How to craft the work-life balance you deserve (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy: 

You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. On today's episode, we're gonna be focusing on work. When I think about what it means to be a better human, a lot of the ideas that come to mind first for me are things that I do in my free time. It's how I deal with interpersonal relationships, how I treat my family, my friends, how I treat myself.

But the majority of my waking hours are, are spent working. So what can we do to improve our relationships to our jobs? But it feels like the demands of making money and showing up to work are gonna go on and on and on and on forever. I mean, that's how I feel. And I have a remarkably easy job. I don't have to do manual labor.

I am just sitting in a chair right now talking out loud to myself while trying to pretend that I'm talking to someone else. So this applies to everyone. If you're struggling with work-life balance, if you are trying to figure out how to find meaning in your work or if you're just feeling burned out, this is an episode we put together for you.

We've pulled some clips from some of our favorite past interviews that touch on these topics, and we're gonna get to them in just a moment. But first, I have to do my job. I gotta do a little bit of work, and my work right now is reading some podcast ads, so don't go anywhere. We will be right back.

Today we're talking about work and life and figuring out how to balance the two, or if there even is a real distinction between them, maybe work and life are actually all part of the same thing. To start us off, here is a clip from our episode, How to Stop Finding Your Self-Worth Through Your Job with Gloria Chan Packer.

[00:01:40] Gloria Chan Packer: 

Solving for our burnout and setting boundaries feels like something we need to either achieve versus fail at. And so when we like set that boundary, we're like, “Wait, this isn't working.” Then we feel like we failed. And a lot of times we're like, “This whole wellness thing is like not working out for me.” And we give up.

And so, yeah, I, I try to also remind myself and everyone else, right, that this entire journey around behavioral change and just feeling more sustainable and more healthy is not linear. I think the goal should be almost like acting like the stock market where it's like up and down and up and down, but like generally trends upwards towards something healthier and towards more behavioral growth and change.

But knowing that sometimes you're gonna feel up and sometimes it's gonna be like a giant regression backwards. And that's just the nature of it. Um, I think a lot of us struggle with burnout because we just over scope and say yes to everything, I'm guilty of this too. 

[00:02:34] Chris Duffy: 

Absolutely, yes. 

[00:02:35] Gloria Chan Packer: 

So if you have a propensity to be like a yes person to always say yes without thinking, try to start buying some time for yourself to truly evaluate your bandwidth and your priorities before you say yes.

So when someone asks you something, like you don't have to say yes or no right away. Say like, “Okay, I hear you, can I have until the end of the day to get back to you?” Or just say, “I need a little bit of time to evaluate what's on my plate and where my priorities are. When do you need to hear back from me by?”

I personally do not feel that the goal should be to eradicate burnout. In my personal and professional opinion, eradicating stress and burnout is neither realistic, nor makes any sense because stress is really this biologically wired human reflex, right? And so the goal shouldn't be to, I think, get rid of burnout, but really to build a healthier and more sustainable relationship with your stress and your, your burnout too. 

I've been reflecting on this personally a lot, right? That feeling of like, I feel like I've, I've failed was actually what was really keeping me from being able to help fix where I was because it was almost like what I tried to prevent burning out from being a new mom and working and a business owner and blah blah blah.

My fear of failing at that is what actually I think guaranteed and like kept me stuck in burnout mode. 'Cause I was like, “No, this should have worked. This is gonna work.” I was really like, “No, this is not working.” What do you need to change? And that's always. Probably gonna be a pretty tough moment and a pretty tough change.

But you make the change and you heal and you move forward and you kind of just keep doing that as you need to throughout the different seasons of life because. If there's any, I think guarantee in life it's that shit doesn't go your way and might go sideways sometimes and things will get very stressful and you'll have to realize that you have to make a change so you don't burn out.

[00:04:29] Chris Duffy: 

We're gonna take a quick break and we will be right back

And we are back. One of the things that I find most confounding about work is that you can do the exact same tasks on two different days, and one day they feel insurmountable and overwhelming, and another day you feel totally in control and capable. Same work, exactly the same work, but very different reactions to it.

