To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Burnout

It's to the best of our knowledge from PRX. Do you get the Sunday night blues? We really do feel a sort of light form of depression, and I think it has to do with a couple of things. One is that there wasn't a break, so there's sort of disappointment in the weekend that didn't happen, and then there's anticipation of the week ahead. You know what that's like, right? Your weekends somehow aren't that restorative anymore, and your weekdays are exhausting. It's push, push, push all the way all the time. You know what? We feel your pain. Half of Americans surveyed say they're exhausted from work. I'm Anne Strange -Hams, and today it's time to take burnout seriously. We're going to talk about how we ruin the weekend and also how to get it back. And then, fast in your seatbelt, the next great metaphor for modern life just might be jet lag. First this. You

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-Hams. Do you feel like you still have weekends? A few years ago, I was one of a two -parent, full -time working family with two very busy kids. We were scheduled to the Gills. Journalist Katrina Onstead. Our devices were pinging with leftover work emails, homework, shuttling the kids between scheduled activities, social events, play dates. There was a kind of sameness, this crush of life, work. I was tired and snappy. I was needing to nap. I was never off. I was always on, and we were all on the whole family. I felt like a failure. We were just

in a grind, and on Sunday nights, my son at the time who was about 11, would say, was that a weekend? You know what? I think a lot of us are not quite sure what a weekend is supposed to be anymore. I mean, for me, I work pretty flat out during the week, and I really look forward to coming home Friday night and feeling like the pressure is off. But then Sunday afternoon rolls around, and I just start feeling blue. I'm not sure what exactly I wanted from the weekend, but I'm pretty sure I either didn't get it, or I didn't get enough of it. Katrina Anstet knows exactly what that's like, and that's why she wrote the weekend effect, a book that explains how we ruined the weekend, and how to get it back. Beginning with those Sunday night blues. That's an actual phenomenon. That actually is something that has been researched, and we really do feel a sort of light form of depression on Sunday

nights often. And I think it has to do with a couple of things. One is that there wasn't a break, so there's sort of disappointment in the weekend that didn't happen, and then there's anticipation of the week ahead. But a lot of this has to do with our changing attitude towards the weekend, where we used to be okay with actually taking that time, and actually having time off was a status symbol, right? That was the badge of honor of the leisure class, was to have a lot of extra time and downtime. And now we've kind of inverted that, and to be busy is high status. So when we have a weekend, we're kind of confused about what to do with it, right? Because we don't want to look lazy. Laziness is so stigmatized, and unemployment is so stigmatized. So I think on Sunday nights, we're kind of, we're feeling all of those things at once. It's like a kind of tidal wave of disappointment and anticipation. Is it because we're also working so hard during the week that we pretty much shove our home lives off into the corner until the weekend, and then the weekend comes, and you want to do

all this stuff that has to do with maintaining your home life, and your social life, and restocking the fridge, and it's too much to fit in. So by Sunday afternoon, you feel like, wow, I didn't actually accomplish everything I was supposed to. So then you're starting the week feeling like a failure. Right, you started a deficit. And that's very true, especially in long hours, cultures, when do we have the time to sort of tend the boring stuff of the week, right? The chores and the domestic obligations, and a lot of that does get shunted off into the weekend. And in fact, what many North Americans are doing on the weekend is one chores and two TV. And both those things are kind of linked, and neither of them are particularly rejuvenating. So if we are able to let some of that go, and that rush for domestic perfectionism, I think women particularly struggle with this, and maybe be content with a little more squalor, that we might be able to regain some of that time on the weekend. So I'm a big

advocate of squalor. I'm trying to make peace with it. So how did we get here? Because honestly, I'm thinking a decade ago, I was doing interviews on the slow food movement, and the slow travel movement, and the slow everything movement. And now it seems like, wow, a decade on, and we didn't learn anything. Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, there are several pieces here. I think the biggest difference, probably in your life, I know it is in my life, from 10 years ago, is this little box that's sitting next to me, blinking, which is my phone, and devices have really changed our relationship to work, right? We are never entirely disconnected. We actually, many of us, carry our offices in our bags, and in our back pockets. And that state of high alertness that's required, even if you're not officially working, but you're kind of in tune with work, it takes a real mental toll. So that's one of the pieces, it's just our constant availability. And the other thing is a real shift from stable full -time work, since this economic crash of

