Ep. 73: Do Nothing with Celeste Headlee (Part 1)

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The British philosopher Bertrand Russell called it “the cult of efficiency”—the drive among high-performers to accomplish more, to be productive, to work. But lately that cult has been pushing more people to burnout and languishing. What’s going on? In evolutionary terms, the cult of efficiency is a recent invention that contradicts the way humans have survived for millennia, according Celeste Headlee, author of the book, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. In part one of a special two-part episode, Headlee joins Dr. Jack Muskat, Medcan’s clinical director of mental health, to discuss how our culture became obsessed with productivity, and why we need to remember how to relax. 

LINKS
More on Headlee and her work at her website, and her book Do Nothing.

Here’s one of the interviews Headlee did, this one with NPR, leading up to the book’s launch. Ahd here’s one she did with Forbes.

Watch Headlee briefly break down the book here. 

She’s also given a TED Talk on how to have better conversations.

INSIGHTS

Burnout, which the World Health Organization recognizes as a syndrome, has six main drivers, Headlee says: Overworking, the sense that you are not in control, being underappreciated, some kind of breakdown in your workplace, unfair treatment and a disconnect between your skills, values and the work you are being paid to do. As the author notes, self-care won’t be able to address any of these things. Tied to this is the revelation that the life expectancy in the United States, at least, has fallen three years in a row. While working on her book, Headlee asked the researcher why this was. The answer: Despair. “Even before the pandemic, we were already on a very, very toxic and dangerous path,” she says. (3:46)

We’ve all heard—maybe even said—the phrase “time is money.” Headlee was surprised to discover that it’s a relatively new phrase. She dug through labour records dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans—and found that for most of history, work happened in pulses. Hunter-gatherer societies worked a day or two a week. Agricultural societies would work hard for a condensed period of time, and then take a celebratory break, like a harvest festival. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution came about that work became a more task-based constant that led to our eventual obsession with productivity. “This is very, very recent in terms of an evolutionary change,” Headlee says, “which means we can change it back.” (5:31)

So when Headlee says “do nothing,” does she actually mean to sit around and do, well, nothing? Not exactly. “Leisure is not inactivity,” she says. “You can be active while you are at leisure. ‘Do nothing’ just means stop trying to produce stuff, stop worrying about the product or the utility of that time and do what you want.” (16:10)

“You are not a multitasker—none of us are multitaskers,” Headlee says. The truth is that the human body and brain isn’t designed to multitask. In fact, multitasking is associated with damage to our cognitive processes. Headlee found research that proves that multitasking degrades the quality of your work, lowers your IQ in that moment (to the point where you could be on par with an eight-year-old) and that you get worse at multitasking over time, not better. Multitasking is even associated with lower brain density, especially in areas related to self-control and empathy. “It’s a terrible idea to try to treat our own bodies and brains like a computer,” she says. “It’s much easier if you work with your body and brain instead of against it.” (16:58) 

Overwork is bad for our health. By constantly pushing ourselves, we put ourselves into such a state of stress that we activate the amygdala—the portion of the brain that is only supposed to be in control under great threat or danger. That, in turn, affects our decision-making abilities. The stress raises blood levels of cortisol and can leave us feeling exhausted, causing further stress in a vicious feedback loop. “That’s what causes burnout,” Headlee explains. “Burnout isn’t because of one bad day or even a bad week. It’s chronic.” (19:42)

Coming up next week: What to do about it, in part two of Dr. Jack Muskat’s interview with Celeste Headlee.

EPISODE 73: DO NOTHING WITH CELESTE HEADLEE (PART 1) FINAL WEB TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:10.03]

Christopher Shulgan: Welcome to Eat Move Think, episode 73. I'm executive producer Christopher Shulgan. When's the last time you just sat around and did nothing? Most of the time, most of us are multitasking. Say it's your third video meeting of the morning, and you're just taking a moment to text the babysitter about heating up tonight's dinner. Does your to-do list nag away at the back of your mind while you're spending time with your kids? Do you find yourself answering emails while streaming a show or watching a game? Even now, what else are you doing while you listen to this podcast?

