Program: BEST OF — Burnout

Yumi
Hey babes, I've been a bit naughty and I've nicked the keys to the Ladies We Need To Talk archives. It's weird in here, tell you what. There's a lot of vulva statues, weird puppets, bit dusty, bit sneezy, but there are some seriously good episodes hiding away that you might have missed. And you know what? They deserve some more exposure, much like my vulva. Now while I was in here, I got to thinking about all the stuff that's on my plate that I need to get to. My mind is basically constantly whirling with work, kids, school pickups, those kinds of commitments, other work, looking hot, friends, dinner, can I afford new tires for my car? Seriously, I have to make a calendar appointment to schedule in time for a cry. And look, I know it's not just me, lots of us are feeling under the pump something shocking. If you're like me and feeling a touch on the brink of a burnout, the truth is that in this case, prevention really is better than a cure. So carve out a good half for yourself right now before it's too late, kick back and have a listen to these Ladies We Need To Talk episode on burnout.

Yumiko
I thought that it would be my fault if I burnt out. I didn't want to show any sign of weakness.

Caroline
Burnout is no joke. It can really wreak havoc on your body.

Amy
I started to really question everything about my life.

Yumiko
I just couldn't get myself out of bed. I just couldn't do it.

Yumi
Burnout. Not something that 18 year old blokes do in beat up old cars to impress their mates. No, burnout is a condition that feels like it's getting so common that it's become a catchphrase. In 2019, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon caused by unresolved chronic workplace stress. The intervening years have seen an escalation in the climate emergency, soaring costs of living. And now that we're back at work, we're meant to feel grateful to even have work. And it's just me or does it feel like we're making up for lost time by working twice as hard at twice the pace. I'm Yumi Steins. Ladies, if you've got a sec, we need to talk about burnout.

Yumiko
I knew that something was wrong when I physically felt unwell from my job.

Yumi
Yumiko Kadota is the author of a book called Emotional Female. In it, she details how chronic work in a toxic environment led her to burnout. And a note here that you don't have to be heroically saving lives to experience burnout.

Yumiko
It was different to just plain tiredness, you know, where you can just have a weekend off, have a bit of a rest and feel refreshed back to work. It wasn't like that at all. It was just a persistent, pervasive feeling of dread and exhaustion. So that was my turning point when I knew that something was seriously wrong.

Yumi
Always driven to succeed, Yumi Ko was no rookie when it came to hard work. But after slogging it out at med school, Yumi Ko was doing practical training at a hospital on her way to fulfilling a lifelong dream of becoming a surgeon when it all came crashing down. One day, she just couldn't do it any longer.

Yumiko
I was already so physically and even spiritually broken at the time that I knew that if I kept I wouldn't survive to the end of the term. It sounds really dramatic, but actually a couple of my colleagues said that to me. Thank God you left. I was actually worried about you. I was worried that you were going to die. So for another medical colleague to say that to me, I knew it was really serious.

Yumi
Leading up to that day where you kind of just had a kind of breakdown, how had you been feeling?

Yumiko
It wasn't just a tiredness. I started to feel things in my gut as well. So when people start to burn out, there can be lots of different physical symptoms in different body parts. And that's a combination of different stress hormones, like an adrenaline as well in the body. But for me, it was my gut. So my gut broke down. So what would you do? Well, I would have lots of pains. And there was one day on the way to work where I actually shot myself in the car. That was definitely a big red flag.

Yumi
Wow. It must have been awful.

Yumiko
It was pretty awful. Very shocking for someone who was previously healthy to be sitting in my car in a pile of my own poop.

Yumi
Did you know what was going on when that was happening?

Yumiko
I had no idea. I thought, you know, have you heard of a shartbefore? Yeah. Yeah. I was like, did I do that? I wasn't that at all. It was actually a whole river of it. And to pull over, clean myself up and knowing that there was no one to cover me at work, just had to keep going. And I just worked commando that day.

Yumi
That incident was an absolute low in the lead up to Yumiko leaving her job. Not long after that horrific shit show of a day, she emailed HR with her resignation. And although she had intended to work out her notice period, Yumiko's body had other ideas.

Yumiko
I couldn't get out of bed for days sometimes. And I knew something was wrong because normally if I'm really, really tired and take some time off rest, I'll bounce back. I've always been on high energy person. So I thought, surely after a week off, I'll be back. I'll go for a run. I'll do some fun things. I'll be okay again. But I realized after resting for a few days and still feeling so heavy, it actually felt like I was wearing lead pyjamas. And so I did go back to see my GP who referred me to a psychiatrist and I was formally diagnosed with clinical depression. And so that's when I thought, oh wow, this is really serious. I'm not just tired. I'm really mentally unwell.

