Is Burnout Inevitable?

The creative industry is rife with secrets. We all know it and for years we've been bound by contracts to stop us from turning a critical eye to what's really going on in our studios. But that ends here. We take the water cooler conversation and put it under the microphone. Join us and the industry's bigger names as we tackle all the topics they don't want us to talk about. Let's break some NDAs. Hey team, welcome to today's episode. This is one that we've had requests for pretty much ever since we started the pod all the way back in season one. And to be honest, I've been a little bit nervous to tackle. Burnout seems to happen to us all both professionally and personally. Our DMs are full of stories from creatives from all different disciplines and they're actually not a particularly easy read. We've got a lot of anonymous messages for this episode, which I think is an indication of how widespread this is as an issue. Today I want us to learn what burnout can look like. Here's some lived experiences of its impact, but I also want us to understand how we get there and what we can be doing moving forward as individuals and an industry to avoid it. Thankfully, I'm not tackling this subject on my own. I'm both glad and sad, I suppose, to be joined by these two brilliant guests who have first hand experience of burnout. So I'll pass over to them to introduce themselves. Hi, I'm Rebecca Price, mostly for Nomey's Bex. My pronouns are she/her and I am Senior Brand Manager at Monotype and have lived experience of burnout and recovery from it. My name is James Horwitz. I am known as James, just to try and copy you, Bex. I am the founder of the Studio Two Times Elliot. Similarly, it's been something that's challenged me through the entirety of running my studio without really either much warning or really much comprehension of exactly what was going on. So I'm excited to kind of speak to my experience today as well. Awesome, we're really, really grateful to have you both here. If you don't know me by now, I'm Katie Cadwell, I'm the co-founder and creative director at Lucky Dip and your host today. Okay, buckle up everyone, we are going in. So let's start by trying to understand the scale of the issue. We asked our listeners if they'd ever experienced burnout, quite shocking me, 97% said yes and 22% of those people have been signed off work, which is really an overwhelming majority. You can't help but wonder if burnout in this industry is inevitable. I know you both had an experience in this, so I think it makes sense to start there. And I want to talk about what that was like, so what did burnout look like for you? Can you describe how that feels to anyone who hasn't experienced it? James, maybe you could kick us off. I think for me, I've always found power in my ability to communicate. Obviously working in a creative medium, you need to be able to both visually and verbally communicate what's going on in your mind. And I think at some point I started to realize that there was kind of quite severe depletion of my ability to do either of those things. And when you're running a practice, both from leading a team internally, but also your ability to convince and communicate to an external audience, whether that be through inspiration or through trying to obtain new clients, which is the lifeblood of a design studio. I realized that I was unable to do that. And I suppose through self-diagnosis being in my 40s and not really having much of a grasp of mental health, especially in my teens, I didn't really understand what was going on. And I'd heard the term burnout, but I wasn't necessarily sure exactly what that specifically meant, but I knew that it was quite a severe problem. Bucks, what about you? For me, it was more like ace of death by a thousand cuts. It was a real slow burner of just this depletion of joy, I suppose, in my life creeping in very much around work. So the week would be very difficult. I would find incredibly hard, but then my weekends would be joyful, again, I'd be with my friends, my family, my partner. And slowly and slowly that sort of misery, I suppose, creeped into the weekends as well, and it just became so all-consuming and cutting yourself off, becoming very insular. Yeah, just really starting to find that everything was consumed by work, and there was just a lack of joy in my life. I didn't really understand why. Yeah, crying a lot, unexplained, and an inability to be able to accept it as well, I think it's a big part of it. And did you both take time off work when you were in that kind of headspace? Yes, I did eventually, but was very much pushed. I spoke to a GP originally, sort of two months before I eventually left. When the GP could have caused it out and said, "These are your symptoms, you're absolutely suffering from burnout, you need to take time off." And I very much pushed back, because I think there's a huge amount of shame that's associated with it. You don't really want to accept that you can't handle it or there's something wrong with you. And then eventually, I think two months later, I then went back to GP again and accepted that what was going on was not right and then took three months. But reluctantly, I think, the GP initially said, "You need to take. I just need two weeks. That's all I need. I had to do two weeks. That's fine." And they said, "She said two weeks is basically a holiday. If you go, if you do weeks, you'll come back. The work will be exactly the same. You need a proper disconnection." And even then, even at the point of sort of giving this note to my CDO at the time, I even said, "I'll just take six weeks. That's fine." And then you realise quite quickly that you need a lot more time. Yeah, mine's sort of, unfortunately, from a different perspective, mostly because I don't have anyone who sits directly above me. So when you have this assessment, you're like, "What is the impact on others when you are the one who's driving the ship?" Which I think is. It's different to use your term or your phrase sex. I still feel quite a lot of that shame, to be honest with you, the fact that when you step out, I can't switch off regardless. So I would almost say that I identified that there was an issue probably three years before I did something about it. And I was then continually showing up. But I wasn't the best version of myself. And what you start to realise is that you start to. You try to basically fill in the gaps of where you know that you're falling down. And I think the impact of my behaviour, even though I don't think it was necessarily seen or brought up on my team, I had this real strong feeling that I knew I wasn't at my optimum, but I didn't know when the right time to be able to step away was. To contrast Beck's story about the balance between feeling quite lost in work and then feeling this joy on the weekend, that the stress of not being able to own or define what was happening, I wasn't able to get out of that headspace or feeling as I was letting everybody else in the team down and worrying what would then happen as a result studio. And I think this is something that you very much