Dr Rachel Morris, host of the podcast You Are Not a Frog, helps healthcare professionals beat burnout.
When you are stressed and you went to a doctor and said, I’m really, really stressed, what can I do? And they say to you, well, the only thing I can do is sign you off sick, how does that feel?
And I’m going to be honest with you. If I went to a doctor to help me through a stressful patch at work and she said “here’s a sick note”, the first thing I’m thinking is “Ah crap, turns out I don’t have what it takes, whatever it is… you know, the thing all those people in The Apprentice or Dragons’ Den seem to have”.
Quick note for the Americans: here in the UK, The Apprentice is hosted by a pickled business walnut called Alan Sugar who hasn’t been relevant since the Amstrad computer in 1984. And Dragons’ Den is what you call Shark Tank for some reason… which is still a better name than the original Japanese one which translates to The Tigers of Money.
Anyway… if I’m getting a sick note from a doctor because I’m stressed at work, the first thing I’m thinking is that the problem lies with me. Quoting again from Rachel:
if that doctor just got out this stress curve and go “Look, of course you’re stressed. Look, well, you’re coping with the pressure has massively gone up.” But then not only has the pressure gone up from external stuff, now the pressure’s gone up from the internal stuff. I’m not good enough. What’s wrong with me?
That stress curve Rachel’s talking about is something we’ve brought up before; it’s called the Yerkes-Dodson curve and it’s a good way of visualising how we can move from bored to burnout via stressed.
If you find yourself prone to procrastination or easily distracted, struggling with motivation or just not wanting to get out of bed even for the stuff you want to do, you might have a bunch of stories in your head that pretty much all amount to the same thing… “There’s something wrong with me”.
This is by design. The carbon footprint movement was co-opted and popularised by fossil fuel companies like BP to shift the burden of responsibility off their shoulders and onto ours.
As Sanah Ahsan wrote in her Guardian piece back in 2022, we’re essentially being gaslighted into believing our struggles with mental health are due to bad wiring, rather than, y’know, the whole screwed-up state of the world right now.
This concept – that fixing what’s wrong with the world means mending something broken in ourselves – is not new, and it’s going to take some time to dismantle. Luckily, we have an expert we can call on.
Ignacio Martín-Baró was a Spanish psychologist. He was born in Valencia in 1942, and in 1989 was murdered in part for his opposition against the civil war taking place in El Salvador at the time.
During his working life, Martín-Baró developed a theory of psychology that posited we either react abnormally to normal circumstances, or we react normally to abnormal circumstances. Meaning that yes, some of us may struggle to cope due to the way we’re wired, but that others are having a perfectly normal reaction to something that’s difficult to bear.
This theory is known as liberation psychology, and it was developed as a response to oppression.
Now, you might not think of yourself as being oppressed, and I don’t want to make this whole thing weightier than it already is, but exploitation is just one form of oppression, and exploitation is kind of at the root of capitalism; it’s sort of the oil that makes the gears run smoothly.
If you think I’m laying it on thick, think back to any time you were asked to stay late or pull in an extra shift, cancel or delay your plans, pick up the phone while you were on holiday, or reply to a late-night WhatsApp message… all because you’re “part of a family”, or even worse, that if you don’t, you’ll be labeled as a difficult employee and your chances to advance will plummet.
By no means am I saying that fighting a civil war or dismantling systemic injustice is in any way comparable to dealing with Janet from Accounts Receivable. I know they feel the same, but they are different.
Let’s break down the idea of liberation psychology and see how the pieces fit together for us Joe Lunchpales and Jane Punchclocks.
Psychology must serve the oppressed
Martín-Baró’s take is that, rather than try to fit everyone into the same box, we should create containers that better fit us.
To echo what I was saying last week, this is kinda what Undo is all about. So much productivity advice is about trying to fit your ways of working into rigid systems because the authors of those systems are convinced it’s the only way you’re going to maximise your time.
