Relevant Links
Science of well being course
The Science of Well-Being Course (Yale) | Coursera
ERI model
The Effort–Reward Imbalance Model - The Handbook of Stress and Health - Wiley Online Library
Related Episodes
#037 Finding purpose at work with Dean Tong
https://howtolive.life/ep37spotify
https://howtolive.life/ep37apple
Episode Transcript
The transcript is auto generated. There may be errors in transcription.
Aparna Dubey: Stress is really a response to a perceived threat and is short term. And once the stimulus passes, the stress shouldn't exist. But if the symptoms continue on an ongoing basis, regardless of a trigger.
It may be likely to be burn out. While some stress can be beneficial, because, all of us tend to operate at our best, potentially with some stress, but chronic stress can lead to burnout.
Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, shard Lal. This is episode 43. Today we are diving into a topic that has been on the mind of many lately. Burnout. You probably know that searches for burnout are at an all time high, But what exactly is burnout beyond just a buzzword? How can we differentiate it from exhaustion or stress? And most importantly, how can we recognize the signs of burnout and effectively deal with it as well as prevented in the future? That's the focus of our conversation today. We're going to approach this slightly differently.
A few months back I had a captivating conversation with my friend Aparna, who described her personal experience with burnout. It was through that conversation that I truly understood what burnout is. Aparna is a fan of the podcast, and when she suggested I cover the topic of burnout, she didn't stop there. She started listing names of experts I could interview, topics I could explore, and so on.
But then it struck me, Aparna herself is the. Perfect person to discuss this with. If she can articulate her experience the way she did during our conversation in that cafe, it would be incredibly valuable for all of you. So after a few months, we've convinced Aparna to join us for this conversation. I'm confident that many will relate to her experience. Let me provide a little background on Aparna. Aparna is a seasoned leader with the consumer goods industry with 18 years experience across the Asia-Pacific region. she's worked with top multinational, Zach Proctor and Gamble, and Kimberly Clarke.
A partner is an MBA from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management M. The bar often ranked number one in India. On top of her professional achievements. Aparna is also a devoted mother of two. From what I've observed, she embodies a growth mindset and is constantly reflecting on her experiences, always striving to evolve.
I'm really excited to have Aparna join us today. her insights will be incredibly valuable to all of us. Let's explore the world of burnout together. But before getting to the podcast, thank you for your support. With your support. We'll listen all over the world in over 110 countries. If you haven't already, please do consider subscribing.
do, consider giving us a rating as well. Thank you in advance. Now, here's the conversation.
Sharad Lal: Hi Aparna. Good afternoon. How are you doing this afternoon in Singapore?
Aparna Dubey: All well, it's a nice day in Singapore after what has been a blistering couple of weeks so it looks to be a good week.
Sharad Lal: Yeah, grateful for the weather, and thank you very much for coming to the show. A few months back we caught up for coffee and you were talking so passionately about discovering that you were burning out and then you did research and the changes that you made. We are gonna dig into all of that because burnout is such a big topic.
But before that, I want people to get a sense of you at work. So if you could describe yourself at work, what's your work style like, what's important to you? That'll give everyone the context.
Aparna Dubey: Firstly, thanks for having me on this podcast. Sharad, I've been an avid listener, so it's great to be here. And burn out is such an important topic. I hope that my experience can help others. Maybe they see themselves in it so happy to share what I've been through and some of my
learnings. How do I describe myself at work? it's a tough question, but often the simplest answer isn't how we explain things to kids. So I'm going to answer it this way. When my kids were younger and they often wanted me to be home with them, they would ask me, why do you need to go to work? And I've always told them it's because I really like working and I'm very good at my work.
And I think this is the essence really of me at work. I find what I do, very inspiring on a daily basis and very meaningful. I enjoy the everyday challenges. I like to believe that I'm good at what I do Over time. I think this has made them value my work too. In fact I'll, I'll tell you a funny story.
Once when my son was in nursery, I wasn't able to make it to school for an activity and he confidently told his teacher that, I wouldn't be coming to school because, his mom has an important job and a big meeting. So, I've, the incident has always stayed with me. And whenever I feel any mom guilt as some of us do, I remind myself that I actually don't need to because my kids don't see it that way, and my work's important to
them too.
Sharad Lal: What a wonderful story. you mentioned this earlier to me and I've found this story about the way your kid talked to the teachers. So fascinating. I've actually spoken it to other people as well, and it's helped them with mom guilt. So great story. you really love work and it's more like it's something you're passionate about.
It's not a means to an end, let's talk about the experience with burnout. So can you give us a context of your life and career at that point leading to burnout?
Aparna Dubey: Yes, absolutely. So a few years ago I was in a job that I absolutely loved. I was the regional marketing director for a loved consumer brand. I was learning new skills, delivering strong results, and leading a great team. What more could you ask for? But it also meant I was working long hours and traveling a lot.
I didn't really mind it because I could see the impact that my work was making. I was in a state of flow and really loving every moment, but at some point down the line, I started feeling exhausted, which for me is quite normal because I tend to work at pace and I'm fueled by this feeling of achievement.
And usually when this happens, I take a couple of days off, I disengage and I come back really feeling refreshed and raring to go. But this exhaustion seemed different because it continued and it always existed. So I told myself that I just really needed a holiday. It was December and we had this big family holiday to Australia coming up, which was fantastic because, December is a great time to recharge and I had a wonderful holiday, great family time, but when I returned back to office, I dreaded seeing the office building.
This was a new experience for me because for someone who's been skipping to work every day and looking forward to it, I was really surprised because I've never really felt that way before.
Sharad Lal: So when that experience happened, what did you think of it and what did you do next?