feel as an owner of a studio is if you step away from the business, what is the result on the livelihood of the team that trust in your guidance and the energy that often you are putting out to those people to keep the workplace a really kind of positive and exciting place and that's really hard to do when you're on below reserve. The little red light on the fuel gauge on your car was way gone and I was still going, I was still showing up and everyone still thought I was fine. But actually this joy and this kind of like ability to still try to be articulate and the happy one was just weighing more and more so on my kind of nervous system. So yeah, it got to a very, very dark and difficult place where a couple of my senior teams said I think it's time for you to take a break. But I'm not particularly good at taking holiday. So again, even though I've taken leave for a couple of months, the beginning of this year, I think I have the highest retained holiday roll over in history. Well, I'm glad that you did both take some time out and thank you for sharing what that felt like for you. I think what I've learned from reading everyone's stories is burn out manifests very differently for different people. So I wanted to read out a couple of examples. We have an anonymous submission here and they said it started really small, just feeling tired. It started off thinking, well, yeah, I've worked a few late nights. I'll catch up on some sleep at the weekend, but then it got worse. I developed severe, almost overnight to the point where my skin was peeling off my hands. I was in so much pain, I had to wear gloves at work. Doctors had no explanation. And after months, it just disappeared. I thought, okay, cool, I'm cured. But then came the panic attacks. The first one I genuinely thought I was having a heart attack. I was on the tube, had to get off, call my boyfriend, come find me. I was dizzy. I couldn't breathe. My chest was in agony. My heart was pounding. Alongside all of this, I wasn't sleeping. I had no creativity left. And I was completely overwhelmed by even the smallest of tasks. So thanks to whoever sent that in. We did hear that people's physical health was really affected by their burnout. It's a bit of inability to work anymore, being the catalyst, right, for actually starting to take some time off, which is fascinating. People are ignoring all the physical signs. And as soon as their creativity leaves, they're like, oh, shit, I'm burnt out. Megan Fry messaged in and said, every time I opened my laptop to use in design, my body felt like it was running away from a beer. So I wanted to ask you both, how did you get there? Do you know what it was about your work life, your personal life, that got you to that point of having to kind of step away? To the point that you just read out that moment of like the smallest task, I remember that so well of it feeling like a house of cards and just the smallest task that gets put on top. The whole thing can come crashing down. I remember when I was really at kind of breaking point, the smallest task that someone would ask me, if something like, can you send me a logo? Or can you send me this and PNG like tiny and the anger that would rise in my body of just this incomprehensible task I'd been asked to do. I just remember thinking was like, this isn't right. I also remember having quite bad road rage every time I got on my car. I was just angry all the time. But in terms of how I got there, for me, I think it was a situation of having too much work. I was in a situation where I was essentially doing three people's jobs at once. And I didn't actually have a manager for a period of time. So there was kind of no visibility. And I think it was that lack of safety, that lack of support, the lack of anyone actually being able to see what was going on. And also, and I don't know if this is something that maybe James would recognise in a different form, but kind of constantly feeling that you need to preview yourself. There's an element of it's never enough. Even when you push yourself from a place of already your point of exhaustion, you push yourself to complete something. And perhaps it's not necessarily praise, but perhaps it's not acknowledged or it's not enough or there's another step to go. So it's sort of like this carrot, you know, the carrot and the stick analogy that you're just always pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing and you never reach this point. So for me, yes, it was a this melting pot of output, output, output. And I do remember, yeah, the symptoms that start to come up, like I started to have quite bizarre, intrusive thoughts. And when it was kind of a breaking point, I think I was a point where I kind of couldn't read so that they're opening the laptop and feeling like you're being chased by a bear. I remember kind of two days before I actually left, I remember if you my laptop and just not being able to actually read words, the letters were just going all over the place, like your brain is essentially a sponge that just physically cannot take any more water. It just needs a really good squeeze, but it's just a breaking point like completely fun. Of course, obviously, James, how about you? I always struggled to identify the specific point in which the kind of the cycle started. And I've been doing quite a lot of work and journaling now, which is something that I found recently as a kind of a meditative and selfless process. I find a lot of solace in writing and I always have done the ability to really hone in and articulate the specific things you're feeling or the things that you want to get down or the things that going on in your mind. And I think trauma is probably one of the biggest things and I don't take that word lightly. I understand that trauma shows itself in many personal and also commercial ways. I think the business went through a lot of challenging times. I think COVID was actually a positive time for the studio, albeit that we were torn apart because it gave us more of an ability to work alongside incredible individuals who realized that change was very much needed because of change of circumstance. So the business did very well at that period. What I've realized though is when things go up, I don't want to use the other word, but they go to shit. I think I'm allowed to swear. I'm allowed to swear. You are fine. When things go to shit and you've got nobody else to be able to share that shit with because you know that they're kind of like slight shifts in your psyche are going to upset the equilibrium and balance of the mental state of other people in your studio. Like where the hell do I go? So I was constantly in this cycle of bad information or something bad that's happened, take it in, live with it, try to resolve it, go in and speak in meetings and be the most positive person. It's kind of in this realm of imposter syndrome and it's something I think that a lot of designers kind of live with anyway that the more that we have to now kind of do different things instead of just focusing on our craft such as public speaking, such as joining wonderful podcasts and learning to