Burn Like Stars – The end of burnout

Jonathan Malesic is an essayist, journalist, and scholar whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, America, Commonweal, Notre Dame Magazine, The Hedgehog Review, The Point, Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. His work has been recognized as notable in Best American Essays (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022) and Best American Food Writing (2020) and has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology (2019). He has been the recipient of major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Louisville Institute. His first book, Secret Faith in the Public Square, won a ForeWord INDIES gold medal for the religion category (2009). His newest book, The End of Burnout, was named a Best Book of 2022 by Amazon and the Next Big Idea Club. It is being translated into nine languages. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

(Image credit: Sarah Wall)

In this episode, Gillian Străine, CEO of GoHealth explores the following with Jonathan: 

• What drove him to write The End of Burnout’  
• The gap between our expectation of work, and the reality – cause it’s in the gap that the trouble happens!
• How Christian theology is both a cause and cure of burnout.
• How to working well is about remembering what it means to be human.
• The spiritual discipline of ‘getting over it’.
• The importance of challenging the system as a means to end burnout.  
• Dwelling in dignity and divinity.
• What Advent has to teach us about the end of burnout.

Links:

Jonathan’s website: https://jonmalesic.com
The End of Burnout – or available wherever you get your books.
Jonathan also mentioned ‘4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman’ also available wherever you get your books.
Visit our website to get connected with the GoHealth Community.

Find us on our socials @GuildofHealth

Gillian Straine: Jonathan, welcome, it’s fantastic that you’re able to join us.

Jonathan Malesic: It’s wonderful to be with you, Gillian.

Gillian: So tell us a little bit more about why you wrote your book, ‘The End of Burnout’.

Jonathan: The book is the result of a, initially fairly unfortunate collision of my intellectual or academic interests and my personal life. So I used to be a theology professor. I taught at a small college in Pennsylvania, in the United States. And one thing I was really interested in that I taught about and I researched and wrote about was how our work raises these challenging moral and spiritual questions about meaning and vocation and cooperating with Creation and all of those things.

And I was very happy in that career for a while. And then at some point, things took a really bad turn for the worse, where I couldn’t, I could barely get out of bed in the morning and I just dreaded going to this job that I had dreamed of for years. I eventually quit that job, and in trying to make sense of my situation, I came across the concept of burnout and I started to read more about it and get into the research of that.

The book is the result of all of these threads coming together. So the, the new research on burnout, the old research on the meaning that we put into work and my own experience and the experience of many other workers who are through something similar.

Gillian: And so can we like zoom in on that point. You’d got your dream job that you’d fantasise about. It’s what you always wanted to do. What happened? What wasn’t there enough of, or was there too much of something else? What was it about that that led to the physical symptoms of burnout?

Jonathan: Yeah, the problem was a mismatch between my ideals for my work and the reality of my job. And that’s really the, the classic definition of, of what burnout is. Our metaphor for burnout is right in the name. It’s a burning you know you, we imagine that we have a quantity of energy that if we don’t manage it well, we burn through it and then we are burned out.

That’s not really what the experience of burnout is like. It’s more like trying to stretch across this gap between your ideals for work and the reality of your job. And when that gap grows and you have to stretch farther and farther to hold ideal and reality together, you undergo what we call burnout. And in my case, my ideals for the work of being a theology professor would sky high. You know, I thought that my work was going to totally fulfil my life and no, no work can really do that. But yeah, the conditions in my work also became harder and harder to manage over time.

Gillian: Hmm. So it’s like the picture you painted for yourself or a picture that sort of says all you needs about who you are as a human aren’t being met. So this is about our expectations are not being met. Is it that or is it something else? 

So I was, I’m training to be a coach and person today in my group, one of the girls said that she finds, she, she works because work meets all her insecurities. So, right, she feels bad about her self, you know, but she can achieve at work and that makes her feel better about herself. So that seems to be two different things. Both, I think, are going to lead to burnout. So our ideals aren’t met or we find something in work that is perhaps a little unhealthy? I don’t know.

Jonathan:  Right, I think that it can happen from both directions. So, right, our ideals might be unrealistic. Ah, and I think that it’s, I think it is unrealistic to expect that work is going to meet all or even most of your human needs. At the same time, the conditions in which you work, as they get worse, they’re going to depart from whatever ideals you have.