Aparna Dubey: I did what I always do, which is I tried harder. I just assumed that it was the daily stresses of life. So I just continued working harder, my usual routine, and then something else happened, which was really odd too. I was in a meeting and I remember reacting very cynically to one of the ideas being discussed in the meeting, and this actually really shocked me more than the exhaustion because as a person, I'm optimistic and energetic and rarely if ever cynical about anything.
Meanwhile, there were sort of other changes happening around me. Org structure, people changes, you know, the usual. So I figured it was time for me to move on.
Sharad Lal: as I understand, there were two things happening, you were shocked with the exhaustion earlier. You were shocked with the cynicism earlier, but you didn't kind of, you put it, you ignored it for a while. And other things were then happening at work.
There was, like you said, org structure changes. There were many other things happening at work because of those external things, you decided that it's time to move on. So
did you look for a new job or did you did you just left? What happened next?
Aparna Dubey: To be honest I wasn't sure that when I left I truly knew why I left, but I knew that it was time for me to leave. So I hadn't, I think, fully processed what the reasons were. I assumed that I just wasn't motivated by my job anymore, and I. So started really exploring a lot of things. I thought what I lacked in my life was inspiration and I started looking at new things that I assumed would inspire me.
So I explored new industries. I spoke to startups. I did skill-based volunteering to help an ngo. I briefly toyed with academy and while all of this was happening I was also talking to recruiters. So in one of my conversations with the recruiter, She said that I seemed so passionate about all of my past work and my results and achievements, and she seemed surprised why I wanted a change when actually everything seemed to be working for me.
One of my mentors that I spoke to insisted that I actually need to identify the issue that I was solving before, assuming that I was seeking inspiration elsewhere, because in reality, I might be solving the wrong problem. And this for me was the first trigger to actually acknowledge that maybe when I left, I hadn't actually fully processed why I left and what I needed to do about it.
Sharad Lal: I think I also remember meeting you during this time and you you may not remember that, and we were again having coffee earlier and I think we spoke about purpose because I was talking about purpose at the time, and if I remember right, you talked about, Hey, I don't really find my.
Purpose, it works. So what I've done is I'm doing these other activities, which give me purpose. And maybe that's what you thought the issue was and, I guess that was also part of the journey to figure out what really was going on. And then these two people spoke to you, which made you realize that I don't want to do this pattern again.
I wanna figure out what the real problem is so I don't repeat the problem.
Aparna Dubey: I think the purpose is so, important. I feel that part of the reason why I have been successful at work and I've been excited about work is because I was inspired by it and I recall thinking that maybe I've just lost inspiration because my purpose is elsewhere.
But that was, I think, one more of the many hypothesis on really what was going on in the process of trying to figure out, what was happening.
Sharad Lal: So many things going on. It's difficult to pinpoint it to one. Maybe you're not inspired, maybe you're exhausted. Maybe it's a phase. There could be so many kind of things. Now, after you went through this effort and these two people said things that got you thinking even more that you don't want to repeat the problem you want to figure out what the real problem is, how did you figure out the real problem?
Aparna Dubey: In my experience I feel that once we open our mind, the solutions present themselves. So it's interesting because I began finding insights in all my conversations, whether it's with friends, colleagues, mentors, for example, in one of the conversations I heard that if we don't learn from an experience we went through and equip ourselves with skills to handle it, it's likely that I will go through the same thing again and not know what to do differently.
Maybe these conversations were always insightful, but probably I noticed them now because I was looking for a solution and my mind was open. In addition to speaking with people, I was also attending lots of webinars. Do you remember how many there were during
Sharad Lal: Yeah, every day there was like a webinar on mental health or or even burnout. All these things.
Aparna Dubey: Absolutely. I made the most use of them. So I remember joining one webinar on wellbeing that had a section on burnout, and the symptoms of burnout that they mentioned are constant exhaustion and lack of energy. Being cynical towards work and if unaddressed, potentially leading to other physiological effects.
This made me connect with my previous lack of energy and starting to feel cynical, and I realized that probably I was burning out now I was a dog with a bone. I red redoubled my efforts to research further and really focus on actions to be taken to address it.
Sharad Lal: So interesting, I liked your insight earlier that there's always wisdom coming out from people, but it's us not in the right state to receive that wisdom. So when we are in the right state, some gold can come out I like that point. And the second point was also extremely interesting that you were sitting there in the seminar and you realize, they're talking about burnout.
There is this thing about. Cynicism, there's lack of energy there, all these things. You did not even know at the time you were experiencing lack of energy, but then you thought back and said, yes, I was. And that started opening you up to, Hey, maybe I'm burning out.
Let me figure this out. So when you came to that conclusion, what did you research and what did you find out in your research?
Aparna Dubey: Lots of things, but I think two things that made a big impact on me. The first one is I found out the difference between stress and burnout. Stress is really a response to a perceived threat and is short term. But in contrast, burnout is a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion that can be caused by prolonged or excessive stress.
And, sometimes we use burnout as a buzzword or we use stress quite casually. But this, I, this difference is quite important to understand. And the extended period of fatigue as being a sign of burnout was an interesting one. And I also learned that while some stress can be beneficial, because, all of us tend to operate at our best, potentially with some stress, but chronic stress can learn lead to burnout.
So it's a, like I said, it's a state of complete exhaustion, which is in turn leads to lack of interest and engagement. And the difference is, I think, important to know for, anyone who's listening to this podcast as
well.
Sharad Lal: I just wanted to double click on this because this is so interesting, the difference between stress and burnout. And you said that stress, there's normally like some sort of a threat. So if I'm trying to figure out whether this, Thing, which is getting my energy down but there doesn't seem to be like a thread, there doesn't seem to be danger, then chances are it is towards the burnout line.
Is this the difference between stress and burnout?
Aparna Dubey: In my mind I also think it's about the duration of it. I feel stress is in response to a stimulus. And once the stimulus passes, the stress shouldn't exist. But if the symptoms continue on an ongoing basis, regardless of a trigger. So it al I also think it's to do with the duration of time.
