How to battle burnout and build a better life

It started with a short temper, dreading getting out of bed and feeling absolutely miserable at work.

Jonathan Malesic had his dream job as a professor, but burnout forced him to walk away feeling like a failure as an academic and a man.

He examines the phenomena of burnout in his book, The End Of Burnout - Why Work Drains Us and How To Build Better Lives.

He quit his “dream job” as a theology professor in 2016, he told Jesse Mulligan.

“I had wanted exactly that job for throughout my entire 20s, basically, and I got it. And at first, I was happy and successful.”

But then things started to go wrong, he says.

“I started to have a hard time getting out of bed and I just struggled to plan for how to teach my classes. And when I got to class I became so despondent because it seemed like the students were not learning anything from me.”

This went on for a couple of years, he says, and nothing he did helped the situation.  

“I went to psychotherapy, I took antidepressants, I even took an unpaid leave of absence - even that long rest, and that long time away from my job, only kept burnout at bay for a few weeks.”

He was lucky, his wife was offered a job many miles from where they were living and he was able to quit.

“The only cure of burnout that I was able to find was quitting the job. And in the time since then, I've been trying to research and understand not only what happened to me, but also what is happening to workers across the United States, and in fact, across the world.”

Having a ‘good job’ is no protection against burn out, Malesic says.

“It's possible to burnout even in some of the best jobs. And the reason for that I think is that we burn out because for a long time we can be stretched between our ideals that we bring to work and the reality of the work that we do.”

In his own job his expectations were high, he says.

“I thought that I was going to live the life of the mind and inspire a new generation of students. And I thought that the job would totally fulfill me as a person.

And the job was good. I had a good salary, I had usually a manageable schedule, I had good benefits, but the ideals that I had, were so far beyond what the job could do. And in fact in many ways the work was more challenging than even I had anticipated.”

Counter intuitively it is newer workers who tend to experience more burnout, he says.

“Because they are the ones who are bringing very high ideals to work. And they often don't have the higher salary and job security that many more senior workers do.”

He sees a satisfying job as balancing act.

“The reality of your job is like a pair of stilts. If they're nicely parallel, if they're well aligned, then you can move forward. But they don't have to get very far out of alignment, before you start to wobble and strain and perhaps even fall.”

Millennials and Gen Z workers are bearing the brunt of burnout at work, he says.

“It's not surprising that early career workers would be susceptible to burnout, they have very high expectations, not only coming from themselves, but also from society, for their work.

“But they've been left to allow that passion and that sense of purpose to be its own reward. And it just isn't, in order for workers to do a good job, in order for their jobs to live up to the ideals that they have. Those workers need decent salaries, they need predictable schedules, they need paid time off, and they need security, they need to know that they are going to have a job in a month, a week, a year.

“But what they we often see, particularly in the gig economy is that some workers don't know if they're going to have a job in the next five minutes, which just increases the anxiety and the pressure on them.”

Men and woman experience burnout differently, he says.

“Women are more likely to experience burnout, primarily as exhaustion than men, across many studies, women tend to score a little higher on exhaustion.

Men tend to score a bit higher on the cynicism dimension.

“And I think that that matches up with cultural stereotypes and expectations that we have for men and women. Women often have to pull a second shift of childcare and other domestic responsibilities after their shift at work ends.

“And that can be manifested as exhaustion.”

Cynicism among men is a signal that the cultural stereotype of the stoical male breadwinner remains, he says.

“He goes to work and kind of grimly provides for his family and doesn't feel necessarily very fulfilled by it, but knows that he has this duty that he has to fulfill.

“What I think is interesting about this is that a lot of younger men believed that they were over some of those stereotypes, but that pattern of masculine Identity that my father embodied, I think is still very much with us.”

He is not trying to say man have it worse than women, he says.

“Rather that we need to pay attention to these differences. And if we want to help men overcome some of the ways that the patriarchy harms them too, then we need to look at these patterns of how men and women burnout differently.”

The solution, he believes, lies in creating meaning away from the workplace, he visited a monastery as part of his research for the book.

“I went to this secluded monastery in northern New Mexico, this is in the desert 13 miles down a dirt road from the nearest highway. And I was drawn to this community of monks who live there, because they put something else ahead of their work in importance.

“The focus of their lives is communal prayer. And that orders their day. Like the rest of us have to work in order to provide for themselves and maintain where they live.

But they only work for about three or four hours a day. And when the chapel bell rings, calling them to communal prayer, they drop what they're doing.”

They know the work will still be there tomorrow, he says.

“This was such an interesting model for how to overcome burnout culture, not because I think we all need to move to the desert, or we all need to join monasteries or anything like that.

“But rather it's that what we do need to do is identify those things we're working toward, what are the things that are more important than our work? And how can we limit our work so that it supports those things without overtaking our lives?”