So even if you have fairly modest ideals for work, if your schedule becomes harder to manage, if you are working harder but not getting sufficient reward, if there is unfairness in your workplace, all of those things can contribute to burnout from kind of the other side of that gap.

Gillian:  I am really curious about some of the theological or Christian spiritual roots to the causation around burnout. So I’m particularly thinking about the Protestant work ethic, right? And so like the tagline for the Protestant movement is salvation by faith, not by works. But I’m Scottish and, you know, I was brought up with really, really rigorous work ethic with theological roots. So how do we get into this muddle and in what ways can you explain to us how our theology can cause a bit of burnout?

Jonathan: Right. And we in the U.S. and Canada have very much inherited that work ethic from, from Great Britain. Yeah, it’s this paradoxically, even though in Protestant theology, salvation is decidedly not by works, the classic analysis of this comes from the social theorist Max Faber. His contention was that, all right, so salvation is not up to me, it’s up to God. There’s nothing I can do to affect God’s decision. But, human beings want to know – like we want some kind of assurance. And so we go looking for that assurance and we have found it, or we have tried to find it in the idea of labour in a calling. So the idea, according to Faber, Max Faber at least, is that to go looking for this assurance of our salvation, you know the Saints, the elect will participate in God’s providential design for the world. And the way they do that is by labouring in wherever God has called them to be. So if you are called to be an accountant or in, you know, John Calvin’s time, if you are called to be a merchant or a farmer or something like that, your diligent labor in that calling can give you assurance – ‘well, I must be one of the elect, look at how hard I’m working to bring God’s providential design for the world into reality’. And the interesting thing I think, is that even as belief in that kind of theology has diminished, in a more secular society, we still have that anxiety. We still have this anxiety about our worth.

Gillian: Sure. So it sounds a bit like a new name for an old problem, right today. 

Jonathan: Right. 

Gillian: Because certainly with I mean, vocation, having a calling to God, the, I, so I do a lot of work with burnt out Christians, often burnt out clergy, and you can sense it in the room when you walk in or the chat over coffee: ‘You’ve just done four? I wish I only had four funerals to do, I’ve done 16 and somebody died during the funeral and I had to bury them as well.’ It’s like, we are sort of we’ve got this economic model of how to measure whether we’re doing enough in our vocation. And there seems to be a whole, can be, it can seem to be a wholesale loss of, of faith really that God, God is with us in this, that we have to keep proving it all the time.

Jonathan: Right. And, you know, this is why the theological angle in the book starts from the idea that each of us is made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore has tremendous dignity, when as soon as we’re born, before we ever go to work, and if we never work, we still have that dignity. And my hope is that by believing a little bit more confidently in that dignity, then we don’t need that same kind of sense of assurance. We know, well, wait a minute, I am loved, I am worthy. I don’t have to prove it to myself.

Gillian: Because so often work, I think, well, I think we can agree on both sides, the point is highly politicised. You know, in the UK, sort of this rhetoric of, you know, hardworking families need to be rewarded and that’s how, you know, the rest of it. So work then becomes something very different, is proving that you’re worthy in a way. So it seems like instead of just suggesting a few quick fixes, you’re saying something quite revolutionary about work and what it is to be human.

Jonathan:  Right. And yet, I mean, that politics of rewarding good workers is very much a feature of the United States. And you hear U.S. politicians say all the time in both of the major parties, they talk about the dignity of work and the idea there that, as they say, is that you have dignity if you work. So you have no dignity naturally, if you go and you work hard, then you get dignity. Of course, I already disagree because I think that we have dignity before we ever work. But you end up seeing, you know, kind of like you said, that in order for that ideology of dignity, this idea that you only have dignity if you work, you end up having to make all kinds of exceptions. ‘Oh, well, someone who’s disabled. Yes, sure, they’re fine. Someone who is retired. Yeah. Okay. You know, children under 18. All right, Well, we’ll make an exception for them, too.’ And like, suddenly you’re making so many exceptions that, you know, the whole ideology falls apart. Like, if you take the other approach and say, well, you have dignity whether or not you work, you don’t have to make exceptions like everybody’s included.

