How passion, impostor syndrome, and phone addiction fit into the burnout conversation
To improve workplace mental health, we need to rethink how, where, and why we work. That’s why Thinkers 50 and the Silicon Guild partnered together through May (Mental Health Awareness month) for a webinar series called Mind Matters: Mental Wellbeing, Leadership, and Work. Leading experts hosted weekly discussions about how to destigmatize mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, and burnout, and rethink workplace practices that harm mental health.
Our third webinar in the series was called “No More Burnout: How to Fight Back, Find Time, and Stop Letting Tech Win”. The conversation addressed how we can fight burnout amid the 24/7 work cycle and the increasing intrusion of technology.
The conversation featured:
- Alyson Meister, Professor at IMD Business School
- Basima Tewfik, Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management
- Jon M. Jachimowicz, Professor Harvard Business School
- Morra Aarons-Mele, moderator, author of “The Anxious Achiever”
Burnout is a serious psychological state which is not remedied by normal amounts of rest and relaxation. It often involves the following:
- Feelings of energy depletion or emotional exhaustion
- Increased mental distance from one’s work and negative or cynical feelings toward one’s work
- Reduced sense of efficacy at work
Many workplaces have adopted positive technological innovations, like personalized diagnostics, AI coaches, and apps to train their employees in soft skills like empathy.
However, the negative effects of technology persist, including increases in feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and perceived conflict with others.
How technology interrupts our lives, by the numbers
Alyson Meister, a Professor at IMD Business School, shared a study that found that over 90% of white-collar workers check their work on their mobile phones, even when they said they were taking a break from work. She also recently conducted a micro-experiment with 160 executives where they collectively agreed to surrender their cell phones for a certain night during an education program. The results? People called her from their friends’ phones in a panicked state, thinking it was in their pocket, but it seemed these immediate negative benefits were followed by positive benefits after time.
On average, executives are interrupted by their phones every 13 minutes, with 72–75 interruptions in a workday. For younger individuals, this increases to every 9 1/2 minutes. This matters because it can take an astonishing 23 minutes to regain focus after an interruption, all of which can add up to a dramatic loss of productive capacity.
Addicted to our phones
The American Psychological Association defines addiction as a compuslive substance use or behavior, despite harmful consequences. Alyson walked through four qualities of problematic phone use:
Loss of control?—?You can’t control the usage of your phone, even when you don’t want to use it.
Dependence or withdrawal?—?You feel anxious if your phone is not with you.
Emotional coping?—?Instead of using emotional regulation skills, you’re using your mobile phone to numb yourself from stress, boredom, or other negative emotions.
Negative life consequences?—?Using your phone leads to feelings of depression, shame, impostor syndrome, loss of social relations, or loss of performance at work.
Negative outcomes are not a result of how much time you spend on your phone, but rather how you use it, including the feelings of compulsion and dependency. Many leaders have gotten their identity tied up in responsiveness and quick problem-solving and fail to ask if that is truly serving them or their teams.
Passion: the remedy to burnout?
Jon Jachimowicz is a Professor at the Harvard Business School. His work centers around passion and its impact on burnout. Passionate people are a leader’s dream, as in many cases they’re more likely to volunteer for additional tasks. However, passion is not a shield for burnout. In fact, Jon’s research shows that passionate people are more prone to burn out. They take on extra tasks, have a harder time detaching emotionally and have less time for activities that potentially help them recharge from work.
Passionate people should be careful of what they say yes to, especially in moments of high energy. Jon recommended recognizing that the passion you feel today may actually be a sign to leave work earlier, to make time for recharging, knowing that you worked especially hard.
Hiring passionate people is not where a leader’s role stops. Passionate people are worse at managing themselves, as they may have a distorted view of their work and needs. Leaders can take things off their plate or reassess how much work they actually are capable of.
Additionally, passion should not be the gold standard for motivation for work. People have a variety of different motivations and approaches. In fact, people who love work more are more likely to moralize loving work, meaning they judge other people harshly if they don’t love their work.
What about impostor thoughts?
MIT Professor Basima Tewfik’s research is about how impostor thoughts?—?the persistent feeling that the people around you are smarter than you are and are overestimating your capabilities?—?are connected to burnout. Despite prevailing wisdom, she does not find a consistent causal effect between impostor thoughts and burnout. In different contexts, impostor thoughts leave people feeling dejected and unable to work effectively, leading to burnout, or they can push people into overdrive, help them rise to a challenge, and change how they view role overload.
She encourages leaders and their teams to have open conversations about how tasks should be prioritized or redistributed among team members to minimize impostor thoughts and burnout.
Common misconceptions about burnout
Burnout is not a personal weakness. If you’re working in a toxic environment, personal strength won’t protect you from burnout.
Burnout is not binary. Everyone struggles with burnout to some degree as we all face stressors in our lives.
We’re very reactive when it comes to managing burnout, we need to be more proactive. Additionally, people believe that they can “save up” their stress for time off: even if you make it to your two-week vacation, if you’re just re-entering the same stressful environment, you will be at risk of burnout. (Especially as work continued without you, and you feel stressed about catching up!)
Burnout remedies are also often placed on the individual. The panelists suggest instead taking a systemic approach to workplaces. In particular, designing systems that promote psychological safety, and have meaningful connections and support.
That said, organization-wide policies are hard to apply for burnout.
Initiatives like No Meeting Wednesdays mean that a lot of tasks get pushed to another day. Encouraging a culture where people are talking about what’s on their plate, and clarify priorities can be a helpful remedy.
Lightning round: What is one way that you are fighting back against the intrusion of tech?
- Turn off email push notifications on your phone, when you’re on vacation. Ask people to call you instead (the barrier to calling is a lot higher than the barrier to emailing!)
- Schedule “no-tech” periods into your calendar, where you don’t even have your phone in the vicinity. You can pair this with a social activity or exercise, especially if you’re with someone that can hold you accountable.
- Emotionally regulate when you feel stress, as opposed to immediately turning to your phone. Breathe!
The replay of the full conversation is available on LinkedIn. Be sure to check out the replay of our fourth and final conversation in the Mind Matters series: Leaders Speak Up: Unlocking Mental Health in the Workplace, from Tuesday, May 28 at 11 AM EST.
No More Burnout: How to Fight Back, Find Time, and Stop Letting Tech Win was originally published in Silicon Guild on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.