I haven’t brought up Oliver Burkeman for a while, so if you’re playing the drinking game, now’s the time to slam one down. But this show is to some degree treading in his footsteps, as he spent much of his Guardian column trying on different productivity and self-help hats to figure out which ones would fit… and what he found was that none of them are going to solve the fundamental problem that there are just too many things, and not enough time in which to get them done.
That means we need to build systems that recognise where we’re at right now. Applying a productivity hack from the chief exec of a Fortune 500 company isn’t going to help when you’re waste-deep in researching a report nobody’s going to read, while the hobbit from IT is leaking dubstep from his headphones and Microsoft Teams keeps tugging at your sleeve with notifications you’re not allowed to turn off, and you’re measuring out your time in trips to the toilet.
Modern productivity, if there is such a thing, is about building flexible systems that match the way you work and think, and respect the constraints you’re working under. And for some of us, that might mean building structures that are more supportive than those other people need. Just like some people need crutches, walking frames or wheelchairs to get around, some of us need infrastructure to hold us up when we’re at work, so we don’t use up all our energy just trying to get through the day.
Stop ideologising common sense
Hands down, one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is a lunch that consists of a bowl of tomato soup and a cheese sandwich. It’s unpretentious and comforting. Last weekend I saw some family and one of them remarked on how weird she thought it was that you’d have a sandwich with soup. When I remarked that there were high-end restaurants in New York that pretty much only served soup and a sandwich, her levels of incredulity remained.
The point is, what’s normal or “common sense” to you is exotic or maybe arcane to someone else. My dad’s one of those people who can do pretty much anything, in the way that only boomer dads can. And my mum’s not far behind, either. I marvel at their ability to redecorate a whole house, fix a broken fuse and repair clothes, just as they marvel at my ability to write songs, perform improv, and name pretty much any song from the 90s in under a second.
We’re a product of our culture, our surroundings, our upbringing, and the inmate gifts or challenges we’re given. To assume that one set of knowledge is something “everyone should know” if it isn’t taught to us is kind of arrogant, not to mention judgy as hell.
The very notion that we should derive our worth from our labour is an ideology, and a pretty poisonous one. I’m all for making positive contributions to the world, but you didn’t choose to be pulled head-first into the world so the idea that you arrive and suddenly everyone’s like “where’s your contribution?” If you ask me, that’s a bit much.
Collective experience matters more than individual pathology
For a brief period, my TikTok feed was full of grifters in Indian call centres getting absolutely shafted by people pretending to be tech-illiterate, or in some cases actually scamming the scammers.
Then I thought about some of those call centre operators’ extreme reactions, and the lack of empathy they have for their victims. And sure, there’s the line that we in the west are all rich and we should be turned upside down and shaken until all the money falls out. But there’s a far more sinister system underpinning the con.
The fact is, if scammers in windowless Indian call centres don’t meet their quotas, they and their family will get the shit beaten out of them. They will actually get beaten up, or in some cases worse.
That’s why they’re pretty good at noticing when you’re wasting their time or pulling their leg. For many of them, this isn’t a fun game where they get to shake down the dumb rich person; it’s a real life Squid Game.
So, Captain Buzzkill, why bring this up? Because we so often think people are being mean to us or taking advantage, when they’re simply operating under a different structure; a different system with its own set of constraints. We don’t have to be white knights with savour complexes about it all, but we can at least acknowledge that someone might be a douche to you because they were taught that’s how you get results. Doesn’t excuse their bad behaviour, but maybe makes it easier to understand.
Consciousness-raising is a psychological act
I don’t know if you’ve ever really paid attention to the lyrics of Smash Mouth’s Walkin’ on the Sun, but they’re surprisingly smart. It was a song that defined the band’s sound into their next album, but this deceptive bubble-gum tune takes pot shots at division, commercialisation, cynicism, and the idea that peace, love and harmony were packaged up and sold back to us… much in the same way our childhoods are constantly rebadged, remastered, and upscaled every 10 to 15 years.
