Working Smarter

IF THERE'S ONE little adjustment that could make a giant difference in work-life balance and job satisfaction this year, I would vote for an end to hurry-worry. I’m talking about that hyperventilating habit of rushing through every minute of the day at work—and at home—as if you were a stampeding wildebeest.

Time panic. It’s everywhere these days, hyped up by instant technology and instant expectations. “Hey, did you get that email I sent two minutes ago?" Pretty soon they’re going to call you up and say, “Did you get that email I haven’t even sent yet?”

THE SPEEDWAY FALLACY

We’re all on a speedway these days, one driven by a fallacy that “as fast as you can” is the goal, when mindless rushing is the foundation for much of what ails brains, teams, and productive endeavor. It drives frenzy, frazzle, false urgency, crisis mentality, stress, burnout, and a host of pointless mistakes that happen when the brain in hijacked by an ancient interloper that believes every minute of the day is an emergency. 

Nonstop motion makes everything appear urgent when we haven’t taken the time to think about what is urgent and what isn’t. Speed for speed’s sake is the wrong goal, unless you like the churning stomach, temper tantrums, and mistakes of false urgency.

Autopilot mechanical momentum, minus thought, undermines productivity. We need informed performance—mobility, having our faculties functioning while we focus on the task at hand, not the clock.

It’s not a sprint to the death we’re on; it's a marathon. That means we have to move with deliberate speed, and for that we need the capacity to think and focus, which isn’t there when rushing.

JACK BE QUICK

The great basketball coaching legend, UCLA's John Wooden, had the best description of how we should approach a swift result. He said, “Be quick but don’t hurry.” It’s a brilliant principle for any organization or individual. Yes, you want to move at a good pace but not at one that mars your thinking, which is what hurrying does. In my time management and work-life balance programs, we focus on quickness and qualifying urgency.

On the basketball court, hurrying triggers forced shots, turnovers, and charging fouls, because it sets off stress-addled emotions. Being quick, though, means you move swiftly but under control. We are not under control when we’re in hurry-worry mode. The ancient part of the brain that thinks you’re going to die unless you race all day sets off the stress response and the catastrophic, shallow, and rash thinking that accompanies it.

Time urgency used to be restricted to Type A personalities and the super-important deadline. These days, thanks to technology, shorter attention spans, and the endangered species of patience, we’re all caught up in it.

All Type A’s are stuck with time urgency, which is a fixation with the passage of time and a compulsion that every second of the day should be jammed with as much production as possible. That goes for when you’re at home too, so time frenzy is very insidious. It wants to book up all your time outside the office too, which kills work-life balance. How do you get any recharging in when you have to fill every moment with production? We need to stop filling time and make our off-hours more fulfilling.

Rushing kicks thoughts from the top floors of the brain to the rote and panicked floors, which accounts for the rash emails, the impulsive decisions, and the shift from thoughtful analysis of the next move to frenzy and nonstop commotion, which isn’t forward motion.

SPRINT TO THE DEATH

There's a reason why we have laws to prevent speeding on highways and railways. Nobody would want a surgeon trying to set a speed record for brain surgery slicing into their skulls.

Researchers have found that rushing is bad for your work, health, and life. Managerial activities that require complex decision-making and long-term future planning are hindered by time urgency (Abbott, Sutherland). Time frenzy is also a heart attack risk (Cole). The pattern goes like this: Impatience leads to irritability, which leads to anger, which leads to clogged arteries. Time urgency can also lead to burnout and emotional exhaustion (Conte).

Exhaustion is a common side effect of hurry-worry, because implicit in the behavior is a false belief that you have to get something done faster or get somewhere speedier than is possible. One eye is always on the long list of things to do after you race through the current task. So there’s a futility in reflex rushing, a frustration with yourself and others that you can never do it fast enough.

The thing about time urgency, though, is that most of it is self-inflicted. We create arbitrary self-deadlines. I’m going to get this done by 12. I’m doing to do this in 10 minutes. People with time frenzy, and especially Type A’s, always overestimate their ability to get things done quicker than the reality dictates. We often box ourselves in with these overestimates of our speediness by telling others that, sure, we can get that done by some super-fast, unrealistic deadline. Always build in extra time, scope creep, to keep yourself from overpromising and underdelivering.

TURNING OFF THE RACETRACK MIND

Awareness of this habit is the first step to curing it. Since time frenzy turns on the stress response, you are going to know when you’re rushing for nothing by the stress symptoms that appear in your body—racing stomach, tightening in the neck, rapid heartbeat, digestion issues, insomnia. When you feel these cues going off, step back and ask, What is the emergency?

Turning off the racetrack mind of hurry-worry restores focus in the moment and takes fixation off the clock and to-do list so that we can harness attention for the task at hand. Not taking the rushing bait allows you to feel in control of events, instead of at the mercy of a world out of control. That allows you to manage demands instead of having them manage you.

And, what might be the most important thing about dumping this habit, you have permission in your life outside the job to enjoy hobbies, do exercise, and live life without the nagging that you should be doing something productive every spare second. That is the real measuring stick in our later years, so you're going to feel productive and satisfied if you can look back and see a life fully lived.

If you and your team would like to get time urgency and management under control, click the button below for details on our stress management, time management, and work-life balance programs. 

IF EACH OF US had a blooper reel, our most forehead-slapping moments would come at times when we were late, rushing, on deadline, under pressure, times when we were under the influence of stress. That’s when brains take leave of their faculties and default to impulsive decisions that make it appear we have the IQ of a panicked wildebeest.

Stress reroutes thoughts from the top floors of the brain to the lower ones—to the irrational emotions of the limbic system and to rote mode. We don’t have command of our chief productivity tool, full attention, when focus and the tenuous grasp of working memory are hijacked by the perceived crisis of stress.

RELENTLESS SABOTEUR

When racing on deadline, we send emails with typos, forget attachments, or overlook important calculations and may have to do the task all over again. When late to a flight, we leave smartphone charge cables behind and worry about whether the front door is locked. When stress sets off sudden anger or rage, we may lash out in ways we regret later.

A raft of studies show that stress is a relentless saboteur of attention, and without the ability to manage it, we subvert intellect and devolve to a state as reckless as someone who’s had too much to drink. We do things under its command that we never would with full, unsidetracked presence of mind. That means stress has a major impact on all the things we need attention for: productivity, engagement, and work-life balance.

“Acute stress impairs the intention-based attentional allocation and enhances the stimulus-driven selection, leading to a strong distractibility during attentional information selection,” note the authors of one study (Sanger, Bechtold, Schoof, Blaszkewicz, Wascher).

The stress hormone of cortisol sends us on a chemical bender, a detour away from goals, focus, and the directed concentration of what’s known as “top-down” attention (you choose what you pay attention to) to “bottom-up” attention, a survival mechanism that hijacks the higher brain in moments of perceived threat.

