Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Trauma informed SLP podcast. Woo hoo.
[00:00:09] Yes, I could have probably bought a sound effect for that, but doing it with my mouth anyway.
[00:00:14] So this is the very first episode that I changed out the format a bit. I actually recorded it as a video that is now up on my YouTube channel. And what I'm doing for this podcast edition is I am re editing the audio.
[00:00:30] So I just took the audio file basically from the video and I'm just taking out any pauses I made for like memes and visuals and stuff and making it more of a through line here and yeah, so let me know how you, what you think of it. Hopefully this is not too distracting. If it is horror, if it's just nothing great and it's just not jiving with a lot of you listeners, I can definitely do separate recordings for these things. It would just take a bit longer. So I'm hoping this format will still work. And if you're someone who really benefits from visuals to help you attend to something, do check out this exact same episode on my YouTube channel at Thetrauma informed SLP.
[00:01:14] The link will be in the episode descriptions below. Hope you guys enjoy it. Woo hoo. Let's get going. Yeah.
[00:01:24] This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves. That's right, folks.
[00:01:39] Welcome to the trauma informed SLP Burnout edition.
[00:01:43] Pew. Pew. Pew pew. Yeah.
[00:01:46] Woo.
[00:01:48] I guess it's everywhere. It's all over the place. It's ever present in our society as a topic of conversation.
[00:01:57] If you search for it, there are so many articles, so many videos on it. We have all sorts of different flavors of it. We have autistic burnout, ADHD burnout, professional burnout, educational burnout, like school burnouth, parental burnout. We got burnout for days, baby. And we also have all these things on, like, strategies to fix it. And what's the one fix? Here's the big thing. That's the big fix for the thing. And but what's interesting is I found this really great article, which I think was originally german, but it's by Hillert, Albrecht and Folderheltze. I believe they were mentioning how like, the concept that the word burnout really was brought up and brought into the cultural awareness as a concept in around 1974.
[00:02:46] But even until today, more than 140 definitions of the word burnout has been suggested, so we don't even know what it actually is. Right. And I noticed this too. It was actually sort of validating to read that, because when I started researching burnout, I would, you know, go to Google Scholar and type in some professional burnout stuff and try to find articles. And there were so many, you guys, so many articles, just, like, article upon article upon article and, like, from all kinds of fields. Psychology, neuropsychology, physiology, business, education, medicine, social sciences. It's, like, everywhere. Everybody's studying it. And some articles, you know, you read the abstract, and, like, they're defining it one way and the next article defines it a different way. So it was actually really validating to hear that. Yeah, I'm not surprised 140 definitions have been offered up as what burnout actually is, because I think what the big deal is is that we've made this huge umbrella concept of burnout, and now we're just piling everything under it. Like, everything that has to do with not really being able to enjoy life outside of work, for example, is work burnout, you know, but there can be so many different factors that play into it. It's such a complex thing that I think because we've made it such a broad concept and because the definition is very tenuous out there, it makes it nearly impossible to really figure out what to do about your own burnout. Like, what is the deal that is, like, making your quality of life so poor, right? Or making it so hard when it comes to your quality of life? Because we know that burnout, as ambiguous as it is in the literature, we do know that when people talk about burnout, those people tend to have some pretty big impacts, negative impacts on their mental health, on their overall well being, on long term health. When it comes to impacts of chronic stress, we know it's correlated with this stuff. We know it relates to this stuff, and we also know it has impacts on, like, how many people go into certain fields. Like, when you know that everybody's leaving the education system in the United States, when there's this massive attrition of teachers, it makes people less likely to want to go and be teachers to replace them because they've heard that people are leaving because of massive burnout, you know, massive burnout, not enough pay, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it can create genuine crises when it comes to, like, how society functions and certain, like, things we need to function, like in healthcare, too. That's another area where once people start hearing about, like, massive amounts of burnout, there's massive turnover, people leave the field. There's a lot of attrition, and, like, you know, people end up with longer wait lists for seeing doctors or getting medical care because of just staff shortages. You know what I mean? So it's like, it's a big deal. It's a really big deal. It can really lead to a pretty big issue in society across a lot of different areas, and it definitely is a big deal at the individual level when it comes to our health, our well being, our overall quality of life.
[00:06:01] So here's what I'm gonna cover under the series. This first episode here is mainly going to be for understanding burnout, at least when it comes to the best working definition we currently have from scientific literature, and also understanding the kind of factors that feed into it, specifically professionally, in, like, the workplace. What kind of factors tend to feed into burnout tend to be related to increased worker burnout, basically.