And if it continues over an extended period, it may be likely to be burn out.
Sharad Lal: Very interesting.
Aparna Dubey: And the other interesting thing I found was a model called effort reward imbalance, or the e r I model. What it says is when there is a mismatch between high effort spend and low rewards, it can lead to an adverse health on both health and wellbeing. Now, reward here can mean both emotional and material reward, and I felt this may explain what had happened because, I work on a feeling of really achievement and satisfaction on a daily basis.
And now with knowing all this, I felt that I had diagnosed the situation identified symptoms, defined the issue, and the possible reason for it.
Sharad Lal: Right. I remember this effort, reward, imbalance, model, which you'd spoken to me about it's so interesting that if you're really working hard in getting the rewards, we don't necessarily feel the mismatch and we keep going. But if that's not happening, mismatch might lead to mental imbalance. in your experience, if we find ourself, let's say in an imbalance here, how do we look at, do we look at, are we putting in too much effort? Should we put the effort down, or can I go and increase the reward? how do we look at this model in your experience?
Aparna Dubey: I feel ultimately the decision differs by individual. And for someone like me who works on achievement and thrives on achievement, in fact, interestingly, one of my top five strengths in StrengthFinder is actually achievement. It. I end up putting a lot of pressure on myself to make progress on a daily basis, which may be self-inflicted too.
So I feel that the, as with any mathematical equation, either you right-size the effort for the outcome or you accept the outcome. two ways to really address the same problem.
Sharad Lal: Yeah, and I also find it interesting sometimes when you're working on passion projects where you don't have any boundaries, like you're working Saturday Sundays where yes, you may be getting rewarded. Your startup is doing well or or whatever project you have, and you're putting a lot of effort, even if you're going at full tilt on both, I think that could also lead to some kind of a crash because you can't keep doing that for a long period of time.
Aparna Dubey: Yeah, absolutely.
Sharad Lal: Cool. Now, we'll, come back to your story. now you understood why you were burning out. You had some frameworks in, place. What did you do
Aparna Dubey: I searched online for solutions, and thank Google for it. I understood that you can't just snap out of it, but you really need to intentionally and patiently work on recharging energy. I also needed to build healthier habits for improved happiness and wellbeing. So what I did was I found a course called Science of Wellbeing by Yale on Coursera.
I don't know if you've heard of it, Shara, but it's an incredibly popular course that is adapted from Yale's most popular psychology course. I especially liked it for its scientific approach in defining what makes us happy and how to build strategies to improve our wellbeing. In this course, I found that key drivers of our wellbeing are gratitude, kindness, savoring.
Social connection, exercise, sleep, and meditation. This was great because I love to work off a checklist, so I knew exactly what I needed to go after, and I realized that my biggest outage was gratitude. Despite being successful and living a largely privileged life, I was surprised that I didn't feel much gratitude and I was surprised to, to think about why would that happen.
But really turns out that some of us are naturally grateful and the rest of us need to learn it as an acquired skill. So I decided to work on improving and having more gratitude in my life because enhancing and experiencing gratitude can improve mood, lower stress levels, and even improve health.
Sharad Lal: Wow. So many interesting things there. So what we are gonna do for the listeners, we are gonna put a link out there for the course on Wellbeing by Yale. So you can try it. The seven things of wellbeing that you mentioned.
Gratitude. Kindness, savoring social connection, exercise, sleep, and meditation. So these are the things you need to have in place to have the right wellbeing and avoid burnout. in this course, I was just curious, is there like an exercise you need to do to figure out what's missing? Or does it straightaway strike you that, Hey, this is missing?
How does that work?
Aparna Dubey: I think the course is great because it's not not just academic concepts, but helps you identify. You know where your opportunities lie and then do re environments, which are actually strategies to put in place to address where you find the gaps are. And I actually did a re environment focused on where my biggest outage was, which was ratitude.
Sharad Lal: Understand and on gratitude. What I found fascinating, which was again, news to me, is It doesn't come naturally. So there's some people who need to learn it. So many things are learned. Gratitude can be a learned skill. I think that could be interesting for people to know. Now, when you learn this about yourself, how did you go about building gratitude?
Aparna Dubey: As part of the course re environments was the act of doing a gratitude journal. So I started, you know, writing one. And, I must tell you in the beginning it was really hard because I struggled to write anything in it. And this weekend actually, I was looking at my gratitude journal and I saw that my first entry said grateful for the last mangoes of the season.
I've come a long way since then and I'm grateful for many more things. But I found that using an app, like I used the com app. Was very useful because it asks you specific prompt questions instead of me simply writing what I'm grateful for. Some prompt questions are, what about today is better than yesterday?
What made you smile today? What are you looking forward to? What are your favorite moments? And I felt that the, because the app gave me these prompts, over time, I started getting better at identifying what I was grateful for and taking a moment to actually acknowledge it. And I felt more energy and improved mood after doing this exercise, so I decided that it's probably worth practicing other changes to improve my overall happiness too.
Sharad Lal: That's so interesting. gratitude is overdone. Everyone talks about it, but it is a reason why it works. Like you say, rewires your brain to look for good things. And I liked what you said about prompts because it may not come easily to people. So if you're asked questions like, what made you smile, or what are you looking forward to, that gets you into the, that gives you the right stimuli to think about it. What else did you do apart from gratitude?
Aparna Dubey: Inspired by, the success I had with my gratitude journal, I decided to do another happiness challenge that I found online, which is called Hundred Days of Happy. It involves identifying and sharing one photo every day that really made you happy. And it was interesting for me more as a, an exercise to look back at the a hundred pictures and identify themes for actually what is making me happy.
And when I look back, the common themes for me are time spent outdoors, time spent with my family, kids, food that I've eaten and art, ordinarily I don't follow social challenges or fads, but I chose to do this one because it made me intentionally practice what was. Relevant to me. And I feel that's true for a lot of, buzzwords out there, that sometimes we don't truly act on them till we need them.