As Daniel Kahneman reported in his sweeping survey of how wrong our brains can be in “Fast and Slow Thinking,” there are two basic cognitive gears. System 1 thinking is a rapid, if not instant, response to a stimulus, and its triggers include the stress response and danger. It’s marked by rash, impulsive, jump-off-the-cliff, knee-jerk familiarity, and mostly speed. There’s no time for weighing pro and con. There’s just an immediate reaction.

STRESS DUMBS US DOWN

System 1 thinking refers decisions to emotions and feeling. This can help extricate you from a life-and-death event in which you would have no time to think your way out, but it’s of little use when trying to make decisions that require thought and reflection. It shreds focus with intrusive thoughts that fan the flames of the perceived crisis of the moment.

The other type of thinking, System 2, is what we use for thoughtful analysis, complex decisions, planning, anything with a goal attached to it. It’s essential for concentration and decision-making, and utilizes the direction and discipline of the higher brain. You are in charge, not an external event.

Subjects in the study above under the command of stress-induced bottom-up attention made a lot of mistakes. Stressed individuals were prone to mis-weighting the information in the tests they participated in and confusing less relevant data with test targets. This is one of the things stress specializes in, causing us to make decisions without considered examination. Errors for the stress group included “a very large portion of response misses, emphasizing a lack of top-down controlled selection bias toward the less salient target feature.”

Stress makes us reach for quick answers, easy fixes, because it forces us to make decisions before we have adequate information to base them upon and ones clouded by raw emotion. It dumbs us down to retaliatory and reflex behavior in which we react before we think. Our job is to build in the thinking before or after the reaction. The key to that is the very thing stress steals: attention.

Attention is the act of choosing from a stream of information and data what you want to pay attention to. It’s a selection process in which your executive attention function in the high brain screens the incoming data and chooses the information that best matches your goal, task, or the tenuous thought associations at top of mind in your working memory. Stress impairs your brain’s ability to stay focused on the task. The release of stress-fueled cortisol impairs intention-based thinking and, suddenly the tail, external stimuli, is wagging the dog.

Minds that can’t stay on task or focus take longer to the get the job done and may have to do the work over again after errors. Obviously, then, the drain of attention has a big impact on productivity. Highly stressed employees don’t just have lower productivity; they also have poor engagement, a survey by Watson Towers found. 

Instead of ignoring the siege of devices and interruptions that afflict most offices these days and the stress they aid and abet, we ought to be finding ways to bring stress management tools to every office to combat attention hijackers. The more stress we have, the less attention and productivity. The more attention we have, the less stress. It's simple, but yet impossible to achieve unless stress management strategies can take root.

The solution is more absorption in every moment of every task we do. Studies show that when we have full attention and engagement, we get the job done faster, remember it longer, and like it more.

The same goes for life outside the job. The more we can stay immersed in the moment, the happier we are, our problems emanating from the realm of the other two tenses. Harness attention, and we can tap the power of the most potent motivation, intrinsic goals, doing our work for the inherent interest, and find optimal experience, when our skills meet a challenge. 

It all starts with doing things that increase attention--putting limits on device time, participating in activities that build concentration (chess, dancing, learning a language), reading, and strategies such as mindfulness and other forms of target focus that increase the attention center in the prefrontal part of the brain and decrease the self-referential hub, where the thoughts and anxieties of stress live and badger us.

In the era of distraction, you still have the power to direct your mind and reduce stress and increase productivity by boosting top-down attention and reducing bottom-up attention. That's if you can regulate the impulsivity of System 1 and let System 2 take back your mind from the attention-stealers.

If you would like to increase attention and productivity on your team or in your company, please click on the button below for details on our stress management, productivity, and work-life balance programs.

It’s that time again. Another year in the books, one that rocketed by for everyone but kids, who spend a lot more of their time present to their world and gazing at barely moving schoolroom clocks. A lot of adults at this time tend to look back over the year and try to remember what notable things took place. We think and think, but sometimes nothing comes to mind. Uh-oh.

The brainlock comes from the fact that the mind is a little passive-aggressive. It actually stops noticing the things we do over and over. It wants new data. It wants you to satisfy one of the key human cravings: novelty. How do you do that? With curiosity, the built-in call to discover your world, and an under-the-radar new year’s resolution we would do well to take to heart.

THE MISSING NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

You seldom see a resolution like “I want to be more curious” this year, because we take our discovery mechanism for granted and keep it sidelined too much of the time. Sometimes it’s because the security equipment overrides the urge to know. Other times autopilot and ruts keep us locked on routine. There’s the law of least effort, in which humans are wired to go for the easiest path, the most familiar, even though the more challenging one is what brain researchers say we really want—the path of engagement.

Yet researchers have found that curiosity is one of the keys to life satisfaction and the learning that makes us feel we are moving forward. “Curiosity motivates people to act and think in new ways and investigate, be immersed, and learn,” write psychologists Todd Kashdan, author of Curious, and Paul Silvia, who specialize in studying curious behavior.

They report that people with higher curiosity are more inclined to participate in activities that are personally and socially enriching, something key to happiness and work-life balance. More curiosity on a daily basis also leads to something that is quite remarkable: greater “perceived meaning and purpose in life.”

New knowledge and experiences align us with internal goals that help us feel we are determining the content of life, which many researchers say is essential for gratification and fulfillment. Those payoffs come courtesy of a drive at the center of learning and a key positive emotion: interest. Curiosity is the agent of understanding and discovering. Without copious use of it, boredom sets in, as do years that fly by without notable events.

THE EXPLORATION BONUS

We are designed to follow our curiosities, to learn and grow, to the point that just the expectation of experiencing something novel can trigger the release of dopamine, a chemical that leads to the rush of satisfaction and a feeling of positive mood. MRI scans showed that the right ventral striatum interpreted novelty as if it were a positive event that actually occurred, suggesting that novelty is its own reward. Researchers call it the exploration bonus. Let’s resolve to give ourselves this bonus often in 2018.

We are all explorers if we just follow our biochemistry. The novelty reward is a biological cue to learn and broaden our world. “Each network in your brain is striving against each other for feedback from the outside world,” writes John Ratey in A User’s Guide to the Brain. “Couch-potato cells that don’t get enough signals will die off, while cells that stay active continue to grow and build in strength.”

Dendrites, the conduits between brain neurons that keep information flowing, shrink or vanish altogether if they’re not stimulated with new input. Active learning and physical exercise increase dendrite networks and also boost the brain’s remarkable regenerating capacity, known as plasticity—the ability for the old dog to learn new tricks and physically reshape the brain while doing it.

A pioneer of plasticity research, Michael Merzenich, says, “It’s the willingness to leave the comfort zone that is key to keeping the brain new.”

THE BEST GOALS ARE INTERNAL

One of the most powerful pieces of curiosity is that it is an intrinsic goal. You do it just to do it. You act unconditionally. You dive in to a new activity because of its inherent interest to you. Most motivation is externally driven—like money, beauty, status. These goals only give us a brief bump in happiness, and then we have to go get more of it. This is because external goals are based on outside approval, what others think, so they don’t stick. We don’t really buy them. Intrinsic goals, on the other hand, go to the bottom line of your core needs—autonomy, competence, and connection with others.

