Transcription
[Music] I'm increasingly tired. Chronic insomnia sets in. I find myself making more and more mistakes at work. I went from being this invincible working girl to a fragile little thing. No longer capable of a normal life.
[Music] I started to become paranoid. I even started having chest pains. I thought, "Well, that's it. I'm going to die." I just accepted it was inevitable.
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>> Much of modern life revolves around work. The prospect of a successful career creates ambition and drives us to strive for excellence, but it can also exact a high price. Professional life has evolved over the decades. Tighter deadlines, heavier workloads, and increasing demands on flexibility and mobility create mounting pressure in the workplace. Non-stop stress, long hours, and sky-high expectations permeate modern working life. This can gradually erode our mental resilience and even put us at risk for burnout.
>> Patri Legeron is a French psychiatrist who's been studying burnout since the 1980s. He's a pioneer in the field and has devoted a large part of his career to understanding, preventing, and treating burnout. He's also the founder of a consultancy firm that specializes in psychological well-being in the workplace. If there's one thing we clearly know about burnout, it's how it starts and develops. Burnout is actually the final stage of the stress process. Remember that stress is a natural phenomenon. We all experience stress when we're stuck in a traffic jam or rushing to an appointment when our computer breaks down or our child wakes up with a fever. Stress is a normal response that mobilizes us and can be very effective in prompting the right reactions to impending threats. But when the stress continues, it evolves into a state of hyper stress that becomes chronic and a prolonged state of hyper stress triggers burnout. We have normal stress, hyper stress, exhaustion. Experts now define burnout as the final phase of the stress process, which is in and of itself a natural phenomenon.
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>> Najini knows all about hyper stress. She threw herself entirely into her work during her 14 years as communications director for a large company in Paris.
[Music] I love a challenge and striving to reach goals. I like new things, too. For me, a professional life should be a varied one in which you're constantly progressing. Routines aren't really my thing. My daily life was pretty typical, except that it was jam-packed. Over time, the workload kept growing, and I didn't delegate as much as I should have because I wanted full control over the quality of my work. My coping mechanism was to extend my working hours. My workday didn't end at 8:00 p.m. I still had a lot of work to do, so I would continue on public transport. And then quite often when I got home, I'd get in a few more hours to get a head start on the next day. It eventually becomes like a hard drug. You're driven by success, recognition from others, and the fear that doing less might jeopardize all that. Yet behind the scenes, all that leaves its mark. Something is brewing.
>> Kristoff also suffered from burnout. He was a team leader for a major US software company and found himself trapped in a downward spiral in the space of just a few months.
[Music] >> My daily routine was quite straightforward. I took care of the morning routine since my wife started work early. So I was in charge of her daughters which meant making breakfast, taking them to school and so on. Then as soon as I was in the car, I started answering emails and so on. A quick coffee in the office and then the workday began. Most of which I did on the telephone or online. Throughout my career, I've been working for international teams. So there's always been this flexibility working from anywhere at any time. We're always ready to give more because we are always asked for more and work is what defines us. And so as the years went by, I completely started to lose sight of myself as a dad and as a person.
Mark, an IT engineer at the same company as Kristoff, was also deeply committed to his job. He poured all his energy into it until he too experienced burnout. I got involved in computer science out of genuine interest. I'd say that my work is above all a true passion. I'm enthused about what I do. The positive side of being passionate about your work is that you invest your entire self and all your time in it. And you strive for perfection in every detail. I can spend a lot of time finalizing something that might seem trivial to someone else, but is important to me when I have to deliver something. Of course, it's not perfect, but I want it to come close. And I love it when at the end of the day, I have the sense that I've done something useful and positive for others.
>> That's you.
>> Yes, that's me. I didn't recognize you in 92. It was the inauguration of the second building, the crystal.