[00:06:29] Then probably in a second video, because this one's probably going to be long enough, I want to get into confounding factors. So these are things that go along with burnout. They either contribute to burnout or burnout contributes to them. It's hard to say which comes first, chicken or egg. It might be very different for each person, but these are factors that we lump under the burnout concept. When we talk about it, like colloquially, with ourselves, with our family, with our friends, or even just with our colleagues at work, we tend to sort of overlap all this underburn out. But these are things that might need a very different approach when it comes to, like, how we can help move past it, how we can heal a little more and hopefully negate those really detrimental mental health impacts. And then I'm going to make an episode on my personal issues with really common strategies and solutions that you hear about all over the place on the listicles, the life hacks, the articles, the videos. I'm going to talk about more like, my issue with a lot of those things because there's so much out there. I don't think you need to hear me rehashing the same strategies over and over again, but I will talk about some of the issues and particularly talk about the things that kind of keep people in burnout that aren't really your fault as an individual. You know, we got to talk about that a little bit, rip the band aid off on talking about that. And then also I'm going to include a little bit, probably a separate episode on my own personal experiences in terms of neurodivergent burnout with, like, ADHD, de autistic burnout, and how it overlaps a lot with professional burnout, how those two things tend to intersect and how like, the mental health from like personal experiences can really impact what's going on with professional burnout and also just with a lot of things. So, yeah, hopefully this will be helpful. My main key takeaway from this series for people that I want people to get is some understanding of some of the nuance, some of the complexity under this burnout concept. So that when you're looking at your own life and you're kind of taking inventory of what you might need to change or, and or improve, you'll have a better sense of where to look, what sounds like it might be kind of the area that you need to look into a little more. Just something that helps give you a better sense of direction of why you're feeling, the way you're feeling and what you might need to help you with it. Right. And how to get the help you need. So that's really my overarching goal with this. So even if you're not a speechless language pathologist, stick with me here. Hopefully this will have a lot of overlap and hopefully it'll still be helpful for a lot of people out there. So let's get into it.
[00:09:07] Let me give you a little overview of what we're going to be talking about today in this main video. Really just focusing on burnout as a concept. Okay, so we're going to go through some of the models of burnout using this meta analysis and literature review by Seislach et al. I believe that's how you say the name. It's from 24.
[00:09:26] And we're going to talk about that a little bit to try to get to where our working definition of burnout is. Then we're going to sort of parse out that working definition a little bit, look into these factors from the workplace that can feed into that. Although, even though this says workplace, I will say a lot of these factors I think really could be argued to have a lot of impact in other ways, too, including like neurodivergent burnout. So we'll get to that. And then also talking about another factor that might lead into, or might at least contribute to increased worker burnout when it comes to the amount of emotional and mental effort you have to put into your job, essentially. So let's get going with talking about the models of burnout.
[00:10:13] So from the Cslack et al article that was really seeking to parse out burnout from secondary traumatic stress, which is a term used, it's sort of the more current term scientists use to talk about what we have also called vicarious trauma compassion fatigue. Like, it goes by a lot of names, but that's what they're looking at, is parsing that out from burnout. And so, in their literature review section. Cause they did get to a meta analysis. But in the literature review section, looking at burnout, they went over the more prevalent models of burnout that exist out there in the research literature.
[00:10:51] One of the first models was a three dimensional model that was a three dimensional response to job stressors. This was proposed by Maslock et al in 2001. And this included exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.
[00:11:10] So essentially, feeling like there's really no point to you being there. Why do you even show up in the morning? Like, there's no even point for you being in existence at this job.
[00:11:20] You're ineffective, essentially. And then also cynicism, you know, just being like, just really, like, just in a bad mood and very cynical and, like, I don't think anything's ever gonna get better kind of a thing. Right? So that was one of the more prevailing models for a long time. And I still actually see it a lot in other fields that are just getting into the burnout research. A lot of people use that three dimensional model. But a little bit later than that, in 2005, there was a single model approach that started to come in that really looked at exhaustion as being the main experience that actually defines burnout. That's the main, like, symptom. The main sign that you are burnt out is the exhaustion piece. And what the researchers under that single experience started to look into was the impact of, like, exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, or mental exhaustion or physical exhaustion. Is it exhaustion across all three? Is it exhaustion? Like, is it more physical exhaustion? Is it more emotional or mental exhaustion? That's what they kind of parsed out, looking at that single experience one. And they really honestly found that, like, you just kind of get depleted of a lot of those resources, like, your energy. It's like it's a domino effect, kind of. It's like if one area, like, if you get mentally just completely exhausted and drained to the point of burnout, you're going to also have the emotional and the physical impacts, too, which makes sense, like, with chronic stress. And we know stress has such a huge impact on our body physiologically, especially long term. And then there was also a two dimensional framework that came out in 2003 by Demirudi et al. And this one really just looked at exhaustion and disengagement. So that's like distancing yourself from work, having just an overall negative attitude. Like, I don't even want to, like, whatever. Who cares? Kind of avoiding tasks, things like that, can be part of disengagement. Now, that one, I think, didn't have a whole lot of legs, because disengagement kind of just seems like a summation of cynicism and inefficacy. Does that make sense?
