Anne Helen Petersen on changing your relationship to work and the guardrails that can prevent burnout
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. When I worked in an elementary school, I experienced so many very weird things that were very specific to being a teacher. For example, I remember the year after I left teaching being absolutely astonished that I could just go to the bathroom whenever I wanted and I didn't have to run back in a dead sprint praying that full chaos hadn't erupted while I was gone. What a wild luxury.

Or now as a comedian, I never stop being amazed by the fact that sometimes I'm paid in money for my work, and other times I do the exact same work and I'm paid in drink tickets. Exact same effort, very different reward. At the end of the day though, there really is not any such thing as a normal job. All workplaces have their idiosyncrasies and their quirks. So how can we make sure that whatever the job you do, you leave work every day with dignity, with respect, with fair compensation, and with energy for the rest of your life?

In my opinion, nobody dives into these issues in a more nuanced, thoughtful, and approachable way than today's guest, Anne Helen Peterson. Here's a clip where she's talking about this new world of remote work and her own experience in it. What remote and flexible work allows you to do is that previously our lives absolutely revolved around work. Work was the sun. We're the planets going around it. And now I feel like

work rotates around the axis, which is my life and what I like to do. So I still work a lot. I'm not saying that the hours are necessarily that dramatically different, but I do it when and how I want to do it. The ability to work anytime is the ability to work anytime. And that's where I think sometimes we forget that

Working from home is a skill, just like learning Excel is a skill. We're going to talk all about how you learn that skill, as well as Anne Helen's thoughts on burnout, demoralization, and the nature of work. Stay tuned because you're not going to want to miss this. ♪

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I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you.

And we're back. Today, we're talking about work with Anne Helen Peterson. Hi, I'm Anne Helen Peterson, and I am a writer and author. I have a newsletter called Culture Study. I have a podcast with Crooked Media called Work Appropriate, and I've written four books, the most recent of which is about hybrid work. It's called Out of Office. So I know that you've written and done a lot of research about burnout, and I'm

I'm curious who you think is most affected or who you've seen to be most affected by burnout. Burnout takes so many different forms. And I think that like it's one of those things that it's difficult to compete at because the the burnout that someone who is working

A hodgepodge of three jobs, none of which have reliable scheduling. You're always trying to find childcare. You don't have an emergency fund. You're trying to make ends meet. Like that is a precarity burnout that is different in a lot of different ways from someone who is working, let's say,

in the tech industry makes a good amount of money, has a partner who also is working and makes a good amount of money, but they feel like their lives are unraveling because they're working all the time. They don't have time. They don't have any identity outside of their work.

They feel like they are constantly working or parenting and not doing great at either. So we think that like that's the difficult thing to square, right? And why hopefully when we talk about burnout, we talk about like specific types of burnout, like teacher burnout is different than...

Someone who is working as a social worker, even though those are similar in a lot of ways. Right. And then I also think there's a difference between burnout, which I think you can come back from. Like people can be burnt out and grapple with it, grapple with their relationship to work or they can find stability like that escape from precarity or they can get that safety net in place and come back from it. And then demoralization happens.

which is a concept that I really learned about from an education professor named Dolores Santiago. She talks a lot about how demoralization differs in that you realize that you no longer can do your job in a way that feels ethical and right with what is available to you.

And I think you see this a lot with teachers and a lot with nurses. Right. So it's not just like I'm really tired and I feel uninspired kind of thing. It's more of an ethical conundrum. I no longer feel I can do this in a way that is that is right. And so I want to talk about how we can come back from burnout. But I feel like actually before we do that, we have to address this this bigger thing, which is you're talking about how all these different types of burnouts.

So maybe it's worth just spending a second to talk about what that bigger umbrella is. What is burnout then? Again, it's one of those things, too, that you feel sometimes it's applied so widely that it loses its specificity. It loses its meaning. And I do think that the word itself has become diluted.

And I was part of that process, right? Like writing the article that I wrote for BuzzFeed about it and then writing the book that I wrote about it was one of many things that led to it becoming part of a larger cultural conversation. And whenever something enters the lexicon in that way, its meaning becomes less powerful, I think, for me.