These three needs are at the core of a fabulous framework for well-being and gratification developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester. When we act for reasons that allow choice, the ability to feel effective, and a chance to connect with others in an authentic way for an intrinsic goal, we are gratified, and that sets off the dance of dopamine in our brain.

Curiosity is the ultimate intrinsic drive. When you decide to search out an answer to a question on the Internet or decide to take a dance class and see that you don’t have two left feet, you are satisfying internal longings and the mandate of your brain to get out and learn. You are writing the script of your life, which is the overriding need we all have to participate in our world. Let's take a look at a few ways we can start doing this more often.

JUMP-STARTING CURIOSITY

5 Ways to Boost Your Curiosity in 2018:

1. Ask more questions. Anyone you speak to is a potential lead to something fun or riveting. Ponder why and how more often. What are they doing for fun?

2. Follow the learning. What do you want to know more about?
Try new things. Put yourself in situations that are out of your normal orbit, and instead of dismissing them, say, “What if I tried that?” Ask yourself, What have I tried lately?

3. Get out there. Physically exiting the control bubble exposes you to new stimuli and sources of curiosity. Identify two hobbies you would like to try, and when you will try them. Travel more often. It's the home of new data. Everything is novel around you. You notice your world, which means you remember it.

4. Research idle musings. Follow up on that thought. It's your inner discovery agent leading you to interests and affinities. People who have interests find life interesting.

5. Avoid jadedness. The seen-it-all-pose of why-bother is the kiss of death for curiosity. 

Brain scientist Gregory Berns says there are two key elements to long-term fulfillment: novelty and challenge. Both lead to the payoffs of internal growth and satisfaction that come from answering the call to know and grow. Let’s stretch out in 2018, be more curious, and have something in the memory bank when we look back on 2018 next year.

For details on how to find more meaningful engagement at work and in life, explore my work-life balance training, classes, and coaching, the step of which is to click one of the buttons below.

YOU DON'T SEE a lot of dogs running corporations or doing brain surgery, but in some ways they are a lot smarter than humans. Take, for instance, how they respond to a stressful event, say, a neighbor and his dog from up the block passing by the perimeter of your house. Your dog gets a whiff of that intruder, and bam! Let the barking begin.

This makes dogs great security guards and sometimes the bane of neighbors. When the dog reacts, its ancient defense mechanism, the amygdala—the same organ that sets off human fight-or-flight—goes off with the timeless trigger built to insure survival through instantaneous recognition of danger and immediate response.

LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED

Now what happens after the stranger dog has gone on to sniff the tree trunks, grass, and hydrants blocks away, or heads home for some Kibbles 'N Bits? Does your dog keep barking for another two hours? Two days? Two weeks? Two months? Two years? No way. The dog drops the event like an old chew toy. It's like it never happened. 

That’s what makes dogs smarter than humans. Because we keep barking long after the stressful event is over. We hang on to the stress, clinging to the undertow of emotions.

But we don't have to. We have the power to shut off stressful events right after they happen and avoid turning them into false beliefs we ruminate about for months on end, something we learn in my work life-balance and stress management training programs.

Cutting stress off at the pass after it goes off is crucial, because if we don’t, the emotions triggered by our ancient defense equipment—which isn’t designed for the social stressors of the modern world—will feed your brain catastrophic thoughts. A part of your brain thinks you’re going to die that second, which is pretty catastrophic. These thoughts form into a false story we tell ourselves that drives the stress reaction.

YOU CONTROL HOW LONG THE STRESS LASTS

Because they are in our head, we think the catastrophic thoughts are true. The longer they remain unchallenged, the more we think about them over and over, which convinces us that the false beliefs and worst-case scenarios are valid. Then we’re stuck with them for days, weeks, months, and, yes, even years. 

Managing stress is a function of perceived control over demands, known as cognitive appraisal, how you weigh the threat. Stress is relative, in other words, to how much control you feel over demands. You can reframe the story of the threat to one that is controllable.

The fact is, you control quite a bit more than you know. You control how long the emotional reaction lasts and the story that sets off the emotions with the stress response.

It’s not the external event that causes stress; it’s your reaction to it, the story you tell yourself about the stressful event. The false story set off by the caveman brain—I'll be fired for that missed sale—can be countermanded if we can take the canine cue and drop the whole thing.

This is something we can do by creating a new, factual story in which the rational mind of the 21st century brain can take back control from the clutches of the ancient brain. When stress is activated, the perceived threat streams straight to the neurons in the original brain, the limbic system and its chief sentinel, the amygdala, hub of the emotional brain, bypassing the prefrontal cortex and hijacking our modern faculties.

We have to be able to catch ourselves when we feel the emotions of stress go off and reframe the story by waking up our modern, analytical brain.

ARGUE WITH YOURSELF

This means we have to argue with ourself and dispute the false beliefs set off by the fight-or-flight response. How do we do that? First, we identify the false story that triggered the danger signal. What thought pushed your button and made your ancient brain feel you are about to die?

What made you feel you couldn’t cope or handle something, which is the caveman brain's instant trigger, something beyond coping capacity? What form did the imminent demise take? I'm never going to get over that criticism. (You will.) If I can't get it all done, I'm going to lose my job. (No, you won't). These are exaggerations, and you can overcome them.

Next, round up the evidence of what happened, looking at the basic facts, and determine what the most likely story is, not the most catastrophic. What other causes are there for the event other than the worst-case scenario?

One of the things that fans the exaggerated thoughts of the stress response is that we take the event as permanent and personal, which jacks up fear or embarrassment by making everything appear hopeless and directed at you personally.

NEVER TAKE IT PERSONALLY

To escape these boxes and drop the event as adeptly as a cocker spaniel, we need to see the situation as changeable, specific to factors that only happened in this instance, and not take it personally.

Things happen in the world. You live in the world, so things happen to you. Taking things personally unleashes emotions, ego, and an irrational state that blinds us to the fact that taking things personally is a self-infliction.

Then you create a new story. Write it out on a piece of paper or put it on a screen, showing how you are going to solve this challenge going forward.

Say there’s a tough deadline causing you to think you can never meet it. You tell yourself you can handle it, because you always wind up handling it in the end. I can do it by unloading other to-do's that aren't as much of a priority, getting more support, delegating, changing aspects of the deliverables, negotiating more time, breaking it down into daily chunks I can do first thing each morning, or whatever reason you can find. What's your new story to solve the stressor, something you're going to take action on?

The key to the practice is catching yourself in the act of stress, so you can use your modern brain to find out what’s under the stress, what’s under that, and so on until you have unmasked the bogus belief, which lets your brain know that it’s not a life-or-death emergency.

When your brain knows the alarm is false, the stress response stops in three minutes. You have to shut off stress before it can entrench false beliefs that lead to dire ruminations that keep you self-inflicting for weeks and months on end.