[00:13:23] So it's kind of that. You can see where the issue trying to find this comes in, because you get into, like, really big nuances. Everybody's pulling out their thesaurus. You know, it's like, isn't disengagement really just comprised of these two factors? You know, it gets. It gets like that because that's how researchers do. And to be fair, it makes sense because it's hard to research something if you don't have a very clear definition of what the thing is that you're investigating. You kind of need a clearer sense of what it is in order to really actually look at it scientifically. Cslack et al found that essentially, exhaustion is, like, the one thing everybody agrees on. It's the one consensus everybody has. That burnout is some level of exhaustion. So that got me looking into definitions of exhaustion, because exhaustion is more than just feeling kind of tired, right? So I found in the Oxford languages dictionary, from my Google search, that exhaustion in the dictionary is defined as a state of extreme physical or mental fatigue, or the action or state of using something up or of being used up completely.
[00:14:27] And when I tried to look into medical definitions of exhaustion, I often bumped into definitions of fatigue, because fatigue is a known medical condition. Fatigue medically means you are extremely severely overtired. The Mayo Clinic noted that it is something we tend to experience. Everyone experiences at some point with a short term illness, like if you have the flu or some of the strains of COVID or maybe if you get the COVID vaccine and it really knocks you out, that is a level of exhaustion you're feeling of, like, I don't even want to get up and get a shower, right? I can't get up and cook for myself. I'm going to order in. And usually, in the case of these illnesses, the fatigue will subside as you heal and get better. So it makes a lot of sense when you think about the energy levels you have in a day. We all have a limit on how much energy we can put into any of our tasks throughout the day, right? There's a level of physical limits. There's a physical limit to physical energy. Like, athletes can definitely go a lot longer for a lot harder physically than I can. I'm not that athletic. Okay. I'm not gonna run a marathon anytime soon. But marathon runners, their physical energy, they have a lot more to do something like that, at least than I do. Right. So I'm gonna get burnt out pretty fast physically doing, like, really, like, intense physical stuff for a very long period of time. And we also have emotional energy and we have mental energy. Right. And that's, you know, my job as a speech pathologist definitely uses a lot of mental and emotional energy, I would say more so than physical. Although if you work with little kids, you can definitely, you use up some physical energy, just like playing with the kids, you know, on the whole. Right. We still have a limit to how much. And this kind of gets a little bit into, like, spoon theory a little for, like, disability stuff, which is the idea that you really only have so much. You only have so many spoons in a day. And then once you're out of spoons, you're out of spoons. And that means you have a deficit of spoons the next day because, like, you have to recover your spoon, your spoon amount, essentially. Right. The other way to think about it would be a bucket. Like, bucket analogies are great. Everybody loves them because it's kind of an easy one. If you don't have aphantasia, that is. Aphantasia is when people can't visualize objects in their mind. But if you don't have that, if you picture a bucket, like, you have a certain amount of energy, and then, you know, the bucket is the amount of energy you have, and at some point it's going to get depleted, it's going to be empty, and then, like, that's it. You're out of energy. Or you could go the opposite way, I guess, too, and be like, you know, all the stuff you're doing is pouring more into the bucket, and eventually the bucket's gonna overflow. So it makes sense that people get really exhausted because essentially, if you're exhausting your bucket, if you're using up your energy, you're using up your spoons every day. And then you try to go to sleep, but you don't get all the spoons back. And then you keep trying to do the same thing again. You do the same amount of energy day in and day out. You're just constantly depleting your energy stores. And over time, over enough, long enough time, you're just going to feel constantly exhausted. And your body has ways of keeping going because you're not actually a bucket and you're not actually spoons you know, we all have this limitation, and the human body has ways of pushing us through that, right? It has ways of, like, it'll. It'll use, it'll increase those cortisol levels and your, and your stress hormones and stuff to keep energy going, to keep muscles going. It has different ways of tapping into different energy stores to keep us going the more we demand of it. But over time, there's still a cost to that, right? There's still a cost to dipping into these energy stores or energy resources, like certain hormones that are really intended to help keep us alive. And like a. Oh, my gosh, there's a bear. What do I do here? Fight, flight, or freeze kind of situation, survival mode kind of situation, versus just pulling on that every day just to get yourself through the day. Right? So this is where we get into that, like, physical overlap of, like. Yes. If you're just constantly depleting your mental energy and your emotional energy, you're still going to have an impact of, like, physical exhaustion and all of that, because you're still having to pull on different, like, hormones and different energy mechanisms in our body to keep the energy spinning in our brain and all of that, right? So, essentially, it's kind of a somewhat simple formula, really, when you think about it. If you sum up your physical, mental, and emotional energy you need at work or throughout your whole day, and you subtract the daily energy demands, like, of your job, for example, if you're just constantly getting a negative number right, then the energy demands of the job or your daily life or whatever it is, is too big for how much you have to give to it. And you're definitely heading toward burnout, towards some level of just constantly feeling exhausted. So hopefully, that makes some amount of sense as to why exhaustion is really kind of the main thing of burnout. And I find it useful to think of burnout, really, as being the exhaustion piece that is the bigger piece there, you know? All right, so let's get into some of the risk factors for developing burnout.