be more kind of like vulnerable, I suppose. I think we're more self aware of the things that are starting to cause the problems. I think that's a kind of a way to kind of summarize it, but my starting point was and always has been in both personal and also in commercial kind of terms, a moment of trauma that I've never had the skills to be able to learn how to cope with. And because I haven't got a business partner, it tends to manifest itself in the way in which I handle relationships is either withdrawal. It's either complete and utter inability to have the energy to go and want to speak with those who I care about almost critically, and this is the one that I get really kind of upset speaking about, but it's also the feeling of loneliness. It feels like you are very isolated and you know in your right mind, you know, there's lots of people who feel the same way, but in that moment, it does not matter what anyone else thinks because you feel so alone. Obviously you've both touched on this feeling of isolation and burnout kind of perpetuates that because we definitely heard from a lot of people that they really withdraw. And what I really liked about both of your answers is this kind of expectation that we can always be doing more that our work can always be better and that's exhausting, right? And some of the other reasons that we heard from our listeners, unreasonable working hours, that's tail as old as time in our industry, taking on too much work, maybe there's been a period of really, you know, you've been really quiet. So lots comes in, you say yes to everything, then you start skipping lunchtime as you're not socialising or exercising obviously life, things happen outside the nine to five. We heard people saying that moving house or doing renovations, they might have had health issues, family finances. So I think we can talk about this forever, but I want to move on slightly to what happens actually practically inside a studio or a business when you're suffering from burnout. So I'm going to ask two slightly different questions to you both. If you're an employee suffering from burnout and you want to go to HR or you want to go to your bosses about it, how do you do that? Becks, I know that's something that you kind of had to do, you had to raise that within the business going to the GP is a big first step. And I think like many things that's that acceptance, even calling the GP, I think for a lot of people can be, you really have to get to the stage where you've noticed that something is not right. So calling your GP, getting a note and I would say take that to HR. One thing I would preface is how you approach HR because I definitely had a situation the first time I spoke to them, which was in the September where I had just, I'd sort of discussed with the GP and like, I don't need time off. I just need my work load to be reduced. That's all I need. I just need work loads to be reduced. And I took that note to HR. They fair enough said, you know, we need to circulate this with received management and that then terrified me because I immediately thought, you know, you mustn't tell them that I'm that I'm suffering or I'm failing because then I think I can't do the job and then I won't get the promotion. So I actually asked them not to share it and kind of went back to that sort of insular shutting yourself down and focusing and getting your head down even more. And then, as I said, I think six weeks to two months later, it got really quite severe and the symptoms were incredibly concerning, call the GP again. And at that point, that was when I then had my note, which I then took to HR. But at that point, I was so broken that I kind of literally handed it to HR. I took it to my CDO and then after that call with him, I remember shutting my laptop and literally, it was like the home of Simpson's meat, the home of Simpson's meat when he backs into a head. It was literally like that. There was nothing else I could do. I just like handed my note over, I closed my laptop and I walked away. I'm sure people could perhaps do it their own way, but I think being aware that people are there to help and ultimately for a business as well. I think this was really important about speaking about it, recognizing that something's not right and taking a week or two weeks just to reset when you're maybe at an earlier stage before you're at crisis point is obviously better for you and your long term health. But also, I hate to say I'm a better for the business than you disappearing for three months or six months or nine months, I know people who've taken a year off, which is awful for your body to have to recover from. So if you're looking at it from an employer perspective, they're losing someone for months on end. And James, you're kind of on the, I mean, I know you experienced it from a personal point of view, but you're also on the other side of the table. So what would your reaction be if one of your team comes to you with burnout? And is that slightly different now that you've almost experienced it yourself? I'm fortunate that I believe we are kind of communicative enough that when there is even an essence of it, there is an open enough space for people to come and have that conversation, but there's obviously that's presumptive that that will happen as to what Bex was saying. For us, there has always been an intentionality about keeping the studio the size that it is. I think when you are able to maintain a studio that sits under say 15 people, I think it what it enables or what it actually disables is the ability for people to remain siloed. And that might sound almost like a little bit dictatorshipy and it's not meant to at all, but what it's supposed to do is encourage the ability for people to really start to get to know and understand each other. And when there is more visibility of the individual people, you start to really understand what their baseline is in terms of personality traits, in terms of wants, in terms of loves, in terms of dislikes, in terms of what they don't want on their plate at lunch time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I would hope that we built up enough of an established relationship that when you start to notice that there are these inconsistencies in behavior that we have an ability or I have an ability to step in and have that conversation without it feeling too overbearing. But it's a very fine line to balance because especially right now, like what you don't want to do is step into someone's personal space and make yourself quite heavy and potentially touch on very sensitive areas. But on the other side, when you do establish that relationship where you are very close to one another is that I make myself vulnerable with the view, not just purely to do it for the sake of the business, but because it's become part who I am as a person now that allows people to feel comfortable in that vulnerability. And I think it's very different depending on age as a 40 year old man is not something that my father, for example, I'm sorry if he ends up listening to this, but he didn't have a huge amount of ability to articulate his emotional