People talk about it all the time. And if everyone's burnt out, then no one's burnt out. It's just the temperature. Whenever you talk about burnout, you have to talk about rapid growth capitalism. You have to talk about what it means to live in a country without a safety net. That is always what I leave your writing and your projects with, is a deeper understanding of the ways in which these things that feel personal are actually tied to larger issues. My PhD is in media studies. And when I think back...

I probably should have been a sociologist. Like it's the thing that makes me come alive is sociology and something that, uh, sociologists sometimes talk about in terms of what their field does is that it's a sort of reverse gaslighting so that you don't feel like the thing that you are feeling, the thing that you are experiencing, that it's not a personal problem, right? Or it's not a personal, uh,

achievement either. Everything that we're experiencing are part of these larger systems. So whether it's, I'm so tired, why does motherhood feel the way that it does? Why do I feel this way about athletics? What is a hobby? Why is childcare hard to come by? Why are we signing up for summer camp right now? Like all of these things are parts of larger structures.

It's interesting to me that you host this podcast called Work Appropriate, where you offer advice on work related issues that come up in listeners' everyday lives, because it feels like that's a real opportunity for you to see the individual and then tie it into the system. What kind of got you interested in looking at work culture in that particular way?

I am not a person who was ever interested in work culture previously. I've never taken a business class. I don't have an MBA. That's not my style. But then work relates to everything. I really started reading about the history of work and the history of our relationship to work as I started researching for my burnout book. And

It's fascinating. It's everything in American civilization is structured by the way that we conceive of work, the way we compensate it, the way who is, what type of work we're expected to do and when and how we're expected to do it. Like, it's just, it's everything. And so I think that sometimes...

I wonder how I got so far afield from some of my primary interests when really I am constantly like a question. All these questions about work are just questions about like how to be a person in the world. Right. You know, I was just taping a podcast right before this where one of the questions is about being an office manager who is constantly asked to like just do like personal assistant work.

shit, right? Like, oh, the coffee machine's not working. Can you come over here and fix this? Like the printer's not working or how do I find this thing on the intranet? I can't figure it out. And the thing is, is historically like that work would have been performed for men in an office setting by their personal secretary, just like they had a wife at home. On most cases, that's no longer the case for many reasons. And for better or for worse, it's

Most offices have just one person filling that role for dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of people. People are all loading all of those questions onto the office manager, who is usually a woman and that work is devalued. It's all part of this larger cluster of changes. And also the reason why they're asking her questions.

quote unquote, stupid questions is because they themselves are so overworked that they're not taking the time to actually figure out how to fix them themselves. Right. Like lack of time means that you waste more time and waste others time. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with so much more from Anne Helen Peterson. And after these ads, Anne and I delve into our own checkered work histories. How checkered are they? Well, you'll have to stick around to find out.

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There's also engineered air mesh on the upper side of the shoe that provides the right amount of stretch and structure. It'll turn everyday miles into everyday endorphins. That sounds good, right? Let's run there. Visit brooksrunning.com to learn more. Okay, we're back with Anne Helen Peterson. I was a teacher and then I was a comedian and a writer. And so I've never really had like a classic office job. And the few months where I've like worked in offices, I've come home and talked to my wife about it and said like,

You're not going to believe this, but like it's summertime and it's freezing cold in the office. I can't even imagine what's going on. And she's like, yeah, that's you're not describing something original. That is everyone's experience in a big office building because she's always had those jobs. Or I was like, you won't even believe this today. I finished everything I needed to do at 3 p.m. and they kept me there for another two hours doing nothing. And she's like, that's literally you're describing a job.

I've worked a lot of different types of jobs, but I definitely had never worked something, a job where I had a straightforward like manager, right? Like someone who like gives you evaluations in the way that we think about it because I was a nanny and then I was a grad student for a long time as I was getting my PhD and everything.

And you don't really have a boss per se when you're a grad student. There's a lot of flying by the seat of your pants. And then I was a professor. And that also like the evaluations you get are from your students. It's a very different scenario. But that first time that I had a manager is when I started at BuzzFeed News. And my manager was also my editor. And he was an incredible editor.

He was not a good manager and that wasn't his fault. He didn't have those skills. And for me, the biggest revelation, and I think people who think about managing for longer than even five minutes always see this is that,

Oh, isn't it interesting that we promote people to manager who are good at their other job, right? That like manager is something that you get to do when you're really good at that other thing. But being an editor has nothing to do with managing people. Managing people is a discrete skill. It can be learned, but it is very different than being really good at whatever thing that you do in your job, right?