Yumi
Dr Amy Ims runs a counselling program called The Burnout Project.

Amy
There's three main areas that they talk about as being these kind of hallmarks of burnout. One of those is exhaustion, which is pretty self-explanatory. You feel tired all the time, often have trouble sleeping, which makes things even worse. The second one is depersonalizations. Often once people start to get burnt out, they start to get a bit of an emotional detachment and cynicism and don't have that same kind of capacity for compassion towards other people and feeling empathy. And then the third one is reduced efficacy. So this is where people start to feel as though they're not doing as good job, that what they're doing in the world isn't making as much of a difference and that they can't get themselves out of this situation, that they kind of don't see any hope for things improving.

Yumi
Have you noticed that burnout seems to have become more visible just since COVID?

Amy
A hundred percent. It's tipped a lot of people from just coping to not coping. And so it's kind of forced that issue in workplaces and with individuals. But I think it's also in some way given people a bit of permission to feel like it's okay to be struggling and it's okay to not be okay because there's this great big thing. There's this pandemic and we all know that's really hard.

Yumi
Now we've heard of the gender pay gap, but there's also a gender burnout gap. Dr. Amy, can you explain the difference between how men and women experience burnout?

Amy
The exhaustion and that emotional detachment are most commonly seen in that order in women. So they get exhausted and then they experience that cynicism and loss of compassion and then get onto that reduced efficacy. For a lot of men, they never get that reduced efficacy. They just get that exhaustion and emotional detachment. There's also quite a difference in how people reach out. So one of the good things about females, they experience more burnout and there are a lot of societal factors that contribute towards that, but they're also slightly more likely to seek help.

Yumi
Well, let's talk about those societal expectations. What are the expectations of women that kind of impact our burnout?

Amy
I think if we start off thinking about COVID, then one of the big ones is just that expectation of what they take on at home. And so we look at so many families where they've been working from home, plus they've got their kids at home and supervising homeschooling and all of that side of things and the logistical changes of kids, sports or whatever else is going on in life. It's generally the women that take on the bulk of that work or at least the bulk of that mental load.

Yumi
Here are some completely unsurprising stats. Women do nearly double the hours of unpaid work each week compared to men, according to the latest Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey. The latest one, not an old one from the 70s. And in 2022, women still earn about 14% less than men who do the same work. On top of that, a recent University of Montreal study found that we're more vulnerable to burnout than men because we hold fewer positions of power, we're more likely to be single parents, we handle the majority of kid and family dramas, and the icing on the cake, we've got lower self-esteem. This is ladies' listener Bronwyn. For her, it's the pile on of all her roles that triggers burnout.

Bronwyn
My role as a mother, as a woman, the load that I carry, consciously or not, ideas of sexism that infiltrate daily life, the sense that our society builds this work ethic that you can only rest when work is done and that never happens. And I think what also creates a burnout often for me is this sense of a lack of connection and community around raising children, around doing my job, around getting things done around the house, so many layers and levels.

Yumi
Dr Amy Imes didn't just wake up one day and decide that helping wrecked people was her calling. She started the Burnout Project after going through a period of burnout herself.

Amy
It was just this build-up of so many little things. I was carrying the majority of our financial responsibility for our family, we had four little children and they weren't particularly great sleepers. I had a really unruly family...

Yumi
Amy's mile-long shopping list of responsibilities might sound familiar. Everyone needs you, it doesn't stop and you can never get on top of it.

Amy
And that fell right around the same time as I changed jobs and was the anniversary of the death of one of my very close friends from childhood. I realised that I wasn't coping with it all and I was always the one in the family who everybody looked to to hold everything together and you know I could do anything.

Yumi
Like so many burnt out women, it's not the job or the study or the parenting or the caring on its own. But the accumulation of all these things that feel like you're being dumped in the surf and as you struggle to get upright and take a breath, another wave comes along and pushes you back under.

Amy
I started to really question everything about my life, wondering what's life all about and what do I want to do from here, those kinds of thoughts. And physically I mean I just wasn't motivated to do things like exercise regularly, didn't really have the time and energy to focus on nutrition that well. So I generally didn't feel particularly well physically or mentally through that period and that went on for quite a long time, that was several months.

Yumi
So Amy, you juggle so many different high pressure kind of roles. Is burnout something that affects highly competent people?