Dan Harris knows that feeling all too well. After working as a TV news anchor for years, one day he had a panic attack live on air, and after that experience, Dan got increasingly interested in and involved with meditation and mindfulness. He is now the author of 10% Happier and the host of the podcast by the same name.

And here's what Dan had to say about how those skills have affected his life. This is from our episode, How to Cultivate the Skill of Happiness. 

[00:05:26] Dan Harris: 

People say when they start meditating, it's like, “Wait a minute, I'm more anxious.” 

[00:05:29] Chris Duffy: 

Mm-Hmm. 

[00:05:29] Dan Harris: 

But actually that, that means you're doing it right. Because you're, the whole goal here is not to like become super zen. I hate when people use that word actually, because Zen Buddhism is actually not at all what we think of as zen. It's pretty like hardcore. 

[00:05:45] Chris Duffy: 

Mm-Hmm. 

[00:05:45] Dan Harris: 

So, but it's not, the goal is not to become blissed out, but I don't even think that's doable without, you know, like an IV drip of Klonopin. Like it doesn't work like that.

So what, what's, but the goal is, is to get familiar with the chaos and cacophony of your own mind so that it doesn't own you as much, but definitionally, that requires seeing the chaos in cacophony, and that is gonna be uncomfortable. It's like, it's humiliating, but what's the alternative? The alternative is, all that shit's happening anyway, and you're just owned by it a thousand percent of the time. 

So what do you want? You wanna sort of wake up to this stuff, take the red pill in the positive sense of that term and start to get out of the matrix to see, you know, what your life is actually about, which is, you know, mostly random thoughts and you know, inappropriate impulses.

And to see, you know, your ancient storylines, all of that stuff. Do you wanna see your anxiety, your depression, whatever, rather than have it own you and, uh, rule you like a malevolent puppeteer? I think, I think it's pretty obvious what the right answer is, and it's not gonna be, you know, all barfing unicorns.

[00:06:52] Chris Duffy: 

I love that clip. I love that clip so much. And also, as far as I know, it is the only time anyone has ever used the phrase barfing unicorns on our podcast. But you know what? I hope it is not the very last time that someone says that. So future interviewees, take note, you're allowed to say that. I love what Dan said about how you have to be willing to see your own issues.

I have to admit that I have sometimes felt in the past, like meditation as I understood it was a little naval gazy, a little bit like making all of the issues of the world about you and your feelings rather than engaging with structural issues. But when I raised that point with Dan, he had a really interesting response to my skepticism and what he said has changed the way that I see the point of meditation and mindfulness.

Here's that clip. 

[00:07:34] Dan Harris: 

We have these burning structural issues in the society. Just to name a few, um, war bigotry, inequality, climate, AI, loose nukes, lots of big problems. And so some people were worried that we're, we're promoting meditation as a way to self-soothe and anesthetize and reduce the stress that is being caused by these structural issues, but not to actually deal with the structural issues.

And I actually just don't think that's the way meditation works. I think properly understood meditation, especially in the Buddhist tradition, which is what I come out of, really is about waking you up. And it starts with dealing with your own suffering and pain and, and stress and hangups, and ancient neurotic storylines.

It starts there because it's hard to be effective if you don't deal with that. I think that is what the point of this practice is. It is to get your shit together. So that you are helpful. That is the point. And you know, you start by just dealing with your stuff. You increase the amount of bandwidth you have to be helpful to other people.

Then you very quickly see that being helpful makes you happy, and so then you have more bandwidth and you can help more people. It's not gonna be like a forever thing. It's like, not like an unbroken hockey stick trend where you're on this virtuous spiral, which I call the cheesy upward spiral. You're not on that in an unbroken way.