We've noticed that certain psychological profiles are more prone to stress. People who are very anxious, perfectionists, workaholics fall into this category. Also, those who invest excessively in their work, for whom work is everything and who have no other interests. These aspects are significant as they account for one-third of the cases. But it's not about blaming individuals for their burnout. It's about helping them understand that their psychology and how they function on the job plays a role. We know and it's well documented in the report by the French Academy of Medicine that two-thirds of burnout cases are linked to the person's environment. So if you have a stressful job with lots of tasks, little time to do them, unpleasant colleagues, poor management, etc. These are known as environmental risk factors, they are a cause.
In 2015, the year before my burnout, there was a change in management. I ended up with a new manager who was from England. He opened my mind to a lot of things. But I quickly realized that he was someone who also restricted my work autonomy. With him, everything had to be done his way. And I gradually felt that the freedom I had and that made me feel good in my job was diminishing. Someone on the team even said, "If you don't mind, I'd like to read your emails." Eventually, my new manager told me, "You're not cut out for this job." The irony of it all is that I created that role. So, I went from being someone with international recognition to my manager telling me, "You're not cut out for this job." That's when things started to become extremely complicated. Naturally, that stressed me out a bit.
I had accumulated a lot of seniority and experience which allowed me to move on from what I had been doing for 20-25 years and focus more on European and even global projects within the company. I was really thriving in this new role. Then during my annual performance review, I was suddenly told I couldn't do this anymore. They just took away everything that was fulfilling and told me to go back to my old job. From that point on, I began doubting myself and doubting the longevity of my position. I started to get paranoid and because of it, I was convinced that they were trying to get rid of me. I realized that something was going wrong when I started experiencing cognitive issues. I was usually good at making decisions quickly, but I'd find myself in sort of a daze saying, "I don't know." My thought processes were slowing down and my neurons weren't firing as fast. And then one day, I caught myself hoping that colleagues wouldn't come into my office for help or advice. That's when I said to myself, "Something's wrong."
You start neglecting things that bring you joy. I used to play sports, see friends, play music, but I was doing less and less of that. I sensed that something was wrong. That's for sure. I was having trouble concentrating. I started making mistakes at work. I lost track of what I was doing and of the future consequences of my actions and so on. Everything became incredibly confused in my mind. During that time, I repeatedly warned my manager. I said, "Listen, I'm not doing well. I constantly feel like crying." The response was always the same. "Come on, you're a man. Just get some sleep. It'll be fine." There's still this really strong macho side that demands stoicism from men. Like, what? You're going to cry? It's impossible. I told other people too, my friends, management, but no one believed me. I felt that something wasn't right, but others couldn't see it.
>> I was much more vulnerable then, more emotional. I had severe digestive and intestinal problems. I was in terrible pain. I kept going to see my doctor. One week it was stomach pain, the next it was neck pain. My ear, nose, and throat issues came back.
>> I kept bursting into tears, which had never happened to me before.
>> I began to experience what's called depersonalization. I started to withdraw as I found no pleasure in being with others. Any form of interaction felt overwhelming. I'd get flustered easily. But it never occurred to me that I had burnout. I wasn't hiding it for myself, but I didn't grasp the severity of it. I didn't anticipate where it was leading. Over three or four months, things really deteriorated.
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Individuals experiencing burnout often feel helpless and powerless. They don't know where to turn to seek relief from their physical and mental anguish. While sufferers are still largely left to their own devices in many European countries, in the United States, burnout has been treated like a medical condition for over a decade. Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is home to the Warren Albert Medical School. Dr. Mariah Stump, both a teacher and working doctor, is studying the effects of stress and burnout on her patients.
>> Hi there, Alex. It's nice to see you again. It's been a little while.
>> Yeah. Good to see you.
>> Nice to see you.
>> Hello.
>> How have you been since the last time we we saw each other?
>> As before, I'm still working excessively and um I'm just really tired. I work a lot during the day and then I barely get home and I still have a lot of work to do until I go to sleep.
>> So that hasn't changed.
>> I know last time when we met we talked about some of your, you know, feelings of burnout, feeling stressed and exhausted and overwhelmed at work, kind of feeling a little disconnected from just things you were doing. How has that been since the last time we we met? Any any improvement?