[00:00:41.00]

Christopher Shulgan: We are overworked, living in a cult of efficiency and dying of productivity, argues journalist Celeste Headlee, the author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving. The solution, she says, is in the title of her work: doing nothing. To restore balance and promote mental wellness, most of us need to let go, reclaim our time and incorporate some leisure into those days and nights.

[00:01:07.15]

Christopher Shulgan: In the first episode of a special two-parter, Headlee joins Dr. Jack Muskat, clinical director of mental health at Medcan. First up, they dive into the fascinating historical context behind our obsession with work. How exactly did we get here? Spoiler: it's a more recent development than you think. Here's their conversation.

[00:01:30.16]

Jack Muskat: Hi, I'm Dr. Jack Muskat, clinical director of mental health at Medcan, and I'm here with journalist and author Celeste Headlee. Thanks for joining us today, Celeste.

[00:01:39.16]

Celeste Headlee: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:41.21]

Jack Muskat: Do Nothing is a very intriguing book. It's one part history, some part social anthropology, a bit of economics, a bit of psychology. And it's sort of making a very bold statement about how we're dying of productivity, and we're living in a cult of efficiency, and, you know, in a society that just can't stop. My first question is, where did you—who incidentally, I had a look at your website, author, journalist, broadcaster, mentor, trainer, developer, any idea where this idea came from?

[00:02:18.05]

Celeste Headlee: Yeah, it just came from the fact that before I was doing, you know, an equal amount of things, but the pace was unsustainable. I kept doing things that I had been told would make it better, right? You know, it's kind of irritating a little bit that the emphasis on self care, because self care is what I tried. And self care doesn't work for the very reasons that I lay out in the book, that this is not about us individually, it's about the society in which we live. And it's been coming for 200 or 300 years. So after I had tried all the things, including quitting my job and becoming self-employed, so that I'd have control of my own schedule, it got worse. Everything I did made it worse. That's when I realized I needed to really figure out what was going on.

[00:03:02.10]

Jack Muskat: Most of us think of psychology as helping the individual do better. So at the very macro level, our jobs as psychologists or anyone who's a therapist, is to help people adjust to the world—assuming the world is a healthy place. So the question becomes, what are we adjusting people to, if what you're saying is that we are sort of structurally living in a society that is very dysfunctional. So I would love to just get your overview in terms of your book, and kind of the narrative arc of what you're really saying around humanity over the last 250 to 300 years, because you're making some very, very, I think, intriguing statements that we need to look at and examine, perhaps because we're living in it, we don't see it.

[00:03:47.14]

Celeste Headlee: Yeah. I mean, just to start us out, I'll give you two sort of data points, right? The first is that burnout was recognized by the WHO, as an actual syndrome just a couple years ago. And I'll tell you the six main drivers of burnout, as far as research is concerned: overwork, feeling that you are not in control of your circumstances, a lack of appreciation, a breakdown of community in your workplace, unfair treatment, and a mismatch between your skills and your own values and the job that you hold. So that's the first data point, which is that if you look at that list of drivers, six drivers, none of those will be affected by self care. The other thing I would say is that, for several years now, the life expectancy in the United States at least, has fallen. And when they asked the lead author of the study report, I think from 2019, why people were dying younger, he said, "Despair." So just to get us started, to give us sort of context about where we are, before the pandemic, we were in trouble. [laughs] Before the pandemic began, we were already on a very, very toxic and threatening, dangerous path. And then the pandemic came in, and we just handled it the worst way possible.

[00:05:11.25]

Jack Muskat: Mm-hmm. Tell us a little bit more about where we've got this idea that work is the end all and be all. And what I found very informative is how the nature of work and the meaning of work has changed over the last few hundred years. And I think that would speak well to why a lot of us are feeling disengaged from what we're doing.