Gillian: Yeah, it’s a big shift, though, isn’t it, I think in mindset. I remember when I was at home with little kids, you know, people would say, Oh, do you work or are you just at home with the kids? I wanted to say ‘blummin’ hell I’ve never worked so hard in my life. It’s a nightmare having young children.’ And when I had cancer when I was 21 and, you know, at that age just finished my first degree and meeting somebody who didn’t know, what do you do? And you’re like, Oh, well, what do I say? If I say I’ve got cancer, that’s going to make me feel super awkward, but I can’t make anything up because and from both experiences, I try now really hard if I meet somebody new, I try not to have my opening question – what do you do? I had experience of that being a really labelling thing and diminishing all the other stuff that was going on when I wasn’t able to work for money.

Jonathan: 

Right? It’s totally in our vocabulary, this assumption that any meritorious activity, whether it is, I mean, when it comes to illness, we often use a kind of military metaphors, you know, in fighting and battling, you know, struggling things like that. With raising families, it’s usually the work metaphor. But we also talk about work, we work on our relationships. We say that marriage is work, friendship is work. We say that mental health is hard work. We we tell children that, you know, school is work and, you know, pretty soon like all areas of life are work. And so there’s just no escape. We can only value an activity if we think of it as work. And I think that that goes along with this bad mentality that a person only has value if they work. I think we need to expand our notion of what meaningful human activity is in order to break out of a burnout culture.

Gillian: So are you also therefore questioning some ideals around capitalism as well and working for money and, and and, and this growth agenda we all seem to be swept up in, especially in Advent. You’ve got, so much you’ve got to buy. So it’s a, these are big question you’re raising, isn’t it.

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean to some extent, particularly the way that capitalist notions that like you say, you know, will more is always better. 

Gillian: Yeah. 

Jonathan: Have infected our culture, i.e. you know, if we’d snapped our fingers and suddenly you know, capitalism disappeared, I don’t think burnout would necessarily disappear. I think that, you know, burnout is just a feature of whenever our ideals detach from reality. And I think that, you know, there are other modes of production that where those ideals and reality can depart.

Gillian:  Okay. So let’s go to one of those places where you saw the ideals and reality, maybe are closer together, because I loved your stories. I want to exchange Monk stories with you because I loved your experience in the monastery. Can you just tell the story again for listeners, I’m thinking, I can’t remember his name, but one of the fathers of monks you work with and you asked about how do you stop work for the day? Can you tell that story again, because I thought that was really interesting and important.

Jonathan: Right. Yeah. So this was a monk, Father Simeon, at a monastery in the south western deserts of the United States. So it’s a Benedictine Catholic monastery called the Monastery of Christ in the Desert. And it’s very remote, just to get there you go off of the highway and drive 13 miles down an unpaved, very pitted, winding road that occasionally comes perilously close to, you know, cliffs edge and and down into a river.

Gillian: You’re painting a picture.

Jonathan: Right! And you know, this monastery is located in this gorgeous canyon. So, you know, the monks are far I mean, very much in some ways, like the ideals of the desert fathers and mothers, like we’re going to go out into the desert, get away from ordinary society and then we’ll be able to focus on what really matters to us, which is communal prayer. So the monks in this monastery try to live really closely to the sixth century rule of Saint Benedict. They pray as many times as Benedict prescribes, so they’re in the chapel five or 6 hours a day. But they have to support themselves. So they do some work. They work six days a week for three or 4 hours a day and just in the morning. And I asked Father Simeon really about this anxiety. Father Simeon had been a defence attorney. You know, he knows about the world of work and burnout. And yeah, I mean, he, he said, well, you know, when when the work period is done, if you feel like your work is not quite finished, like you just get over it. And he said that it’s not easy for monks to do that, especially when they’re young. They want to prove themselves. They still have that worldly thinking. And it occurs to me that, you know, getting over it is an important spiritual discipline.

Gillian: So just to be clear, getting over it, getting over your attachment to having to finish or your work’s going to give all the meaning you can get, you just got to get over it.

Jonathan:  Yeah, exactly, right. Your work will be there the next day. You know, I, I think about the, you know, the brief little sermon Jesus gives about the the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Like they don’t worry, you know, they, they know that, you know, there will be enough – they will be provided for and like why are you worried? You know, aren’t you worth even more than them? Yeah, the work, the work will be there, don’t worry. There’s something else to do right now that’s more important.