emotional state. So I think there's a hell of a lot of trauma that comes from having that inability to read how I was feeling even from a young age. But I've done my very best to be and create an environment that allows people to feel authentically vulnerable and I think that only really happens when those who are trying to steer the ship are open enough about their own vulnerability as well, which is exactly why I wanted to do this. I would also probably also just add to this that if you are in an environment where you are reprimanded for the way in which you feel that has been brought on by the amount of work or some form of emotional trauma, then I probably question whether or not that environment is the right place for you longer term anyway. And I know that's a very big presumptuous, almost slightly, it's discounting what would happen if you were to lose your income by making the decision to move, but I think I've also kind of come to terms with the fact that unless you are making changes, you are going to still unfortunately live within that reality and something that I was told a long while ago is what you're not changing you're choosing. And then this seems very harsh in terms of this mentality, but in some ways I live by this is that if I am really uncomfortable disappointed or not achieving and I know that there is a route to resolve it, I know that there's still a choice for me to do that. And if I don't, then you are still stuck in living within that reality in a very kind of cold and clinical way. I was just going to add a couple of points to because I think it was really beautifully articulated and the idea of our generation particularly being able to actually put our hands off and wave that white flag and say actually things are not good. I think can be incredibly difficult because mental health was not a conversation that people had in our parents generations at all. So it's nice to be able to be part of those conversations that are kind of carving a different story for the people that come after us. But also to James's point about creating that space and vulnerability when you're in an organization or a larger brand. One thing that was really important to me was creating a space that people can go to when they are at a crisis point because if you are in a state of burnout where you're walking yourself to the ground, you're already on a hamster wheel. You're already waking up every day. It's the first thing you think of. You're probably perhaps crying every day. You are probably having quite dark thoughts. And so for example, looking through a large pack of your private health care benefits that you might get through work is literally the last thing you're going to be doing. It's something on hand that's quick and easy to go to when you're at a crisis point, I think is something that would be helpful for more brands and organizations or even small businesses to do. And it was something that was very important for me to implement when I came back to work to make sure that where I was working had a specific mental health offering that was very well articulated and very well circulated to people knew that it was somewhere that they could go. The last point was just James raised and it is about allowing people to again have agency to set their own boundaries and especially with freelancers, I think that's really difficult. It would be nice if people didn't have to go through a crisis point to then come back to then learn how to set their own boundaries and actually to know. Oh right, this is actually something that I need to enforce within my life to know that actually this is my safe space and then there's a line and then there's work. What we heard from a lot of our listeners is that they didn't go back right and that James you touched on that too is that people just really attributed everything that they were feeling to that specific working environment so they completely stepped away. We have to acknowledge the privilege in that right not everyone is in a position to be able to just quit their job and look after their own health wanted to share a story. The agency I was part of had a very fast paced culture was zero margin for error or even research not many systems in place to achieve those things. It was based across two locations and splitting my time over direction and online meetings led to the feeling that my actual design time had to be twice as productive even though it was being cut very short. I was designing and producing three hours a day or so I had to put out eight hours of work into that time or work late they then went on to share with us that they left their job. So yeah, that's something that we heard a lot that people's resolution to their burnout was to just quit. I have a question for you both which I think is slightly sticky and so I'm really interested to get your take on it. Who's responsibility is it? Is it your responsibility, your individual responsibility to look after yourself and recognize that burnout and make the steps to change or is it the employer's responsibility especially in a situation like that story when that burnout is a really direct response of how the studio is running on the process is there. I think it's a little bit of both but I think there's a lot of nuance in that response because it's not necessarily to say that it's the employee's responsibility to dictate the operations of a business. However, I think it's definitely the responsibility, the employer to be in a position where they create opportunity for that open communication. I always say that no one's going to be looking out for you like you are yourself. I'm married. I know that I have a wife who loves me massively but at the end of the day she's not going to resolve my problems and it's a similar kind of way in which I think about my work will be that I've got necessarily no one above me who can solve the problems. However, creating the space and also the structure within the studio to set rules or set process is the feel is that they are for the best need of the people who work there. I've got a notion environment that I spent three months of this year writing which is all about company policy and I didn't write them as an employer I wrote them as an employee which I thought was a really important thing to do. I wrote them based upon what I believe as a human being I want demonstrated and I want to be surrounded by and by trying to remove the weight of commercial kind of pressure on my shoulders what actually is to an environment to be the most supportive to both myself and what I need as a being and those around me. Now I understand that not everybody does this but this may have been a result of feeling the way that I did. I was becoming increasingly frustrated by behavior that I didn't feel was in line with my basic like upbringing and my human kind of like once. So to create a baseline of an environment that feels open and communicative we spent a lot of time building policy that was centered around basically being a kind person. And I think it is about those how do you build policy that feels as though it only focuses on how we