>> Uh, no. No, the situation's status quo.
So there are two nervous systems in the body. One is the sympathetic nervous system. One is the parasympathetic. So the first one is that fight-or-flight response. So if you see something and it automatically scares you, you know, your heart races, it it you you get startled. That's your body gearing up for an intense uh situation. And the parasympathetic on the other hand is the body's uh natural relaxation uh nervous system. So being in a constant state of stress really causes that sympathetic nervous system to always be activated. So your your body is always responding to this fight-or-flight situation even though you know walking into work and dealing with your normal environment is not a high-pressure situation. So whenever the body is exposed to repetitive stress day after day, hour after hour in someone's work, a hormone hormone called cortisol is released from the body. And exposure to chronic cortisol results in a variety of different manifestations in the body. For example, increase in the fluctuation of blood sugar. So people could put on weight more easily. um also causes people to be more fatigued and so some people will express it in the adrenal gland and they'll have what we call as you know almost like chronic fatigue syndrome. They will feel just chronically exhausted even after getting a regular night's sleep.
>> I started to notice that I was having trouble swallowing.
>> Obviously that puts a lot of tension in my neck on both sides. I've noticed that I feel a stiffness and a lot of tenderness back there and across my shoulders. Other physical symptoms that you're going to feel in the body are going to be the tight muscular tension um is very common. Mostly the neck and shoulders. Other people will experience headaches sometimes even just tension headaches or migraines. Other people may feel digestive problems, problems, you know, with constipation or or or moving their bowels because they're very stressed and tense. So tension in the physical body um can manifest itself in different ways in different people.
>> So I'm going to have you lie down here for me. So your head will be up here.
>> All right.
>> Over the years, Dr. Stump has observed an increase in the number of patients suffering from work-related burnout.
>> All right.
>> After conducting extensive research on how to address their physical pain, she now incorporates acupuncture into her treatment. When you feel that little guide tube on you, just take a little breath in and out. Okay.
>> Okay. We're going to do five points in the ear. Okay.
>> It's fine. Yes.
>> For Alex's symptoms of depression, anxiety, we're focusing on the ear. So, that's a five-needle protocol developed to help with anxiety and depression specifically. And then the points in the neck are for the muscular tension that he's describing with the symptoms of, you know, muscular strain from looking at the computer and things like that. And then the points on the arm and hand are more general acupuncture points for balancing and stress reduction and really for pain, specifically this one for the headaches. There's a lot of data about acupuncture and stress reduction and immune function. And so patients who get acupuncture regularly actually have higher amounts of we call them fighter T cells, the cells that are like the army for the body that gear up if you have an infection. So it really helps boost your immune system and also a lot of studies about anxiety and depression. So patients who get acupuncture regularly are able to reduce sometimes their medication levels um to help them stay off of higher doses of medicines. So I think today he'll feel better acutely. He'll go home and feel less tense. He'll hopefully feel more relaxed. But ideally he would get these treatments typically once a week would be helpful.
Nadia, Kristoff, and Mark all experienced physical symptoms yet chose to ignore them. For months they didn't seek help. They continued to endure the pain and pressure until their bodies reached a breaking point.
>> Burnout hit on June 7th, 2016. I remember it well. A rainy Monday, the first Sunday of February, 2019. My alarm goes off, but I know I won't be able to get up. I'm not the type to take sick leave yet. I don't even need to think about it. I just know intuitively that it's not going to be possible. I grab my phone and call the office to inform them I won't be coming in. And that was the beginning of a kind of descent into hell. What's happening to me? How can I get through this? What kind of doctor do I need to see? The world will keep on turning without me, but I won't be at work. It was destabilizing, unsettling, and distressing.