As a reminder of your new role model, purchase a chew toy from your local pet store and put it on your desk. When stress goes off, grab that toy and drop it, symbolizing the canine approach—or go after the false story and create a new one that makes you as smart as a Yorkshire.

For details on our stress management and work-life balance training programs for your team or organization and tools to control reactions, emotions, and excess barking, click the button below. 

HUMANS HAVE an unfortunate knack for getting in our own way. We tend to specialize in unforced errors—false beliefs, delusions, and habits that undercut the indispensable tool that keeps us from self-inflicting more sabotage: impulse control.

More and more of us are losing it, and with it, the ability to regulate impulsivity, which means we are also losing the discipline to stay on task, avoid temptations, manage stress, and even process thoughts while sleeping. 

It used to be that impulse control issues were confined to children and adults with psychiatric conditions or substance abuse, but these days it’s infecting a whole bunch of us, thanks to the siege of unbounded devices and interruptions. The more interruptions you have, the more a part of your executive attention function that regulates impulse control, known as effortful control, is eroded.

CAN'T HELP OURSELVES

In other words, the more we check email or Facebook posts, the more we have to check them. You can see the impulse control deficit everywhere—from colleagues who don’t hear a word you’re saying because they are glued to their phones, to family members AWOL on devices at the dinner table, to oblivious text walkers blithely walking against a red light, to what I saw recently at the gym. Every single person in view was staring at their phones, some trying to do exercises on the machines while holding onto the sacred device with one hand. It’s like mass hypnosis, Invasion of the Mind Snatchers.

And speaking of snatched minds, researchers say that, if you default to your device every spare moment, when you sleep at night, you won’t have any thoughts to process. Sleep helps us find patterns and solutions to problems, but the catch is you have to have thoughts in your head during the day to have anything to process at night. Device reflex preempts the thinking and musing needed process events.

Digital and mobile devices are wonderful tools, but there is a price for abusing them. Researchers like Gayle Porter of Rutgers have found that technology is as addicting as any substance. After all, what is the definition of addiction? It’s the inability to regulate impulsivity—and an obsessive compulsion to engage over and over in an activity of instant gratification. Sound familiar?

Temple University researchers Henry Wilmer and Jason Chein found that excessive use of mobile devices is associated with weakened ability to delay gratification and increased impulsive behavior. The constant default to notifications, bongs, chirps, and chimes plays havoc with self-regulatory and cognitive control that support goal-directed behaviors.

The study discovered that mobile technology habits, “such as frequent checking, are driven most strongly by uncontrolled impulses and not by the desire to pursue rewards.” Compulsive device use, then, isn’t triggered as much by the positive reinforcement of an email response, but by an irresistible urge—due to impulse control malfunction.

SHRINKING ATTENTION SPANS 

Impulse control is central to attention, our chief productivity tool. As self-regulation capacity is reduced, so is the attention span. This creates a constant need to shift to the next quick escape/stimulation and away from anything that requires effort and discipline.

The result is high distractibility, multitasking, impatience and flitting from one thing to the next in a pattern known as Attention Deficit Trait. It’s not a condition you are born with, such as Attention Deficit Disorder; it’s a byproduct of information overload and interruptions that overwhelm the brain’s attentional faculties and wind up mimicking that condition.

When impulse control is compromised, it doesn’t just affect email checking. It undermines ability to regulate any habit you may have, whether it’s Jim Beam, chocolate, or outbursts of anger. The habit formation cells in the brain actually grow larger and the goal centers shrink.

Paying attention is all about a goal. You want to do something, learn something, experience something, but you can’t do it unless you marshal your self-regulation equipment to hold off all the distractions while you focus. That takes effort and effort takes impulse control, more of it than you might even imagine.

This is because all the tasks we do every day are dependent on a very fragile tool: working memory. Also known as short-term memory, working memory is the faculty we use to get anything done. It’s a maximum of three to four thought chunks that we can hang on to for only a handful of seconds. Without a functioning impulse control mechanism, it’s very hard to keep those thoughts together. Impulsive phone and email checking and interruptions blow up working memory as they detonate attention and effort.

THE SIREN OF INSTANT GRATIFICATION

It’s not only working memory that is at risk, though, when impulse control systems are down. There are more than 1.3 million car accidents every year caused by people on their phones while driving. Research shows the dynamic behind those tragedies—people who engage in impulsive behavior are less apt to delay actions for a later reward (Hayashi, Russ, Wirth, 2015).

Without impulse control, instant gratification is the guiding instinct. As the word “instant” implies, there is no real thinking here, only reflex. That effectively eliminates rational decision-making. It leads to what Nobel-prize winning researcher Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1” thinking—impulsive, shallow, jump-off-the-cliff, last thing in the memory. And it’s wrong a lot of the time.

Time pressure and rushing, another habitual behavior in the workplace egged on by the unmanaged use of devices, also cause a loss of impulse control. Instead of analyzing the situation, brains skip analysis and leap headlong into rash decisions.

Most of the rushing today is false urgency. Everything appears urgent when we haven’t taken the time to think about what is urgent and what isn’t. It’s important to counter rush mode with “System 2” thinking, which Kahneman calls “slow thinking,” which allows the analytical brain to weigh all the factors before a decision. Is it an emergency or a speed trap?

Without impulse control, we are at the mercy of our emotional reactions to events, which drives stress. The data show that interruptions make every task you do seem more difficult by jacking up the aggravation load 105% (Bailey, Konstan).

Preserving impulse control is essential, then, to avoid destructive decisions and habits, protect working memory, and reduce stress and burnout. How do we do that? The humans have to be in charge of the devices, instead of the other way around. Information management is key. Turn off email and cell phones and check them at designated times. Create an Email Etiquette and Norms Guide, something I help develop in trainings for my work-life balance, stress management, and time management clients. That puts you in control.

Stop multitasking, another habit that blitzes self-regulation and drives impulsivity. Increase attention through activities shown to build focus in the prefrontal cortex—mindfulness, chess, learning a language or instrument, and spend more time in nature, which takes attenton off anxieties and increases positive mood. 

Substitute a good habit for a bad one. Every time impulse strikes, stop yourself and practice delayed gratification. You'll get to it when you are not in your car, after other priorities are taken care of, when you, not your inner saboteur, are in charge.

For details on how our work-life balance, stress management, and time management employee training can help restore impulse control, cut stress, and build productivity on your team, click the button below:

This is the first in a series of articles highlighting the results of key studies on work-life balance, stress management, and productivity.

THE RECENT decision by IBM, a leader in remote work and flexible schedules, to bring many of its teleworkers back into the office has left human resource experts, not to mention employees, scratching their heads. IBM joined companies such as Yahoo and Aetna, which have made the same move.

Why would a savvy organization like IBM want to roll back flexibility when countless studies have shown that it improves performance and job satisfaction and that the core need of everyone is more autonomy, not less? 

GROWING MORE FLEXIBLE

Flexibility is particularly important to a big chunk of the current workplace: millennials. Some 80% cite it at the top of their list of employer requirements. A recent Gallup study shows that telework is not going away; it’s booming. Some 43% of employees in the U.S. say they can work remotely at least part of the time. That’s a 4% increase since 2012.

