My Weekly Thoughts: The Burnout Is Real Edition

Welcome to my Weekly Thoughts Newsletter, where you'll find my take on the week's news stories, my favorite pieces on how we can thrive even in our stressful world, and some fun and inspiring extras.

***

The Doctor Is I?n? Burned Out: Most of the studies of physician burnout so far have focused on what happens to medical outcomes (short answer: not good), but in a new Annals of Internal Medicine study, researchers from Stanford, the Mayo Clinic and the National University of Singapore take a look at the economic costs of burnout among doctors. The conclusion? In the U.S. burnout costs $4.6 billion each year in the form of physician turnover and reduced clinical hours. It’s yet more confirmation that burnout is costly in every way.

Intuition FTW: Emma Boettcher, a 27-year-old University of Chicago librarian, ended James Holzhauer’s historic "Jeopardy!" streak. In an interview, she shared her secret for unseating Holzhauer, a professional sports gambler who had become known for a systematic, aggressive strategy: “I was a little more guided by intuition and feeling as opposed to having sussed out the exact, optimal strategy beforehand and using that every single time.” 

With a Side of Stigma: In yet another sign of workplace culture being fueled by the pressure to appear busy all the time, a new survey shows that millennials are more worried than other generations about the consequences of taking lunch breaks, with 37 percent saying they don’t feel empowered to break for lunch. Also troubling: Compared to Gen X managers, millennial bosses are nearly twice as likely to look down on employees who take lunch breaks. If this sounds familiar, try one of my favorite Thrive Microsteps, which is simply eating lunch away from your desk. You’ll be more effective when you return to work, and you’ll also open up opportunities to make authentic connections with your co-workers. Read More: My Job is To Prevent Burnout in the NYPD, But I Forgot About Myself

Making All the Right Noises: While the headlines for Apple’s WWDC this week were dominated by Dark Mode (which sounds like a new superhero franchise) and the new bells and whistles of iOS 13, of greater interest to anyone who cares about their health and well-being were the new health features added to the upcoming watchOS 6. These include fertility and menstrual cycle tracking and a new Noise app, which monitors the ambient sound levels around you and sends you a reminder to turn down the noise when it hits danger levels. It’s all part of a welcome trend to build technology that goes upstream to give us more control over our own well-being. Read More:The Future of Health Is All About Going Upstream

Brain Drain: Beyond whatever Twitter is doing to our intelligence is a new study on how the internet itself is changing our brains. Researchers from Harvard, Western Sydney University, Kings College, Oxford, and the University of Manchester found that “the internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations” in several areas of cognition, “which may be reflected in changes in the brain.” And if something changes the way we function, then society itself also changes. "The bombardment of stimuli via the Internet, and the resultant divided attention commonly experienced, presents a range of concerns," said Jerome Sarris, Ph.D., of Western Sydney University. "I believe that this, along with the increasing #Instagramification of society, has the ability to alter both the structure and functioning of the brain, while potentially also altering our social fabric.”

***

Westend61/Getty Images

Yes, Burnout is Real — And We Can Address It Much Better When We Call It What It Is

This week Dr. Richard A. Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, published an op-ed in The New York Times asking: “Is burnout real?”

It was a backlash moment — not unexpected, but nevertheless swift — following the recognition last week by the World Health Organization of burnout as a syndrome stemming from “chronic workplace stress.”

The paradox is that Friedman is well aware of how rampant burnout is. Indeed, he considers a lot of the evidence, including a survey that found that 95 percent of human resource executives think burnout is hurting efforts to retain workers, and responds, “but when a disorder is reportedly so widespread, it makes me wonder whether we are at risk of medicalizing everyday distress. If almost everyone suffers from burnout, then no one does, and the concept loses all credibility.”

So it’s strange to say, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that a phenomenon can’t be real because it’s widespread. That’s precisely what an epidemic is. Friedman’s observation that “almost everyone suffers from burnout” doesn’t refute the existence of a crisis — it makes the case for one.

He argues that “however well intended, we have created an unrealistic and misleading expectation that students and workers are supposed to be happy and stress-free at all times, and if they aren’t, it is a problem that needs to be fixed.” Do you know a lot of people who expect to be “happy and stress-free at all times?” I’ve never met a single such person.