Calling out bullshit is how we start to climb out from under it. The Emperor’s New Clothes is still a powerful fable because it shows us what happens when we all slump into groupthink.
If you can be the person at work who says “Hang on, I don’t think this is fair”, you’re doing the brave job of calling out some systemic bullshit the rest of your coworkers are struggling with, but have maybe learned to accept.
It’s not easy and it’s definitely not fun, but being the squeaky wheel in your organisation – the one who calls out the nonsense, who restates a new policy in actual English rather than corporate jargon – being “that guy” might just be the first step to bringing about some change.
That’s Ben Askins, reading a real WhatsApp conversation. He’s got loads of them. If you’re into this sort of stuff, you might have already come across his TikToks or his new long-form YouTube series.
There are countless examples of bosses who think workers should be grateful for every hour they get in their zero-hours contract. Now, Ben’s already fighting that good fight so I’m not gonna tread on his toes, but clips like this show just how far up their arses many managers’ heads seem to be. That was a confusing sentence so let me take another stab at it.
You’re not lazy. You’re not asking too much of your job. If you’re young and you’ve only been in the workforce for 5 years, your relationship with employment is already knackered, because everything got tipped upside down and dipped in shit when covid struck.
And yes, there are stories of so-called work-shy gen zedders who make all sorts of demands on their workplaces, but most of what I see is younger people getting a bit better about defining their boundaries, and pushing back when their line managers take the piss.
So, what can we do?
And of course, when you push back, what are you given? As Dr Rachel Morris discovered when she started trying to help other doctors beat burnout:
There is nothing between stress and burnout in terms of help for people, apart from being told to go meditate, do some yoga, focus on your wellbeing, focus on your wellbeing. That’s great. But how can you focus on your wellbeing when you’re doing three people’s jobs?
But what even is “wellbeing”?
Wellbeing for you probably looks very different to wellbeing for me. Then what happens is organisations go “Everyone’s really stressed. Let’s do a wellbeing program. So let’s put in some lunchtime sessions where people can go into yoga”.
Now, FYI, I love yoga. For me, it’s a really important thing, but not in the middle of the day when I’ve got a million different things to do, probably better in, in the evening, but then I need to turn my laptop off and have the time to do it.
So the biggest problem for wellbeing is getting the time to “do” wellbeing. So if we wanna quickly run through wellbeing: we have eight ways to wellbeing, include the five, government ways to wellbeing that they developed in 2008 as a bit of like five fruit and veg for the mind.
Those five ways to wellbeing are
- Connecting with other people
- getting some exercise or just moving your body
- Being present in the moment
- Continual learning
- Giving back to others
These form part of a government initiative that Rachel’s built on in her work, to help people find a path towards feeling better.
So if you’re not yet ready to smash the system or go all Jason Bateman and plot the murder of your boss – and site note, please don’t do that, it’ll reflect very badly on this podcast – then start by taking a good long walk to a pub where you can have a drink with some friends, and while you’re there, take advice from former subject of the podcast Merlin Mann, and look up at the chimneys of the houses you pass. It gets the sun on your face but it also gives your mind something else to focus on. Try and read or listen to something that’ll expand your outlook a little or maybe just work on honing your hobby. And if you can spend a bit of time every now and again looking out for someone else, it all helps.
And look, I know that’s a bit cheesy and maybe it feels twee. But like any good cliché, they exist because, on some level, there’s some truth. And if Tricia Hersey is right and rest really is resistance, consider me the leader of our little rebel alliance.
Sleep well, my friends. For we rise at dawn. And then have brunch for about 11, catch up on our box sets and then, then we march! Up the stairs to Bedfordshire, and then to victory! Now bring me my tomato soup of justice, and the cheese sandwich of destiny!
[crowd roars]
Go deeper
Liberation psychology - Wikipedia
Five ways to mental wellbeingFive steps that we can all take to improve our mental wellbeing.