Studies have shown that flexibility increases perceived work-life balance, which in turn reduces the stress of commuting, marital conflict, and money spent on childcare, opens up the pool of talent beyond the immediate geography of the company office, increases hours available to work and quality time to think without interruptions, allows employees to not burn up sick days while taking care of an ill child or aging parent (only 22% of sick days are used because the employee is sick), and boosts family time and productivity.

Some say that IBM’s recent lackluster revenue might be behind the call for employees to come back to the office. Others say that better collaboration requires more physical proximity. The strategy certainly didn’t work in the case of Yahoo.

NAVIGATING THE BREAK POINT

I thought it would be a good time to look at what the research actually says about flexibility—in particular one influential study using IBM employees as its subjects. It’s the first of an ongoing series on the Working Smarter blog here spotlighting key studies in the work-life balance, stress management, productivity, and engagement arenas. This particular study, “Finding an Extra Day a Week: The Positive Influence of Perceived Job Flexibility on Work and Family Life Balance” (Hill, Hawkins, Ferris, Weitzman 2001) examined the impact of flexible place and time on a cross-section of 6,451 IBM employees, and deserves more notice.

The study devised a clever gauge to measure the impact of flexible schedules on perceived work-family imbalance. They measured the number of work hours per week when employees experienced difficulty managing work and home responsibilities. They defined it as “the number of weekly paid work hours at which 50% of the sample responded they had a difficult time or very difficult time balancing the demands of their work and family life.” They called this the “break point.”

They also measured the weekly hours at which 25% of employees had trouble managing their work-life—the “balance point.” They did their calculations for each work group by setting work-family balance as equal to .50 or .25 and then measured those with and without “flexplace” and with and without flextime.

The researchers found, not surprisingly, that longer work hours corresponded to lower work-life balance, and flexibility was associated with higher perceived work-life balance. Only 28% of employees with flexplace and flextime had difficulty with work-life balance, compared to 46% of those with neither of those options. Twenty-nine percent of those with a choice of where they worked had trouble with work-family balance, while 40% of those without that option had work-family difficulty. The difference was larger for those with flextime. Just 29% of those with flextime had work-family problems, while 44% without it did.

Another interesting finding is that for hourly workers, who had the most rigid schedules, only 18% had work family difficulties if they had flexplace and flextime, compared to 42% without it. The biggest advantage was for parents with preschoolers. The work-family break point for women with small children was 43 work hours per week, but without flexplace and time, it was 32 hours a week.

FLEX SCHEDULES INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY

We have known for a long time that flexibility in hours and locales not only increases employee satisfaction, but it also results in more hours worked, i.e., increased productivity. The same was true in this study. As the authors stated, “Employees with perceived flexibility in the timing and location of work were able to work longer hours than those without perceived flexibility before experiencing a difficulty in balancing their work and family life.

“For example, the break point and balance point for those with perceived flexibility in the timing of work were 60 hours per week and 44 hours per week, respectively. The break point and balance point for those without perceived flexibility in the timing of work were 52 hours per week and 41 hours per week, respectively.”

They concluded that the business payoff of perceived flexibility in the timing of work is a big one. It allows an employee to work “an extra day of work” before work-life balance becomes difficult—60 hours with flextime, 52 hours without flextime.

The data is compelling. Remote work and flextime work, which is why more and more companies are opting to offer it. We know this makes sense intuitively. People who feel they have more control over their work schedules have more perceived control over their lives. It’s lack of control that drives stress and overwhelm and the “spillover effect”of strain on work-family, as it’s called in the research.

The study spells it out. “Perceived job flexibility, given a reasonable workweek, enables more employees to have work-life balance (personal and family benefit) and also enables employees to work longer hours before impacting work-family balance (business benefit).”

That sounds like a big win-win to me. Regardless of IBM’s decision and that of a few others, the trajectory is for more flexibility to keep talent on board, particularly among millennial staffs and management. The digital tools and collaborative software, from Slack to Base Camp, make it possible to maximize performance while allowing employees to feel more effective and self-responsible in the process.

If you would like details on our work-life balance employee training programs and how they can increase your team's performance and work-life survey scores, please click on the button below:

IT'S THE METRIC at the heart of every company: valuation. Corporations and startups alike battle the competitive marketplace every day to increase the estimate of their brand or service’s monetary value. There are legions of financial experts, management teams, investors, entrepreneurs, pundits, and small business owners assessing financial worth, but there’s another valuation that doesn’t attract much attention: that of the human resources behind those companies and their prices.

On the balance sheet, in fact, employees are viewed as liabilities, as an external element to the operations, part of accounts payable or wages payable. Clearly, there would be no company but for all the people who make it fly, which makes them very valuable—indeed, invaluable to any organization. Studies show the more we can communicate employee value, the more the monetary yardstick will grow.

FROM PAYCHECK TO PARTNER

This is because the most important key to employee engagement is a sense of being valued by the company. Call it the Worth Ethic. When employees feel valued, their motivation changes, from collecting a paycheck to partner in the mission. That makes them want to go the extra mile and expend the definition of engagement, discretionary effort.

The shift from external motivation (paycheck) to internal goals (service, excellence, challenge) means that effort no longer has to be whipped up from the outside; it’s self-generated, the only way you can have engagement, anywaty, which has to be come from within.

Researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester have documented that the usual external reward system motivates effort only when there’s a reward. When you run out of pay raises and promotions, there’s nothing left to incentivize, since external rewards motivate only the need for more external rewards, whose effects are ephemeral. You get a quick bump in happiness, and then it’s gone,

The real motivator is internal motivation, which satisfies core psychological needs, such as autonomy and competence. Those are the ultimate arbiters of self-value. They gratify self-mastery needs that are self-generating and self-propelling.

How do we unleash this self-propulsion engine? Consistent and a new kind of communication, development programs, and words and especially deeds that show employees they are appreciated and an important part of the organization. Let’s take a look at some of the most effective ways to increase employee's sense of feeling valued and the job satisfaction that follows.

SIX KEYS TO EMPLOYEE VALUATION

1. Offer development programs. The first step for clients I work with is a work-life balance program, one that shows staff you care and want to help them grow. When people are given tools to work smarter, manage stress, and feel like they are taking care of their personal responsibilities too, they feel valued. Learning and progress gratify their core needs and increase the value of their skill-set.

More effective, confident, less stressed minds change attitudes. And company value. In one study of large companies (Arthur) work-life balance initiatives were shown to increase shareholder value by some $60 million per company. No doubt, that is because more discretionary effort leads to increased productivity. A Federal Reserve study found that work-life balance policies boosted productivity 10.6%, while a report on telework saw a gain in productivity of 30% (Pitt-Catsouphes, Marchetta).

Development programs are a signal that you want to solve bottlenecks and create more effective work practices. Turning down the pressure and increasing skill-sets makes the team feel you are looking out for them. Beyond that, employee training is one of the key levers of employee engagement. When employees are given opportunities to learn and better their craft, they reciprocate with more commitment and performance.