But if we are intentional about identifying an opportunity and then making that really something that we want to fix for improved wellbeing, I think we can all do it.
Sharad Lal: that's a very good point on, on buzzwords where you talk about yes, there's some people who just chase buzzwords and some people who just stay away from buzzwords what, I understood what you were saying here was. When we need to use the buzzwords, that's a good time to try and access them. Like If something's missing and if we access it at that time, we can get the best benefit out of it and that's when we can deepen it. So it's staying open to it and when it's calling for us using it, and that's how we can learn from it.
Aparna Dubey: Yes, absolutely. I think you've said it better than I .
I did a few other things actually. as a person, I'm quite, competitive and I noticed that my husband looked happier than me and I tried to get to understanding what makes him actually happier. And I linked it back to the course. One of the elements in the course was exercise.
And I found a strong correlation in how my husband is fitter and deals with daily stresses better, and I figured that if I were physically fitter, I would be much better in managing the daily stresses of life and be better at wellbeing. So I have made exercise a part of my day and I've worked on physical fitness as really an enabler to mental wellbeing.
And I've always enjoyed sports. So I started learning tennis beyond just working out in the gym. And lastly, I strengthened my social connections. Often when there are so many things to get by in the day, they I realized that they were starting to fall off the list of things I did.
So I made social connections a priority by planning ahead and putting them in the calendar With all these changes, I feel like a new person now.
Sharad Lal: Wow. So for me to understand that, right, there are certain things you did, like you already had an interest in sports, so you reignited that. But there are things like social connection, which you realized is an important lever of mental wellbeing and avoiding burnout. You decided that I need to figure out my own way of doing it.
Was that, would that be fair to say?
Aparna Dubey: Yeah, absolutely. And especially as an introvert managing our energy I think is quite key. But I realized that I genuinely enjoyed deep, meaningful one-on-one conversations. And I decided to build my social connections through a really authentic process of connecting with people one-on-one versus large gatherings, which is what I set out
to do.
Sharad Lal: That's interesting. So social connection was important, but then you realized in that whole wide array, what is it that you like? Not necessarily ne networking events, not necessarily many people. The one-on-ones is things that you like and that's how you can have that part in your life. Very interesting.
Now, how have you ized this? If I can put it this word, it like, because it's good to do a one-time effort. Many of us do that, but later on we kind of forget about it. Life comes in the way. How have you created a system? So So mental wellness becomes sustainable to you, and the problems don't come up again.
Aparna Dubey: That's such a great question, Shara. Often we find something new. We find it useful for a time, but somehow find ourselves getting back to old habits. But I had started seeing the benefits of the changes I had made, and I was keen to make it part of my lifestyle. And during this time, I read the incredibly popular Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Which is a fantastic guide to breaking bad behavior and adopting good ones. It showed me how small incremental everyday routines compound into big positive changes over time. So I've now made it a plan to actually integrate these into my lifestyle such that they become a habit. So I still continue my gratitude journal on Calm.
I exercise five times a week and I track it on Fitbit. I plan my catchups and social connections before. The week starts and my calendar fills up. So I've integrated all of these in a planned way and I track them on a
daily basis.
Sharad Lal: That's wonderful and, James Clear's book on Atomic Habits. We've loved it on the podcast. It's such a wonderful book. In terms of habits, you're kind of making a structure around it so you make sure you do it. Is there any structure and accountability that, hey, if you don't do, like you said, exercise five times a week and it shows up like those sticks are not there how how do you manage accountability for the habits?
Aparna Dubey: I have not found that to be a challenge in general. I tend to be quite accountable. So if I do have a thing to be done on my to-do list it tends to get done. So I've, I haven't faced that issue. But if you have any tips for, others listening, that would be great.
Sharad Lal: the little that we've seen as a coach, especially in the beginning stages, it's important to have an accountability partner. That's why in gym you have partner workouts where the two people go together, they're accountable to each other when we do coaching, it's like you have an accountability partner where you just tell them, I've done this, I've done this. And the person holds you accountable. But if you can hold yourself accountable and your strong will like you. I think that's great as long as it's working for you.
Whatever works, well. I know we've gone through this entire journey. Thank you very much for sharing it. And I know it's not always a linear journey. Of course, there's a lot of meanderings here and there, but we found a reasonable linear way of explaining it and understanding it, so thank you very much for sharing it.
It'll be very relevant to people, but as we close out, what's the one piece of advice regarding burnout you'd like to leave the audience with?
Aparna Dubey: I think my biggest advice is to listen to yourself. Often we shut out the most important person, which is ourselves, and only we know how we are feeling at, any given time or day. And my suggestion is if you are seeing any signs of burnout, act on it. Identify the cause, and then be intentional about interventions needed to address it.
Because burnout is real and more people go through it than they realize. But as with any skill, managing and preventing burnout is entirely possible. As you've seen from my story.
Sharad Lal: Thank you, partner. What a wonderful story. And thank you very much for coming to the How to Live Podcast and sharing your story all the very best.
Aparna Dubey: Thanks very much.
Thank you Aparna, for such an important and useful conversation. I will link the various resources Aparna mentioned in the show notes. There are many action steps we could consider. We could do the course that Ana did and find out what we need to fix or prevent burnout. We could also look at ways to build gratitude and happiness.
But here's a suggestion all of us could consider for projects we are involved in or work in general. Where do we lie in the E r I spectrum effort, reward, imbalance, spectrum. Are we putting in too much effort and not getting the rewards? If that's the case, should we reduce the effort or find ways to get better rewards?
Does it mean saying no to stuff or a conversation with our boss? Best of luck. That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. We will be back with another episode two weeks from now on June 20th. We have a very fascinating episode.
