Rest
Why trauma-informed leaders are protesting the hustle and preventing burnout
It was Monday morning. She hadn’t slept. Not a wink.
For the past few months, she’d made a habit of working weekends. This past weekend was no exception. If she gave her full attention to work, she rationalized, she could achieve anything and everything. Eventually she could retire to Tuscany and plant an olive garden.
Her body had begun to protest. Painkillers weren’t covering up the ache in her abdomen. Doctors were concerned. For moments, her vision turned foggy.
Other systems began to malfunction. She was irritable. Slightly delirious. A colleague pinged her on Slack. Asked for last-minute adjustments to an asset.
”I need to rest. Can we pick this up in the morning?” she said.
“We need to get this to the printer’s today,” he said, “It needs to be ready by Friday.”
She opened her computer, pulled up the file. Her brain wasn’t making sense of anything.
”Listen, I can’t do this right now. I’m sure we can find other solutions. Printers with a quicker turnaround? My mind will be clearer in the morning.”
He insisted.
She grew more irritable.
He pushed.
She snapped.
“I haven’t slept in 24 hours! This is not my problem!”
“Yes, it is your problem,” he snapped back, “Your fatigue is the problem. In fact, you’re the problem.”
She turned off her computer.
She laid in bed and stared at the ceiling. She went over the dialogue on Slack in her head: “Was he right? Am I the problem? How can I fix myself, so I am not a problem? “
She could meditate more. Drink more protein powder smoothies. She could find ways to conserve energy.
She would stop saying she was tired. She would focus on being nicer. More agreeable.
As she considered her options, she found it difficult to fall asleep.
Houston, we have a problem.
In 1970, an explosion on the American spacecraft Apollo 13 sent the crew’s oxygen supply propelling into space. Astronaut Jack Swigert called NASA Mission Control Center (aka “Houston”), and reported the problem.
“Problem” is an understatement. To conserve remaining resources for reentry, the crew had shut down critical operating systems. They made it back.
Will we?
Thirty-five percent reported feeling burned out.
A year ago, Mental Health Research Canada (MHRC) surveyed 5,500 workers about wellbeing in the workplace. Thirty-five percent reported feeling burned out.
You may be able to protect yourself by firmly saying “No” more often. “No” to extraneous demands at work. “No” to infringements on personal and professional boundaries. “No” to sacrificing a good night’s rest. The more job security you have, the easier it is to say “No.”
But when the oxygen tanks that sustain life have gone hurling into outer space, you can say “No” all you want, but you still need support from Mission Control.
No number of individual self-care initiatives will cure a culture that expects people to work long hours and sacrifice rest, family, and wellbeing. If there’s not enough fuel in the tank, there’s no point in shooting for the moon. If there are insufficient resources to get there, it makes no sense to soldier on.
The pandemic has demonstrated what life might look like when our oxygen supply is compromised at a global scale.
Isn’t it time we reassign our priorities?
What happens to the brain when it lacks adequate rest
Doctors-in-training in America spend up to 80 hours a week in the hospital. Single shifts routinely last up to 28 hours. If residents accept sleeplessness as protocol of entry into the professional, can’t we all?
As physicians James R. Wright and Norman S. Schachar point out, the current model for residency training programs has roots in the less-than-wholesome habits of its creator, the early 20th century surgical educator, William Stewart Halsted. Renowned for a seemingly superhuman ability to to stay awake for days on end without fatigue, Halsted was also hiding an addiction to cocaine.
Research into overworked physicians tell us that sleep fine-tunes the balance of insulin and circulating glucose. If inadequate sleep turns into a lifestyle, you’ll disrupt your blood sugar levels to the point that a doctor might classify you as pre-diabetic.
Rest enriches our ability to learn and recalibrates our emotional brain circuits. That helps us to navigate social and psychological challenges. Your amygdala, just below the hypothalamus in the midbrain, processes emotional responses when you sleep. When people face an important decision, they often “sleep on it.” The brain needs rest to process the feelings that fuel decision-making.
A lack of sleep leads to chronic stress, which impairs the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, an evolved brain region that provides top-down regulation over thought, action, and emotion.
Ongoing exposure to uncontrollable stress also leads to a deterioration of neural connections. When performance in the prefrontal cortex diminishes, it can be difficult to self-regulate.
What can you do to support adequate rest for your team?
It might seem like a “no brainer,” but your people need to rest. So do you. You both need rest in all sorts of ways.
People need adequate sleep, but they also need to rest in the assurance that they can come to you safely with problems. Employees need breaks, but they also need to rest in the sense that they belong in your community.
If your employees are burning out, you may be tempted to send them home, to keep a the machine running as usual.
But time off is not always a solution. By the time an employee experiences burnout, she’s likely already feeling helpless and isolated from her colleagues. If you work in the “Mission Control” of an organization, make sure you’re not inadvertently cultivating a culture of burnout, and take responsibility if you are.
Here are a few tips to prevent employee burnout.
Six tips to encourage rest and prevent burnout
Work cooperatively with employees to establish a manageable workload and schedule.
Ensure workers feel they have a degree of autonomy and control over their own work and that any expectations of the outcome of their work is crystal clear. Establish trusting relationships with your colleagues, so they feel confident they can make their own decisions and come to you if they are unsure of what to do. If you’re not on the same page over priorities in their work, open a dialogue and talk compassionately, transparently, and clearly about it.
Ensure everyone has the resources they need to carry out their work.
That includes office supplies and technological resources, but also reliable lines of human support. If an employee is consistently working over her capacity, are you giving her authority to outsource work to other team members or to contractors?
Discourage communication “after hours.”
Does your organization run on reliable business hours? Are you expecting employees to be available to answer messages in the evenings or in the middle of the night? Make a habit of scheduling any emails, so they arrive in your colleagues’ inboxes at appropriate times of the day/week. Encourage everyone on your team to follow suit.
Treat all employees fairly and equally.
Sixty-hour weeks for weeks on end are not always the cause of burnout. Workers experience high-levels of stress, which lead to cognitive and emotional fatigue, when there’s a lack of psychological safety in their working environment. Does your organization have a clear code of conduct and of ethics? Is there a diversity and inclusion policy that ensures all individuals are treated fairly and equally? How are these processes and policies put into practice? What checks have you put into place?
Listen to employees’ concerns compassionately.
Problems and conflict are inevitable in any organization, even high-performing, high-functioning ones. Accept that conflict is part of any pursuit What matters is how supported employees feel by their managers when conflicts do arise. Encourage your staff to speak to you in confidence. Listen without judgement. Find collaborative and compassionate ways forward. Avoid pointing fingers to any single individual as the source of conflict, and discourage this practice with others. Avoid the development of an employee subculture where colleagues are complaining to colleagues about colleagues. Gossip undermines good work, not to mention trust, which is the foundation of any healthy professional relationship.
Be vulnerable.
No one expects leaders to know everything. You’ll earn the trust and respect of your people when you can be vulnerable enough to say that you need support and feedback on how to do better. Admit your own struggles. It will open the doors for authentic collaboration and compassionate paths forward for the whole organization.