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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
When I was a CEO, I was an executive, I never worked less than 80 hours a week. It was a great job. I truly believed in the mission of the organization. I was an enthusiast for it, but I was burning out by the end of 10 years.
Chapter 2: What is burnout and how is it defined?
From the early parts of the coronavirus epidemic to the direct aftermath, there's a pretty big increase from about half the population to almost two-thirds of the population that are showing some signs of burning out. When you're feeling like a desiccated husk of a human being and everything feels like an insurmountable task. despite the fact that at one point you were really good at your job.
Where ordinary work is extraordinarily hard, it's hard to see how you can ever make things better. You just want to give up, quit, run away. You're fantasizing about just walking off the job.
Chapter 3: What are the signs of burnout and how can you recognize them?
You don't have to live this way. Spoiler alert in this episode, you don't have to be overwhelmed. Hey everybody, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is my podcast about how all of us can lift each other up and bring each other together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
I've dedicated my career as a behavioral scientist to love and happiness, and I want to bring those ideas to you. in part because I want you to have more love and happiness in your life. But I have an ulterior motive, which is that I want you to join me as a happiness teacher.
I want to arm you with the best facts, science, and data to help people understand that they can live better, happier lives. I want you to be a teacher just like me, because that's how we scale this.
Chapter 4: What are the main causes of burnout in the workplace?
This is how we make a better world. So thank you for being part of this movement, whether this is your first episode of the podcast or whether it's well into the first year of episodes. Many of you have been with us from the very beginning, and I thank you for that. Please do continue to share the episodes with other people. passed them on.
It's really good for the algorithms, the algorithms that rule our lives unhappily. They do rely on the replication that comes from you by word of mouth or sharing these particular ideas. So send a copy of this to somebody that you love, if you think that they can use it. Also, please do give me your comments and feedback and criticism and ideas for new episodes of the podcast.
What would you like me to be talking about?
Chapter 5: Which occupations experience the highest rates of burnout?
Write to me at officehours.arthurbrooks.com. If you'd like to go a little deeper in these ideas, you can always get it from my newsletter. We have more than 200,000 people with a huge rate of readership right now. I mean, it's just, it's amazing how many of you are reading the newsletter. If you're not yet, you can get that for free, completely for free at arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter.
Chapter 6: What can employers do to prevent burnout among employees?
And if you want to talk about these ideas in person with other people and occasionally with me as well, We are holding retreats now on the ideas that are in this podcast on the science of human happiness. You can go to retreats.arthurbrooks.com to learn more about that. And as always, you can read my books. Here's my latest book.
Chapter 7: What strategies can individuals implement to combat burnout?
If you've been watching the podcast, you know I've been talking about it relentlessly, the meaning of your life. Pretty much everything comes back to the meaning of your life, doesn't it? Well, certainly all of my work does. Now, I mentioned a minute ago that I'm super interested in what you think I should be talking about.
Chapter 8: How does remote work influence burnout rates?
And many of you, the last time I asked about it, you wrote in the number one topic that people said they wanted me to write and speak about was topics as we age, interestingly. second half of life topics. How can we mature and get happier as we get older? And maybe that says something about the demographics. Maybe what I should do is dedicate an episode to making kids get the hell off your lawn.
Maybe I should do an episode on how it's too loud in restaurants. I'm kidding. I know a lot of you watching are not super into the old folks jokes. But the truth of the matter is that we are all Moving on in years, time is linear after all. And I will be doing more topics on that for sure. It's something I've thought an awful lot about.
But the second most requested topic is what I'm going to be talking about here today, which is how can I engage in a different and more joyful way with my career and my work? Specifically, people have asked again and again for me to talk about burnout, the topic of burnout. Something that I've studied a lot over the years and teaching at a business school.
I have a lot of colleagues who are doing it as well. Related to that is what I will do in a future episode, maybe even next week's, on workaholism, the addiction to work. So first burnout and then later workaholism. These are two very requested topics. And there's incredibly interesting research on this that's extremely encouraging.
If you're suffering from burnout in your job, burnout in your career, burnout in your life, you're not alone. This is a very, very common thing, but it is something that we can actually remedy. With a little bit of information about the science, I promise you, your life can actually get better. And when you go on to different periods of your life, you can actually avoid this pitfall.
So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Now, When I talk about burnout, the first thing that I'm interested in, or the first time I looked at it, is who made that term burnout? I mean, I guess it's really descriptive, but obviously somebody had to put it into current parlance. And it turns out that there are two people that you can turn to, to arguably have coined this term.
The first, believe it or not, is Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian existentialist novelist from the late 19th century. And his most famous novel, his greatest novel, maybe the greatest novel that's ever been written. And as a matter of fact, and if you want to learn more about psychology and the human psyche, you got to read this book.
If you haven't read it yet, The Brothers Karamazov, aka The Brothers K. It is a psychological thriller. And I promise you, you're not going to be able to put it down if you're interested in behavioral science. And in Brothers Karamazov, there are three Brothers Karamazov that are grappling with their relationship with each other and with their father, who's a drunk and a pretty bad guy.
Now, the brothers all have different personalities. The youngest of the brothers is Alyosha, who's a saintly gentle figure. He's sort of the good guy of this. And originally Dostoevsky was going to write three different novels for each of the three brothers. He only made it through the first one before he died. And this is the one that really focuses on Alyosha's life.
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