>> As it turned out, that was only the start of the breakdown because that was the day my burnout really began. I arrived at the office and went into a small room to prepare for my annual review, but I knew it was going to be difficult. I knew it because I couldn't concentrate. I felt like I was on autopilot. Suddenly, the camera turned on and the director said, "Hello, Kristoff. How are you?" And I burst into tears. I couldn't even manage a hello. As you can imagine, she didn't understand. The next morning, I went to see my GP, whom I've known for a long time. He'd noticed I'd been coming to see him often over the last months with pains here and there. He asked me, "Kristoff, what's wrong?" And like with my director, I couldn't speak. I cried. So, he asked me a bunch of questions, to which I must have nodded yes or no. I have no idea. Moments later, he said, "Kristoff, you're suffering from burnout. I'm putting you on sick leave. We'll start with 15 days and I'll give you some pills to help you sleep." My sick leave ended up lasting for several months.
I met one of my colleagues near the departure lounge and we started to have breakfast together and chat. It was gate 52, if I remember correctly, in terminal one at Charles de Gaulle. And I started to tremble. My hands and arms were shaking uncontrollably. It spread through my whole body and then I started to get cold sweats. I was drenched, as if I'd been under a UV spotlight. I left the restaurant and started walking into the departure lounge. That's when a flight attendant saw that something was very wrong with me and said, "Sir, you're not well. Sit down. Lie down. I'll notify the emergency services." A doctor examined me and confirmed that I had just had a severe panic attack. Strangely, I did not go home. The first thing I thought was that I had to get myself on that plane, otherwise people would notice my absence and that would have consequences for me and my job. I was really focused on that.
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When the breakdown comes, it brings mixed feelings.
>> There's worry, anxiety, incomprehension, shock, and at the same time, a kind of relief.
>> Because everything stops. Finally, everything stops.
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>> I spent my days lying on the couch, sleeping, and watching TV. What's incredible is that I couldn't read. I couldn't surf the net. It was impossible. I just couldn't do it. The only thing I could manage was manual labor. My wife laughed about it as I'm not much of a handyman at all. It's not my thing. But back then, I stripped the paint off all the shutters and repainted them.
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I didn't feel like doing anything. I couldn't read a book, not even one page. I couldn't even watch a game show on TV because after 5 minutes I was exhausted. Truly, it was like a blackout, as if my brain were on pause in shutdown mode. My mind couldn't take anything in. I couldn't memorize anything. And yet, I still remember having all these thoughts about work and feeling this enormous sense of guilt.
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Mark, Kristoff, and Nadia had to take extended leaves from work to deal with their burnouts. They all eventually managed to recover despite a lack of medical guidance, few public resources, and no conventional treatment. Why is so little medical assistance available to people with burnout?
I define burnout as an unidentified medical object, a UMO. It exists. We see people with burnout in our offices. Folks tend to say, "I'm burned out," when they're just tired. But genuine burnouts exist. The French Public Health Agency estimates there are hundreds of thousands of cases each year, but that's an approximation as it's not an officially recognized medical condition yet for a few reasons. First, the diagnostic criteria are somewhat unclear. Depression, for instance, was also tough to define for years. Now we have precise criteria regarding duration and other factors that help distinguish between someone who's psychiatrically depressed and someone who's just tired or feeling down. But with burnout, it's not yet clear at exactly what point simple fatigue turns into burnout. The syndrome hasn't yet been clearly defined by the WHO. The lack of a precise diagnosis means there's no standard treatment. So sufferers often find themselves isolated and left to fend for themselves. For those who can't overcome burnout on their own, what options are there? Seeing a psychologist, checking into a psychiatric hospital. While some people choose these approaches, a multitude of private burnout treatment centers have also sprung up in recent years. Though patients must pay for these out of their own pockets, this chateau is hosting some special guests in the heart of France's Burgundy region. The Human Tempo organization welcomes up to 10 participants to their burnout recovery retreats costing some 1,500 euros per week. The guests are all physically and mentally drained from their work. Most prefer to remain anonymous to avoid being recognized by their colleagues. However, Xavier and Frederik have agreed to share their stories.