We'll talk about death. Don't worry, it's not gonna be dark and scary. In fact, it might fill you with positive energy. It's not an episode you wanna miss out on. I hope you join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.
The transcript is auto generated. There may be errors in transcription.
Aparna Dubey: Stress is really a response to a perceived threat and is short term. And once the stimulus passes, the stress shouldn't exist. But if the symptoms continue on an ongoing basis, regardless of a trigger.
It may be likely to be burn out. While some stress can be beneficial, because, all of us tend to operate at our best, potentially with some stress, but chronic stress can lead to burnout.
Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm your host, shard Lal. This is episode 43. Today we are diving into a topic that has been on the mind of many lately. Burnout. You probably know that searches for burnout are at an all time high, But what exactly is burnout beyond just a buzzword? How can we differentiate it from exhaustion or stress? And most importantly, how can we recognize the signs of burnout and effectively deal with it as well as prevented in the future? That's the focus of our conversation today. We're going to approach this slightly differently.
A few months back I had a captivating conversation with my friend Aparna, who described her personal experience with burnout. It was through that conversation that I truly understood what burnout is. Aparna is a fan of the podcast, and when she suggested I cover the topic of burnout, she didn't stop there. She started listing names of experts I could interview, topics I could explore, and so on.
But then it struck me, Aparna herself is the. Perfect person to discuss this with. If she can articulate her experience the way she did during our conversation in that cafe, it would be incredibly valuable for all of you. So after a few months, we've convinced Aparna to join us for this conversation. I'm confident that many will relate to her experience. Let me provide a little background on Aparna. Aparna is a seasoned leader with the consumer goods industry with 18 years experience across the Asia-Pacific region. she's worked with top multinational, Zach Proctor and Gamble, and Kimberly Clarke.
A partner is an MBA from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management M. The bar often ranked number one in India. On top of her professional achievements. Aparna is also a devoted mother of two. From what I've observed, she embodies a growth mindset and is constantly reflecting on her experiences, always striving to evolve.
I'm really excited to have Aparna join us today. her insights will be incredibly valuable to all of us. Let's explore the world of burnout together. But before getting to the podcast, thank you for your support. With your support. We'll listen all over the world in over 110 countries. If you haven't already, please do consider subscribing.
do, consider giving us a rating as well. Thank you in advance. Now, here's the conversation.
Sharad Lal: Hi Aparna. Good afternoon. How are you doing this afternoon in Singapore?
Aparna Dubey: All well, it's a nice day in Singapore after what has been a blistering couple of weeks so it looks to be a good week.
Sharad Lal: Yeah, grateful for the weather, and thank you very much for coming to the show. A few months back we caught up for coffee and you were talking so passionately about discovering that you were burning out and then you did research and the changes that you made. We are gonna dig into all of that because burnout is such a big topic.
But before that, I want people to get a sense of you at work. So if you could describe yourself at work, what's your work style like, what's important to you? That'll give everyone the context.
Aparna Dubey: Firstly, thanks for having me on this podcast. Sharad, I've been an avid listener, so it's great to be here. And burn out is such an important topic. I hope that my experience can help others. Maybe they see themselves in it so happy to share what I've been through and some of my
learnings. How do I describe myself at work? it's a tough question, but often the simplest answer isn't how we explain things to kids. So I'm going to answer it this way. When my kids were younger and they often wanted me to be home with them, they would ask me, why do you need to go to work? And I've always told them it's because I really like working and I'm very good at my work.
And I think this is the essence really of me at work. I find what I do, very inspiring on a daily basis and very meaningful. I enjoy the everyday challenges. I like to believe that I'm good at what I do Over time. I think this has made them value my work too. In fact I'll, I'll tell you a funny story.
Once when my son was in nursery, I wasn't able to make it to school for an activity and he confidently told his teacher that, I wouldn't be coming to school because, his mom has an important job and a big meeting. So, I've, the incident has always stayed with me. And whenever I feel any mom guilt as some of us do, I remind myself that I actually don't need to because my kids don't see it that way, and my work's important to
them too.
Sharad Lal: What a wonderful story. you mentioned this earlier to me and I've found this story about the way your kid talked to the teachers. So fascinating. I've actually spoken it to other people as well, and it's helped them with mom guilt. So great story. you really love work and it's more like it's something you're passionate about.
It's not a means to an end, let's talk about the experience with burnout. So can you give us a context of your life and career at that point leading to burnout?
Aparna Dubey: Yes, absolutely. So a few years ago I was in a job that I absolutely loved. I was the regional marketing director for a loved consumer brand. I was learning new skills, delivering strong results, and leading a great team. What more could you ask for? But it also meant I was working long hours and traveling a lot.
I didn't really mind it because I could see the impact that my work was making. I was in a state of flow and really loving every moment, but at some point down the line, I started feeling exhausted, which for me is quite normal because I tend to work at pace and I'm fueled by this feeling of achievement.
And usually when this happens, I take a couple of days off, I disengage and I come back really feeling refreshed and raring to go. But this exhaustion seemed different because it continued and it always existed. So I told myself that I just really needed a holiday. It was December and we had this big family holiday to Australia coming up, which was fantastic because, December is a great time to recharge and I had a wonderful holiday, great family time, but when I returned back to office, I dreaded seeing the office building.
This was a new experience for me because for someone who's been skipping to work every day and looking forward to it, I was really surprised because I've never really felt that way before.
Sharad Lal: So when that experience happened, what did you think of it and what did you do next?
Aparna Dubey: I did what I always do, which is I tried harder. I just assumed that it was the daily stresses of life. So I just continued working harder, my usual routine, and then something else happened, which was really odd too. I was in a meeting and I remember reacting very cynically to one of the ideas being discussed in the meeting, and this actually really shocked me more than the exhaustion because as a person, I'm optimistic and energetic and rarely if ever cynical about anything.