the late 2000s, to precarious work culture. The city where I live in Toronto, 50 % of the workers here are in what they call the precarious. They're working in the gig economy, so they have several contract jobs, or part -time gigs, and put together that usually annihilates the weekend, and it is hard to have that kind of slowness that you reference, that time off, that official time off, where you really are at the clock, if you know that in two hours, you have to get your third job. It's a really complicated subject because it seems like it's both personal, and has to do with personal choices that we make and that we have some control over, and also structural, and this is also political and economic issue. Yeah, it is. It is really complicated, and I'm always wary of it being framed as a self -help issue, because certainly there are things that we can do on a personal level, and I try to implement a my life to make the most of that rare time off, but ultimately, yeah, I mean, this is a public interest issue, and it does require some kind of

government intervention, and it requires corporate overhaul and business leaders who are willing to model healthy behaviors around work -life balance and long -hour culture. So yeah, I think if we don't actually look at this in a serious way as a social issue, then I think we're inviting increased levels of anxiety and mental health issues, and it is serious. This actually isn't just a private thing. This is something that is happening across the board to many laborers. So when you decided to do what you could to change your own and your families weekend, what did you discover? Did you come up with some components, some ingredients for having a good weekend? The most useful delineation for me was figuring out that there are two kinds of leisure. There's passive leisure and active leisure, and we were very engaged in passive leisure, which we were kind of passing off as fun, which meant that we were so burnt out on the weekends, and this might sound familiar, I don't

know, but we would collapse in the couch and watch Netflix or watch sports. That's pretty familiar, right? Because you're just so burnt out, and that might provide immediate kind of benefits, but they're sort of like hedonic, right? They don't really last. But active leisure is that kind of deeper engagement with an activity like a hobby, or even a sport with other people, something where you can kind of hit that flow state and really come out of yourself, and that kind of leisure, that kind of use of time, free time, has much more benefits, long lasting benefits. So for us, we had to create space to do that active leisure and that meant, frankly, in our family, pulling the kids out of activities. We just thought they're enriched enough, and what they really need and what we really need is a little bit of boredom and a little space in the weekend to explore and figure out for them what they really liked independent of our agenda for them as children. And I think in this moment of hyper parenting, it can be almost scary to say, oh, my kids don't have anything

to know on the weekends, they just run free, right? But of course, that's where all the epiphanies are and that's where we figure out who we are. And then I realized that was kind of the same for me, and for my husband as well, that we needed to create space on the weekends for anything to happen. Often that means for us getting into nature, getting out of the city, or even within the city, finding nature, finding beauty, making sure to get to the museum or even just walk over to a beautiful sculpture and take it in, but just really putting the brakes on and reframing our relationship to time so that time doesn't always have to be in service to us. And time isn't something that we're kind of chasing, that it's neutral. We can be unoccupied, and in that lack of occupation, we can find a lot of meaning and purpose. I guess one of the problems with our overbusy work lives is a lot of us don't actually really have hobbies anymore. Yeah, and that's a real loss, actually, because hobbies provide that sense of mastery. That's one of the greatest sensations of being human to get good at something, and particularly when those hobbies

are shared by other people, and then you have instant sense of community. So yeah, I'm a big advocate for hobbies. I joined a running group, because I'm an introvert. I had to turn something very solitary into something collective, just to get that experience of being with other people and learning something and getting better at something. And I found it really rejuvenating, actually, like it's a big part of my week now. You said art matters, seeing something beautiful. Why? I think one thing I discovered doing this book was that it's really an existential question about what are we doing with our time? What am I doing with my time? Why am I even here? Right? You could go down this rabbit hole pretty quickly when you're investigating leisure. And beauty is, it's fundamental to life. It is where we experience our emotions. It's where we're changed and transformed. And I think it's very easy to go a long time without noticing the beauty that's around and even putting ourselves in situations where beauty is clearly around us.

And I know for me that it's, and it research backs us up. I looked it up. It actually does destress. Museums are places where people's anxiety levels decrease. And to be alert to beauty, and to be alert to history in a museum, I mean, that's an extraordinary use of time. And it has the kind of benefits that will really last much more than the Netflix binge. There are some things that people do on the weekends that you suggest you're not actually so great. Like, you're not a big fan. I was surprised to read. You're not a big fan of brunch. Why? What do you have against brunch? Oh, brunch. I'm not the first person to say this, but brunch seems like the ultimate time suck to me. Right? A brunch, as it's become in many urban centers in any case, it's become such a kind of ritual of consumption where I live. I live around a corner from a very hot brunch spot and there are lineups that go around the block. And I just think really like two hours for these sort of warmed over eggs benedict in a very loud