And what it means is that a lot of organizations are deeply dysfunctional because they have people doing this work of like managing people that have no ability to do so, no skill at it, no affinity towards it. And that I think it's one of those things, like a lot of things in the office that you're like, this is so obvious. Why don't we change it? But offices oftentimes are like,

Just these massive barges that take days, years, decades to move to change anything. There's just so much. This is how we've always done things. And this is how we're going to continue to do things that something like the pandemic actually for all of its horribleness is in some ways an interesting work experiment because it allows us.

and allowed us to actually change things. And some companies did. And some companies are just desperately trying to return to what was the status quo before the pandemic. And I think those companies are really struggling. I feel like there's an intersection here between the burnout that we were talking about earlier and some of the culture change or how to change an organization because

at least in my own life and talking to friends, I feel like so often the cause of burnout is feeling like a lack of agency in what you're doing. And like, you can't, you see all the problems and it feels like it's impossible for any of them to change. And so you're just, you know, you're grinding your gears and nothing is happening. So how do you, when you're in a situation where you're in one of these big barges, how do you turn it? How do you make it so that it feels like, okay, I can change the things that are making it so that I'm burning out? Well, I think this is where

Our beginning discussion about the difference between like doing hourly work, right, where you are not necessarily you don't feel like your identity is stocking the floor on an Amazon warehouse, but it burns you out because you're working so many hours to try to make ends meet. Right. Or it's burning your body out because of the physical wear and tear of doing that work.

Historically, people in those jobs, when they got fed up with that, they unionized and they pushed back. And so they were able to gain agency or they had agency when they started the job through the power of their union, through solidarity, right? Because one of those workers could not ever change the way things worked in that warehouse, in that factory, whatever.

But people together pushing back against the company could find that agency, could find that power. And I do think that that is right now why you're seeing unionization efforts not only in places like Amazon and Starbucks, but also in jobs where there's a similar but different sort of exploitation. It's less of a physical exploitation and more of an exploitation of passion. So museum workers, graduate students, students.

There's a real fight to push back on these larger structures that have been really intractable in the way that they have conceived of. This is what you're paid at a nonprofit job. This is what you're paid in entry-level publishing.

you just you have to deal with it somehow. And usually people deal with it by either going into debt or having to leave the industry because they can't go into debt or never being able to enter the industry in the first place because they don't have, you know, any sort of familial or parental cushion to help them along the way. And what about for the other types of burnout where it's not where the lever is a little less clear, right? Like if you're getting burned out because it's too long or too hard or you're not paid enough,

It's a very clear how to fix that problem. What about the ones where you feel like your voice isn't heard or it just feels like you're being used for things that are inane, if that makes sense? Well, and this is where I think we get into this discussion of demoralization, right, where people are like, I can't do my job the way that it needs to be done with what is available to me.

And so I think of nurses, right, who are quitting in droves. Teachers, same thing. And a lot of nurses and a lot of teachers are unionized. But the thing is, you can't change the entire structure of healthcare in America. You can't change the way that it intersects with anti-vaxxation, right? You can't change how people behave during COVID. You can't change...

uh the way that parents are calling in and asking to audit the books that you have in your classroom right like the anti-critical race theory pushback that's happened all of that i think it's this combination of like i didn't sign up for this shit right like i want to work with kids or i want to help save lives i did not sign up to like argue with people about

like whether or not the vaccines kill people you know like that I didn't sign up to have these science conversations or I didn't sign up to like argue the importance of talking about race in class uh that's not what this job was was supposed to be so it's that and then also that feeling of like it don't have the tools you know we wouldn't ask a nurse to walk around every day

saving people's lives without, I don't know, a blood pressure cuff or a thermometer or, you know, the ability to put in an IV. Like those are essential tools to her job, their job. But we're at a place where I think a lot of nurses are saying, you're taking away my ability to do that, whether it's by scheduling or pay or the way that they organize like shifts, like just overwork, all sorts of things, experience, you know,

It's taking away their ability to do their job well. It's interesting because the two professions that you just pulled as examples, they're teaching and nursing. They're both professions where there's an idea probably before you start of what you're doing, right? Like I'm helping people with their health care. I'm helping people with learning.