Meanwhile, there were sort of other changes happening around me. Org structure, people changes, you know, the usual. So I figured it was time for me to move on.
Sharad Lal: as I understand, there were two things happening, you were shocked with the exhaustion earlier. You were shocked with the cynicism earlier, but you didn't kind of, you put it, you ignored it for a while. And other things were then happening at work.
There was, like you said, org structure changes. There were many other things happening at work because of those external things, you decided that it's time to move on. So
did you look for a new job or did you did you just left? What happened next?
Aparna Dubey: To be honest I wasn't sure that when I left I truly knew why I left, but I knew that it was time for me to leave. So I hadn't, I think, fully processed what the reasons were. I assumed that I just wasn't motivated by my job anymore, and I. So started really exploring a lot of things. I thought what I lacked in my life was inspiration and I started looking at new things that I assumed would inspire me.
So I explored new industries. I spoke to startups. I did skill-based volunteering to help an ngo. I briefly toyed with academy and while all of this was happening I was also talking to recruiters. So in one of my conversations with the recruiter, She said that I seemed so passionate about all of my past work and my results and achievements, and she seemed surprised why I wanted a change when actually everything seemed to be working for me.
One of my mentors that I spoke to insisted that I actually need to identify the issue that I was solving before, assuming that I was seeking inspiration elsewhere, because in reality, I might be solving the wrong problem. And this for me was the first trigger to actually acknowledge that maybe when I left, I hadn't actually fully processed why I left and what I needed to do about it.
Sharad Lal: I think I also remember meeting you during this time and you you may not remember that, and we were again having coffee earlier and I think we spoke about purpose because I was talking about purpose at the time, and if I remember right, you talked about, Hey, I don't really find my.
Purpose, it works. So what I've done is I'm doing these other activities, which give me purpose. And maybe that's what you thought the issue was and, I guess that was also part of the journey to figure out what really was going on. And then these two people spoke to you, which made you realize that I don't want to do this pattern again.
I wanna figure out what the real problem is so I don't repeat the problem.
Aparna Dubey: I think the purpose is so, important. I feel that part of the reason why I have been successful at work and I've been excited about work is because I was inspired by it and I recall thinking that maybe I've just lost inspiration because my purpose is elsewhere.
But that was, I think, one more of the many hypothesis on really what was going on in the process of trying to figure out, what was happening.
Sharad Lal: So many things going on. It's difficult to pinpoint it to one. Maybe you're not inspired, maybe you're exhausted. Maybe it's a phase. There could be so many kind of things. Now, after you went through this effort and these two people said things that got you thinking even more that you don't want to repeat the problem you want to figure out what the real problem is, how did you figure out the real problem?
Aparna Dubey: In my experience I feel that once we open our mind, the solutions present themselves. So it's interesting because I began finding insights in all my conversations, whether it's with friends, colleagues, mentors, for example, in one of the conversations I heard that if we don't learn from an experience we went through and equip ourselves with skills to handle it, it's likely that I will go through the same thing again and not know what to do differently.
Maybe these conversations were always insightful, but probably I noticed them now because I was looking for a solution and my mind was open. In addition to speaking with people, I was also attending lots of webinars. Do you remember how many there were during
Sharad Lal: Yeah, every day there was like a webinar on mental health or or even burnout. All these things.
Aparna Dubey: Absolutely. I made the most use of them. So I remember joining one webinar on wellbeing that had a section on burnout, and the symptoms of burnout that they mentioned are constant exhaustion and lack of energy. Being cynical towards work and if unaddressed, potentially leading to other physiological effects.
This made me connect with my previous lack of energy and starting to feel cynical, and I realized that probably I was burning out now I was a dog with a bone. I red redoubled my efforts to research further and really focus on actions to be taken to address it.
Sharad Lal: So interesting, I liked your insight earlier that there's always wisdom coming out from people, but it's us not in the right state to receive that wisdom. So when we are in the right state, some gold can come out I like that point. And the second point was also extremely interesting that you were sitting there in the seminar and you realize, they're talking about burnout.
There is this thing about. Cynicism, there's lack of energy there, all these things. You did not even know at the time you were experiencing lack of energy, but then you thought back and said, yes, I was. And that started opening you up to, Hey, maybe I'm burning out.
Let me figure this out. So when you came to that conclusion, what did you research and what did you find out in your research?
Aparna Dubey: Lots of things, but I think two things that made a big impact on me. The first one is I found out the difference between stress and burnout. Stress is really a response to a perceived threat and is short term. But in contrast, burnout is a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion that can be caused by prolonged or excessive stress.
And, sometimes we use burnout as a buzzword or we use stress quite casually. But this, I, this difference is quite important to understand. And the extended period of fatigue as being a sign of burnout was an interesting one. And I also learned that while some stress can be beneficial, because, all of us tend to operate at our best, potentially with some stress, but chronic stress can learn lead to burnout.
So it's a, like I said, it's a state of complete exhaustion, which is in turn leads to lack of interest and engagement. And the difference is, I think, important to know for, anyone who's listening to this podcast as
well.
Sharad Lal: I just wanted to double click on this because this is so interesting, the difference between stress and burnout. And you said that stress, there's normally like some sort of a threat. So if I'm trying to figure out whether this, Thing, which is getting my energy down but there doesn't seem to be like a thread, there doesn't seem to be danger, then chances are it is towards the burnout line.
Is this the difference between stress and burnout?
Aparna Dubey: In my mind I also think it's about the duration of it. I feel stress is in response to a stimulus. And once the stimulus passes, the stress shouldn't exist. But if the symptoms continue on an ongoing basis, regardless of a trigger. So it al I also think it's to do with the duration of time.
And if it continues over an extended period, it may be likely to be burn out.
Sharad Lal: Very interesting.