Burnout, as the World Health Organization makes clear in its new definition of the term, is very different from the unavoidable stresses of daily life. And arguing that today’s young people expect their educations and careers to be one long joyride simply isn’t backed up by the data. Burnout goes much deeper. It’s our always-on culture and the dramatic acceleration of the pace of life made possible by technology that have led to spikes in poor sleep, depression, anxiety and suicide, with depression and anxiety among teenagers increasing by 60 percent in the last 20 years.

“Though I can’t prove it,” Friedman writes, “I suspect that my generation suffered less burnout than current students for the simple reason that we expected to have a rough ride, and our expectations often turned out to be worse than the real stresses we confronted.”

But it’s not unrealistic expectations that are the problem — and it's hardly only young people who are burnt out. And the 96 percent of senior leaders who, according to a Harvard Medical School study, are experiencing burnout aren't burnt out because they expected a stress-free existence. We see the feelings of "energy depletion or exhaustion,” as the World Health Organization defines a characteristic of burnout, across all generations and occupations, leading to a host of downstream health consequences that can’t be ignored.

So, is burnout real? Yes. Full stop. And when we call it what it is, we’re much better able to address it. Read More: Yes, Burnout is Real — And We Can Address It Much Better When We Call It What It Is

Before You Go

New Book of the Week: The Beautiful No: And Other Tales of Trial, Transcendence, and Transformation by Sheri Salata. After decades as an executive at Oprah’s Harpo Studios and the OWN network, Salata embarks on a journey to answer a burning question: “What happens when you realize you’ve had the career of your dreams, but you don’t have the life of your dreams?”

Neologism of the Week (new words, terms or phrases that define our time): “Attentional inequality” — In his latest podcast for Vox, Ezra Klein explores the idea that poor children are far more likely than rich children to develop unhealthy relationships with screens. As Klein says, “The possibility that among the many, many kinds of inequality that we allow to flourish in our society, that one is going to be attentional inequality, seems like a very cruel way for all of this to play out.” It’s part of what I call the “new digital divide,” a phenomenon I wrote about here.

Sports Highlight of the Week: A lesson in what life is really all about in one moment from the French Open, as described by beIN Sports correspondent Tancredi Palmeri: "Tennis player Mahut losing at Roland Garros in front of his family, breaks down in tears. His kid runs on court to hug him. His opponent Mayer getting emotional. Father and son walk away hand in hand. Losing, winning, living.” Watch it here.

Moment of Wonder of the Week: This amazing video shot by wildlife photographer Dylan Winter of starlings roosting for the night. Every evening, starlings gathering in giant formations, swooping and darting and whirling through the sky, moving almost as a single organism in groupings called “murmurations.” As Winter says: “So who decides whether to turn left or right? Or to form a giant sphere? Or a jumping lion in the sky? … Maybe we’ll never have all the answers, and that’s alright with me, because every time I come here on a winter evening, I still get the chills, and I’ll still be amazed, and I’ll walk home thinking, ‘How wonderful is that?’”

Moment of Wonder II: Wonder isn’t just about flights of fancy — it can be about anything that takes us out of the day-to-day, gives us perspective and helps nurture our sense of gratitude. That’s the feeling I got reading this powerful and moving piece by Rachel Donadio on visiting the cemetery at Omaha Beach, the site of the D-Day landings 75 years ago this week. “I had been told nothing quite prepares you for this place, and it was true,” writes Donadio. “Cemeteries bring back ghosts. But the sadness, or grief, was also world-historical. I kept thinking about the steep cliffs, the wide stretches of beach, the rows and rows and rows of graves. My trip to Normandy had left me with an unsettling feeling that the postwar world — the world of the Marshall Plan and NATO and international alliances that a lot of us grew up believing were unshakable — is fragile.” Some valuable perspective for our own lives, past, present and future.

Army Signal Corps Collection / U.S. National Archives / Handout via Reuters

Books: Last week I shared some of my summer reading suggestions and asked what you have on your list. Here are some titles you shared:

• Figuring by Maria Popova
• Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
• The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates
• How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life by Caroline Webb
• #Chill: Turn Off Your Job and Turn On Your Life by Bryan E. Robinson