show it for one another what our minimum expectations are as human beings. It automatically creates the environment to only be about how do we do the very best work that we can and it often leads to very honest conversations and the more honest you can be in critiquing work one another. I personally believe it makes it far easier to then have more honest conversations about how you're feeling again I'm not like I'm not the oracle I don't know whether or not this is the right or the wrong way but what I do know is it's created a far happier environment. I mean that's a brilliant answer honestly and I think best when you talk about your burnout and you talk about the situation at work right having multiple job roles and the workload and the pressure. Do you look back on that time and do you say that was my employer's fault that I got to that place or do you think no that was all me. And I'm the reason that I you know I was putting too much in how do you feel about it where do you think the responsibility lies. Well, I think there's two questions when I look back at this look back at the situation that I went through I definitely have opinions of how it could have been handled differently. But in a more broader sense I agree with a lot of what James was saying I think initially I would think it was sort of 50 50 but actually I think a lot of it is on the employer not to necessarily manage the workload but it to create an environment that feels safe. So an employee feels like they can talk about where they're at with things or their mental health or how they are finding the work that's being put on them and if that's not being led by the employer if that environment of safety isn't being created. And I think it's very very difficult for an employee to put their hand up and say this is too much or I'm really struggling and the problem then just perpetuates because the less safe someone feels the more they will go inwards the more they will work harder to try and prove themselves. So yes, I do think a lot of it is on the employer to acknowledge it and actually very interestingly when I went back to work I worked the RHR department to bring mental health to the front of things like our employee experience survey that gets sent out I think twice a year. And we added for the first time ever a mental health question specifically and I was told it was the most highly engaged with question that they've ever had. To the point it being the employees responsibility as well I teach yoga on the side which I have done actually post burnout as a kind of a side project for myself but I noticed earlier this year I was taking on a lot of classes and I noticed myself going down a stage of burnout which actually honestly I didn't think it would happen in something that I loved so much and I noticed myself getting really tired my skin getting started getting really bad and it was nowhere near the burnout stage I'd been before but I recognized the signs and I thought to myself, do you know what this is on me? This is on me to pull back and to say no to things but I don't know whether I would have had the confidence to do that or I would have recognized it had I not been through a cycle of burnout and come back. I think something that you mentioned earlier on is the employer might not feel that the responsibility is theirs but to be gross about it it's in their benefit for them to take on some of that responsibility so they have a happy healthy workforce. But I do want to move on ever so slightly when you're thinking about the impact of burnout on a studio we think about not being a full capacity right because you've got people off. But we also need to think about the output of the studio from a burnt out team so had this story sent in. I believe the point that I actually realized I was burnt out was when I realized that I didn't care about the outcome of something I was doing at the time. Usually my work or design in general is something of a safe space for me mentally. I tend to care a lot and put a lot of my energy into what I'm doing but when I felt like it doesn't matter and without having any other practical reason in my life to think that way I realized that I was dealing with something I couldn't handle. So quite a personal question I have for you both now how do you feel about the work you produced during the time that you were burnt out. I really resonate with the not caring but actually perhaps not maybe at a time when I was at peak burnout right before I went off. It was almost the opposite I cared deeply and I felt like I have actually spoken to someone else who now speaks publicly about burnout and he said the same thing which is that you sort of feel as if the world will stop. There's this feeling of self importance or certainly I experienced that of you're so consumed with your work that you think if I don't deliver this thing quite literally the entire company will collapse. But I cared I actually cared deeply about it but I don't think the quality of the work I was putting out was particularly high. I remember having to do a strategy document and I was trying to visually trying to make this kind of graphic to explain the strategy that I was trying to implement and it was it was as if I was making it was crayons. But I just I couldn't I didn't have their head space to work out how to get this idea down on paper or you know in design and nor did I have the capacity to ask anyone for help because I just I didn't have the mental capacity. And it was quarter zone and adrenaline pumping through my system you just your thing is science is actually your prefrontal cortex shuts down and you're a miktola enlarges that your constantly in flight which means like normal mental tasks that you are you know you're capable of doing just become incredibly difficult. Great answer James how about you I think it was the other way around for me as I started to care more but in capacity to be able to resolve or actually come to terms with even comprehend. With even comprehending the scale of that care mostly because I was like completely unable to do the thing that I cared so much about and increased how much I cared and more frustration because I said why can't I do this thing that I know I'm really capable of doing. And it led to the studio collapsing basically like the studio completely shut down because I wasn't completely incapable I had to make redundancies we weren't bringing in the amount of work for the number of people that we had. To let people go that have been with the business for a very long time. For me I cared so much but I had an inability to be able to catch the things that I normally would have done. I can recall things pretty well I think that's a little bit my superpower I can kind of see things and work out how to put them into words which has always been a real benefit for me. I really relied on when someone takes that away from me like where's my value anymore so self deprecation you start to question even self appearance and self words to get into your personal life as well it breaks down your marriage it went back like we went really badly and then on top to round that