Aparna Dubey: And the other interesting thing I found was a model called effort reward imbalance, or the e r I model. What it says is when there is a mismatch between high effort spend and low rewards, it can lead to an adverse health on both health and wellbeing. Now, reward here can mean both emotional and material reward, and I felt this may explain what had happened because, I work on a feeling of really achievement and satisfaction on a daily basis.
And now with knowing all this, I felt that I had diagnosed the situation identified symptoms, defined the issue, and the possible reason for it.
Sharad Lal: Right. I remember this effort, reward, imbalance, model, which you'd spoken to me about it's so interesting that if you're really working hard in getting the rewards, we don't necessarily feel the mismatch and we keep going. But if that's not happening, mismatch might lead to mental imbalance. in your experience, if we find ourself, let's say in an imbalance here, how do we look at, do we look at, are we putting in too much effort? Should we put the effort down, or can I go and increase the reward? how do we look at this model in your experience?
Aparna Dubey: I feel ultimately the decision differs by individual. And for someone like me who works on achievement and thrives on achievement, in fact, interestingly, one of my top five strengths in StrengthFinder is actually achievement. It. I end up putting a lot of pressure on myself to make progress on a daily basis, which may be self-inflicted too.
So I feel that the, as with any mathematical equation, either you right-size the effort for the outcome or you accept the outcome. two ways to really address the same problem.
Sharad Lal: Yeah, and I also find it interesting sometimes when you're working on passion projects where you don't have any boundaries, like you're working Saturday Sundays where yes, you may be getting rewarded. Your startup is doing well or or whatever project you have, and you're putting a lot of effort, even if you're going at full tilt on both, I think that could also lead to some kind of a crash because you can't keep doing that for a long period of time.
Aparna Dubey: Yeah, absolutely.
Sharad Lal: Cool. Now, we'll, come back to your story. now you understood why you were burning out. You had some frameworks in, place. What did you do
Aparna Dubey: I searched online for solutions, and thank Google for it. I understood that you can't just snap out of it, but you really need to intentionally and patiently work on recharging energy. I also needed to build healthier habits for improved happiness and wellbeing. So what I did was I found a course called Science of Wellbeing by Yale on Coursera.
I don't know if you've heard of it, Shara, but it's an incredibly popular course that is adapted from Yale's most popular psychology course. I especially liked it for its scientific approach in defining what makes us happy and how to build strategies to improve our wellbeing. In this course, I found that key drivers of our wellbeing are gratitude, kindness, savoring.
Social connection, exercise, sleep, and meditation. This was great because I love to work off a checklist, so I knew exactly what I needed to go after, and I realized that my biggest outage was gratitude. Despite being successful and living a largely privileged life, I was surprised that I didn't feel much gratitude and I was surprised to, to think about why would that happen.
But really turns out that some of us are naturally grateful and the rest of us need to learn it as an acquired skill. So I decided to work on improving and having more gratitude in my life because enhancing and experiencing gratitude can improve mood, lower stress levels, and even improve health.
Sharad Lal: Wow. So many interesting things there. So what we are gonna do for the listeners, we are gonna put a link out there for the course on Wellbeing by Yale. So you can try it. The seven things of wellbeing that you mentioned.
Gratitude. Kindness, savoring social connection, exercise, sleep, and meditation. So these are the things you need to have in place to have the right wellbeing and avoid burnout. in this course, I was just curious, is there like an exercise you need to do to figure out what's missing? Or does it straightaway strike you that, Hey, this is missing?
How does that work?
Aparna Dubey: I think the course is great because it's not not just academic concepts, but helps you identify. You know where your opportunities lie and then do re environments, which are actually strategies to put in place to address where you find the gaps are. And I actually did a re environment focused on where my biggest outage was, which was ratitude.
Sharad Lal: Understand and on gratitude. What I found fascinating, which was again, news to me, is It doesn't come naturally. So there's some people who need to learn it. So many things are learned. Gratitude can be a learned skill. I think that could be interesting for people to know. Now, when you learn this about yourself, how did you go about building gratitude?
Aparna Dubey: As part of the course re environments was the act of doing a gratitude journal. So I started, you know, writing one. And, I must tell you in the beginning it was really hard because I struggled to write anything in it. And this weekend actually, I was looking at my gratitude journal and I saw that my first entry said grateful for the last mangoes of the season.
I've come a long way since then and I'm grateful for many more things. But I found that using an app, like I used the com app. Was very useful because it asks you specific prompt questions instead of me simply writing what I'm grateful for. Some prompt questions are, what about today is better than yesterday?
What made you smile today? What are you looking forward to? What are your favorite moments? And I felt that the, because the app gave me these prompts, over time, I started getting better at identifying what I was grateful for and taking a moment to actually acknowledge it. And I felt more energy and improved mood after doing this exercise, so I decided that it's probably worth practicing other changes to improve my overall happiness too.
Sharad Lal: That's so interesting. gratitude is overdone. Everyone talks about it, but it is a reason why it works. Like you say, rewires your brain to look for good things. And I liked what you said about prompts because it may not come easily to people. So if you're asked questions like, what made you smile, or what are you looking forward to, that gets you into the, that gives you the right stimuli to think about it. What else did you do apart from gratitude?
Aparna Dubey: Inspired by, the success I had with my gratitude journal, I decided to do another happiness challenge that I found online, which is called Hundred Days of Happy. It involves identifying and sharing one photo every day that really made you happy. And it was interesting for me more as a, an exercise to look back at the a hundred pictures and identify themes for actually what is making me happy.
And when I look back, the common themes for me are time spent outdoors, time spent with my family, kids, food that I've eaten and art, ordinarily I don't follow social challenges or fads, but I chose to do this one because it made me intentionally practice what was. Relevant to me. And I feel that's true for a lot of, buzzwords out there, that sometimes we don't truly act on them till we need them.
