I last spoke with Dr. Michi Shinohara on burnout, and this episode delves into burnout and how self-care vs. other care can be a remedy for the particular symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, inefficacy, and cynicism. Dr. Kira Schabram, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. She received her PhD from the University of British Columbia, her Masters of Science from Concordia University, and both a Bachelors of Science and Bachelors of Arts from the University of California, San Diego. Her academic expertise centers on compassion, meaningful work, and teamwork. Here are links to two different articles about her work, one on burnout and one on meaningful work.
I last spoke with Dr. Michi Shinohara on burnout, and this episode delves into burnout and how self-care vs. other care can be a remedy for the particular symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, inefficacy, and cynicism. Dr. Kira Schabram, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. She received her PhD from the University of British Columbia, her Masters of Science from Concordia University, and both a Bachelors of Science and Bachelors of Arts from the University of California, San Diego. Her academic expertise centers on compassion, meaningful work, and teamwork. Here are links to two different articles about her work, one on burnout and one on meaningful work.
[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today, I'm going to continue my conversation about burnout with Dr. Kira Shabram. For people who have not had the chance to listen to her bio, I will give a brief summary here. Dr. Kira Shabram PhD is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. She has a PhD from the University of British Columbia, a Master of Science from Concordia University, and has a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts from the University of California in San Diego. She does research on compassion, meaningful work, and teamwork.
[00:00:35] You addressed three patterns in the animal shelter workers, the ones who isolated probably without meaning to, and the ones who pushed for a leadership position, but then felt like they still didn't meet it, and then the ones who could focus on teamwork and then also still would get into a leadership position. I'm battling burnout. I think I've definitely been in the first two categories, even though I haven't yet quit. I'm not sure that I'm in that third category yet, where I'm good at delegating, and knowing I'm part of a team, and being able to shut it off. That's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you because I had read about your work on this.
[00:01:15] Kira Schabram: It might be helpful to briefly define burnout. And burnout is something that we've actually studied for about 40 years now, and a lot of credit there goes to work by Christina Maslach and her colleagues out of Berkeley. When we talk about burnout, we are talking about three symptoms that occur in certain combinations. The three basic symptoms. The first is exhaustion. You wake up in the morning and you think, how am I going to get out of bed? Often it's emotional exhaustion too, just feeling completely drained. The second is inefficacy. Things that used to come easy to you no longer do. You're spending an hour drafting an email or just sitting, staring at your computer screen. Or you're just feeling like you're not accomplishing as much as you used to. The third is cynicism. And cynicism is a sense of alienation.
[00:02:02] When we first started studying burnout, it was studied almost exclusively in a healthcare setting. And was studied as this alienation from the patients, so no longer empathizing with them or feeling any kind of human connection. We've since studied burnout in a lot of other industries, so we talk about it as alienation, possibly from patients or clients, but it could also be from the work itself. What is the point of this work? Why does it matter?
[00:02:27] And as I've mentioned before, those three symptoms tend to work in certain combinations. One common pattern is that people first feel exhausted, and because they're exhausted, they're not getting as much done, so they feel inefficacious. And because they're not getting enough done, they start to feel cynical.
[00:02:43] But when organizations try to intervene, they really only think about the exhaustion. That's all they've ever focused on. Now the good thing is at least they're focusing on something now. Five, 10 years ago, they focused on nothing. [Yeah.] But so when you look at what organizations are trying to do to combat burnout, the reason it often fails is they're only thinking about exhaustion.
[00:03:01] So let's give people time off, or let's do some sort of wellness intervention. And so one of the things that my colleagues and I are studying is how do you combat burnout? The number one thing is preventative. It's best if your employees don't crash into burnout because it's incredibly difficult and costly to pull people out of burnout.
[00:03:22] So number one, as an organization, the onus is really on you to make sure that employees don't burn out in the first place. So we're talking about the healthcare field, right? What could we have done better during COVID to prevent burnout in the first place? Once people have crashed into burnout, it often is truly this crash off a cliff.
[00:03:43] One of the ways that we find you can reverse it is people have to do it for themselves. And I'm always a little worried about saying that, right? Because it makes it seem like the organization is off the hook and it's up to you, physician or teacher to pull yourself out. That's not my intention, but I do find that people tend to know best what they need. The way that you reverse that burnout is you think about which of those symptoms you are, experiencing. Exhaustion, inefficacy, cynicism; may be all of the above. We ran a study on self and other care, so self and other compassion, very simply speaking, doing something kind for yourself or kind for someone else.
[00:04:20] And we studied that both in a longitudinal design, so over multiple years with social service workers and then through a interventional diary study. And what we found is that if you are experiencing exhaustion, self-care is the way to go. Self-compassion, take time off from work, and don't feel bad about it. Take a nap, cook a meal, go get a pedicure. We found really small acts actually helped reverse acute burnout. And so this idea of self-care that's been around for a couple years really does seem to work for exhaustion. You and I were talking earlier about how it's so hard to say no, but if you're suffering from exhaustion, It's the only way to get out of it. Say no to things. Go take a nap.
