How To Recover From Burnout When You Can't Take Time Off

0:00Hi, this is Monique Rhodes. Welcome to the In Your Right Mind podcast. We're learning how to be happier by working with our minds. I'm excited to get into today's topic and I hope you'll find it helpful. Don't forget we have the happiness quiz. It's really, really good to do. Either click on the link in the description or go to I and Tend to be happy.com. I'm someone who knows a bit about burnout because I've had burnout myself on two occasions and it was massive. And what I see is that everything you've read about burnout assumes that you can stop. You can take a sabbatical, you can book a trip, you can step back from work for a while. And what happens is you're reading these kind of articles on your phone at 10 at night, you've got people depending on you and there's no version of your life where any of that is available. So let's get stuck into the useful version. I'm going to tell you why time off from work was never going to have fixed it anyway. What the

1:02research says actually restores people and what I would love for you to change about your evenings. First of all, I want to be clear what burnout is because the word gets used for ordinary tiredness and it's far more specific than that. There's a woman called Christina Maslack. She studied this for over 40 years and she's built the measure that most researchers still use. She describes it in three parts. The first is this. You're exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix it. You've gone flat towards people. You used to care about and you've started to doubt whether anything you do makes any difference at all. So that second one is what gives it away. Tiredness makes you want to go to bed. Burnout makes you stop caring and then makes you feel guilty for not caring. So let's look at the research around the holiday. There's a set of studies looking at people's burnout levels before a holiday and after one and the results are really

2:06consistent. As you would expect, burnout drops while people are away on holiday but then it comes back. In one study, burnout had returned part-way within three days of going back to work and it returned completely within three weeks of going back to work. And other research has found the benefits of a holiday fading within about a month of returning back to work. So if you've taken a week off, you felt briefly human and then you've been flattened again by the middle of your second week back. That's the pattern that this research describes. You didn't waste the week off, you didn't take the wrong holiday, it's just that a week away was never going to hold against what you go back to. So here's what does hold. Researchers have identified four experiences that genuinely restore people and they measured which of the four mattered most. The strongest by a long

3:07way was psychological detachment. So detachment means being mentally away from work, not simply stopping but not thinking about it. And that distinction is one of one that most of us have never made because we stop working all the time and we almost never detach. You leave your office and you carry the conversation home in your head, you talk to your partner about it, talk to your kids about it, you talk to your friends about it, or you're checking your emails on your phone at the kitchen table. All messages are still arriving all evening. Or you cook dinner while you're rehearsing what you're going to do and say to your boss tomorrow. Or you sit down at nine and your bodies on the sofa and the rest of you are still in that meeting you had today. And this is the part I most want you to have. How well you switch off from work in an ordinary evening matters more than whether you get a holiday at all. Which is good news because an evening is something you have five days

4:10a week, if you work five days a week and maybe a year long sabbatical isn't coming. All right. There was a study where people recorded what they did in the evening and how they felt the next morning. And the people who detached from work in the evening woke up with more energy and in a better state the following day. And the people who stayed mentally at work, they woke up tired, no matter how much they slept. So the exhaustion that you might wake up in within the morning isn't only about sleep. A really great deal about it is where your mind was between eight and 11 the night before. And this is why people with burnout so often conclude that something must be medically wrong with them because they sleep eight hours, they wake up unrestored and they assume it's their body failing. Sleep repairs your body. It was never designed to give your mind a period of not being at work. So here's what I'd like you to do. And I want to be really direct about it because this is

5:16the part people treat as optional and it isn't. When you finish work, you move away from work completely. Let me tell you how I do this because I hold this line so firmly having suffered from burnout. When I finish work, I'm finished. There's no working emails on my phone. There's no messaging coming in. My workspace is shut down and I'm on with the play part of my life going and playing tennis, going and playing at the beach, whatever it is going and hanging out with friends. That's not a luxury. And it's not strictness for its own sake. It's the single most effective step available to someone who's burning out and can't take leave from work. All right. Two more points about what doesn't count. Scrolling doesn't count. And it's worth knowing that scrolling is genuinely, genuinely tiring for your brain rather than restful. It stops you working without detachment,

6:21detaching you from your work because your mind stays free to keep running the same conversations underneath. What does work is something absorbing enough to occupy you and slightly demanding. So researchers call these mastery experiences. I love mastery experiences. They simply mean something mildly difficult that isn't your job. So what I do is I cook something I've never made before. I love it. I get lost in it. Hours disappear. You might play an instrument. You might learn a language. You might do what I'm doing and build a garden. And when your mind goes back to work during it, which it will, you don't have to fight that. Just notice where it's gone and come back to what you're doing. Come back to the cooking or the music or the garden. That returning is the practice. Now, you might be thinking, I don't have time for this. You do have time. What you've been doing is spending your evenings in the same state you were in at work, which is not the same as being

7:25short of hours. So detaching from work is not an extra activity to fit in. It's a decision about what you allow into the hours you already have. And there's a second point I won't skip. Burn out comes from the conditions of your work. All right. So all the research shows this. If your workload is genuinely impossible to do in the hours you're given, then no evening practice is going to fix that. And the conversation you need is with your employer about the work itself. What we're doing here stops you being drained further while you have it. So I'd like you to start treating this as non-negotiable because that's how it's treated in places that take it seriously. You know, in France, there's a law that was brought in some years ago giving employees the right to disconnect. So companies over a certain size have to agree to rules about contact outside working hours so that people aren't expected to answer emails

8:27in their evenings. An entire country decided this mattered enough to legislate. You can decide it too without a law. Your time after work is non-negotiable. Your weekends are non-negotiable. Not because you've earned them, which you have, it's not a reward for getting through the week, but because that's where your recovery actually happens. And there's nowhere else for it to happen instead. And it's really important that you understand this. I don't let my team work outside of their hours. All right? Because I know they're going to work better if they go and have their life. That's the truth. The research shows it. And if you're worried that shutting down properly will make you less, look less committed, notice what's actually happening to your work at the moment. So burnout takes your judgment, your patience, your ideas. Before it takes your hours. So the version of you that switches off in the evening is a much better worker

9:30and colleague than the version who never does. Okay? You don't need to get away. You need your evenings back. You need to be genuinely somewhere else in them. All right? Don't forget. I intend to be happy.com or you'll find the link in the description. Let's see how happy you are because I want you to be absolutely happy. As always, go gently in the world.