all off you take the time off and I've completely lost the ability to know what it was to relax. I'm sitting here at home and I'm still looking at my phone I've deleted slack but I've re downloaded it and I have switched off from client emails but I'm still taking their phone calls because they want to discuss a new project. So I never really took that time off because I still had a studio to run and I was very aware that the studio had had bad times so how do I rebuild this correctly. There's a lot of emotion like a lot of weight and I think there's not enough and again this is very subjective and I think it's based on the environment that you're in I don't think there's enough awareness of the pressure especially on on the shoulders of the founder and actually how much of a how the task that is to maintain a studio that you believe or you kind of commit to being and built on correct practices. You're really driven to want to do incredible work with incredible thought rather than a reliance on just doing crappy work for big money that just keeps the wheels kind of moving. Yeah I think if I was to kind of drop a bombshell there basically result in the entire breakdown of my company so I had to rebuild that again I had to liquidate it and luckily I was in a position where I found some people were really trusting enough and said you know what this is something we're fighting for the studio's existed for 15 years. There's a real commitment to what you want to do I never lost my ambition of anything I'm more ambitious than I ever was and I think that that ambition that obsession to be the best whilst also being very mindful that to take people on that journey you have to be very very aware of how that ambition manifests itself to not be something that is. It's aggressive but something that's kind of like a fuels this fire within you like I actually want to get there so I think yeah to be really kind of drop a bombshell yeah that's what happened. And I think the build up to a lot of that even beforehand was that I started to become an imposter I beck knows me from long time ago I don't know if she remembers just how many different styles of hair I had. I remember that we go way back it wasn't you know and I remember being in even kind of personal relationships and I was just simply fulfilling a narrative that I believe they needed and I think we discount the fact that there was a huge amount of pressure and expectation put on the name of the studio of course you're doing great work not only to represent those who work alongside you but to continue to commit to an industry that I really love. So I put a lot of weight on my own shoulders I'm extremely hard on myself and that's a journey that I'm having to kind of like navigate at the same time so I don't think I'll ever unfortunately be fully resolved of my burnout but I am starting to be and live by the mantra of what I'm not changing I'm choosing by basically going and working from Spain for next week for a month which is the first time I've ever done it. And it kind of plays into something that we're working through which I announced early this year about residences which is the pressure of having a fixed environment where one person at the top is dictating how people work the way they should work in a single environment that's not particularly aware of what that means to people to have to travel in based upon changes circumstances becoming a parent losing a parent moving home having a breakup getting married all of these things are traumatic in positive and negative work. So trying to create too much of a framework that serves the only purpose of yourself feels very dated so residences for me as this model that we're we're trying to kind of lock down at the moment which is how do we choose and define the intention of space and that space is purpose is purely to resolve the betterment of the specific thing that we're collaborating on to work through. And I think that that's one it means that there's a really excitement about what that space holds when it means we have a focus and then the ability to break and go back to where we need to be to do our very best work and be the best version to myself and I think this is a realization that just because generations before me and the work that I admire does not mean that they're working models are best suited to how we want to work so you can separate how great their work is from how good it is to work there. Thank you both for being so candid I've not really said that but I think there are lots of things that you're saying and echoing that we've heard from our listeners and I think the fact that they submitted anonymously does suggest that there's still an element of that kind of shame around it so. And we say that we're proud of them because I know how difficult it was for me to own it and becks follows me on my personal account I don't know she remembers but I publicly posted something which was very out of character for me and very interestingly the responses to that message were few and far between. And I don't know if it was the fear of replying with something that they felt respected the gravitas of what I put out. But the beautiful thing and I don't know if this is generational but for me the number of guys who stepped forwards who are in their kind of 20s 30s and even one of my friend who's in his 60s because I don't discriminate on age for my friends is that the amount of things that they can relate to and I think that the more vulnerable that we can be or the more that we can create space in our environments to be vulnerable in any capacity whether that be. I don't know the answer to this question or I'm at the point where I simply can't contribute anything of value it's a very broad spectrum. The easier it is to climb that ladder of feeling comfortable at both ends. I want to say even though people are anonymous I think both becks and I can say probably with quite a lot of sincerity that it takes a hell of a lot of confidence to even come out and own that so yeah thanks to the people who submit the question. I completely agree I completely agree and actually it leads to a point about showing up for people who have either taken time off work or have against like waving that white flag. Some people would be incredibly surprised when you do take time off your kind of surprised the people that show up because as James says some people don't and one thing I really noticed was once you get over the first initial couple of weeks or month of just complete physical and mental exhaustion because it's a bit like your body's been in a vice essentially and then you sort of let go once you start to feel a little bit like a human being again. One thing I noticed was that having time off is also an incredibly lonely place to be because the majority of your friends are at work and all your partner is at work and you don't really have anyone to hang out with. And you kind of can feel I certainly did even more lonely because suddenly the shame is piled on top again so showing up for people who you know are at a crisis point I think it's really really important. Like a friend of