environment. It's very performative, I think. To become another form of conspicuous consumption. It's conspicuous consumption. I'm teeth degree. It's a lot of money. And I think the less money is spent on the weekend, I suspect the better you'll feel. I think there are ways to get that kind of human connection. And in fact, around food, which is always such a wonderful site for being with people that you love. I think you can get that without dropping 70 bucks from a mosa and some lousy hash browns. I wanted to ask, would you mind, could we end with, could you read your manifesto for a good weekend? Of course. Manifesto for a good weekend. Connect. Do this in person. An old friend, a new one, a neighbor, an neglected relative. Extend yourself. Care. Offer your time, volunteer. Become an activist for a cause you believe in. Write an angry letter to someone in government. Go hang out with a group of people who care about something more than you do and let it rub off.

Play. For every passive activity, do two active ones. Go green. Define nature anyway you choose. Get close to it. Return to that place every few weekends until it's sacred ground. Beauty. Expose yourself to art that takes your breath away. Make something with your hands. Stand outside a church on a Sunday morning and listen to the choir. Join the choir. Do less. Less shopping. Less cleaning. Less decluttering. This does not mean more cluttering. Less hovering over the kid. Don't make plans. Make space. Wander. Wander. Be. Repeat next weekend. Katrina Onstad is the author of The Weekend Effect. The life -changing benefits of taking time off and challenging the cult of overwork. And then it's W -E -K -E -M -E. It's weekend. W -E -K -E -M -E. It's weekend. In 1985, the New Yorker writer Susan Orleen started traveling around the country

to find out how Americans were spending their Saturday nights. One thing she discovered? How many Saturday nights songs there are? E -M -D. I love a sad midnight that I already got no fun. I got some more than those I just got paid. How I wish I had someone that talked to I'm willing on one way. S -A -D -U -R -D -A -Y. S -A -D -U -R -D -E -Y. I think my personal favor was the Bay City Rollers, which was just S -A -T -U -R -D -A -Y. I think I feel particularly nostalgic about it because it was a big song when I was a kid. And little did I know that someday I would be sitting and doing research in the S -Caf Library trying to sign all the songs ever written with Saturday night in the name and believe me, it is a long list, except for Moon and June, if I remember

correctly. And of course, if you don't count love, because that's not fair, since obviously that's in the name of almost every song ever written. But Saturday night is probably one of the most common phrases again to me that meant that it means something to us. Saturday night, five rides in my row, cuz it's gone to the road hill, you know some good old boys get ready to ride, cuz it's almost Saturday night. It's just a very rich phrase that is

a shorthand for a lot that is the subject of song of love and romance and longing. Hey now Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week and I sing the song that I sang for the memories I usually seek until I hear you rap on the door, until you're in my arms once more. Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week. The New Yorker's staff writer Susan Orleen and okay, what we miss. Send us your favorite Saturday night song. Hey, how about on Facebook? We're tackling burnout and how to deal with it this hour. Are we living in the golden age of exhaustion? Or are we too tired even to think about that? I'm Anne Strange -Hamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.

The New Yorker's staff writer Susan Orleen I sing the song that I sang for the memories. We're talking about burnout this hour and

I have to confess getting this show on the air every week takes a lot of work and it doesn't always fit into a nine to five kind of schedule. So we wind up prepping for interviews at night, at home and yes on the weekends. We stay at work late, getting edits and sound mixes done and we love the job, at least I do. I'm pretty sure everybody else does too. But we do get burned out. And I bet that you know exactly what that feels like. Because in one recent study, 50 % of people surveyed said they often or always feel exhausted from work. This was across professions up and down the career ladder. 50 %? MS Apple says that's because collectively we have fallen for outdated ideas about success. MS Apple is the science director for the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. That's at Stanford University. And she's also the author of The Happiness Track. Steve Paulson sat down to talk with her. Emma, you opened your book with an anecdote from a college internship you had one summer at

a big newspaper in France. Can you tell me that story? Absolutely. During that time, I was an intern running between the editorial floor and the basement where all the facsimiles were being printed. On the editorial floor, there was just a lot of stress, quiet, and kind of misery. People just hunched over their computers. In the basement, it was just a party going on. They were having a great time. Everybody's working through the night toward the same deadline. And yet, there was a completely different attitude. The editorial staff were more white -collar and the people were just eating their pizzas out of a box and not looking very happy. The basement level was more blue -collar

