How to Avoid Burnout | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | - I'm interested in this concept of burnout.

00:00:04.840 | We hear about burnout.

00:00:07.080 | We associate it with too much adrenaline,

00:00:11.000 | lack of sleep, tired and wired, feeling disengaged.

00:00:15.180 | The poet David White has a beautiful poem,

00:00:17.740 | I forget the title, about burnout where he says

00:00:20.120 | that I think the cure to burnout is wholeheartedness.

00:00:25.120 | And I always like that, it's a bit more abstract

00:00:28.000 | than the kinds of things we're talking about today.

00:00:30.940 | But I like that,

00:00:31.780 | because there's something about wholeheartedness,

00:00:34.720 | really leaning into something with the true desire

00:00:38.200 | to be there and to explore it no matter how hard,

00:00:40.880 | that is the opposite extreme of burnout.

00:00:43.760 | - Yeah, well, I mean, I think burnout in,

00:00:45.840 | if we're thinking knowledge work,

00:00:46.700 | like people with office jobs, my diagnosis there,

00:00:49.360 | it's not exactly quantity of work that does play a role,

00:00:54.320 | it's the kind of work.

00:00:55.480 | Because I think what's happening, what's been deranging,

00:00:58.600 | actually, for people in these jobs is

00:01:01.320 | workloads are getting larger, right?

00:01:04.960 | In part because communication is low friction

00:01:07.320 | and we always wanna be demonstrating activity

00:01:09.400 | because of pseudo productivity

00:01:10.760 | and people are always asking us to do things, we say yes.

00:01:13.680 | Everything we say yes to

00:01:15.600 | brings with it administrative overhead, right?

00:01:18.220 | Which is talking about the thing but not actually doing it.

00:01:20.520 | So it's like emails about the commitment,

00:01:22.220 | it's meetings about the commitment.

00:01:24.440 | Because our workloads are larger,

00:01:26.680 | what happens then is more and more of our time

00:01:28.800 | has to service this administrative overhead

00:01:30.600 | because everything we say yes to

00:01:32.040 | brings with it its own overhead,

00:01:33.480 | it adds up, it aggregates, right?

00:01:35.120 | So now more and more of our day

00:01:36.520 | is spent talking about work

00:01:38.120 | and not actually doing the work

00:01:39.240 | and to make it even worse,

00:01:40.240 | it's not like this overhead is all batched together,

00:01:43.000 | it's sort of spread out throughout your day.

00:01:45.560 | So it's also putting you in that state

00:01:47.200 | of constant distraction, which makes it hard to do work.

00:01:49.860 | What I think is burning people out

00:01:51.440 | is they're now in this state where they're saying,

00:01:53.280 | I'm spending most of my day talking about work,

00:01:55.480 | sending emails, attending meetings.

00:01:57.460 | Very little time is left to actually

00:01:59.460 | make progress on the work.

00:02:01.160 | And then the workload gets larger and larger.

00:02:03.360 | This by itself is deranging, right?

00:02:05.440 | It feels like you're in some sort of nihilistic experiment.

00:02:09.280 | Like, what is this?

00:02:10.120 | Why do I have six hours in meetings?

00:02:11.560 | I'm not actually, this can't be the right way to work.

00:02:14.000 | And then what happens, of course,

00:02:15.440 | is you have to recover time in the morning and the afternoon,

00:02:17.600 | maybe after your kids go to bed,

00:02:19.160 | to try to actually make progress.

00:02:20.520 | So now you also have just a straight work quantity issue.

00:02:23.360 | So you're working more hours.

00:02:24.880 | There's an energy drain.

00:02:26.240 | But I think that psychological piece

00:02:28.760 | of this can't possibly make sense,

00:02:31.640 | that like I'm checking email once every two minutes

00:02:34.440 | and spent six hours in Zoom,

00:02:36.000 | like doing very little actual high value work.

00:02:38.480 | Like this can't be the right way to work.

00:02:40.480 | That's what I think the burnout epidemic

00:02:41.800 | right now is coming from,

00:02:42.880 | is that psychological component of,

00:02:44.840 | we all know this is stupid,

00:02:46.640 | but no one is saying the emperor has no clothes on.

00:02:48.640 | We all know that the amount of email and meetings I'm doing

00:02:51.400 | is such a waste of my salary.

00:02:53.160 | Like this is a highly trained brain.