2. Meet with employees one-on-one more often. Everyone is busy, but making time to connect with staff is essential. People who are the least engaged say their managers have no time to meet with them. Among engaged employees, 87% know their managers well. Drop by and find out what’s going on with your employees. What are the pressing issues? How’s life outside the job? What are they excited about in their life?

3. Recognize skill and competence. Saying thank you more often is great, but it’s even more effective when you recognize the skills of the person that were brought to bear on the task. As we have learned, competence is a core need in everyone. We have to feel effective, and when we do, we feel great.

When you want to give someone props for something, tell them you really like the way they did that project. That goes to the mastery drive and encourages more of it. You can vary your delivery methods for this message by using handwritten thank-you notes from time to time, targeted to their competence and effectiveness. The personal touch has even more salience in a tech world.

4. Speak a different language. When you look at the science of engagement and intrinsic motivation, it’s easy to see why only 32% of the workforce is engaged, according to Gallup. Most managers are too busy to speak to employees and when they do, they use the wrong style of language to evoke engagement—controlling language, using pressure and threats.

That is the opposite of the autonomy need and makes people feel forced and controlled. To unleash engagement, the language has to be more informational, promoting choice, offering rationales for tasks, and providing positive feedback.

5. Solicit participation, ideas, and solutions. The overarching need of humans on this planet is participation. We are not here to be spectators. We are here to be a part of things.

Lack of involvement in the organization drives boredom, learned helplessness, and a withdrawal to presenteeism, in which someone is physically present but mentally AWOL. Encourage employee ideas, feedback and solutions. Companies who invest in employee involvement had a return on investment of 19% in a study by USC’s Edward Lawler.

6. Use active listening and constructive responding. No one is going to feel valuable if you’re talking to them while gazing obsessively at your phone. Leave your devices behind or turn off the sound on them before you meet with your colleague or staffer.

Use active listening techniques, such as making sure you are facing the person, making eye contact, and listening intently, to let them know you are focused on them and what they have to say. When it comes to responding, avoid the active destructive mode of pointing out the negative or passive constructive mode of responding in generalities.

Opt for constructive responding by asking questions and offering authentic, enthusiastic support. Yes, there are times to point out negative issues, but that can be done while reinforcing the overall positive trajectory and what can help that going forward.

Expressions of value have to be consistent and convicing, so let them know more than once a year that you like the job they are doing and why. A little acknowledgement goes a long way to increasing the valuation that's most important to all who can affect the bottom line. And that's priceless.

THE SIGN on the copy editor’s desk said, “Next mood swing in 8 seconds.” It always brought a smile to my face, and it was pretty darn close to the truth in the war room of the copy desk at the Los Angeles Times (where I once worked), where editors have to negotiate last-minute story edits and be the last line of defense on errors before publication, all while racing against the clock of the daily deadline.

Mood swings aren’t confined to newspaper editors, though. They are a fact of life for all of us. Our mood is highest on Friday and Saturday (for some reason), lowest on Monday. Mood tends to be high in the morning and low at night. Weather can affect mood, as can headlines, things people say, traffic, and too many other influences to list here.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Each of us cycles through multiple moods several times a day. Depending on how we feel, we may be gung-ho to take on a project or be immobilized by a pessimistic funk. Like stress, moods are often reactions to events and operate behind the curtain of consciousness, pumping us up, shutting us down, leaving us at the mercy of whatever feeling has bubbled to the surface.

Moods have a big impact on what we get done during the day, how much we get done, the decisions we make, and the stress that we feel. Researcher Marcial Losada found in a study that looked at the behavior of business people in meetings (using a two-way mirror for observation), that those with positive mood, who asked questions, didn’t go on the defensive, and used positive framing in their language, were more productive employees, had better sales, and got along with others better.

Maybe we should pay more attention, in that case, to the emotional levers of mood, since they have such an impact on performance, motivation, interest, persistence, and satisfaction, among many others. These are some of the reasons that my work-life balance, stress maangement, and time management employee training programs teach the power of optimism and the resilience that comes from it.

Without awareness of our mood or how to change it, we wind up little more than a marionette to the urgings of autopilot emotions set off by events out of our control.

We’re all familiar with how things go results-wise when the day gets off on the wrong foot. Everything seems harder, takes forever, as intrusive frustration, sadness, or anxiety gets in the way of what you’re doing. The tone tends to spread throughout the day.

THE POSITIVE BIRD CATCHES THE WORM

Researchers have found that the opposite is also true: Get off to a good start in your workday, and more good things happen. Nancy Rothbard of the Wharton School of Business and Steffanie Wilk of Ohio State found in a study conducted with customer service representatives that those who started out the day in a calm or happy mood generally stayed that way. Interaction with customers didn’t reduce that emotional state, but increased it.

On the other side of the spectrum, people who began their mornings in a bad mood finished the day that way. Not surprisingly, those in a negative state were 10% less productive than their positive colleagues.

Negative emotions don’t do much to win over customers. They keep us caught up inside our head and ego, which makes it hard to empathize, share, or connect with others. Meanwhile, positive emotions are a magnet for others. Studies show the visible sign of optimism in your demeanor, known as positive affect, is a hallmark of all kinds of success, from business to dating. Who wants to hang out with a grump? Optimists make an average of $25,000 more per year than pessimists 

In the same way that moods imperceptibly latch onto us, they also spread those emotions, positive or negative, to the people we are working with or trying to sell a product to. Emotions and the expressions of them in the tone of voice or facial expressions of others are highly contagious, thanks to mirror neurons in the brain designed to simulate the emotions of others. It's a social bonding tool.

The positive emotions we generate set off those same emotions via mirror neurons in others. When you’re in a negative or pessimistic frame, that triggers a similar attitude in others, which comes back at you to reinforce an unhappy or irritated state.

OPEN ROAD OR BUNKER

The work of Barbara Fredrickson, author of Positivity and the leading researcher in positive emotions, has shown that positive emotions broaden and build us. We are more open, take more initiative, meet new people, take more risks, feel more confident, bounce back faster. A pessimistic state reverses the outward direction, and we wind up bottled up in an internal bunker, distracted by frustrations, anxieties, cynicism, or fears. The focus is on me, me, me, and that shreds our chief productivity tool, attention, as we retreat into the fallacies of the ego.

Moods are ephemeral. They come, they go. We don’t have to be their prisoner. We don’t have to take them seriously or have them put the kibosh on starting a new project, reaching out to others, or enjoying our lives. We can change our mood in an instant. Think of something you should be grateful for that you haven’t been paying enough attention to, and a down mood disappears. The experience of gratitude wipes the surface ego-clinging emotions clean.

GETTING OFF TO A GOOD START

How do we get off to a positive start each morning? It starts the night before. The science of work recovery shows the way. If you don’t get rid of the stress and thoughts about the demands of the day when you get home from work, that stress and negative emotions follow you to work the next morning, researchers Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz report. When you recharge brain and body through activities that build positive mood, you go back to work the next day in a positive frame.