Talking to everyone here, I realize that we are all professionals who love our jobs and are dedicated to our professions, but we don't put ourselves first. We always put others first and our jobs first and we end up forgetting ourselves. When I had my pulmonary embolism, if the emergency services hadn't come, I'd have gone right back to work. I lost almost all of my hair. I suffer from extreme fatigue. I often have pain in my shoulders and hips. I have trouble sleeping. I suffer from memory loss, make mistakes, and forget lots of things. I take the wrong road. But at the start, I didn't really notice. Imagine [Music] you have a ball in your hands. The first thing about Human Tempo is you meet people who are going through the same thing you are. So right away it's quite reassuring. You think, well, the others are normal, so I must be normal too. You realize that burnout is not a flaw. Most of the people here are professionals with exceptional skills, really top-notch.
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During their stay, participants take part in physical activities, group discussions, and workshops. They each have a personalized schedule and are pampered with wellness treatments, including shiatsu massage.
>> Shiatsu can help people in stressful situations to relax, unwind, and re-energize to refill their depleted tanks. And it lets them reconnect with their bodies, as you can't separate mind and body. Mostly these are people who are very mind-based, very focused on their duties, on what they must do. So shiatsu can help to center them. I arrived here in a state of extreme fatigue and mental distress. This has already recharged my batteries a little. By taking care of yourself, you learn to reconnect with your body.
The group meets each day with Human Tempo's co-founder Rachel, who gives courses on treating burnout. The diagram may seem a little complex, but we'll take our time getting into it. There are several levels. The first is to open your mind. She uses the latest research to encourage her guests to engage in self-reflection. Here she's teaching them about Theory U, a change management method developed by German researcher Otto Scharmer.
>> Who am I and what do I really want? The purpose of Theory U or your presence here is not to be able to say after everything I've seen here, who am I? That's easy. One paragraph, five lines, voila. And what I really want is this, this, and this. Rather, these questions are there to help you on your journey and they never call for a definitive answer because in fact, these are questions you can ask yourself all of your life.
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Does everyone understand Theory U? We'll take a break now and we can discuss it when we come back. See you in a bit.
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I'm not sure I've reached the very end of my burnout yet, but there's a theoretical aspect to the workshop that's already helped me conceptualize it and put our pain into words. The difficulty now is fully grasping it all because the real challenge is to apply what we've learned in a long-term sustainable way and change all the toxic habits that have led to our burnouts.
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>> All the participants feel they have made progress as the week draws to a close. But what happens now? What steps remain on their path to recovery from burnout?
>> In a final feedback session, they reflect on their time here and what it's brought them.
>> The week I've spent here was just too short. [Laughter] That's the main takeaway. It was way too short. Coming from a bad place, it feels so much better to be here that it's hard to leave. Being in a place where you're truly understood,
>> where you can really say anything, that's priceless.
>> I think I got so absorbed in my work, I forgot myself. The massage is from Julian, with him having to almost jump on my back to find a muscle.
>> From Sylvain, who searched inside me but found no energy there.
>> They helped me realize that I'm like a shell with nothing left inside. I accept the huge challenge of finding myself again. It's the start of a beautiful journey.
>> I think we've all discovered our human tempo.
>> I also saw each of you evolve and your faces change. Maybe I've already changed, too. [Laughter] It's encouraging. And the start of a great adventure.
>> Well, to conclude, give yourselves a big round of applause.
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By the end of the week, Xavier, Frederik, and the others have learned to better cope with their burnout. Understanding more about the syndrome and its causes compensates at least in part for the lack of a precise diagnosis. Some of the participants will return to work in the coming days while others will remain on sick leave for several months. What is the economic cost of such burnout-related sick leaves? Today, it's estimated that half of the sick leaves in the European Union are linked to stress. These are EU figures, and it costs our economies billions. The financial burden of sick leave is paid for by all of us through social security. Most sick leaves due to burnout are covered by health insurance. So everyone's contributions fund them. The cost to companies is quite low. But some countries, especially in Northern Europe, are taking a polluter-pays approach. Once they must pay for the harm inflicted on their staff, companies start to rethink their policies. In the Canadian province of Quebec, all workplace accidents are paid for by employers, making mental health a major concern in the workplace. Even though it doesn't officially recognize burnout as an illness, the provincial government has decided to address the issue. A new law now obliges companies to analyze psychosocial risks for their staff in the same way as physical risks.
