. I'm at RZ Greenfield and I'm at Francesca today. You can tweet your half Bake Takes two at game Plan or you can call our brand spanking new half Bake hotline at two and two six seven zero one six. And if you like the show, please head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts to rate and review and subscribe. We read every single one of them. There was a new one recently.

We loved it. It was great. We loved it. This podcast was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. Head of Podcasts is Alec McCabe. And we'll see you next week. Bye two one to six one seven oh one six six. I'm sure I stold that it's a half baked hot line. Yeah, I love it.