I retain the capacity to be a schmuck. I mean, I make all sorts of mistakes, but if I can make that my default pattern rather than a rarely accessed one, then then I'm in good shape. So I think having said all of that, like I'm, I am. I think if meditation is being taught correctly, it will put you on a glide path toward more of that and less of being stuck in your own stuff. 

[00:09:28] Chris Duffy: 

Okay. Well, one thing that Dan and I definitely share in common is that we both retain the capacity to be schmucks. I certainly have that capacity. Thinking about what Dan was talking about there, the ways in which the personal intersect with broader structural issues. That strikes me as an extremely powerful way to frame this, and it ties in with how Anne Helen Petersen told me she thinks about burnout and what that phrase burnout really means.

This is from our episode, On Changing Your Relationship to Work and the Guardrails that Can Prevent Burnout. 

[00:09:56] Anne Helen Petersen: 

Well, I think the first thing is to figure out whether you, your burnout, the primary source of it is this feeling of financial precarity, right? Like, and if that's the case, is there a change that you can make in your life?

And I'm not talking about like, stop drinking lattes or anything, a name like that. Is there a future point in your life where that precarity would end? Right? Like are you in a place where like, “Oh, my student loans are gonna be paid off in a year.” Or, uh, “My living situation is going to drastically change.” Or, “There's absolutely going to be a huge promotion at work if I can just get to this point.” Or, “If I can just finish this program.” Or whatever.

I feel like that's actually a very small portion of people. Sometimes it's that whatever you are doing as your job, is going to keep you in that precarious position for the rest of your life unless something changes. And that's when you have to be like, “Okay, I'm a person in the world. My job is not my life.”

Right? Like, or, “I am more than my job. So does that mean I need to change my job? Does that, do I need to change careers?” If this is not sustainable, right, financially moving, like, and nothing's going to change. Is this, I need to have a conversation with myself about that. And then if you get past that point, the primary thing is not financial.

It's not that feeling of precarity. It's more this feeling of addiction to my job. Right. Not knowing how to stop working. And that I think there are some like very basic utilitarian things that you can do that make work less omnipresent in your life in terms of turning off notifications, creating bumpers in your day like an on ramp and an off ramp.

Being much more mindful about using delay send for emails or, um, you know, even something like inbox when ready, which makes it so that you only get a batch of emails once every hour. Uh, and then also I think talking with your manager too, because oftentimes we put expectations on ourselves in terms of availability that our managers do not actually place on us, right?

Like if you have an even decent manager, they don't want you to burn out because churn is expensive. So how can you actually create, uh, clear expectations about availability and expectations in that way? So those, those are like kind of the, the basic things. But then the next thing too is figuring out who am I besides my job?

A lot of people lost anything, any part of themselves that wasn't their job along the way or their very, very, like maybe their partner. Right? I just, I know a lot of people who have failed to cultivate or to sustain close friendships. Are, have no feeling of community around them. All they do is, um, work and then kind of, they're just so exhausted that like maybe they can deal with one hangout a month and that too feels exhausting.

They don't have any hobbies. Even the idea of a hobby seems frivolous. But a hobby is just something you do 'cause you actually like it. Then the last thing I'd say is get a good therapist. Most people I know who've untangled their relationship with work and and recovered from their burnout, they've done so through a good therapist.

[00:13:13] Chris Duffy: 

That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much for listening. You heard clips from Gloria Chan Packer, Dan Harris, and Anne Helen Petersen. I am your host Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is a podcast, but it is also a team of people working together.

And on the TED side, the people who are doing that work are Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles. And on the PRX side, this is also a job because if you don't think that it takes work to edit out all of my strange noises and bizarre non sequiturs, you better think again. 

Thank you to Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Maggie Gourville, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzales, and of course, thanks to you for listening to our show. Without you, this would not be possible for us to do as a job. And if you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five star rating and review. That is the biggest way that we get out to new people.

If you are listening on Spotify, please answer the discussion question that we've put up there on the mobile app. I love reading your answers every week. It's so fascinating. We will be back next week with another episode of How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks again for listening.