We all need work recovery strategies to detach ourselves psychologically from the events of the day. After-work recreational activities from running to going to the gym and relaxation processes such as reading, listening to music or meditating can help you make that break. The most effective tool to get mental separation is through mastery experiences, activities that allow you to learn and increase your core need of competence—aikiko, a dance class, playing an instrument. You feed your core identity this way, not just your performance identity at work, and that allows you to feel good about yourself no matter what happened at the office.

You can also do things in the morning before you start work that get you out of your head and into positive contact with others. Have a light conversation with the barrista, the garage attendant, your neighbor and you can get an attitude adjustment.

What music makes you feel good? Use it on the way to work or during the day to lift you up. The grea,t retired voice of the Los Angelee Dodgers, Vin Scully, would play opera and classical music in his car on the way to the broadcast booth to sustain that genial spirit beloved by millions.

The lesson of a host of behavioral science is that being buffeted around by stress and moods isn't very smart. We are more productive and happier when we are proactively doing something to manage the negative and accentuate the positive. We are not tree stumps. We can make choices that change our world for the better. 

To get your team off to a good start and stay that way, click the button below for details on my work-life balance and stress management training programs.

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM on what makes for productive work often settles on the endurance factor, or quantity of hours. It’s as if the workplace is an Ironman triathlon in pants. The quantity yardstick plays right into the hands of a work behavior that is the opposite of what any employer would want: workaholism.

This is because the conventional wisdom on productivity is dead wrong, as in deceased-human-being wrong. As burnout scholar Christina Maslach puts it, “A workaholic will die before an alcoholic.”

WORKAHOLICS AREN'T MORE PRODUCTIVE

For most alcoholics, it’s a long demise from cirrhosis of the liver or alcohol-related hepatitis. For workaholics, the end comes quickly in the prime of life, courtesy of stress-induced blood clots and heart attacks. It’s not a very productive outcome.

Researchers have found no positive correlation between workaholic behavior—long hours, feeling you should be working every waking minute, overwork—and productivity. Melissa Clark of the University of Georgia found in her metastudy on workaholism research that “even though workaholics may spend more time thinking about and physically engaging in work than the average worker, this may not be of any benefit to their employer.”

As someone who coaches and trains employees to work in a sustainable and more productive way through work-life balance, stress management, and time management programs, I have had the opportunity to see up close why workaholics don’t do their companies any favors. They have high levels of stress, which undermine complex decision-making and cause crisis mentality, time urgency, bunker mentality, mistakes, and a raft of medical problems resulting in high absenteeism and medical bills. They think no one can do the job as well as they can, so they can't delegate or trust, causing bottlenecks, conflicts, and missed deadlines.

Stress constricts the brain to the perceived crisis of the moment, so you can’t see the big picture, and the ruminating thoughts it sets off serve as a constant distraction from whatever it is you’re trying to do. The workaholic’s stress and time frenzy is also highly contagious, spreading anxiety and frazzle throughout the team or department.

DRIVEN BY NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

The very motivation of the workaholic is at odds with employee engagement. While engaged employees get intrinsic enjoyment from going the extra mile and fulfilling inner needs such as excellence or service, the workaholic is driven by negative feelings about work—that he or she should be going overboard. Guilt and perfectionism drive the workaholic, and both are constant stress triggers, self-inflicting pressure and tension beyond the demands of the job and causing friction with others.

Clark found in her research that “workaholism was related to the experience of negative discrete emotions (i.e., guilt, anxiety, anger and disappointment) at work and home, whereas work engagement was related to the experience of positive discrete emotions (i.e., joviality, attentiveness and self-assurance) at work and home" (Clark, Michel, Stevens Howell, & Scruggs, 2013). 

The difference in outlook has a big impact on the organization and the individual. People driven by negative emotions and pessimism have been shown to have reduced productivity, sales success, and rapport with others on the job, reports Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina.

In other words, proactive engagement is generated from within and satisfies core psychological needs as a result, while workaholism is a chase for external approval that can never be attained, since there is always the next item on the to-do perfectly list or jump on the instant you finish the last task. Engagement fuels positive emotions; workaholic behavior negative emotions.

The motivation behind workaholism, in essence, is a self-inflicted inadequacy, which can help us see why it’s a hazard to work, relationships, and home life. It forces you to prove worth beyond what’s needed in a futile exercise that runs over colleagues, performance quality, family, and health.

WORKAHOLISM UNDERCUTS ACHIEVEMENT

The term “workaholism” has been hijacked over the years to mean somebody who works hard, to the point experts had to stop using the word and switch over to “overperformance,” instead. It’s a more accurate definition, focusing on the act of not knowing when to say when and the poor time management and non-boundary-setting that drives it.

On so many levels, then, the workaholic undercuts his or her very reason for being—achievement. Quality results are not being accomplished—in fact, the opposite is happening, with output the result of fractured attention and a frazzled, overwhelmed work style. And you can never take satisfaction from what you get done, because there's always more to do.

Making things worse is the fact that the workaholic can't step back and recharge or even enjoy a free moment--since he or she hears the voice to get busy in any quiet moment. Free time is the engine of energy, focus, and productivity, so jamming it with more work cuts off critical performance resources.

This is a complete misunderstanding of how the body works. Periods of activation set off by the demands we face each day have to be countered with the parasympathetic system’s built-in remedies of rest and maintenance. If there’s no recovery, the stress builds cumulatively day to day, taking us down the road to the burnout treadmill.

SUDDEN DEATH

Which brings us back to the physical threat of workaholism. How does it take you out of the sentient human being column so quickly? Let’s take a look at how the condition plays out in Japan, a country with a long tradition of punishing work hours. The Japanese salaryman is known for laboring long into the night, and stories abound of people doing 100-hour weeks having heart attacks at the office. They have a term for it: karoshi, or death by overwork.

There are some 2300 official karoshi deaths each year (you have to have worked 100 hours or more of overtime per month for the family to qualify to receive karoshi benefits, about $20,000), but Japan’s National Defence Council for Victims of Karoshi says the true number might be a high as 10,000 people annually.

People who work too much tend to eat badly, not get exercise, and have very high stress levels, and along with that, high blood pressure and cardiovascular problems. A Finnish study that examined 603,000 working people in the U.S., Europe, and Australia reported in 2015 that working 55 hours or more per week doubles the risk of heart attack and increases the risk of a stroke by a third.

Behaviors that drive workaholism, such as impatience, irritability, perfectionism, and anger lead to chronic stress, high blood pressure, and clogged arteries, and it’s a sudden trip to the ER or mortuary. Sure, there are alcoholics who have a quick exit, too, say, from auto accidents, but the majority will raise lots of glasses over the years while the workaholic has long since departed.

What if you love your work? Can you still wind up with a premature departure from the planet? Yes. Brian Curin, co-founder of the Flip-Flop Shop, a footwear retailer, started feeling out of sorts after working as an around-the-clock entrepreneur for years. As the boss, he had control, something that helps mitigate stress. Yet he felt he better get checked out. He had his blood pressure assessed and did an EKG. He still didn’t feel right when he ran to stay in shape, feeling sluggish and a little breathless.