Gillian: Yeah. Yeah. I guess you have to know what’s, what is more important, you know? So you need to have a concept of yourself outside of work. But I was really struck by that, you know, and I wasn’t there, obviously, but they kind of get over it. I mean, that, that’s difficult. That’s hard. But of all the stuff I read around burnout, and I read a lot of time management books and you know, how to work, because I juggle family and all sorts. I love that because it was so clear. It’s like a slap in the face. Get over it. Who do you think you are? You’re about God’s work, you know, you just get to join them for a little bit. It really struck me.

Jonathan: I also like to think about that in terms of… another book that that I love, that I’m sure that many listeners are familiar with is, the English journalist Oliver Burkeman’s book 4000 Weeks – Time Management for Mortals. And it’s a very similar message as Father Simeon has, you know, you have a limited number of years, weeks, hours, minutes on earth, you have limited attention, you have limited ability. You’re very limited physically. You can only be in one place at a time. And Burkeman wants us to radically accept that limitation. We are finite. We are, our desires will always outstrip our ability to fulfil them. And the only way to live kind of in a sane and sensible way is to become okay with having some of those ideals and desires unfulfilled, become okay with letting some people down and, you know, recognising that it’s not up to you to fulfil everything that everybody demands of you, because it’s it’s probably impossible.

Gillian: I think there’s something also around fulfilling your potential that can, I don’t know, lead to stress. So here’s my, can I tell you my monk story? Yeah, please. I heard this story I, when I was training to be a clergy, a clergy person, we took time management for clergy or whatever. I thought it was going to be all about how you manage your diary and to do lists and, you know, whatever it was. But we had this really interesting guy. He was a psychologist, psychotherapist, but also a priest. And he told the story and I never forgot it because I think he says something important. He said, right, imagine this, you’re in the monastery and you’re a monk or a nun and your job is to pull the turnips. So you’re working away along the row of turnips.

You’re pulling them out one by one. And just as you’re pulling out the penultimate turnip, the bell goes and it’s time to go and pray, right? So what do you do? Now every single bit of me, I maybe I’ve changed my mind a bit now, or I was like pure Protestant work ethic -you pull out the last turnip. What do you mean what do you do? You’re there! But that’s the wrong answer. You go and pray because that’s a bigger thing to do. But as he explained it, he’s also said, you know, and I’d like to know what you think about this. He said, the reason you don’t pull out the last turnip is that you don’t know when you’re going to die. And some of our anxiety about work and how to live and fulfilling our potential, our anxieties just in the fact we don’t know how much time we have. So if we live and work according to task, we will always be anxious because we’ll never know if we’re going to finish. But if you live and work according to time, the right thing to do in that moment, then you will live at a sort of psychological or existential place that is less anxious.

Jonathan: Yeah. So this is another thing in Benedict’s rule, ‘keep death daily before your eyes’. Always remember that you will die. Your time is limited. And I think that, you know, Burkeman is, you know, not, he’s not writing from a religious perspective, but there’s so much wisdom in what he is saying in yeah, I mean recognising that you, your life will end with undone tasks. There will be things on your to do list. And, you know, we’re forced to become okay with that. I mean, we have no choice. I think that’s the thing is like you can’t just – you have to be okay with it!

Gillian: Get over it, right?

[LAUGHTER]

Gillian: It’s really interesting. I want to talk, I want to kind of shift towards solutions is too light a word, but right. You’ve talked really beautifully about some of the roots of burnout behaviour within religion and theology, right – the Protestant work ethic. But let’s look at the good stuff in our theology and our spiritual tradition that can help us, particularly struck by your word dignity and by the word divinity, remember? So when I was reading it, I don’t know why, but my head, I don’t know in your tradition, in my sort of high Anglican tradition on Ash Wednesday, you go to church and they draw big Ash cross. And they go, ‘Remember, thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return’. And I kind of feel like we need an alternative ritual that says ‘Thou art divine and dignity and you must remember that.’ Can you speak a little bit to these roots? And if we’re going to get over it, what better frameworks can you offer us?

Jonathan: Right. Yeah. And I think, yeah, it has to start with dignity and, you know, seeing that image of God in, in ourselves and in others. My burnout is connected to yours or it’s connected to the other people that I interact with day to day. And it’s not even just like when I’m at work, like when I go into a shop and I’m a demanding, unreasonable customer that is affecting the working conditions of someone else. If I am an unreasonable parishioner, for example.