and the printing staff that was just this attitude of, let's do this together, let's make this happen and let's have fun at the same time. Those workers in the basement, they had wine and cheese and bread. I mean, they knew how to live well. They had a buffet set up, for sure. So the obvious question is, most of us, all of us, I think, would like to be like those French press workers in the basement, why aren't we? Well, there's a view that you cannot be successful unless you sort of have to sacrifice your happiness. There's this misconception that in order to achieve your goals or professional goals, you have to sacrifice your own well -being. And if you look at the data, we have this all wrong and that's why I wrote the Happiness Track because again and again, I saw that if you want to be more creative, if you want to be more innovative, if you want to be more influential, more charismatic, if you want to be more focused, and if you want to be more productive in general, taking care of your own well -being is the number one most critical thing you can do, your own well -being and happiness.

That's not obvious to me because it seems like there often is a trade -off between stress and success. I guess you could say that you have to sort of grind it out at times to get to that next level. And what you're saying is correct at times. So we know that stress can really help us move through that deadline or escape that. Boss, that's about to run us over. It mobilizes us, it mobilizes our mind. We are attention and memory, get strengthened. We can really focus and get through that deadline. But if this is our constant modus operandi, if this is the way we live our life, actually we're deteriorating all of our systems, we're deteriorating our attention, our memory, we're deteriorating our health, our immune system, and so forth and so on. So momentary stress, yes, you've heard of good stress, yes. But if it's a constant way that we live our life, which it is at the moment, then it is not going to help us achieve our goals, but it will lead to burnout. And we're seeing 50 % burnout across professions and it doesn't

matter if you're a lawyer or you're working for a nonprofit or you're in the medical field, we're seeing this across the board because we've really bought into this idea. So for example, when we are very busy, we say, oh, I better go get another coffee. Or always thinking of productivity in terms of an adrenal rush. We have to somehow be in a fight or flight mode activating our sympathetic nervous system, which is that fight or flight response in order to get things done. If you live this way day after day, you will burn out and you will be miserable. You said 50 % burnout across the board? Yes, of course. That's kind of astonishing actually. It's astonishing, but it's also not surprising. Another very shocking study has shown that 75 % of the American workforce is disengaged at work. And of that 75%, 25 % are actively disengaged. But the question is, why would it be worse now than it was, I don't know, 20 years ago, 50 years ago? That's an excellent question. And I think one of the reasons is we are seeing that the speed of life, some studies show that it's increasing every year, which is not surprising given

the role of technology in our lives. We are simply receiving information so much quicker than we did in the past. And we're also expected to send that back out just as quickly. We're also being interrupted all day long. It's very difficult to have a steady stream of thought when you're constantly receiving emails and text messages and instant messages and phone calls and God knows what else. It's also gotten to the point where not only are we being interrupted but we've gotten into the habit of interrupting ourselves in order to check our devices and so forth. So we are dealing with so much more stimulation and information that we ever had, a very astonishing study that came out just a year before the iPhone came out. So this is before we all had iPhones showed that we are receiving 30 ,000 gigabytes of information every single day which would be enough to crash a small computer in a week. So this again was a year before the iPhone came out. Can you imagine what it is today? But the other side of this is that I think a lot of us crave that kind of high intensity stimulation. Yes. You know, it's not forced on us by our jobs. We

go after it, including in our spare time. It's just, you know, it's a rush. But it sounds like you're saying it comes at a cost. It certainly comes at a cost. But it is a rush and you have very accurately pointed out a fact that is very characteristic also of our U .S. culture. So research that I participated in as well at Stanford University as a graduate student shows that if you ask Americans to define happiness, they'll define it in a high intensity, positive way, using words like excitement and thrill. If you ask people in East Asian countries, I'm thinking Korea, Japan, China, to define happiness, they're going to use words that are low intensity, positive, like calm, peaceful, serene. So we love intensity. You're absolutely right. And there's a lot of reasons for that. We are an immigrant culture that was very much defined by the Protestant work ethic. It certainly served our ancestors. The question is, is it serving us now? And from what we're seeing, we really need to create

some balance here. So for example, we're hearing about meditation all the time now. It's a household word, everyone's trying it. And in a way, meditation is an extreme action. You're sitting, closing your eyes, doing nothing. For a culture that's so productive, that's extreme. We need sort of an extreme remedy for this extreme lifestyle that we're living. People are taking silent retreats. So the question is, how can we cultivate resilience? And one of those ways is to learn to activate our parasympathetic nervous system again. Because we've gotten to the point where we're so engaged in our fight or flight response that people are not able to sleep at night. That there's a very high use of anti -anxiety medications and so forth. And someone just to try to calm back down. But we can all do this naturally. There are natural ways to activate your parasympathetic nervous system so that you can have a more balanced day, more balanced nervous system. This is something we have to relearn. It's something that we knew how to do as kids. It's something you can observe