[00:19:47] So Maslock and leader, which I believe is the same Mosloc as those earlier burnout models from 2001, but from 2016, they put out a paper where they looked into organizational risk factors for worker burnout, for employee burnout, and they identified six key professional domains. And like I said, I think this does have some overlap with personal as well.
[00:20:12] But we'll. I'll just present it right now as they did in the paper, and then probably bring it up as the connections later when I go through my own personal experience with autistic and adhd burnout. So the first domain that they mentioned is workload, which is not surprising. I think this is definitely an issue for many us workers across many different fields, many different professions, you know, from servers, blue collar, like physicians, nurses, teachers. Oh, good lord, yes. You know, like, it's just workload can be way too much, right? Look back into the late 19th century robber Baron era, and you read about how often people had to work in those factories that they did, like these constant, like twelve to 16 hours, days, and they didn't get weekends, they didn't get time off, etc, etcetera. It's like, yeah, super heavy. Way too much workload right there. Right. And so essentially that's just leading to burnout because you have that little like, simplistic equation that I just mentioned about, like the energy stores you have and the amount of work demands, the workload you have to do every day. Right. If you're just constantly depleting those energy stores. Yeah. You're just gonna end up completely burnt out.
[00:21:27] And I think this is one of the bigger things that it emphasized, gets emphasized a lot because it does have such a huge, it's like one thing that unifies so many workers in the United States is having too much do at work, having too many demands, having bosses that just constantly want you to keep on working. Well past when you've clocked out, you know, you get those articles of quiet quitting and stuff like that, right? When people try to put in boundaries of like, no, I'm gonna do my, like, I'm gonna do my 40 hours and I'm gonna be done. That's it. That's my job. That's what I'm hired to do. And the bosses are like, whoa, actually, we don't like that. You know? Right. We want you to do more. So definitely an issue workload. The second key domain they mentioned was control. I like to think of this also as autonomy, essentially. So it's the essence of the amount of control you have over your work days, how you manage to get your work done, like your just daily flow of tasks and when you take breaks and when you don't, and et cetera, et cetera. Right now, basically, when you're, when you don't have any control over that, let's say you have a really highly, like, micromanagey type boss or something, or supervisor, if you don't have a lot of control or autonomy, you don't have any sense of independence at all that's going to wear on your energy stores, because you're probably using a lot more mental energy and or emotional energy to kind of keep going within the confines of what this person says you have to do rather than you just kind of going with what your instincts are. Right.
[00:22:58] That probably takes off a little more mental load in my mind. But I also have a personal theory. My personal theory is that for those of us in jobs, like, at the time I was working in schools when Covid shutdown happened in 2020, and for people who were able to work from home during COVID shutdown, I think we experienced, like, an unprecedented level of autonomy, of control over our work days, of the fact that, like, we could roll into Zoom meetings in our pajama bottoms and throw on a little, like, cardigan or jacket and poof, your dress for the day, and the fact that if a meeting got to a section where it wasn't really about you anymore, but you still kind of have to be on it, you could just turn off your camera and carry your little laptop down while you did your laundry. You could get some, do the dishes or something while you're listening to stuff. And that was, like, such a major autonomy thing. And we had so much time to, like, do those tasks right. And then a lot of these, a lot of jobs ended up going back, of course. And with education, of course. Yes, I think probably a pretty good thing to go back in person for a lot of students, but a lot of jobs have this return to work thing. And I think people are experiencing a loss of autonomy, you know, and the frustration that comes from that. The amount of extra effort they feel, feel they have to put into work when they suddenly are not in control of, when they take a little break, or when they can just walk off to go to the bathroom or etcetera, etcetera. Okay.
[00:24:29] The third domain they talked about was reward. Obviously, for most workers, this is salary. You know, most of us want to have fair wages. We want to make enough money if we're working full time to support ourselves and our families and maybe have enough to save a bit so that we have peace of mind for emergencies. So essentially, we want livable wages.
[00:24:51] That clearly is not a thing happening across most of the United States workforce at this point. So it is a very big topic on a lot of people's minds. Like the amount of money the CEO's of huge corporations make versus how much their entry level employees make, for example.