[00:04:59] If you are suffering from cynicism, that's not a good idea because you tend to alienate yourself even further. If you are engaged in too much self-indulgence or self-care, you tend to become even more alienated. So in fact, what we found is that cynicism gets reversed through other compassion. Do something nice for someone else. Take a coworker out for a coffee, do a yoga class with someone else, mentor someone, volunteer. In grad school, I would volunteer all day Saturday, which at the time my supervisors were always saying, isn't that driving burnout? And I couldn't explain why it wasn't. In hindsight, I know now it's because it was addressing that cynicism bit. I felt like I wasn't having any kind of impact through my research because it's such a long pipeline. But I was having an impact through volunteering. The good news is if it's inefficacy, we find that both self and other compassion work. Do something nice for yourself or do something nice for someone else. They both give you the sense of small victories and accomplishments.
[00:05:54] This answer, mapping that onto a calling, what we find is that people who tend to stick around, so people who we describe as being on that practice path seem to naturally be doing the things that we would advise to do if you are looking to combat burnout.
[00:06:07] So they are engaging more self-care. They know when it's time to go home and take a break, and they're also engaging in more other compassion. They are creating this community. They're mentoring other people. They are helping others. And not only are they feeling good about that and learning from that, but when it came time to rise into leadership positions, people would nominate them because they'd say, Hey, here's this person who looks out for others. And so these are two different streams of research that I've done over the last decade, but they've somehow seamlessly complimented each other.
[00:06:37] Christine Ko: Oh, yeah, I love that. I had read that in your article about combating the symptoms of burnout with self-care versus you shouldn't do it with self-care if it's cynicism. And I found that really interesting and an important way to think about burnout. And I appreciate that you emphasize that burnout is a system problem, and the onus shouldn't really be on the individual. But of course we are the ones who are living our lives and and we do know ourselves better than, a faceless system does.
[00:07:04] Across the board in academics, so not just academic healthcare, but academics in general, there's a culture of overwork for one thing. And then I think for me at least closely tied to that, especially in the past, before I started exploring this stuff on this podcast, is shame and feeling like I'm not measuring up. When there's this culture of overwork and the bar is up 50 stories, instead of thinking, oh, it's this impossible bar, I'm always saying, yes. Because I'm like, I have to reach that bar. And when I don't reach it, I feel like I'm not measuring up.
[00:07:38] Kira Schabram: And you wanna look at where that comes from. One of the things that I'm lucky to do at a business school is we get to look at the why, because we certainly have those cultures of overwork. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the time his grandchildren were in the workplace, we would all only be working 15 hours a week.
[00:07:54] Christine Ko: That's fascinating. Why did he think we would go down to 15 hours a week? Just cuz he thought that was the minimal amount we need for meaning?
[00:08:02] Kira Schabram: There's no empirical evidence behind why he said 15 hours. Specifically, he thought we could work even fewer hours, but we would need 15 hours to have meaningfulness in our lives; that there's some value that comes from work. I think his point was that: what are we going to occupy our time with? Work will probably still be part of it, but it's not going to be this necessity where we're just working these very long hours, and he's just been very wrong about that.
[00:08:26] What's happened instead is that in white collar jobs, we tend to work longer and longer hours. When I say white collar jobs, I'll focus on expertise jobs. So what you are doing as physician, what I'm doing as a doctor. What we have found is that it's just incredibly hard to break expertise into smaller chunks, and so that if you are an expert at something: if you are a surgeon, if you are a researcher, you're working longer and longer hours because it's really hard to get that stuff out of your head and to someone else. It's just easier to do all the things that you only have in your head.
[00:08:59] Christine Ko: This question of expertise and it being very difficult to transmit it, that's why the hours get longer. I was thinking of motherhood or parenthood, and that the same thing probably applies that even though we say, oh, you're doing it to yourself, you don't wanna delegate; it's probably that same issue. There's a sort of expertise of running the home life work, and it's really hard to explain all of that.
[00:09:24] Kira Schabram: I don't know if that helps, but I suppose my point to you is, yes, we do it to ourselves, but we do it because there isn't an alternative right now. As a society, we haven't really figured out how to split up expertise more. So there are people that are predicting that, a lot of jobs are going to get automated, but that for a while expertise is going to require longer and longer hours and have this burnout issue. And we don't really have an answer for how to make that work.
[00:09:52] I'm very lucky that my husband is a stay-at-home parent. So we are a single income. Now you might think then that he is doing the majority of the childcare. In a sense he is, but I do also think that we reflect the statistics. I have a seven week old, I have to feed that child physically. That's something he's never gonna be able to do. There's certain expertise that already is on me. But then there's also, and I think he would agree to me saying that, there's a historical assumption that the mother will do all the decision making labor, right? And there's extensive research on that out there that all of the planning, the finding the schools, the making sure the doctors was there, I still do all of that.
[00:10:30] Why do I do all of that? I shouldn't. Even with us, where I think we are a fairly enlightened couple in that I know all the research, we have constant communication, it still happens. The advice I should give myself is, still, you're still doing too much. I think it's just a constant struggle to try to back away from that. But I agree with you that it is because motherhood is so important to me, right?
[00:10:52] I study this, and I still say yes to too many things. So it's very easy for us to show the empirical evidence, give the advice, you know, in the same way we say get enough sleep and eat healthy. I think this is just like that. Do I follow it all the time? No, I wish I did. My husband wishes I did.
[00:11:07] Christine Ko: Yeah, I think all really good points. This will end part two with Dr. Kira Shabram, and because she just is such a wonderful source of knowledge, I would like to do one more episode with her where we will focus on compassion. So look out for a Part 3 with Dr. Kira Schabram.