animals that they're able to do that. One moment, your dog's chasing that ball like a maniac. Next moment, they're asleep. Same thing with your kids. But for adults, it's as if we can't turn off again. So you said there are things we can do to lessen the feeling of burnout. Like what? It's important to learn how to build our resilience. So I'm going to share with you the research that I conducted in Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin -Madison. And I worked with veterans returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan with trauma. Now, you might wonder, okay, what do they have to do with me? They have a lot to do because trauma is basically when you are in such a state of stress and fight or flight that you have not been turned off ever again. You are unable to sleep and you're basically in the highest level of stress that you can be of anxiety. These were veterans, many of whom had gone through programs at the VA standard programs or medication protocols that hadn't worked for them. Many of them were self -medicating with drugs and alcohol at this point because there weren't any other options left for them. And we did a breathing protocol with them for a week. Now, sounds simplistic, but breathing is probably

the most powerful thing you can use to access your parasympathetic nervous system. When you say a breathing protocol, like what? I mean, what do you do? Well, it was a workshop that taught a number of different practices. I mean, I'm happy to teach you something briefly here online if you like. Sure. I mean, go for it. Yeah, tell me. How should I breathe better? Well, when you breathe in, your heart rate accelerates and your blood pressure goes up. When you breathe out, it decelerates. Your blood pressure goes down. So, the simplest thing you can do is start to lengthen your exhales. So, taking a few minutes at your desk, closing your eyes, and breathing out twice as long as you breathe in, is going to calm your heart rate immediately lower your blood pressure. Those are very simple things. You can do it at the wheel when you're driving in traffic. You can do it when your kids are having tantrums and you need to calm yourself down. The breath is one of the most powerful tools that we have that we don't know about. And it's literally in our back pocket and it's free. What we saw with the veterans was that many of them came in extremely skeptical, as you can imagine.

After a week there, trauma levels normalized. And a month and a year later, they were still normalized. It's a huge impact that it had. And it really, what it was, it was sort of like reprogramming their nervous system to become more again, to be themselves again. So, next time you feel burned out, just breathe. Actually, I tried that this morning. I woke up feeling really anxious. It worked. MSEPULA is the author of The Happiness Track. How to apply the science of happiness to accelerate your success. And that was Steve Paulson talking with her. So I know you have days. Sometimes when you come home dragging from work, you're totally wiped out. I do too. But you know what? People in every century and every age have complained about feeling exhausted. But what's changed over time are the explanations. Cultural historian Anna Katarina Schaffner lays them out in her new history of

exhaustion. Steve Paulson reached her in Kent, England. Anna, what made you want to write a book about the history of exhaustion? Basically, a few years ago, I noticed a really significant increase in newspaper reports, television programs, and scholarly studies on stress and burnout, especially in Germany, where I'm from. And the hours is basically the most exhausting age in history. And these reports to certain extent also chimed with my own experiences. I had been feeling periodically extremely fatigued and weary, sometimes helpless and overburdened. And so I was really personally interested in that topic. But I also wondered whether the superlative claims about our age could really be true. So the question was, do we actually live in the golden age of exhaustion? Exactly. So what did you find out? First of all, almost everybody who writes about exhaustion nowadays claims that this is the case, that we've never ever been as collectively exhausted before as we are now. And they argue that email and mobile phones, for example, generate this

perpetual reachability that really erodes the boundaries between work and leisure time. But what I found is that exhaustion has been a concern throughout the ages. So you're saying exhaustion actually goes way back in history. People have basically always been exhausted. Absolutely. And my research has really taken me back all the way to the age of classical antiquity. And what is really interesting is that the concern remains the same, but the theories we developed to explain exhaustion, where it comes from, what we can do to tackle it, change really, really radically. We should probably actually define our terms here, what exactly we mean by exhaustion. So it's not just depression that you're talking about. It's not even just burnout, it's something else. Yeah, basically exhaustion is a really, really difficult phenomenon to explore. My understanding of exhaustion is that it's an individual physical and mental state, but also a broader culture of phenomenon. And physically exhaustion can be manifest as fatigue,