[00:25:07] That's probably one of the biggest ones. And yes, money doesn't buy happiness and all that, but it sure does buy a lot of peace of mind, especially if you're able to support people, pay medical bills, buy a house, perhaps, you know, or a working car that doesn't break down constantly, right? Like, these are things people either want and or even just need, especially if they don't live where there's good public transit and they need a car to get to work. So when the primary reason you're even working to make a living, to be able to afford food and shelter, you know, basic physiological human needs there.
[00:25:43] If you feel like you're not making enough money for that, yeah, you're gonna get pretty burnt out going to work and still struggling a lot with and having a lot of stress after outside of work, right? Especially with money. Rewards aren't just money, though. It also includes, like, being told you're doing a good job, getting positive feedback about what you're doing, maybe being supported well enough, or like, if you say you need a resource, being given that resource because you are a valuable member that they want. They want to reward the fact that, like, yes, you. It's good, you want it, you need this, we give it to you, you know, and a lot of us don't get that either. At a lot of places. A lot of times, people in managerial positions don't always focus on the positive stuff. A lot of times it's like, kind of goes with that autonomy control thing, too, right? Where I feel like most micromanaging bosses I've ever had pretty much never rewarded me. It was always criticism or negative feedback, constantly. There was never, like, good job. It was very rare to get positive from bosses who are more set in that sort of mindset, right? And what's interesting is, like, if you reward people with, like, positive feedback, they feel like they're more competent at their job. And a little spoiler alert here, but competency, like, the psychological need to feel like you're competent at what you do plays a huge role in employee well being, which we're going to get into a little later in a different episode. But a little spoiler on that. You have to start feeling a little more competent at your job to feel like you're doing a good job and to feel like you belong there and yay, you're doing good work, and it's great. You kind of have to get the feedback that shows you you do have that competency.
[00:27:23] So. Okay, anyway, let's move on to the next domain. So the fourth domain is community.
[00:27:32] Now, this is the sense that, you know, you have relationships, positive community with people you work with, essentially. And this can get really tough if you work, if you're a member of a marginalized group that is not very present or represented at your job, it can be very hard to have a sense of community there through that. For speech language pathologists and other service providers, especially at schools, for example, or skilled nursing facilities, it can be really hard to feel like you have community when you're kind of the only one doing your job in the building. Like you're the only SLP there. It can be tough. You want to vent about things. If you want to vent in the schools to somebody about medical billing taking way too long and the software is just being a nightmare, you have to go find someone else who uses that software to vent to them about that, to get that sense of connection and a little validation and like, oh, I know, blah, blah, blah, right? Because if you try to vent to like, say, teaching staff, they don't bill Medicaid Medical. If you're California, they don't do services that bill like that. That's for special education services, especially for physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, speech language therapy, and also mental health services. Those things are the things that bill, you know, because we're more medically adjacent there as service staff. So, you know, if you want to complain to the teacher about, like, the software is being really laggy and really slow, and I have like 50 different things to put in for the 50 different kids, and it's going to take forever at this point. You have to explain the situation first in order to really vent. And it, you know, it doesn't always help with that sense that you're part of that teacher community per se. Does that make sense? I mean, venting is one of the ways we develop some level of community with ourselves, you know, or some camaraderie of like, we have a similar job we're doing here, and we can talk about the things we like and the things we don't like, you know. And the other thing that comes to mind about community that can be where really wear you down is like, if you happen, this is kind of going along with being a marginalized, being a member of a marginalized group or just being very different from the people you work with. But I, you know, especially in speech language pathology, we do have a fair number.
[00:29:44] Our demographic is still predominantly cis white, heterosexual females, middle class, usually.
[00:29:51] So kind of suburban vibes, you know, and some folks in that demographic get fairly clicky. You know, there's some social learning there about, you know, friends and what friends are and such and I don't know, with my audhd and queerness. I see, like, if I go to Asha, for example, our big convention, and I see a lot of kind of same demographic folks, I tend to get a little nervous because I don't usually fit in with that demographic very well. You know? Like, I get accepted at first and then I get rejected later. So I get nervous. I get nervous about the idea of, like, going to a different private practice, for example, because, like, it might be very clicky, and I probably won't fit in with the click. So I won't have a sense of community there. I won't have a sense of being connected or cared for by anybody there, you know? No, I'm not speaking for experience. What are you talking about?
[00:30:49] Crazy? Of course not.