[00:05:32.07]

Celeste Headlee: Yeah, it's really fascinating. I mean, the research wasn't fascinating. I had to go through labour records dating back to the days of the Greeks and Romans, which I wish on no one. But what you find is that humans lived one way for most of 300,000 years, and we worked less than half the year. And that's not just people with wealth, the so-called idle rich. This is even in hunter-gatherer societies [where they] work maybe one or two days a week. It's actually more work—we worked more when we became farmers than when we subsisted just through hunting and gathering, which doesn't make sense to a lot of people, but it is the truth. So we worked one way, and this is something that was common for every culture that I could find records for, in pretty much every continent, that there is a pulse to the work, right? You would have a harvest, which is an intense amount of work for a limited period of time, and then what did people do? they had a two-week harvest festival, right? I mean, that's the way humans behaved was this pulse.

[00:06:35.25]

Celeste Headlee: And then came the Industrial Revolution. And you know that phrase, "Time is money?" It is so cliché at this point that I kind of assumed it had always been around, but it's only 250 years old or so. And that's because, before the Industrial Revolution, time was not money. We were task-based. You were paid, or you survived, earned your keep, for each thing that you produced, or each activity that you did, not for the amount of time it took you. It wasn't until we gave up the means of production, to quote a little Marx here, and we became just bodies on a line, that our time was more valuable than what we could produce with our hands. And so this is recent. I mean, in evolutionary terms, this is very, very recent in terms of a change, which means we can change it back.

[00:07:32.18]

Jack Muskat: I think one of the challenges we have is that the fruits of industrialism and capitalism, and when I read your book, I mean, it almost hearkens to: is capitalism the cause of our problems? Is a Protestant ethic the cause of our problems? Everyone says they don't want to have, "I didn't work long enough at the office" on their tombstone, but everyone's at the office working. And it's very, very difficult to kind of get off that treadmill that we're on, because it's being enabled by technology. But you found that it wasn't just the devices, that it was the way in which we were thinking about our work that got in the way. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you experienced?

[00:08:13.08]

Celeste Headlee: You know, when I started this research, I wasn't writing a book, I was writing a completely different book. I was just trying to solve my own problem. And I thought that I would find that I was addicted to my smartphone, right? Most adults admit they're probably addicted to their smartphones, right? I thought I spent too much time looking at screens. And so I basically went neo-Luddite for a month. I mean, I bought a flip phone that could not access the internet. I mean, it was texting, but that old school texting that takes forever. I took off my Fitbit, I just basically got rid of every screen that I possibly could. And it did make things a little bit better, but it didn't actually solve the problem. I was just basically treating a symptom. And so that became my research. I mean, the research project began this series of peeling back the layers to say, "Well, if it's not that, then what?"

[00:09:06.05]

Celeste Headlee: And then, you know, that's how we land back at the 19th century, and the beginning of industrialization. And I tell the story of the very first steam engine because—I mean, I have no idea what the education is like where you grew up, but here in the US, they didn't really make clear how the Industrial Revolution changed everything. I don't think I realized that at all. They teach it, but they just teach it as like, hey, this is a positive thing, you know, it made everything better, and everyone started getting wealthy and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And it really didn't. It didn't do that. So it was an eye-opening exercise for me to realize that our tech, which we have been blaming for so much, is really not the problem. You know, but this is the thing. It's a pattern in society when there's a general problem, when a lot of people are suffering from the same issue, there's this trend, this tendency to turn this back and say, "Okay, what is it that you need to change about your life?" Right? We always turn it back on the person, this sort of individual accountability. And that's good to a certain extent. I mean, you're a psychologist. Obviously, that's kind of what you do every day, right? Let's change what it is that you can change. But at the same time, that's limited. You can only change so much, and then it has to become a revolution. And then it has to become a movement to change society.