He went back to the doctor and did a treadmill stress test. Good thing, too, because his physician looked at the result and told him he had to go into surgery that minute for a quadruple bypass. He was 39 years old.

Don’t be a hero or a martyr. Workaholism is a lose-lose for work and life.

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JOB BURNOUT is an accident. No one aspires to a state of exhaustion so complete you don't want to get out of bed. If we knew ahead of time that we were headed down this road, we could change course. But we don’t know that, because the chronic stress that drives burnout directs us down an unconscious track of mechanical momentum.

We don’t think about managing the demands that are pushing our buttons, we just keep reacting to them on autopilot on a route I call the burnout treadmill. Just keep going until the paramedics arrive. Unfortunately, they are arriving so we need a healthier approach to how we work and react to pressure, stress, and other people, and that means a conscious understanding of how we respond to burnout triggers and how certain personality traits and habits factor in to the equation. Stress management has to be as routine as brushing teeth.

BRAKE FOR BURNOUT

To prevent auto crashes, we moderate speed and make sure the brakes are working. To keep the accident of burnout at bay, we have act preventitively too, by putting the brakes on uncontested stress and perfectionism, and what researchers call self-undermining, from bad coping habits to lack of communication 

Most of the people I work with in my coaching practice suffer from burnout. They come to me after a long period of extreme work hours, workloads beyond their capacity, and high chronic stress from demands that have overwhelmed their coping systems, touching off anxiety, cynicism, and fear about what the future holds.

They are not slackers; in fact, they are the opposite. They have worked so hard that they have gone beyond what’s healthy or needed to be productive in their work. They may think they are the only one who can get the job done right and don't delegate. Often, they associate endurance, quantity of hours on the job, with performance, when in the knowledge economy, it’s all about how fresh the chief productivity tool—attention—is. I meet them when the exhaustion, drop in performance, and medical issues tell them they can’t go on anymore like this. 

Burnout is what happens when chronically high demands meet low to no resources or support. The final stage of chronic stress, burnout is a condition of accumulation, unresolved stress that piles up day after day for months and years until it drains all coping resources—emotional, physical, and mental. It’s easy to get caught up in because chronic stress floods the body with adrenaline that masks the physiological impacts and makes us think we’re handling it, at least for a while—until we’re not. 

We're left in a state of chronic exhaustion, futility, and feeling a lack of personal accomplishment. Not only do you not have energy to do the job or live your life with joy, but you also feel like there’s no point to doing either. Cynicism and emotional distancing, withdrawal, and a host of medical issues follow.

CONTEST THE STRESS

Studies show a high incidence of depression, anxiety, and alcohol dependence in burnout cases (Ahola, 2007). Burnout is also a factor in cardiovascular disease, diabetes (Melamed, Shirom, 2006), gastro-intestinal problems, and stroke.

On the performance side, burnout triggers higher absenteeism and turnover (Maslach 2001), and presenteeism. The body’s at the office but not much else. It takes longer to get tasks done because of low energy and attention levels, so productivity is reduced.

There are situational factors that trigger burnout—the structure of the work, unrealistic deadlines, excess workload, and insufficient reward or support—but also individual causes rooted in personality traits and our own responses (or lack of them) to demands. The key to not fall prey to reflex burnout triggers is to be aware of the daily issues that drive stress, and resolve, dispute, communicate, and adjust them so they don’t push your buttons.

We all have a job we have to do. Nothing we can do about that. But how we do our tasks is something we can change. When we make adjustments to how we do our tasks and how we respond to others, we turn off the engines of burnou, which thrive on lack of control. When we make little and big changes, delegate, ask for help, control devices, and find ways to feel more autonomous, we eliminate the festering root of burnout—helplessness.

Research shows that when we exercise acts of choice and flexibility, we satisfy one of our core needs, autonomy, an antidote to burnout (which thrives on futility and lack of agency). One study (Bakker, Demerouti, Euwema, 2005) found that employees who communicate often with supervisors, get regular feedback (something you can ask for), have social support, and feel more autonomy as a result can have high demands but not get burned out.

DO EXTRAVERTS GET BURNED OUT?

The key to managing the stress that drives burnout is increasing control over demands and the thoughts and self-talk that undermine us. That’s where we gain autonomy and make work-life less difficult. But we have to set boundaries, which are a success tool, studies show (Nash, Stevenson, 2004). We can’t be doing two hours of work email at home. We can’t reflexively do 12-hour days without asking what’s wrong with workflow, delegating, or time management. 

And we have to speak up. We have to let others know the situation is untenable. One of my clients told her boss that though she loved her job, the toll of burnout on her and her family was no longer something she could accept. Something had to change. The boss agreed and removed a person driving high stress from contact with her and gave her a month off with pay to regather her crashed resources.

Proaction is the way out of burnout. Keeping everything inside is the way to keep burnout going. This client is an introvert, but she was able to step up and communicate her needs. Studies show, by the way, that extraversion is negatively associated with burnout. So if extraverts tend to have less burnout than introverts, that is instructive data. People more inclined to talk about challenges and ask for adjustments feel more control over events, and that control reduces the helplessness of silence.

EXHAUSTION LEADS TO MORE EXHAUSTION

In a fascinating study, Arnold Bakker and Patricia Costa examined the individual side of burnout. They found that, “Employees with higher levels of daily exhaustion show self-undermining behavior…Chronically burned-out employees are less able to manage their own emotions, and more likely to encounter conflicts at work. These self-undermining behaviors all contribute to higher daily job demands.”

Bakker and Costa found too that high levels of daily exhaustion resulted in mistakes that had to be done over, which pushes schedules back, creates more time urgency, and more pressure in an ever-repeating cycle.

Researchers have found the best antidote to burnout is something every employer wants: employee engagement. People who feel they are valued and participants in the way the work is done don’t get burnout out. Burnout scholar Christina Maslach has reported that the key dimensions of burnout—exhaustion, cynicism, and lack of professional efficacy—are the polar opposite of engagement's main domains: vigor, dedication, and absroption. 

The autonomy support framework created by the University of Rochester’s Edward Deci and Richard Ryan is an ideal antidote to burnout. It brings more teamwork, satisfaction, and something else critical for anyone to do something that’s hard—the right kind of motivation, intrinsic motivation. When we work, not for the external payoff, but for internal goals such as service, challenge, excellence, or craft, we satisfy our core needs of autonomy, competence, and connection with others and don’t go down the track to isolation, alienation, and catastrophic thoughts that lead to burnout.

Attention, then, is our exit off the burnout treadmill. The more attention we have on how we work, the fewer emotional reactions and mechanical momentum that can self-undermine us. There is nothing more important to pay attention to than your health, so let’s all make sure we jump on the triggers that set us off and not give stress a pass or buy the bravado that we can “take it.” Or one day, you get taken by burnout.