[00:30:53] The fifth thing is fairness. This is the fifth work domain that really matters when it comes to burnout. And if you develop it, fairness is the sense that essentially everybody gets treated equally and equitably at work, right? So if I ask for a resource that I really, really need, I get that resource. And then if somebody else asks for a resource they really need, they also get that resource. Not I ask, well, we can't really give it to you because we have to give stuff to other people instead. Right? Like, that doesn't always feel very fair, right? Or maybe like when, back when I was a server at a restaurant, this would happen a lot where, like, certain people who, like, we're really buddy buddy with the managers, you know, they would get time off all the time. They get all the days off. They ask. And then the rest of us have to just constantly be working. Like, we have to cross our fingers and hope we get time off, which is just a very unfair thing. Doesn't feel great. And it definitely wears you out because it's like you can't even count on time to recuperate. Servers, you feel? You feel me? Servers, you feel me? I know you do, but, yeah. And it also can really stink because as a speech language pathologist, once again, since we're kind of the only one in the building, a lot of people don't really know what our daily flow of our jobs like. They don't really know the resources we actually need. They don't really know what we do. So sometimes we get assigned jobs and duties. That is fine. In theory, it should be okay because, yeah, the teachers have to do that as well. So it makes sense that we would have to help out and do it, but at the same time, it can really cut into our ability to do our job because our job and our daily flow is so different. You know? Like, I've even heard from some SLPs who, like, had their principal wanting them to do, like, recess duty, where they watched the kids when they had, like, an IEP meeting, an individualized education plan meeting happening at the same time, and the principal kind of acting like, well, you can just change the IEP, then we really need to do recess duty. And then the SLP's, like, the IEP is, like, legally mandated to occur on this, like, by a certain date and requires, like, coordinating a whole team of people plus the parents plus the kid to, like, come together. And it's been scheduled for months. So it's like, I. That should be the priority, and that is the priority to the special education staff, but maybe not the priority to the school administrator, for example. You know what I mean? Just feels a little unfair. You know? It feels like they're not really respecting the job duties. You have to do the high priority duties for you just because your duties are different. It's like they still need to have that same respect for those high priority things in order for it to feel like there's a. Some level of fair treatment here. You know what I mean? Feel me? I think we got it. All right, let's move on to the 6th.
[00:33:39] The very last one, number six, is values. This is essentially where it feels like your own personal values as a person, things that make up your character, your principles, all of that feeling like those values align when you're at work. The values of the company, the values of the business, the values of the organization align with your values. And this can be a really tricky one, I think, especially for people who go into any level of caring professions. So people go into medical care, people go into education, people who go into these professions wanting to help people that are not usually very lucrative professions. Right? Not all of us, anyway. So it's like you go into it because you want to feel like you're helping people and you're doing good, and you get all this training and you get all this. You get these accreditations and stuff, and, you know, all the, like, this is the best way to do your job. And this is the best thing you can do for your students or for your patients or for your clients. This is the best way to do it. But then sometimes organization demands, your boss's demands, productivity, billing. Like, there can be so many different things that go into it that you start to feel like you can't actually give the best care because you're being pulled in so many directions, and you don't even have time to plan out. And the best you could do, right. And that can definitely burn you out, because you're going to have a lot of emotional energy and mental energy that goes into trying to still give the best care, even though you have so many extra demands being put on you.
[00:35:12] And that brings me to the last, real, last little section that I really want to get to on this video, which is this concept of emotional labor. And really mental labor, too. But emotional labor for sure.
[00:35:30] Emotional labor as a concept came about when people were studying customer service facing positions, particularly so, like, retail workers, restaurant workers, which I did plenty of in my musician days. But these sort of entry level service professions, retail, you know, customer service type things, they looked into emotional labor as a potential contributor to a lot of worker burnout in those jobs, because those jobs have very high turnover. Those are turn and Burnham kind of jobs. You get the job, you stay there for a little bit, and either you want to get promoted or you want to get out, because you just get so burnt out so fast, right? And you're trying to find places where, like, maybe the boss will be less micromanaging. Maybe I'll get more time off here, maybe I'll make more money here, and it'll be more worth it. Like, that's the sort of the grind of, like, customer service facing positions a lot in the United States. So emotional labor started being looked into, I think, in, like, kind of the late nineties, into the early two thousands a lot. And it still studied a fair amount, but it refers to the regulation of your feelings. So being able to, like, feel things and also regulate, like, how much of it you're feeling, essentially, whether you're getting really escalated and having an anxiety attack or whether you're able to stay a little more calm, for example. And then also the expressions of your emotions and how that has to meet certain requirements at your job. Like, you have expectations of certain display of emotion, certain display of feelings, right, in your job. And the main thing is that the amount of labor you put into how you display your emotion and how much emotion you can display and what emotion is expected to display it is something that depletes the emotional energy stores of people and definitely