mine sent me a box you know the pastor of Angela something for us to talk about branch but those past deliveries she sent me a box. So I'm not so happy to be the agent and it was just the kind of thing I remember her saying you know like food is love and I completely agree but it's like the simplest thing but when you're at a crisis point you don't want to cook it's the last thing you want to do. I got it tattooed on my arm if that helps says don't be afraid to care. It was a note to myself this leads me on very very nicely to my final question you're both brilliant guests you've been teeing me up all the way through this has been a heavy episode you know I'm not going to sugarcoat it but there is positivity right there is like at the end of the tunnel there is this growth journey that people who've been through this kind of go on. So I wanted to read out a couple of stories from listeners about how they've moved on from burnout and what they're doing now. So the first someone said my workplace is amazing they trust me they know I deliver and they don't mind if I need to take time offline or have days but I just crack on without team as messages hanging on stop it makes a huge difference when your employer understands that we're not machines. And I had a voice note here from Chris Wilson about how he recovered from his burnout so I'll play that to both now. I think I just let the work consume me not from the physical mental point but I neglected time and my wife and my son as well passed up on time with family and friends just to get the projects over the line. It can I scared me shock me and looking at how to avoid this going forward so I tried to put hands in place like reducing my hours no more work weekends only nights and reduce the whole day what week. And it's been declined so I wasn't available through a messaging apps to avoid the kind of 24 hour access. It's been really positive but in the recent ones I've noticed that some of the bad habits have started to creep back in. So I want to talk to both individually now about what are you doing differently to stop that from happening again. A big thing that I found and I would also recommend to anyone else is personal boundaries is a huge one but also community. And I think that it comes back again to the kind of the insular going inwards and again if you look at the 12 stages of burnout and hit you and I talked about previously but that those kind of micro stages that people go through and those points that you can recognize when things are starting to slip and actually just being aware of those steps they things like when you start to kind of get resentment for your colleagues. I think you're already at step seven but even step four is things like canceling plans for the sake of work so I think just having an awareness of that and being really open about it I think is super important. But yeah the community please for me is massive because finding purpose finding belonging in a space that is not necessarily attached to work even if you love that work. Finding a sense of self in a completely separate space so that might be something like volunteering or going to a run club or for me it's things like yoga or. Yeah just finding community and things that are kind of out in nature and they're so simple but they remind us that we are human beings and that we weren't really built to sit behind a laptop especially obviously in creative industries like we were built to live in community and to share things. So for me that's a huge, huge piece and also doing things that are creative that again don't involve outputs they things like going to a gallery with a friend and just being able to like softly and passively view beautiful art or view things in the creative environment or join a pottery class like it seems really cliche but it really does open up a part of your brain and it also. Honestly I think scientific level of recovery it also allows your stress responses to reduce. I wish my was as awesome as I felt like I'm continually on that spectrum of multiples to be honest with the multiples of spectrums but I think for me it's getting comfortable in the fact that I'm feeling uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong I'm still in the situation when you run a studio I'm still feeling like I'm putting positive syndrome a lot of the time and people we've recently spoke on a stage and put a person I still find it really uncomfortable with lots of people saying nice things I'm like yeah it's just little me from North West London doing work that I like and I'm glad you like it that kind of thing. The one thing that's been really important is removing the expectations I put on others of how they should be behaving or showing up for me and I know it doesn't really connect necessarily directly to burn out but I think. Burn out isn't just related to work it's also emotionally exhaustion as well and I think that. I don't think I'll be particularly self aware I think sometimes I talk a lot and a lot of that is a result of nerves and then on the other side of it I kind of sometimes crave having kind of people around me and I know that it's not fair to try and. Take my needs out on other people to force them to share an environment with you and I think really the one thing that I've found to be the most beneficial. Is to start enjoying being in my own company can I start to really enjoy and love the weirdness that my personality brings can I stop being so critical on the things that really are irrelevant can I start to do the things that my gut tells me that I need to do can I go and be in a space that feels less conformative because it fulfills me and what I need as a person rather than following the rhetoric that's set before us. I feel like a little bit that we've lost all this generationally anyway and I don't mean that in terms of when people were born I just mean in terms of the time that we're in right now. I think we've gone back to a little bit of conformity where being that outlier or being yourself you kind of feel that you have to push yourself back into a box again. I'm really comfortable in the fact that I speak a lot now I'm really comfortable that I like to wear clothes that maybe not everyone else in the meeting is wearing and people will comment on it for example. But I just come to terms with the fact that that's who I am and I don't need to do things anymore that feel as though I'm doing them for other people's praise and that for me by the way was huge benefactor in why I got to where I was it wasn't just the pressure of the work. I almost would argue that it was more pressure on myself to go I need to fulfill everything that I know the industry and what every other person who told me I'd never get to where I am needs to be. And I think you should just be comfortable where you are and set yourself realistic expectations of where you believe you can go and I think my power now is feeling comfortable in speaking to the things that I need even if I'm only speaking to myself and nobody else. I'm just going to follow what I need to do to to maintain and not be like this constant shitty little boats