00:02:54.440 | Like I could be writing these reports or this code

00:02:56.400 | or creating these business strategies,

00:02:58.160 | but we're all just accepting this.

00:02:59.520 | I think the absurdity of the current situation

00:03:02.480 | is creating as much of the burnout as it is just,

00:03:05.200 | we also have to add these extra hours.

00:03:06.880 | There's just like a straight aggregation of work quantity.

00:03:10.240 | - It's almost analogous to taking professional athletes

00:03:15.240 | or would be professional athletes

00:03:18.200 | and having them do a bunch of other physical labor

00:03:20.520 | so that they're showing up not fresh for the game

00:03:23.520 | and little micro injuries and distracted.

00:03:27.080 | - And no one's admitting that this doesn't make sense

00:03:28.920 | and everyone's just getting injured

00:03:30.160 | and no one's talking about it.

00:03:31.460 | So it's the absurdity of it would drive people crazy.

00:03:33.520 | And it is driving people crazy.

00:03:35.080 | - It's so difficult though,

00:03:37.840 | because certain things like smartphones

00:03:40.240 | are very useful on the hospital ward.

00:03:43.280 | I mean, doctors can communicate,

00:03:44.600 | nurses communicate so much faster now.

00:03:47.920 | Parents and kids can communicate.

00:03:49.440 | Who's gonna pick up the kids?

00:03:50.400 | Nope, got stuck in traffic, you go this way.

00:03:52.280 | Alternate route on Google maps and on and on.

00:03:54.800 | So it's all woven in with stuff

00:03:56.920 | that's also highly adaptive.

00:03:59.280 | It makes it tough.

00:04:00.920 | It's almost like the work of being a selective filter

00:04:03.680 | is half the work of trying to deload the cognitive systems

00:04:06.800 | that would allow you to do deep work.

00:04:08.320 | - Yeah, well, in the workplace it's even harder than that.

00:04:11.400 | Because part of the issue is email and Slack,

00:04:15.160 | let's just say digital communication.

00:04:17.280 | I spent a lot of time studying that closely, right?

00:04:19.360 | From like a technocritic standpoint,

00:04:21.280 | the introduction of digital communication to the workplace.

00:04:24.680 | And the problem there

00:04:26.000 | is the reason why we're checking this all the time.

00:04:28.040 | It's not some like individual habit deoptimization.

00:04:32.240 | It's not, oh, I should just check this less often.

00:04:34.400 | What happened is when we introduced

00:04:35.720 | low friction digital communication to the office,

00:04:38.560 | this emerging consensus came about that said,

00:04:42.480 | great, let's just use ad hoc messaging

00:04:44.940 | as our major way of collaborating.

00:04:47.200 | Like we can just figure things out on the fly.

00:04:48.920 | I can just be like, Andrew, what's going on with the whatever

00:04:50.760 | and you can answer me and I can send it back.

00:04:53.080 | This was very convenient.

00:04:54.120 | The activation cost was low.

00:04:55.760 | And so this is how we began actually collaborating on work.

00:04:58.400 | Now what happens is as workloads get higher,

00:05:00.460 | we now have many things at the same time.

00:05:02.480 | They're all generating these asynchronous

00:05:04.140 | back and forth conversations.

00:05:05.880 | Most of these have some sort of time sensitivity, right?

00:05:08.520 | So if I email you and say like,

00:05:09.900 | what's going on with like the guests coming later today?

00:05:12.100 | We have to kind of resolve this before later today.

00:05:15.640 | So now it's not just that these messages

00:05:17.320 | are going back and forth with all these different threads,

00:05:19.360 | but I have to keep checking my inbox

00:05:20.880 | to make sure the gap's not too big.

00:05:22.600 | This is not a failure of habits.

00:05:24.200 | It's not a moral failure.

00:05:25.320 | It's necessitated by the fact

00:05:28.200 | that all these back and forth conversations

00:05:29.860 | have to keep moving forward.

00:05:31.640 | So it is difficult then if you're in this system

00:05:35.320 | to step out by yourself

00:05:37.120 | because this is the way we're collaborating

00:05:39.120 | is these asynchronous back and forth messages.

00:05:40.920 | And I can't disengage myself from that

00:05:43.240 | without slowing things down.

00:05:45.200 | Like from a mathematical game theory point of view,

00:05:48.080 | it's a suboptimal Nash equilibrium.

00:05:50.320 | It's not the right place,

00:05:51.680 | not the right way to run this.