Jean-Pierre Brun is an associate professor at Laval University in Quebec City. He has dedicated over 25 years to studying workers' mental health. Companies in Quebec have been addressing the issue of psychosocial risks for over 20 years now and have successfully refined their strategy and measured the impacts as well. This is what we call return on investment, and increasingly, it's considered a given. There is no longer any doubt that this issue must be factored into the life of the company and its day-to-day business.
>> Alexandre Uber works for Hydro-Québec, Quebec's leading natural gas distributor. As the company's executive director for environmental health and safety, he's responsible for ensuring his colleagues' welfare. To ensure the well-being of our employees, we check in with our staff. So, regularly, we conduct a series of surveys to see how people are doing, and we analyze the risks of mental health problems just like we analyze hygiene safety or physical safety risks at work. They have trained staff to conduct the interviews and score people according to a checklist. The results show us where our weak points are, where the risks are, and what levers we have to improve things. So if we have an employee who goes on disability due to a mental health issue, we can support them. We have a health office with resources and professionals who will direct them to the right resources to ensure not necessarily a quick recovery but a sustainable one. An employee who feels good at work is a benefit to the company. Firstly, each employee is a representative of the company. A company's value is its people. So if people feel good, the company will do well. At least that's what I believe. Plus, we're able to present figures, indicators for return on investment. So, how much money I invest ensuring the well-being of my staff and how much I save in return. And here, we're only talking about money. But money is just the tip of the iceberg. If our employees feel good at work, they stay. So, we retain our talent. We retain the organization's most valuable assets. Happy employees are more creative, contribute better ideas, and energize their colleagues. So you see, there's a synergy effect to employee well-being. While promoting health is a priority for companies like Hydro-Québec, why aren't many others doing enough to prevent burnout?
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We need to provide companies with the right tools and methods. For example, take the important issue of workload. Everyone complains about their workload today, but when we look at the existing tools to curb the problem, there are very few. We shouldn't put this responsibility solely on team leaders, as it's too much for them. Upper management must also make sure that they provide the means and capabilities to implement these good management practices.
>> While more countries are recognizing the importance of mental health, why are measures to combat burnout still so limited? Why is burnout prevention so underdeveloped in many workplaces? Is mental health still a taboo topic here?
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Firstly, we have a long tradition of denying the grueling nature of work. Our Judeo-Christian culture perhaps makes us think that suffering at work is part of life, that it's normal and even somewhat redeeming. Though in Northern European countries and cultures with more Protestant influences, suffering is more something to be combatted. We also have this belief that work which isn't done in suffering is inferior. For example, performing a job when you're happy isn't viewed as something productive. For people suffering from burnout, changing their attitude and relationship towards work is often both a priority and a necessity. But once they've recovered, how can they return to work? Now, I'm going to ask you our standard question so we can get to know you better. Who are you and where do you come from?
>> Kristoff, Mark, and Nadia all went through their burnouts alone and regret the subject remains taboo. Today, they feel the need to promote awareness and help others by sharing their experiences.
>> You know, your health, your body, it's your most precious asset. We all know that in theory, but once you've experienced a burnout, it's no longer just a concept. It's reality. Without your health, you have nothing. Life stops.
Nadia quit her communications job to become an executive coach. Her mission: to raise awareness about mental health and the risk of burnout. Kristoff and Mark returned to their jobs, but together they launched a podcast about burnout syndrome in which they invite sufferers and experts to share their knowledge and experiences. While burnout is now an identified occupational phenomenon, it remains a complex and vague syndrome without a standardized treatment. As a result, many companies and institutions worldwide are still reluctant to recognize it. In Europe and North America, measures are being taken to prevent the onset of burnout and calculate its cost to society. Rehabilitation centers are being set up to support and reintegrate those afflicted. Still, a profound change in mindset is needed to make well-being and mental health a priority in workplaces around the globe.
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