[00:10:37.24]

Jack Muskat: Well, I want to get to that, but before we go there, I want to go back to you, because I think that one of the things that impresses me the most about your book and about your talks, is how, you know, do the work, working on yourself. Things happened to you, and you made a change. And what happens to most of us is we see what's going on, even if we do the journalling, and we do the reflection, but fear overtakes us, and we seem unable to make that change. And if you don't mind sharing personally what went on in your life that made you—I won't call it a radical change, but you were on planes, you were giving talks, you were working, you started your own business, you had moved into areas that everyone would see as you're very successful. And yet you write that you just felt exhausted all the time. But something happened. Was there a moment? Where's that ah-hah moment that I'm always looking for for our patients and saying, "There's going to be a moment. Do you want that moment to sneak up on you, or do you want to be in charge of it?" So how did that happen for you?

[00:11:41.00]

Celeste Headlee: I mean, it did kind of sneak up on me. It was a slow-moving disaster, right? But the ah-hah moment was when I was lying in bed for the second time in a matter of months with bronchitis that knocked me out. And I am an extremely healthy person—"healthy as a horse" has come out of my doctor's mouth. And I just could not understand how I could be so sick multiple times, to where I was just out, cancelling things constantly. And then I began to remember other things as well: snapping at my family members, becoming irritable, when I'm a pretty chipper person in general. That's what flipped the light switch on so I could actually see the situation in which I was in.

[00:12:26.21]

Celeste Headlee: And then, you know, I'm a scientist at heart. I began to experiment. I tried the experiment with getting rid of the technology. That didn't actually work. I quit my job and became my own boss. That made it so much worse, I can't even describe to you. I started making sure that I meditated again every single day. I'm a Buddhist, I meditate anyway, but I scheduled in, only to realize to my brain, I was simply adding another task to my to-do list every day, and I began to resent meditation, right? So then I started asking, "Well, if I'm so overwhelmed and out of time, always, where is my time going?" And I spent weeks—I think it was something like five or six weeks keeping a time diary, the same way that nutritionists ask patients to keep a food diary, right? I was absolutely brutally honest with myself, because frankly, nobody was going to see it but me. If I spent 90 minutes shopping for shoes online, I notated that down. But essentially, just every 30 to 60 minutes, I would stop and notate down in my little notebook what I had spent the past hour doing. And then after a period of weeks, I could sort of look back and sort it. I could sort it into eating, social media. I had a clear picture of what I was doing with my time, and it was not what I wanted to be doing with my time. I did not want to be spending that much time browsing through Instagram, or just, like, scrolling through Twitter. I had no idea. And that was Paul on the road to Damascus, that was Buddha underneath the tree. That was the big eye-opening moment for me.

[00:14:10.10]

Jack Muskat: Yeah, realizing how many notifications disrupt you, noticing how much time it takes to get back to work, noticing, as you say, how people actually worked and did productive work maybe three or four hours a day, and yet we're spending seven and eight hours and getting less done. What was the most surprising thing you found in looking at your journals over that time period, in addition to all the time spent on social media?

[00:14:35.19]

Celeste Headlee: I think the most surprising thing was just how much time I just kind of puttered away clicking on stuff on the internet. You know, I do the New York Times crossword every day, but I don't just do the New York Times crossword, right? They have all those little, "You might be interested in this article," and I think, "Oh, I am interested in that article," and click on that, and it takes me somewhere else. I didn't realize that. I also didn't realize that I had way more free time than I thought. Much more. Because over the course of my work day, I would tell people that I was working 12 hours a day—and I truly believed that, but it wasn't true. I was, in terms of actual sit down and get your work done, I was working, as you say, like, maybe five hours a day. And even that I didn't need. So that was very surprising to me. And when you couple that to when I started doing research and realized that some of the most productive and accomplished people in history worked maybe three or four hours a day, things began to sort of fall into place for me.

[00:15:42.26]

Jack Muskat: As we look at the title Do Nothing, well, does that mean I'm doing nothing? Is it leisure? Is it laziness? How do I know that I'm not just efficiently going about doing nothing? I had a patient who meditated for seven years. And I said, "Does it help?" He said, "No." I said, "Well, you can stop now." It was just checking boxes. You know where I'm going with that?