But because of all of the other societal issues, they kind of all everything that falls through the cracks above in society ends up in public schools, ends up in hospitals. Right. Like homelessness, mental illness, poverty, inequality, all of these things, they end up becoming issues that.

It has to end somewhere. And these are places where everyone is dealing with them because you're dealing with all people in the society. Yeah. And librarians, too, or libraries, too, I would say are another place where like all of those things intersect. And then the other thing that I'm curious about is how race and gender play into who gets burned out, because teaching and nursing are historically very gendered workforces. Obviously, that's changed. But historically, those have been

women's work. And obviously there was a time before that, before they were pushed into being women's work. All of this stuff is intersectional. But first, if we approach it from the gender lens, there is an understanding that work that women do or work that women feel called towards caring jobs, right? Like any sort of nurturing, caring profession. So that expands beyond nursing and teaching to include things like social work, home health care aids. There's a lot of different things that could fall under that umbrella.

Those things are also conceived, like parenting, as something that you should naturally do, want to do, even for no pay. And then the racial element of it is really complex in a lot of different ways. But one thing is that those caring professions also were oftentimes a way for women who came to this country as immigrants to find their foothold in the industry, right?

If you look at the demographics of, say, home health care, it's like it's made up of immigrants. And if we curtail immigration to this country, we are going to have a home health aid crisis because that is the primary source of people doing this work in homes. But then you also just, again, work that is done. It's kind of a catch 22 work that is done by immigrants, by people of color, by women is devalued.

And because it's devalued, that is also part of the reason why people who are immigrants, women and people of color can get those jobs. Does that make sense? It's interesting thinking about the the jobs where because enough people want to do it, we can treat you badly.

Yes. There's something very strange about this is like this is such a good job that people want to do it. So we're going to make the conditions so bad that it's actually not a good job after all, because that's the only way that it could succeed. Right. Is what it's like. It's like so valuable. Like it's so venerated in some way that it's like they don't have to care about making it into a good job. You know, someone like in a lot of places, not all, but in a lot of places being a garbage worker.

If you're like working for the city, right? It's actually a pretty good job, right? In terms of you get a pension, you know when your hours are like it's just it's a steady job that that is the way that it is. They had to make it that way in order to get someone to do something that is central to our society.

Whereas teaching, because people think of it as something that is so lovely that everyone would want to do it anyway, they don't have to think about, or we as a society do not have to think about making it into a good job. Again, I think that that has changed. We have made it into a bad enough job that it's repelling people. And I wonder too, if we're reaching a point where fields like journalism or working in nonprofits are

also feels the same. If someone is listening to this and they're an individual and they're feeling these symptoms of burnout, right? They're feeling this overwhelm. What are some practical things that they can do to get themselves back to a place where they're feeling stable and they're not feeling that complete burnout? Yeah, well, I think the first thing is to figure out whether your burnout, the primary source of it is this feeling of financial precarity, right? And if that's the case,

Is there a change that you can make in your life? And I'm not talking about like stop drinking lattes or anything inane like that. Is there a future point in your life where that precarity would end? Right. Like, are you in a place where like, oh, my student loans are going to be paid off in a year or whatever?

My living situation is going to drastically change or there is absolutely going to be a huge promotion at work if I can just get to this point or if I can just finish this program or whatever. I feel like that's actually a very small portion of people. Sometimes it's that whatever you are doing as your job is going to keep you in that precarious position for the rest of your life unless something changes. And that's when you have to be like, OK, I'm a person in the world. My job is not my life. Right. Like I am more than my job.

So does that mean I need to change my job? Does that do I need to change careers? If this is not sustainable, right, financially moving like nothing's going to change. I need to have a conversation with myself about that. And then if you get past that point, not that feeling of precarity, it's more this feeling of addiction to my job, right? Not knowing how to stop working.

And that I think there are some like very basic utilitarian things that you can do that make work less omnipresent in your life in terms of turning off notifications, creating bumpers in your day, like an on-ramp and an off-ramp, being much more mindful about using delay send for emails or, um,

You know, even something like inbox when ready, which makes it so that you only get a batch of emails once every hour. And then also, I think, talking with your manager, too, because oftentimes we put expectations on ourselves in terms of availability that our managers do not actually place on us. Right. Like if you have an even decent manager, they don't want you to burn out because churn is expensive. So how can you actually create that?

clear expectations about availability and expectations in that way. So those are like kind of the basic things. But then the next thing too is figuring out who am I besides my job? A lot of people lost anything, any part of themselves that wasn't their job along the way, or like maybe their partner, right? I know a lot of people who have lost

fail to cultivate or to sustain close friendships, have no feeling of community around them. All they do is work and then kind of they're just so exhausted that maybe they can deal with one hangout a month and that too feels exhausting. They don't have any hobbies. Even the idea of a hobby seems frivolous.