Amy
It can affect everybody but most of the people who I see are extremely driven, intelligent, resourceful, resilient people and it's really not until we reach breaking point often that those cracks show or really realise that I just can't keep all of this together. When we walk through the world, we look around us and we see all these amazing women who we think are doing everything and so then we look at ourselves and think why can't I do that, what's wrong with me because everybody else is doing just fine.

Kylie
For me, burnout came slowly and it was insidious and I didn't know it was happening until it was too late.

Yumi
Ladies listener Kylie is one of those highly driven busy women that Dr Amy often sees.

Kylie
I've always been an overachiever, push, push, push, go, go, go, all because I wanted to be perfect. I'm the main money earner so I had to work a certain amount whilst trying to raise two very small children, whilst trying to be a good partner, whilst trying to be a good friend, whilst trying to still do well in my job. I had let it go on for so long and I kept going and going and going and going that I almost became unable to rest.

Yumi
So Kylie had what she describes as a mental breakdown. She took a long time off work and started on antidepressants.

Kylie
Which I have to say is the best thing I ever did because it just calmed my fucking mind. I could think clearly and all these stupid expectations that I'd placed on myself and things that I considered were important. I have to do really well in my job, I have to have a really clean house, I have to exercise every day, I have to eat really well. All those things sort of came into perspective and I was like I need boundaries, I need to be able to sit still and play with my kids and not think about the next thing I have to do. It's okay if my bathroom isn't cleaned every week, if I'm tired, don't. If I want to sleep in, sleep in. But I don't think I would have gotten there if I hadn't had a mental breakdown. It's like I needed someone to give me permission.

Yumi
An inability to rest, to get off that treadmill, those are common threads with so many experiences of burnout. Here's doctor and author Yumiko Okodoto again.

Yumiko
Even after I did burnout I was straight back onto reapplying for jobs again, thinking about my future, what am I going to do? I just felt this urgency to get on with it and just naturally I'm one of those people, I have no chill. My sister tells me this all the time, she's always like girl you have no chill. I guess I was just so used to working so much that I became afraid of resting

Yumi
I see a lot of myself in you, not just the name Yumiko, but I feel afraid of resting in case if I do stop I might not ever start again. I just feel like if I lose the momentum, you hear about women who go to bed and don't get out for four months, that might be me. I do feel a lot of what you describe about burnout and I'm imagining a lot of people listening are as well. What's the difference between just being really tired, really freaking tired and pulled in multiple directions and feeling quite tapped out? What's the difference between that and burnout?

Yumiko
A big thing is whether you feel refreshed after rest. I remember I took a little bit of a break when I was burning out and when I went back to work after a period of time off, I did not feel rested. And it's not just physical and emotional exhaustion, there's this feeling of cynicism as well. That's a big element when you think what's the point in this, why am I at work, I don't want to go to work anymore, particularly if you used to love your job. I'm pretty sure I still love my job.

Yumi
In her book, Yumiko Kadotadescribes how the culture of overwork in the medical profession is rife.

Yumiko
I love this phrase of a canary in a coal mine. You're not trying to make stronger canaries. The coal mine is the problem. We enter the profession because we wanted to care for others. There's expectation that we will work, work, work, work, do unpaid overtime, not take any breaks and all the generations of doctors say, well, I went through a hard time, why should you have it easy?

Yumi
Could it be the gendered thing that they often were male and had a wife that was kind of managing their personal lives and their home lives?

Yumiko
Oh, absolutely. I mean, there were times where I wish I had a domestic partner at home looking after things when I got home. And certainly I know that my male colleagues who did have wives, they never had to worry about meals. They didn't need to worry about washing or cleaning. Everything was done for them.

Yumi
How does being young and Asian and working in a male dominated workplace add to the effects, the compounding effects that lead to burnout?

Yumiko
It's certainly not something that I identified at the time because I was, I guess, like a hamster on a wheel. I just had to keep going and just keep running. But looking back now, there were so many examples of microaggressions that I faced in the workplace.

Caroline
I think it's about just acknowledging that within workplaces, there are power differentials.

Yumi
I want you to meet Caroline Kell. She's a proud Mbarbara woman who coaches First Nations women who are suffering from burnout. And yes, Caroline's lived with burnout herself.

Caroline
There was a number of kind of events that sort of led me to that burnout. So one was just an overworking. To be quite frank, this notion that my worth was a direct contribution of how much work I do and that kind of seeking validation through work. And I think that's a story a lot of women can really relate to. Within the workplace, it was quite a toxic workplace. I'd experienced a bit of bullying and a feeling of a lack of safety, even at the leadership level.