00:05:54.000 | The utility value of this configuration is low,

00:05:56.360 | but no one individual can deploy a different strategy

00:05:58.720 | that's gonna be higher value.

00:06:00.000 | We're stuck in it, right?

00:06:01.440 | And so now it becomes really hard for an individual

00:06:03.520 | just to say, I want to check my email less often.

00:06:05.620 | It's built in systemically

00:06:07.480 | into this hyperactive hive mind workflow.

00:06:09.360 | And the only way to break free

00:06:10.880 | from the suboptimal configuration

00:06:12.840 | is to basically have the organization itself

00:06:14.800 | do like a really high cost change to the rules of the game.

00:06:17.840 | These are how we're collaborating now.

00:06:19.500 | We're not using email freely anymore.

00:06:21.760 | We're gonna use this system instead.

00:06:24.240 | It's a very expensive top-down procedure

00:06:28.040 | to free ourselves from the suboptimality.

00:06:30.240 | It's like in the world of work,

00:06:31.300 | that's partially why this is such an intractable problem.

00:06:33.440 | I mean, I tried to write a book about this recently

00:06:36.280 | and it was really hard to gain traction

00:06:37.820 | because it's not easy to solve this.

00:06:39.400 | Like no individual can move out of this

00:06:41.200 | and you have to put in a lot of energy

00:06:43.280 | as an organization to try to change this.

00:06:46.040 | So it's in some sense,

00:06:47.000 | email is a more insidious problem

00:06:50.720 | than social media on the phone.

00:06:52.400 | 'Cause at least over here,

00:06:53.980 | this is my engagement with this.

00:06:55.560 | And I might have these moderate behavioral addictions,

00:06:57.520 | but I could make differences here.

00:06:59.360 | In my company, oh, this is much worse.

00:07:01.760 | This is like a systemic problem.

00:07:03.600 | It's an emergent deterministic work impact

00:07:06.880 | on a economic, social, cultural system

00:07:09.280 | that was completely dynamical

00:07:11.080 | and went in a way we didn't really expect.

00:07:12.780 | So it's a really tough situation sometimes,

00:07:15.800 | especially in the world of work.

00:07:17.560 | How do we get out of this constant distraction?

00:07:19.880 | It's why, you know, I wrote "Deep Work"

00:07:21.880 | and I was like, well, why don't people just do this?

00:07:23.480 | That's why they don't just do this,

00:07:24.860 | because it's not so easy to reclaim this time.

00:07:28.360 | - Well, it's like when I was a graduate student in postdoc,

00:07:31.840 | I was focused on eating pretty well,

00:07:33.900 | meaning just clean-ish food.

00:07:36.240 | And people talked less about that at that time.

00:07:41.360 | I was also really committed to exercise since I was 16.

00:07:45.080 | People were less committed to that

00:07:46.900 | in the academic sector at that time.

00:07:48.460 | Now, I think it's commonplace for people.

00:07:50.140 | Like, I'm going to my yoga class.

00:07:51.180 | I'm doing my zone two cardio.

00:07:52.260 | I go to the gym.

00:07:53.100 | You know, men and women do this.

00:07:53.940 | You know, I remember having like this,

00:07:55.460 | like sneak off to the gym, like, okay, yeah.

00:07:57.860 | And, you know, you felt like a bit of an oddball

00:08:03.380 | if you were the one bringing your lunch

00:08:05.060 | to the, you know, the pizza luncheon.

00:08:07.420 | Not that there's anything wrong with pizza, I love pizza,

00:08:09.020 | but I was trying to eat well.

00:08:10.340 | I have for a long time.

00:08:11.220 | I feel better when I do, and I'm grateful that I did.

00:08:13.660 | But you get some weird looks like,

00:08:15.020 | oh, do you have an eating disorder or something like that?

00:08:16.980 | That's what people would say then.

00:08:19.020 | Now, people would probably look and go,

00:08:21.100 | that looks better than the pizza.

00:08:22.380 | People start to understand.

00:08:23.280 | So I think there needs to be a cultural shift.

00:08:25.340 | And I think there has been a cultural shift

00:08:27.260 | around food and exercise.

00:08:28.620 | Certainly food, meditation, sleep.

00:08:31.500 | I think people are far more accepting

00:08:34.260 | and actually encouraging of their workers and coworkers

00:08:38.580 | taking really good care

00:08:39.540 | in order to function better for longer.