But a hobby is just something you do because you actually like it. And then the last thing I'd say is get a good therapist. But most people I know who've untangled their relationship with work and recovered from their burnout, they've done so through a good therapist.

It seems like in the course of my work life, my time as a person in office and in working, that the idea of burnout, the idea of needing to take time for yourself to do things outside of work, it's become less stigmatized, less shameful. Does that track with you? And why do you think that is?

Yeah, I think that that is workplaces trying to like acknowledge that it exists because their employees have talked about it a lot. And then that trickles up the chain.

But then the workplaces do very little to actually change the way that they do business in a way that would prevent it happening. Right. So acknowledging it is a bandaid and the wound just keeps reopening because they don't have things like something we talk about in our book out of offices, actual guardrails. So like actual structural changes that protect people from the runaway train of work.

Because if you don't have those structures in place, we're all taught that working more or pushing past boundaries is how you show yourself to be exceptional. Hmm.

What's an example of a guardrail that would be an effective guardrail? Our guardrail is we do not check email on PTO when we have PTO. Or we do not send emails past 6 p.m., 8 p.m., whatever it is for your workplace. We do not have meetings on Fridays. And having no meetings Fridays doesn't mean, oh, because no one has meetings, isn't this a great time for us to have a meeting? Which is something that happens a lot. And it's not just something that is advised.

It is something that is practiced across the company from absolutely the top echelons of leadership all the way down to new employees. And it's also something that if you break it, instead of it being like, oh, yeah, that person's working really hard. Like they're emailing them PTO. If you break it, it's an opportunity for your manager to email you and say, no, this is not how we do things here.

It's actually sustaining a company culture that is working to prevent burnout instead of quietly congratulating people who behave in burnout ways.

I'm curious if you just have like a favorite work anecdote or something that comes to mind that's been really interesting for you to think about or that you've enjoyed a lot. Maybe one that you've experienced yourself is also an option. This isn't hyper specific, but every time that I hear about someone who, a company that is actually really working with a four day work week, and I'm not talking about four 10 hour days, which sometimes people do to like save money on electricity. I'm talking about

If we decide as a company that we're going to be really focused on our work for four days a week and you can take that fifth day, sometimes people, depending on what kind of work you do, sometimes that fifth day has to be spread without it or spread without the week. It doesn't matter.

The way that it dramatically changes people's relationship to work, like, that is really, really interesting to me. Because the way that work is oriented now, you get to Saturday and a lot of people, like, cram all these activities into Saturday because you're trying to, like, make everything, like, all of your parenting activities, all of your, like, friend activities, your athletic activities, everything. And then Sunday...

You're recovering and you're already prepping for the rest of the week. And you get a sense of this, like what if four day work week, how it could change people's lives when we have a three day vacation weekend. Right. And you're like this whole other day here. Like I can not only take my returns to the post office, but.

But I can actually sit and read a book for an hour. Like there isn't that need to like hyper schedule all of the fun and organization out of the weekend. And the other thing that happens, apart from that initial like exhale of I have actual time to do the things that I want to do, people cultivate hobbies, but they also are able to commit to things in their community.

You do something like what I do for my friends is you can pick up the slack in caring for a kid, right? You can be the place where they go after school for one of those days. You can spend time with someone who like an elder or a family member that really needs that weekly content.

You can show up for a weekly appointment at the food bank to work the shelves there. Like there's so many things that are made available. And it doesn't mean that people are less productive. It doesn't mean that your company is like loses the cutting edge advantage. People do better work because working all the time is not the same as doing good work. Like that's something that we've lost sight of.

Well, Anne Helen Peterson, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for making time to be on the show. This was a real pleasure. Thank you so much. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you to today's guest, Anne Helen Peterson. Her podcast is called Work Appropriate. Her sub stack is Culture Study and her latest book is titled Out of Office. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com.

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