lethargy, and weakness. And on emotional and spiritual level, we can describe the symptoms of exhaustion as weirdness, disillusionment, apathy, hopelessness, and lack of motivation. And what I try to do for my research, as I looked at different historical and current diagnostic categories, such as melancholia, nervousness, neurostemia, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, and burnout. And these diagnosis are obviously not the same as exhaustion, but they combine core symptoms of exhaustion with a range of other symptoms. Exhaustion has been explained in very different ways. Okay, well, give me some examples of that. I mean, what were some other different definitions or explanations for exhaustion if you go back to previous centuries? Yeah, for example, in the age of classical antiquity, when humor theory was really the dominant medical model, exhaustion was thought to be caused by a surplus of black bile. And

it was thought to literally cloud the sufferer's imagination and spirit because the black bile in the body would evaporate and produce dark fumes that would make us see everything through a glass darkly. And in other periods, for example, in the middle ages, exhaustion was theorized as acedia and that was thought to be produced by a lack of willpower, a lack of commitment to God and a lack of proper faith. In the 19th century, exhaustion was thought to be the result of permanent overstimulation. The urban environment had become really draining in a way that was almost vampiric. You know, as I hear you run through all these different historical explanations, I mean, we could kind of laugh a little bit at some of these, but maybe just being human is exhausting. Maybe it's always going to be exhausting whatever age we live in. Yeah, I fully agree with you. I think we all worry about exhaustion because at a deeper level, I think exhaustion really hooks into anxieties about death,

about the waning of our energies as we age. And what is really interesting though is that this sort of ubiquitous psychological underlying reason for worrying about exhaustion is always being repackaged. In each age, people come up with totally different theories to explain it. There's nostalgia built into this that, oh, if only we could live the way we used to. Absolutely. I think nostalgia is a really, really interesting component in exhaustion theories because most people who complain about their own age and its particular difficulties look back really longingly to previous periods that they imagine as less exhausting. They sort of romanticize in the process. I think that is happening now in our age as well. Right. I mean, if only we could go back to the days before the internet came on or before there was social media, you know, life was better back then. Exactly. But I would say that every age had its demons and had its

challenges and people in the past have felt as we have. Now, to jump ahead to our own time, it seems there's kind of a perverse reaction to exhaustion among some people. It's almost like a status symbol. I am so busy. I am so important that there's a reason why I'm constantly exhausted. Some forms of exhaustion are culturally validated in that they allow people to signal their significance and their importance. And by saying, oh, I'm so stressed, you basically say, I'm very much in demand and at work nobody can survive without me being there. And also being overworked is in some circles considered to be something very positive in the sense that you're driven, you're ambitious, you're dedicated. Well, it's so interesting to think about that if we think about people who say they're burned out, for instance. Yeah, it's just too much, but it's not my fault. It's because I'm so valuable, as opposed to say,

if I'm depressed, then that suggests, oh, there's something wrong with me. That's definitely the case. And I think the difference between burnout and depression is particularly interesting because burnout discourses tend to be quite different in various different cultural and national settings. So for example, in Germany, it's very politicized. It's all about it's the working conditions that are what causes the workforce to suffer so much. So there's an expectation that the government steps in and you know, changes legislation protects the workforce, whereas if you diagnose as depressed, that definitely comes unfortunately still with a sort of mental health stigma. Whereas the burnout diagnosis is in some ways almost a bit heroic, you know, people wear it with almost as a badge of honor. Well, and also it's like, I think people are not so shy about telling, say, their co -workers, I feel really burned out, but to tell other people you're depressed, that raises the stakes considerably. I mean, that's something you tend to be careful about.

Absolutely, and you know, that brings us really back to questions, you know, wider philosophical questions about responsibility, agency, and willpower. And I think that's why theories about exhaustion are so interesting because all of them take sides in that argument, some blame exhaustion on the environment, some blame it on personality, you know, some people might be more resilient, others aren't. And then you have really interesting theories that basically declare exhaustion as a disease of civilization, you know, broader environmental developments. So what I hear you saying is that we should be kind of careful about trying to come up with a psychological diagnosis of exhaustion because it's always more than that. And I guess I'm wondering if you're suggesting that exhaustion is almost more of a metaphor and the metaphors change from one culture to the next. Yeah, I think metaphors play a really, really crucial role in theories about exhaustion because metaphors are

