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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Burnout kind of comes from a place of just like numbness or not feeling and lack of motivation. Tense pain, angst in my chest that then just spreads slowly across to my shoulders. I'm stuck in this hard place of I don't want to give up this job, but I don't really enjoy it anymore.
Jonathan Malesic landed his dream job teaching at a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania.
From about age 20 or so, I wanted to be a college religion or theology professor. And I got it. I got exactly my dream.
He was publishing papers, earning tenure. He was really happy until he wasn't.
So about eight or nine years into the career, I found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I started having weird, inexplicable pains in my torso in particular. I was constantly exhausted. I dreaded going to work. Everyone at the college had to take theology. Very few wanted to. So my class was, you know, somewhat resented by the students.
The college itself was under a lot of stress. There was a budget crisis along the way. People were let go. There was just a lot of worry at the college.
jonathan wasn't himself i had a very short temper uh i would find myself blowing up in meetings over very minor things um i yeah i was constantly frustrated i felt sort of useless i would find myself lying in bed in the mornings for hours like watching over and over the video for peter gabriel's song don't give up I also love Kate Bush and that song's a duet.
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Chapter 2: What are the signs and symptoms of burnout?
In the video, Gabriel and Bush are just like in this embrace for six straight minutes with this like eclipsing sun behind them. It's extremely dramatic. I just needed to hear that over and over and over again. I'm fundamentally a nerd. So I solve problems in my life very often with research. And somewhere along the line, I had encountered this term, burnout. I wasn't just a failure.
I wasn't just bad at my job. I wasn't just tired. Something happened that researchers identify as a real phenomenon.
I'm Jonquan Hill, and this week on Explain it to Me from Vox, we get into the reality of burnout and what to do if you just don't have any more to give. Jonathan decided that he needed to quit that dream job. And as he started to think about what to do next, he wanted to understand what derailed his career.
As I read more and more articles about burnout, A name came up over and over again, and it was Christina Maslach, who is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She's the sort of godmother of burnout research. You know, I read many of her early articles.
As their emotional resources are depleted, workers feel they're no longer able to give of themselves at a psychological level.
I've read one of her books called Burnout, The Cost of Caring.
Burnout.
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Chapter 3: How did Jonathan Malesic's career lead to burnout?
The word evokes images of a final flickering flame of a charred and empty shell of dying embers and cold gray ashes.
And I just couldn't get enough.
Why did you think what happened to you was burnout and not just like, ooh, this job, not a good fit?
One thing was that I took the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which is the standard research instrument for measuring and classifying burnout. It's a 22-question survey, asks, you know, how often do these following kind of bad experiences apply to you?
I feel emotionally drained by my work.
Working with people all day long requires a great deal of effort. I have the impression that my team slash colleagues make me responsible for some of their problems. I'm at the end of my patience. I feel full of energy. I've become more insensitive to people in the workplace. And I scored in the 98th percentile for exhaustion. I was so proud of myself, you know?
You're like, look at me. That's right. I won.
Exactly. You know, it's like I aced this one.
Of course, there's a big difference between fatigue and boredom and actual burnout. But I'd love for you to explain the difference from a scientific perspective. What makes burnout, burnout?
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Chapter 4: What is the Maslach Burnout Inventory and how does it work?
The world is a dumpster fire right now. And the job market is trash. That said, you do still have agency within your days. There's also something called an energy management audit where for a week, if you were to track your time from the moment you woke up to the moment you go to bed and you figured out what your energy patterns were.
What can you do to either redesign your time or change up your environment to sustain your energy levels? So in a workplace, that could look like I'm going to take a meeting with my camera off or I'm going to take it on a walk. Or if I know I have a particularly draining meeting at 12 p.m. every single day, I'm going to take a five-minute block off.
And I'm going to get up and just like shake out my nervous system, do some jumping jacks, put on my favorite song and just like close my eyes and give myself that rest for 30 seconds. I can set a reminder on my phone to do a breathing exercise just to get back into our bodies a little bit more.
Is there anything you'd recommend not doing? Maybe something that feels good now, but ultimately in the long run is gonna make it harder.
Pushing when you have no more capacity or resources to push and thinking that you need to do it all by yourself. We live in a highly individualistic society. And I mean, especially women, we take on so much emotional labor on top of just the day-to-day. So I would say if you are feeling stuck
on a problem at work where you're feeling super stressed, the solution is not to push through and put in more hours. That is going to be not only a disservice to the work itself, it's going to be a disservice to you. We can't self-help our way out of systems of oppression or burnout. And I think sometimes we really just need to let some of the plates fall and break.
Because if we continue to take on everything and our employers see like, oh, you know, Danielle's got it. She can keep doing all of this and it's fine. Then they're just going to continue to expect that out of me. But if I say I'm letting these two things fall and break and it's the company's responsibility to fix them, then maybe I will actually finally get some help.
That's it for this week. We have an episode coming up about weddings. Getting married can get super expensive. Did you ball out or did you keep it small? If you have a wedding coming up, what's the price tag? Tell us about it at 1-800-618-8545 or email us at askvox at vox.com. If you want to support this podcast and all the work we do at Vox, consider becoming a Vox member.
Vox members get access to things like our Patreon, where there's bonus content from your favorite Vox reporters and hosts. Check out vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Peter Balanon-Rosen and Danielle Hewitt. It was edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by Patrick Boyd. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy.
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