00:08:42.420 | - Yeah, I think this is gonna be the next revolution.

00:08:44.100 | And it's gonna be a revolution that's gonna unlock,

00:08:46.220 | we're talking on the scale of like a trillion dollar GDP.

00:08:48.900 | When we go through knowledge work and have this revolution,

00:08:51.260 | I call it like the cognitive revolution.

00:08:53.340 | Let's take really seriously

00:08:54.460 | how the brains of our workers work.

00:08:56.540 | Like these are our number one assets,

00:08:58.020 | like not to be too mechanistic about it,

00:08:59.800 | but what is our main capital asset

00:09:01.780 | if we're a knowledge work organization?

00:09:03.160 | We have some buildings, but it's really these brains

00:09:05.140 | that we have like employment contracts with.

00:09:06.520 | These brains create value.

00:09:08.380 | Let's take seriously how the brains actually operate.

00:09:10.780 | And as soon as we do, we'll say,

00:09:12.500 | oh my God, these brains are checking email

00:09:15.060 | once every two minutes.

00:09:15.900 | What a disaster.

00:09:17.060 | It's like if we had a car factory

00:09:18.660 | and we spent $20 million on one of these German robots

00:09:22.780 | that can put cars on the doors or whatever,

00:09:25.420 | and we just weren't taking care of it.

00:09:26.940 | And it was like rusty and it was dropping the doors

00:09:29.020 | and the production pipeline was going down.

00:09:30.540 | It was like, this is crazy.

00:09:31.560 | We gotta take care of this equipment, right?

00:09:34.140 | When we have the cognitive revolution,

00:09:35.780 | the sort of cognitive capital revolution

00:09:37.300 | in knowledge work, I think it's gonna unlock

00:09:38.980 | a trillion dollar GDP.

00:09:40.140 | I think that's how unproductive we've been.

00:09:43.420 | If we just think in the pure raw terms

00:09:45.860 | of brains producing stuff that's worth money,

00:09:50.020 | like if we're just like super deterministic

00:09:51.780 | and kind of inhumane about it,

00:09:53.980 | so much is being lost because we're in the suboptimal

00:09:57.340 | Nash equilibrium.

00:09:58.180 | Everyone just email everyone all the time.

00:09:59.460 | Everyone's just on Slack all the time.

00:10:00.860 | That when we finally have the revolution to get over that,

00:10:04.180 | it's gonna be a massive economic hit.

00:10:06.100 | And AI might play a role in this, right?

00:10:08.780 | Because maybe AI, once it gets planning capabilities,

00:10:11.300 | is gonna be able to take the burden

00:10:13.580 | of some of this back and forth planning.

00:10:15.300 | I think it's easier to get there with cultural shifts.

00:10:17.140 | I don't think we have to wait to build

00:10:18.820 | an email capable chat GPT to do this.

00:10:20.940 | Like you could solve this tomorrow.

00:10:22.260 | This is cultural as much as it's tool-based.

00:10:24.560 | But I think it's gonna be a huge revolution

00:10:26.500 | when we get there, akin to like the assembly line

00:10:30.920 | in manufacturing, which was like a 10X improvement

00:10:34.020 | in productivity metrics.

00:10:35.500 | When we figured out the continuous motion assembly line

00:10:37.540 | with interchangeable parts was a massive,

00:10:40.120 | it created this productivity engine.

00:10:42.500 | I'm using the economic sense of productivity now,

00:10:44.860 | you know, dollars per worker.

00:10:46.540 | The economic miracle that came from this process-based

00:10:50.060 | industrial innovations in the late 19th,

00:10:52.620 | early 20th century, the money generated by that,

00:10:55.660 | the wealth generated by that was the foundation

00:10:57.420 | of the modern West.

00:10:58.720 | Like the whole world as we know it was built.

00:11:00.980 | So there's these huge latent potentials.

00:11:03.340 | And right now I don't think we're there with the brain.

00:11:05.180 | And I think it's gonna be a huge revolution.

00:11:07.100 | It's just difficult, right?

00:11:08.960 | It's not an easy revolution to start,

00:11:10.540 | but I think it's gonna change whole industries

00:11:13.580 | in ways that it's gonna be hard to even imagine.

00:11:15.980 | - Thank you for tuning in

00:11:16.860 | to the Huberman Lab Clips channel.

00:11:18.660 | If you enjoyed the clip that you just viewed,

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How to Avoid Burnout | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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