really all we have when we talk about the kind of exhaustion that I'm interested in, you know, the one that doesn't really have clear cut medical underlying reasons. And also, if you think about it, we don't really have an accepted theory about human energy in the West. We have that in other cultures like in Chinese medicine, everything centers around the notion of Qi, and you have in India, you have Prana, and in other cultures, you have conceptions of what human energy might be, but in Western culture, all you have is theories about the kind of things that might exhaust our energy. Now, you are a cultural historian, but I'm wondering if you have any suggestions about what we can do to feel less exhausted. I don't know, any tips we might take home. I would say it's deeply personal what exhausts us and what stimulates us. So, for example, some people really thrive on meeting others, you know, extra words to thrive on on social situations, whilst introverts have to spend a lot of energy when they're in

social situations, and I need a lot of time on their own. It's important to have good institutional cultures in place such that no emails are sent after working hours because it's really stressful. If you come home and you see that work emails are still popping in your inbox, because that creates a culture of everyone is expected to work after hours. So, I have to ask if that applies to your own life. I mean, do you manage to turn off email when you're home? I'm actually really bad at it, and it is definitely something that exhausts me. I wish I were much stronger. I think actually smartphones really are, most of us are addicted, and it's not healthy. And? And? What? Oh, sorry, I was just checking my phone. That's Anna Katarina Schaffner talking with Steve Paulson about her book Exhaustion, A History. Coming up, we explore the cultural

history of desyncranosis, aka jet lag. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio, and PRX. Next time

you're stuck at the airport looking for something to read, why not pick up a copy of Jetlag? It's a small book, won't take up much space, but it contains a lot of big ideas. Christopher J. Lee is the author, and he says Jetlag has become more than a temporarily scrambled body clock. It's become a way of life. So, Doug Gordon sat down with Lee to learn more. You open your book with an epigraph from T .S. Eliot. Would you mind reading it and explaining how it relates to Jetlag? Sure. So, this epigraph is from a 1936 poem by T .S. Eliot, called Burton Wharton, that later became part of this collection, four quartets that was published in 1943. Time present and time past are both perhaps present and time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is

unredeemable. I'm sure some listeners are familiar with those lines from T .S. Eliot, and the reason I decided to include T .S. Eliot in those lines in particular is because I wanted to announce to the readers of this book that this wasn't a typical book on Jetlag, that I wanted to reach for other understandings of time and our relationship to time and how time is a part of being modern. As I say at the end of the first paragraph, to be modern is to know what time it is, and essentially what I mean by that is I think part of being modern is being particularly conscious of time and not just time in terms of minutes and hours, but also understanding the epic that we're living within, having a hypersensitivity to that. I can't help but notice that the name of that T .S. Eliot poem Burnt Norton is similar to the word burnout, which is kind of what General feels like, is that just a coincidence? Yes, well actually I think that's a

fabulous observation and truth, I did not make that connection myself. You say that in a sense Jetlag has always been with us, so you're saying that it predates our travel, which you kind of just talked about with relation to the T .S. Eliot poem, so how can this be? How can you make the case that Jetlag has always been with us? Jetlag is about our struggle with time, that is to say our biological struggle with time, and in a sense about our mortality, the human limits of travel, in the way in which our human limits come into conflict with technology. If you think of Jetlag that way within these broader themes, then we can see how these themes are actually very human ones and have been with us for a long period of time going back to the Greco -Roman period. I think that as I cite in the book a number of philosophers going back to Plato and Aristotle to St.

Augustine and up to the 19th century and 20th century, there's a deep philosophical tradition engaging with time and what it means for our mortality and our biology. So would it be fair to go so far as to say that Jetlag is a kind of time travel? Because technically it is, but I mean even more figuratively, metaphorically, do you see Jetlag as a kind of time travel? Absolutely, and this is another thing that fascinates me about Jetlag. I think as I write in the book, Jetlag is time travel without the charisma. Yeah, that's great. And what I mean by that is that when we think of time travel, we think of HG Wells, the time machine, we think of movies like Back to the Future, we think of films like The Terminator, essentially people traveling back and forth in time to correct something, to save something, to create a better future. And there's a certain magic to that. With Jet Travel, we

also are, in a sense, you know, traveling back and forth in time whether we travel to Los Angeles or Singapore or travel to London or Moscow, but we don't feel the magic. And this is why I say Jetlag is time travel without the charisma. That's great. You got to get that pattern. That's a great phrase. It would look great on t -shirts and stuff. You say that Jetlag is what contemporary globalization feels like. What do you mean by that? Yes. I'm a college professor. I teach at Lafayette College and I teach global history. You know, one of the things that I try to have students understand, or, you know, the different ways we can approach globalization as a phenomenon. That is to say that globalization is such a huge phenomenon. It seems intangible. And a common approach for approaching globalization is to point to Starbucks franchises in Beijing or to see McDonald's in New Delhi. These sorts of incidents of commercialization of capitalism,