Gillian: Can’t imagine that ever happens.

Jonathan: Totally hypothetically. But you know, that’s going to contribute to clergy burnout. You know, if you are if you’re in the position of someone whose job entails a kind of service, you know, you don’t want to come out to your students or clients or parishioners and say ‘you’re the problem’. But, I mean, the reality is that I mean, of course, you know, the the people that you work with and the people you’re trying to serve, are contributing to the problem, you know, yet you can’t really say that out loud. But we have to take responsibility for each other’s ideals and conditions and potential burnout. And theologically, I think that, you know, the way to think about that could be, you know, the body of Christ – that each of us is a member. And, you know, if if one suffers, the whole body suffers. And so, you know, I may not be you know, I may not be the hand, but I need to care about the hand so that the whole body can be healthy.

Gillian: So I hear that’s a thing we, sorry, that’s so light. You know, we can apply that to ourselves and ask ourselves questions about how we plan our day and all the rest of it. And it’s maybe great if you live in a monastery and, you know, we’ve got Saint Benedict and hundreds of years, we’re pretty sure about the system there. What if the system that we’re living in is counter to that, to, to living a healthy life with the dignity and divinity that we respect? Is it just about survival and changing how I think about the system I’m in and saying get over it at the end of the day? Or is there a larger political question about challenging the system as much as we’re able to?

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, I think that we do have to challenge the systems and I think that we need to recognise that these systems are human constructs. It very often feels like political systems, economic system, modes of production in workplaces and so on are irreformable. They’re just these colossal facts of our existence that kind of pressed down on us. But all of those systems were made by human beings. And so it can, it might be difficult to remake them or to modify them, but it’s not impossible, you know. And so maybe another thing that we need to get over is in some respects, perhaps we need to get over our sense that we owe these systems something. You know, we can reform them. The people who made those systems, we may want to honour them in some respects, but they’re not here anymore. We’re the ones who are in control. We have the power to remake our workplaces, to remake our churches and hospitals, and, you know, ultimately even our government systems. You know, it’s hard and and we won’t, we probably can’t totally remake them, but we can move things in a direction where people’s dignity is respected.

Gillian: It almost feels like there is a oh, what’s the right word? That we must in some way, because if we don’t challenge systems that and if we have the, if we’re in a privileged position to be able to challenge systems then not doing it wouldn’t be respecting our understanding of ourselves as divine and are made in the image of God is just putting up with crap if we don’t, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Gillian: So we’re in Advent and I’m just curious about all the work you’ve done around how to, how to manage work and to recalibrate I guess, your, your sense of, of worth as a human being. Can you give us any advice or top tips around how to have a good Advent we’re particularly thinking about? So our Advent season is called waiting well, how can we wait well for the Birth of Christ. We don’t really do the four last things, we kind of take a more positive twist on it – so we’re asking, how can we wait well with presence. You can see the dual use of the word there. Any advice you can give us?

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, what Advent culminates in is you know, the incarnation, God becoming human. So it’s like if you did not get the message that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, here it is again, in you know, more radical and concrete form. Human beings are so worth saving that God will become one of us in order to make that happen. So I think that Advent is a great time to think about human dignity, the, you know, your own human dignity and the dignity of those around you. You know, that could be through alms giving, you know, prayer, things like that. But yet recognising that each of us has this unbelievable worth a worth that we have a hard time accepting, which it’s kind of shocking that, like our value is least visible to ourselves and Advent, you know, Christmas is, you know, a radical confrontation with that.

Gillian: Jonathan, thank you so much we’re actually going to be picking up this conversation over in the GoHealth Community as we go through Advent together. Our theme is Waiting Well with Presence. I’d love to know what you thought about what we’ve been discussing here on the GoHealth podcast. The Advent journey is available for all our GoHealth Community members.

Thank you to Rosie Dawson for producing this podcast and to Wendy Lloyd from the GoHealth Team for all her work on this series and this podcast. Please do hit share and let others know about our work and this podcast, I’d love for as many people as possible to hear it as we together seek to flourish and be that thing right – healing presences in the world today, we need that right now and going into next year as well. 

Jonathan, thank you once again for being on the GoHealth Podcast.

Jonathan: Thank you, Gillian, it was a real pleasure.

Gillian: It’s been lovely chatting with you.