What you should do in August
Are you (like the old me) an August overloader?
How do you spend your August?
Every August, I (Wendy) used to ask myself: how I can use the quiet ‘dog days of summer’ to load up my to-do list and get more stuff done. Then I would crash in September.
Are you (like the old me) an August overloader?
Or are you (like the reforming me) an August rejuvenator?
This newsletter invites us to explore work/rest tensions. People easily see an either/or; resting takes away from productivity, and vice versa. Yet (surprise, surprise) work and rest are a powerful both/and.
The research is clear. The inability to rest, relax and detach from work leads to burnout. Getting more stuff done does not always help us to get more stuff done. Success depends on keeping these forces in a harmonious dance.
One CEO we know takes at least two weeks off each summer for a “reading retreat,” cozying up in a bungalow to catch up on new ideas. Another leader unplugs for 24 hours every weekend to focus on in-person connections. Yet another prioritizes nine hours of sleep each night by eliminating as many evening activities as possible.
To dive into the both/and of work and rest, we are excited to bring to an interview with one of our favorite authors—Amelia Nagoski. Amelia, with her twin sister Emily Nagoski, wrote Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle (I, Wendy, am particularly excited to bring to you two UD Blue Hens!). Amelia shares the benefits of rejuvenation and how to weave these practices into our daily lives, weekly schedules, and annual calendars… and most importantly how to draw on practices that collectively support one another to lead more thriving lives.
What will you do to rejuvenate this August, and kick off a new school year energized? (By the way, I (Wendy) am taking two weeks off in August to spend time with family, hike on the Appalachian Trail, and read as many Louise Penny books as possible.)
* Hello Southern Hemisphere friends! We hope you can revisit this newsletter next January!
Work and Rest… its NOT and either/or
“When we prioritize our life …our work gets better.” (Arianna Huffington, author of Thrive)
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Amelia Nagoski is a superhero - championing ways that we can individually and collectively value our humanity in a stressful world. We are so grateful to benefit from her wisdom.
In Burnout, you make the case for navigating stress as a cycle - we experience stress, but then we also need to complete the stress cycle. What is the problem if we do not complete the stress cycle?
Like all emotions – like all bodily functions – stress is a cycle, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is the activation of neurochemicals, hormones, electrical signals, etc., in response to a perceived threat. That response changes every system in our body, preparing us to do whatever is necessary to survive the threat. The middle is the use of those chemicals by all our organs to fight or flee. In the end, we either survive the threat… or none of the rest matters. If we never use the activation of the stress response, we get stuck in the activated state. That might lead to chronic tension, chronic pain, inflammation, etc. One well-documented example is blood pressure.
The stress response raises our blood pressure to deliver more oxygen to our muscles. But if we don’t use that up in the act of fight or flight, and if we experience stress over and over without enough time to recover, that pressure can do damage to blood vessels. Without time to heal, the damage is where plaques can form, which can break off… and that’s how chronic stress can cause a stroke or heart attack.
In Burnout, you point to tactics for responding to stress by completing the stress cycle. Some people might think that the more they become skilled in completing the stress cycle and dealing with stress, the more stress they can endure. What do you think? How do you think about the "right" level of stress?
Wellness isn’t the absence of stress – wellness actually isn’t any single state of being or state of mind. Rather, wellness is the freedom to oscillate through all the cycles of being human: from effort to rest, from stress to safety, from eating to digesting, from autonomy to community, and so on. So, stress isn’t the enemy. Getting stuck is the enemy. So the quantity of stress isn’t really the issue, as long as you also have access to the resources you need to recover.
Completing the stress cycles involves removing stress hormones from the body through physical activity, affection, laughing, crying, etc. What we love about these approaches is that they target different parts of us – emotions, actions, connections. But they are not about how we think. We love that these factors bring us from our heads into our bodies - but we wondered about the role of cognition. Where does our thinking/mindsets come into this experience of completing the stress cycle?
Because stress is a cycle that happens in our bodies, we need to tell our bodies that they are capable of moving us from danger to safety. And our bodies don’t really communicate in words or thoughts. Jonathan Haidt likens our relationship with our bodies – the unconscious and autonomic processes that respond to our environment -- to that of a rider on an elephant. We can learn to communicate with the elephant, but in the end, that elephant is going to do what it wants. We’re just along for the ride. Our thoughts and intentions might influence the elephant, but only with repetition, practice, and care.
SLEEP - its value and quality - is such an important insight in your book. We see this insight as part of a broader cycle of rest and work. What do you think? How do you see rest enabling work?
We define wellness as the freedom to oscillate through all the cycles of being human, including the cycle from effort to rest. Appropriate levels of exertion can improve the quality of your sleep, and good quality sleep can improve the fruits of your labor. And it’s not just sleep. Daydreaming, mindful eating, or anything else that makes you feel refreshed and recharged is rest, and will allow you to return to a state of effort without draining yourself dry.
COVID offered a watershed moment to highlight the physical and mental exhaustion at work, and invited company leaders to pay more attention to employee well-being. Now, coming back from COVID, company leaders feel like the pendulum has swung the other way that they are struggling with productivity. How would you advise companies to build the right balance between work and rest, productivity and well-being?
Based on the science and my own experience as a conductor, I can say that the most important thing for a leader to do is to care for the humans over whom they have authority. When we have the ability to make other people’s lives better or worse, it’s our responsibility, always, to try to make them better. Productivity is a direct result of wellbeing. The pendulum would have to swing extremely far indeed to overbalance the exploitation that has been the default treatment of workers since the industrial revolution, and most of history before that.
I advise companies to prioritize the humanity of their employees. A lot of companies want workers to think of their workplace as a family, but only to elicit obedience and loyalty from them, never to provide them with the care that a family should provide. In the end, what matters is the golden rule: treat employees the way you want your boss to treat you. Be generous, patient, flexible. Listen to them when they tell you what they need. Value them more than you value your profits. And if you feel you can’t do that because of the demands placed on you, reflect on where those demands come from and what it is about our social and economic systems that make it seem impossible to allow humans to thrive.
It's true that we live in a system that takes burnout for granted, and assumes that we will all willingly sacrifice our wellbeing on the altar of other people’s convenience. When we start to question that default assumption, we start to create change based on care rather than personal profit.
You are navigating Long COVID, which I imagine adds immeasurable stress. What are your own go-to tactics for navigating stress? What are you doing this summer to rest and rejuvenate?
Emily and I are among millions of people disabled by Long COVID. We’re lucky to have access to medical treatments and education about ongoing research, but the work of recovery is about all I have the energy for. I’ve learned greater compassion for my limitations than I ever expected to need, which is a surprisingly restful practice. Also, I find it meaningful to advocate for others with similar disabilities, and that sense of meaning and purpose definitely helps keep me going.
What are you working on now? What are you finding most exciting? What other question would you want to answer about burnout, stress, work and rest that we didn’t ask?
The most important thing to remember about managing stress is that the cure for burnout isn’t “self care.” Caring for yourself can help, but you don’t exist in a vacuum. A good night’s sleep won’t translate into increased well being if your co-workers sneer and shame you for not answering emails at 3am. A nice stress-relieving walk will become a source of stress if you get cat-called in the middle of it. No, the cure for burnout isn’t self care. It’s all of us caring for each other, creating an environment of safety where we protect each other from unreasonable demands, and remind each other we don’t have to strive for the unreachable goals set by exploitative systems.
Want to learn more? Check out these great books:
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle - Amelia and Emily Nagoski
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less - Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less―Here's How - Alex Soojung-Kim Pang