of the exchange of goods, the movements of peoples and so forth. So with this book, essentially what I'm trying to point to is that globalization is also something we can feel. That moving across time zones, traveling by airplane, feeling Jetlag, that's a sensory experience that gets to what I think globalization is about. So I hope some readers will think of Jetlag as not just a difficulty to overcome, but actually something related to the globalized world that we live in. You include a quotation from the beginning of William Gibson's 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition in your book. Would you mind setting it up and reading it for us? Because it's a really great description. Yeah, I should say that in writing this book, what struck me is how few authors wrote about Jetlag within their books. What stood out for me about William Gibson's novel pattern recognition is that he does talk about Jetlag at the very beginning of the book. Just

to give a brief setup, essentially Gibson is talking about his main protagonist, Casey Pollard, describing what Jetlag is like for her after she has arrived in New York after a long flight from London. Her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical, down the vanished wake of the plane, the brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly and are left behind and must be awaited upon arrival, like lost luggage. You have this other great literary excerpt about Jetlag. Martin Ames is 1984 novel Money. I'd like to have you read that one for us too and set it up. Yes, so Martin Ames's novel, as the title suggests,

Money is in effect an allegory about global capitalism during the 1980s and essentially it's the antihero of the book as this man named John Self, who is like many Martin Ames characters is not entirely likable. This passage from Money is in the middle of the book and basically I thought it gave a very accurate description of what Jetlag is like to experience. I'm a thing made up of time lag, culture shock, zone shift, human being simply weren't meant to fly around like this. Scorched throat, pimpled vision, memory wipes, nothing new to me, but it's all much worse these days, now that I ride the planet shuttle. I have to get up in the middle of the night to check out the can. My daily tiredness peak arrives exactly when it wants to, often after morning coffee. All day I'm my night self spliced by night thoughts, night sweats, and all night well I'm something else entirely,

something else again. I'm something over evolved, the salty slipstream thinning out and trailing down over the black Atlantic. Hello. Hello. How are you? Good, how are you? Are you asleep? Not yet. How about you? How long you staying for? I'll be in the bar for the rest of the week. You described Sophia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation as one of the most popular renditions of Jetlag in recent memory. So I'm curious, what does this movie tell us about Jetlag? Well, I love this film, I should say that. I gave me an excuse to watch the film a number of times while writing this book. And essentially what fascinates me about the movie is that essentially Jetlag provides a premise for their relationship. That is to say, both Charlotte played by Scarlett Johansson and Bob played by Bill Murray, they find each

other in this relatively anonymous hotel and downtown Tokyo suffering from Jetlag. And as a result of that, they start talking with one another and eventually develop this unexpected relationship because they're in this hotel and unable to sleep and staying up at odd hours and finding themselves at the hotel bar. But I think the film itself, through that premise and through their relationship, opens up a deeper metaphysical ground about their lives and about aging. And so Charlotte basically confronts this post -college period of trying to discover herself, trying to find out what she wants to be in life. Whereas Bob played by Bill Murray essentially is confronting a middle -aged crisis and feels disappointed with his career and finds himself in an unhappy marriage. And so Jetlag essentially provides this premise for confronting these issues in their lives and so I think

that for me is where Jetlag can potentially be instructive. What does Jetlag tell us about our relationship with technology? Well, I think it tells us that our relationship to technology is very complex. We tend to think of technology and technological innovation as bringing nothing but good things as being nothing but positive. But I think Jetlag tells a different story. It says that there are certain side effects to technological innovation and side effects that point to our human limits. Christopher J. Lee teaches history at Lafayette College. He's also the author of Jetlag, Doug Gordon, talked with him. To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Wisconsin Public Radio. This hour was produced by our very own Doug Gordon, who comes from Canada, where they work just as hard as Americans, but they never get exhausted. He had helped from Charles,

Energizer, Monroe Kane, and Mark, always on Rickers, audio engineering from Steve Gotcher. Late Night Sound Design by Joe Hartke, Steve Paulson tirelessly reads dozens of books every week so the rest of us don't have to. And I'm Anne Strange -Hamps. Thanks for listening. PRX