But if we are intentional about identifying an opportunity and then making that really something that we want to fix for improved wellbeing, I think we can all do it.
Sharad Lal: that's a very good point on, on buzzwords where you talk about yes, there's some people who just chase buzzwords and some people who just stay away from buzzwords what, I understood what you were saying here was. When we need to use the buzzwords, that's a good time to try and access them. Like If something's missing and if we access it at that time, we can get the best benefit out of it and that's when we can deepen it. So it's staying open to it and when it's calling for us using it, and that's how we can learn from it.
Aparna Dubey: Yes, absolutely. I think you've said it better than I .
I did a few other things actually. as a person, I'm quite, competitive and I noticed that my husband looked happier than me and I tried to get to understanding what makes him actually happier. And I linked it back to the course. One of the elements in the course was exercise.
And I found a strong correlation in how my husband is fitter and deals with daily stresses better, and I figured that if I were physically fitter, I would be much better in managing the daily stresses of life and be better at wellbeing. So I have made exercise a part of my day and I've worked on physical fitness as really an enabler to mental wellbeing.
And I've always enjoyed sports. So I started learning tennis beyond just working out in the gym. And lastly, I strengthened my social connections. Often when there are so many things to get by in the day, they I realized that they were starting to fall off the list of things I did.
So I made social connections a priority by planning ahead and putting them in the calendar With all these changes, I feel like a new person now.
Sharad Lal: Wow. So for me to understand that, right, there are certain things you did, like you already had an interest in sports, so you reignited that. But there are things like social connection, which you realized is an important lever of mental wellbeing and avoiding burnout. You decided that I need to figure out my own way of doing it.
Was that, would that be fair to say?
Aparna Dubey: Yeah, absolutely. And especially as an introvert managing our energy I think is quite key. But I realized that I genuinely enjoyed deep, meaningful one-on-one conversations. And I decided to build my social connections through a really authentic process of connecting with people one-on-one versus large gatherings, which is what I set out
to do.
Sharad Lal: That's interesting. So social connection was important, but then you realized in that whole wide array, what is it that you like? Not necessarily ne networking events, not necessarily many people. The one-on-ones is things that you like and that's how you can have that part in your life. Very interesting.
Now, how have you ized this? If I can put it this word, it like, because it's good to do a one-time effort. Many of us do that, but later on we kind of forget about it. Life comes in the way. How have you created a system? So So mental wellness becomes sustainable to you, and the problems don't come up again.
Aparna Dubey: That's such a great question, Shara. Often we find something new. We find it useful for a time, but somehow find ourselves getting back to old habits. But I had started seeing the benefits of the changes I had made, and I was keen to make it part of my lifestyle. And during this time, I read the incredibly popular Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Which is a fantastic guide to breaking bad behavior and adopting good ones. It showed me how small incremental everyday routines compound into big positive changes over time. So I've now made it a plan to actually integrate these into my lifestyle such that they become a habit. So I still continue my gratitude journal on Calm.
I exercise five times a week and I track it on Fitbit. I plan my catchups and social connections before. The week starts and my calendar fills up. So I've integrated all of these in a planned way and I track them on a
daily basis.
Sharad Lal: That's wonderful and, James Clear's book on Atomic Habits. We've loved it on the podcast. It's such a wonderful book. In terms of habits, you're kind of making a structure around it so you make sure you do it. Is there any structure and accountability that, hey, if you don't do, like you said, exercise five times a week and it shows up like those sticks are not there how how do you manage accountability for the habits?
Aparna Dubey: I have not found that to be a challenge in general. I tend to be quite accountable. So if I do have a thing to be done on my to-do list it tends to get done. So I've, I haven't faced that issue. But if you have any tips for, others listening, that would be great.
Sharad Lal: the little that we've seen as a coach, especially in the beginning stages, it's important to have an accountability partner. That's why in gym you have partner workouts where the two people go together, they're accountable to each other when we do coaching, it's like you have an accountability partner where you just tell them, I've done this, I've done this. And the person holds you accountable. But if you can hold yourself accountable and your strong will like you. I think that's great as long as it's working for you.
Whatever works, well. I know we've gone through this entire journey. Thank you very much for sharing it. And I know it's not always a linear journey. Of course, there's a lot of meanderings here and there, but we found a reasonable linear way of explaining it and understanding it, so thank you very much for sharing it.
It'll be very relevant to people, but as we close out, what's the one piece of advice regarding burnout you'd like to leave the audience with?
Aparna Dubey: I think my biggest advice is to listen to yourself. Often we shut out the most important person, which is ourselves, and only we know how we are feeling at, any given time or day. And my suggestion is if you are seeing any signs of burnout, act on it. Identify the cause, and then be intentional about interventions needed to address it.
Because burnout is real and more people go through it than they realize. But as with any skill, managing and preventing burnout is entirely possible. As you've seen from my story.
Sharad Lal: Thank you, partner. What a wonderful story. And thank you very much for coming to the How to Live Podcast and sharing your story all the very best.
Aparna Dubey: Thanks very much.
Thank you Aparna, for such an important and useful conversation. I will link the various resources Aparna mentioned in the show notes. There are many action steps we could consider. We could do the course that Ana did and find out what we need to fix or prevent burnout. We could also look at ways to build gratitude and happiness.
But here's a suggestion all of us could consider for projects we are involved in or work in general. Where do we lie in the E r I spectrum effort, reward, imbalance, spectrum. Are we putting in too much effort and not getting the rewards? If that's the case, should we reduce the effort or find ways to get better rewards?
Does it mean saying no to stuff or a conversation with our boss? Best of luck. That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. We will be back with another episode two weeks from now on June 20th. We have a very fascinating episode.
We'll talk about death. Don't worry, it's not gonna be dark and scary. In fact, it might fill you with positive energy. It's not an episode you wanna miss out on. I hope you join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye-bye.