Yumi
Caroline says that systemic racism in workplaces means that sometimes Black women are invisible.

Caroline
I think we've all sort of had an experience where we haven't been seen or heard or validated within the context of a workplace and how that really erodes at your sense of confidence and your sense of self and your ability to make decisions or influence decisions.

Yumi
Not only are Indigenous women sometimes gaslit and invalidated in the workplace, it's what's happening simultaneously in their non-work lives that can push burnout levels to the extreme.

Caroline
In the context of First Nations people, we have so much more of a collective responsibility. It's not just the nine to five roles. It's often the very non-traditional roles we play outside of the workplace. So many of our communities, grassroots organisers, campaigning, opening up organisations, family homes, and often juggling many competing responsibilities. There's a beautiful piece of research that's found that on average, one Aboriginal person is responsible for the emotional and financial needs of up to 100 people.

Yumi
The same research by Nola Turner-Jensen founds that in comparison, non-Aboriginal people were responsible for between four and eight others.

Caroline
I kind of thought, oh, that can't be true. And I started to look at my own family. I'm one of six. My mum's one of 11. And it starts to get pretty complicated when you start to do the math.

Yumi
Like Yumiko and so many of the listeners who got in touch, Caroline found it hard to stop and rest, but she could only ignore her body for so long.

Caroline
The first sort of signs were not getting my periods, body pain, IBS. And I kind of just thought this was just normal parts of stress. I was probably drinking more, inability to sleep. It really was kind of wreaking havoc on a lot of different areas of my life. And it kind of just got to a point where I just totally hit rock bottom.

Yumi
Oh, God, do we all have to hit rock bottom to get a couple of days off? Can't we hit like fluffy blanket bottom or warm slipper bottom? Soft white tropical sand and palm trees swaying in the wind bottom?

Caroline
I hit such a wall of fatigue that it was a real struggle for me to kind of get out of that. For so long, I was just operating from my mind and keeping going and running on adrenaline. And the body was really screaming out to me saying to stop. And I was just saying, no, one more email, one more phone call. And then when I did stop, it was really difficult to get back out of that.

Yumi
After burning out and quitting her job as a trainee surgeon, Yumiko Kodoto was admitted to a mental health institution for six weeks, where a combo of medication and therapy started to set her right. But it took four whole years before Yumiko felt like she was back to her pre-burnout self.

Yumiko
My main symptom of depression was actually insomnia. So for me to sleep again took a really long time. And it was only until I was on maybe my fifth or sixth different antidepressant where it finally worked and I was able to sleep again. And that period actually took 18 months before I slept.

Yumi
Yumiko, was there a turning point when you realized you were back or better?

Yumiko
When I had my first full night's sleep, that was definitely one of the highs in my recovery. I was like, yes, I can sleep again. This is amazing. I slept for a whole night because until then I would wake up every hour sometimes. But I do want to really highlight that it's not always going to be a straight line. Sometimes you will go backwards before you go forwards again.

Yumi
What would you tell young Yumiko about burnout, knowing what you know now?

Yumiko
The big thing for me is boundaries. I know that I still struggle with it sometimes, but it's something that I've learned to be better at. Saying no to more things and not feeling bad or guilty for saying no to things. Because you have to protect your time and it's not just your physical energy, but also your mental energy as well and your peace. And I obviously don't want to burn out again because it has taken me a very long time to recover.

Yumi
Sometimes when I worry that I'm getting close to burnout, I imagine that, gosh, at least if I catch fire, my kids will be able to toast marshmallows on the flames of my burning body. Which is, you know, a kind of a gag, but it's also a reminder that when everything falls apart, the thing that a lot of us really want is to be near the ones we love and to show them kindness and affection. It's not about work or buying things or keeping bosses happy. For me, I'm just a person who likes cuddles and good food. Am I getting enough of that? I don't know, but while we think about it, here, take a marshmallow.

Yumiko
I feel happier and my definition of success has definitely changed since burning out because I realised that success isn't just about working hard and making it to the top of the career ladder. There are so many other things that define success. I just know so many people who are at the top of their careers, but they're absolutely miserable and I don't want to be like that.

Yumi
If all this talk about burnout and all the shit we need to get done has prompted you to take stock, our episode about how to solve the mental load might help. And we also have a good one on the power of saying no. Yeah, say no, but say yes to listening to that. Head back into the Ladies We Need To Talk feed to find those and all of your favourite episodes. And don't forget to tell all your burnt out mates about Ladies We Need To Talk.