leads to worker burnouthen. So there's a couple different ways of conceptualizing this emotional labor, especially at work. And one of the earliest ones is looking into levels of acting. So you might hear it as surface acting or deep acting, surface acting, being like, you're just kind of fakey. Get, right. You're just showing the emotion they expect you to see. So think of, like, customer service voice. Think of, like, you know, someone walks in right before clothes, and it's a restaurant. And the United States restaurants do soften closing, meaning if you get in before close, they still have to serve you. Okay. Most restaurants do soft closing. So let's say someone walks in five minutes before, and it's a big table, but they're there to eat, and you're not officially closed yet, so you have to serve them even though you really were looking forward to getting home. Right. Like, the restaurant's been really empty for a long time. You're all done cleaning up your section. You're ready to go. But because you're closing now, you have to serve these people and clean up after them after they leave, so it delays you going home. So you have disappointment as a real emotion you're feeling, and then you also have the expectation of greeting the customers politely, blah, blah, blah. Right, customer service. So surface acting would be like, hey, how's it going? Oh, yeah, no, no problem. It's great. You know, it's that sense of, I will fake my politeness and kindness, even though I'm actually. The main feeling I'm feeling is disappointment that I don't get to go home. That's surface acting. Deep acting is when people actually change their emotions to meet the role demands. So in that case of a server sitting, you know, serving that table that came in five minutes before close, the deep acting of that person would be, I do feel disappointment, however. I need to be friendly and kind to these people because, you know, this is my job and whatever. And then they go into their memory stores and think of something that puts them in a better mood. So they shift their emotions internally to match up with the emotion they need to display. So if they need to display friendliness or excitement or just a little bit more friendly energy, they might drum up an emotion of hanging out with friends, or they might, you know, whatever it is, right? You can kind of think of deep acting as, like, the Daniel Day Lewis version of acting, okay? It's like you are becoming the role. You're becoming the friendly customer service person in that moment, okay? And what people have found when they looked into all sorts of different combinations of surface acting, deep acting, people who really feel emotions, people who are just faking emotions, is people who do the deep acting. People who really do find a way to feel the emotions they're displaying actually have less burnout in the long run, which seems counterintuitive because it does take a lot more energy to learn to do that at first, but it actually takes a lot less energy long term. That's the idea, is that once you get pretty good at doing that, then displaying the emotion takes a lot less mental effort. You don't have to think so hard about how you're displaying the emotion because you're actually feeling it instead of, like, you have to think about how you're faking it. What's the emotion? What do I need to show? Am I doing a good job? You have to judge other people to make sure you're doing a good job faking that emotion. Neurodivergence. Feel me on that. That feels a lot like masking. So deep acting actually causes less burnout in the long run because, yes, it's high energy, high effort initially, but then once people get good at it, it takes a little less effort to actually display.
[00:40:34] The other way to conceptualize emotional and mental labor is the balance that people use between empathy and emotional regulation when they're dealing with clients or patients. Okay. This is particularly in caregiving. So, like nursing, mental health, rehab, like these kind of professions. So the amount of empathetic concern you have towards somebody and the amount of emotional regulation or detachment you can have so you don't go so far into those emotions like that. You don't have a whole meltdown or something right there that can be called detached concern. So you have empathy. You have concern. You are feeling some of the feelings of you're empathizing and feeling some of the feelings of that person, but you're not all consumed by it. You're able to kind of regulate yourself and keep yourself a little more calm so that their emotions don't consume you, essentially. And what they found is having that balance, being able to feel some empathy, and also regulate that as it leads to less emotional exhaustion over time for people in caregiving roles, which I think is really interesting because in my dehumanization in medicine, I believe episode, you know, a lot of times medically, people are taught to, like, not don't feel empathy, ignore empathy, sort of squash it down, because, like, I. It hinders problem solving. But newer literature, newer research has shown it actually doesn't. When you're looking at overall patient health and well being, empathy is incredibly important for problem solving. So it's important to feel it. And not feeling it leads to more burnout than actually allowing yourself to feel the empathy, feel the emotions around what's going on with that patient or client and actually processing through that emotion, that's actually a much more important skill. And if you're doing problem solving in this social context, you have to have empathy to actually accurately do that. The literature that showed empathy affects problem solving was really only in the area of spatial reasoning. So think of playing Tetris. It kind of makes sense. You don't need a whole lot of empathy to play tetris. I don't have to empathize with the blocks that hard, you know what I mean? And I feel like medically, that probably applies if it's like surgeons maybe, you know, doing spatial reasoning when they're doing their surgery. But in a lot of areas of medicine, it doesn't actually apply. A lot of times, most people, including, like, internists and other general practitioners and stuff, they need to be considering the full picture of the whole patient, their family, their life, their quality of life, all of that stuff. So empathy is actually really important. So I think that's interesting. That detached concern, a balance of empathy and being able to regulate actually leads to a decreased amount of emotional and mental burnout in, like, nursing and other medical professions, which is very interesting, I think.