that's bobbing up and down on the water. It's nice to end on an optimistic note to be honest and understand that the you might not necessarily have or not have burnout and in the same way that we think of mental health as a spectrum. Our emotional capacity as humans is also a spectrum and we just need to be monitoring that when we can we could have talked for hours and hours and hours on this but as always on the pod really it's about starting these conversations. There's this quote that I read it's okay to do less when you're dealing with more and I think for creative people in particular that's something that has really stuck with me. We're going to link to all the resources that we've talked about in today's episode and also producer Hattie will obviously have the goods in the small print so stick around so you can hear about that especially if you're struggling at the moment and just know that that we're here. Thank you so so much you were absolutely brilliant guests you've been incredibly candid and very vulnerable so thank you and it's just been amazing to chat with you both. Thank you for the opportunity appreciate it. Thank you so much. Brilliant brilliant episode those guys were just amazing weren't they it was so interesting it's such a tricky complicated thing and I feel like they were so open about all of it even kind of like the messy parts of it which which was amazing. Maybe crosses over into the world of mental health which is not something that we've covered explicitly on the pod before but it is obviously something we talk about in most episodes and like you said they were just so candid burn out has been on the list requested since day dot and they were just the perfect people to discuss it in a way that was I think probably quite relatable for people to be honest. Definitely and the fact that it's relatable makes so much sense because the first thing that I want to kick us off with in the small print is this stat so 70% of creative professionals experience burn out in 2024 which is absolutely insane it is so problematic honestly it's so problematic. Yeah which is why I actually think the small print today is going to be quite important because we've talked a lot about people's experiences and we heard from the guests how they tackle their own burn out and try to avoid it but there are obviously some incredible people who have dedicated their careers to this space so kick us off. Totally so I started by looking at a really good Ted talk by Jackie ivy and she talks about what burnout really is kind of breaks it down for us and it's not just about being tired which I think is the real classic thing that people associate with burnout right like you just absolutely knackered and you're exhausted but it's not just that it's this deeper depletion of purpose energy and connection to what made work inspiring in the first place. And she talks about how purpose is really vital to creative people right and it's when you lose the why behind your created work is when you become much more vulnerable to burnout and that makes total sense but yes it's worth a watch just to kind of really understand what's happening and what's the play. The next thing that I came across is a strategy or a theory called the 42% rule and it's from the mental health UK burnout report so this is a they say it's a science backed approach which we love to avoid in burnout and they say that 42% is the amount of time per day your body and your brain need to spend resting in order to avoid burnout right so that's about 10 hours in every 24 hours. So they've got a suggested breakdown for how you should accrue those 10 hours so they say 8 hours of sleep 20 to 30 minutes of stress reducing conversation with your partner or other trusted loved ones so like not arguing about tours I guess. 30 minutes of physical activity 30 minutes of paying attention to food so like really sitting down and eating properly not walking it down on sofa I guess and then they said 30 minute wild card so that's depending on your needs this could be anything from preparing to sleep or social time you know going to the park I'm sure counts as well card. So Casey how do you think you're doing with your 10 hours out of 24. You know better than I thought I would do I sleep hard and I sleep a lot so sleep sleep never be huge issue for me I get at least 8 hours sorry for the people that don't sleep well so no that's free it's nothing more annoying than someone telling you that they sleep lots. I obviously should probably say publicly that conversation so partner always stress reducing I think I struggle on the food actually and not eating at my desk and working through lunch I'm really bad at that physical activity I've got dog so and the wild card yeah not every day I suppose and I don't necessarily pay attention to that every day and how about you. Well as somebody that has a very small baby I think I'm not doing particularly well across the board particularly the idea of 8 hours of sleep is like a sort of mythical magical pipe dream for me at the moment but perhaps in my prior pre baby life I was I was doing alright good to have some goals for what you're aiming to get towards. There's always room for improvement and I think that's the point right is there is this what we love about this approach is this tangible thing you need to aim for so there's these 10 hours and you need to try and get them however you can so that could be a really useful tool for people I think I'm definitely going to bear it in mind more to see where I'm at. And the final piece that I wanted to chat about is a new book from any salon in so it's called the creative well being handbook me as a designer she took a year sabbatical to try and rediscover her passion so kind of like we were talking about that losing their purpose she discovered that we really need five things to fuel creativity and she said those five things of connection wonder pause movement and joy. So aside from the fact that the book itself is very visual and very beautiful as you imagine from a designer is filled with interviews from leaders from across the creative industry and exercises to kind of help you reset your creative energy and kind of find some of those things that fuel your creativity again so we obviously love to see fellow creatives trying to help the industry to do better so I think that would be a really good read for everyone. Nice and I just wanted to end I guess by saying if you are suffering from burnout or you think based on listening to this episode you might be the first thing is just absolutely to talk to someone and get help so speak to your GP but also speak to your peer speak to your boss don't be afraid to say that you're struggling and try and take some time out. Thank you and thank you Hattie for today's small print that brings us to the end of the episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to our wonderful guests make sure you subscribe so you don't miss when we do random drops of episodes on you. This has been NDA produced by Hattie soundtrack by Jamie Alal and Toby McCarran. I've been Katie Cadwell. Catch you next week. [Music]