[00:43:19] So that's kind of a lot. That's it for this particular episode. Let's wrap things up a bit. Okay. I think it's fairly obvious that if burnout is related to these six organizational domains, organizations do have a lot of responsibility to help with employee burnout. That's sort of my bigger takeaway that a lot of times with this exhaustion stuff, a lot of it comes from one of these key work domains, being violated or having to do way too much emotional or mental labor at work to just keep up with the expectations of your work. And I know that definitely overlapped for me with neurodivergent burnout and internalized ableism and stuff like that. So I'll get into that later on. But that does bring me to this setup, I guess, for the next episode, which is that a lot of the rhetoric we have in the United States, especially around work ethic, around hustle culture, around girl bossing and all that, this, like, work ethic idea has a really heavy shame base to it, right? You get a lot of messaging around like you're a really bad person if you're not doing everything you're after to do. You don't, especially if you're socialized as a girl growing up, you're really trained that you're not really allowed to say no to caregiving and doing extra tasks. Right. Also, people get the message you're letting your team down, you know, if you don't answer your emails off the clock, because that's an expectation here. Everybody has to do that, you know?
[00:44:48] And when you internalize these messages that, like, your exhaustion and your burnout is, is a minor thing and that you should just push through it because you don't want to be lazy, you know, you got to push through because otherwise you're just being lazy, you know? And if your motivation is like, avoiding a sense of internalized shame, that has a real impact on mental health, you know, and it definitely leads to this condition of chronic work stress where you're just chronically in this, like, super high survival mode y, like, just constantly depleting your energy stores day in and day out just to get through. So it's basically that message of, like, you're never actually going to be good enough to deserve good things, you know, to deserve a better wage, deserve time off. It's like, you have to be good. You have to be a good worker to deserve reward.
[00:45:40] And that message of never being good enough is like, so toxic, right? And it just is so pervasive. But, you know, it's a very toxic message because you can't, you can't just keep pushing through. At some point, at some point your body's gonna give. At some point the energy is not there anymore. And it's not good to constantly be seeking external validation from other people to determine if you are good enough to deserve, like, just fairness and equity, you know, that's just absurd, right? So take away from that is don't feel bad about setting any work life boundaries. You have to set, quite frankly, don't listen about this quiet quitting stuff. Like, listen, here's what happened. This is what I remember. And I went to the wayback machine to confirm this, but there were so many articles on worker burnout in the 2000 teens that were like, you have to set good work life boundaries. You've got to not answer your emails off the clock, and when you're home, you're home and blah, blah, blah, you know, and like, compartmentalize and eat well and rest enough and take enough days off, take mental health days off if you need to, et cetera, et cetera. And then Covid shutdown happened and then wage suppression got worse and inflation continues to rise and wages do not increase with it. And people started getting unemployment checks that were actually better than their actual paychecks during COVID shutdown. That made people kind of wake up to like, hey, I don't want to go back and work so hard for, like, no money. Like, are you kidding me? And I think that that's when we started to see a lot of the quiet quitting things. We started to see more of a shame narrative around, like, oh, you want to set work life boundaries. You don't want to answer emails off the clock. You're just quiet quitting. You're only doing your 40 hours and then leaving quiet quitting. Like, in my opinion anyway, it's just a way of, like, you know, keeping workers really only looking at the company's bottom line instead of their own health.
[00:47:42] So I say personally, do your best not to feel ashamed about it, not to give you that feeling of, like, I'm being lazy and this is a bad thing. The truth is, if you need to slow down or you need to recover from exhaustion, do it. If you have the means to do it, do it. You know, if you have the time off saved up, take it. You know what I mean? Take some mental health days to relax and all of that stuff. But. But most of all, even if you don't have those resources to take the time off to really recover, I think, at least for myself, learning to counter that shame narrative in my mind and kind of deprogramming it a bit has actually really helped to alleviate a lot of the mental exhaustion and emotional exhaustion I experienced for a very long time. So even if you don't have time to do other things, just be kind to yourself and talk to yourself kindly. If you're having a moment where you feel like you need to be lazy. What that likely means, especially if you're burnt out, is that you have been working too hard and you need to recover. And that's okay. That's not laziness. That is just a vital part of recovery.
[00:48:49] It's an important part of health. So that's hopefully my takeaway from that. I hope you guys all have a great rest of however long it'll be before I get out a new episode. Hopefully you found this helpful. If you did, let me know your thoughts. You can find me on Instagram. The link is in the show notes, but I also changed the be easier. So it's t t I s l p. It's how you find me there. Now, you could head over to YouTube and drop a comment on the video about this, or you could just flat out email me. That's totally fine. If you have any thoughts or ideas or any comments or any topics within this episode that you just want me to go deeper on, I always love doing that stuff. Heck, yeah, man. I hope you guys all have a great week or two. And do take care of yourselves and treat yourselves very kindly with a lot of compassion. Bye.
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