[00:16:03.27]

Celeste Headlee: It's the old, "Doctor, it hurts when I move my arm like this." "Stop moving your arm like that." So, you know, it's interesting to me how many people associate idleness or leisure with laziness, right? And they are not the same thing. But leisure is also not inactivity. And this is one of the things I really tried to explain in the book was that, you know, a security guard is idle while working. A fisherman is often idle while working. You can be active while you are at leisure. Do nothing just means stop trying to produce stuff. Stop worrying about the product, or the utility of that time, and do what you want. Sit for a while.

[00:16:47.25]

Jack Muskat: But I'm a multitasker. I can do it all, right? Okay, folks, get ready for this. This is gonna be a real surprise about multitasking.

[00:16:59.12]

Celeste Headlee: You are not a multitasker. None of us are multitaskers. There are species that can multitask—surprisingly, the pigeon is one of them. But human beings can't. And it's incredibly damaging to the brain. In fact, you know, since researchers had more access to the fMRI, the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, in which we can watch people thinking while they're conscious, the research on multitasking, or the attempt to multitask has gotten voluminous, and it's almost entirely negative. You know, some of the surprising stuff for me about that is, you know, I'm just going to list off a bunch of research facts about multitasking. A) when you are trying to multitask, as in maybe on a conference call and also answering email, the quality of both tasks goes down by double digits. Your IQ drops by 12 to 14 points, which puts you on the par with, like, an eight-year-old child.

[00:17:55.22]

Celeste Headlee: Over time, you get worse at doing more than one thing at a time. Not better, worse. In fact, researchers expecting to find that people who are heavy multitaskers were better at this actually found that people who said they multitasked a lot, couldn't even remember the position of dots on a page. Like, their brains were just constantly skittering all over. And worst of all, is the damage that it does to your brain. People who called themselves heavy multitaskers had less brain density. And a lot of the loss of brain matter was in this area here, which is related to self-control and empathy. So it's a terrible idea. It is always a terrible idea to try to treat our own bodies and brains like a computer, as though we can force them to do something. Rise and grind, right? No pain, no gain. That's ridiculous. It's so much easier if you just understand what our bodies and brains, how they're meant to function, and work with your body and brain instead of against it.

[00:19:01.10]

Jack Muskat: Right. And what you seem to be saying is that when we're at odds with our physiology, and with our normal way of functioning—let's say an analogue way—and now we're multitasking, we're on Zoom calls, we have Zoom fatigue, we're dealing with 24/7 notifications, or worrying that we're going to miss something and the FOMO that's out there, our body is just in a constant state of stress releasing.

[00:19:23.20]

Celeste Headlee: Oh, yeah.

[00:19:25.02]

Jack Muskat: And the inability I noticed as well is people are finding to make decisions, there's a kind of decision fatigue. And there's just a sense of, Adam Grant calls it "languishing," that we had during the pandemic that I'm hoping we can get out of now as we get more and more social. And I'd like you to comment on that.

[00:19:43.24]

Celeste Headlee: Yeah. And essentially, what we have done by pushing ourselves constantly is we've put ourselves into such a state of stress, that the amygdala takes over, right? The part of our brain, the lizard brain, that responds to threat and danger, which is only supposed to be in control, A) if you're being chased by a tiger; and B) for a short period of time. But essentially, we have kept ourselves in this state of stress, so that the amygdala has been driving the car. And that's a terrible idea. Terrible! It means your executive decision-making functions never even get to weigh in. Those outer parts of your brain matter that are the higher thought, the part that thinks again, before, you know, it makes bad decisions, it doesn't even get a say. So we have a toddler taking control of our lives.

[00:20:37.00]

Celeste Headlee: And the irony is that, because of this, not only does it keep us in this heightened state of stress, it raises your blood pressure, it raises your cortisol levels as you mentioned, so you're going to feel exhausted. But it also makes bad decisions, and that adds to the stress, right? It becomes this very vicious cycle, to where the amygdala takes over, it does a terrible job at running our lives, that makes us feel more stress, that makes it more likely that we're going to go back into amygdala control. And that's what causes burnout. Burnout is not because of a bad day, or even a bad week. It's chronic. And that is where we are.

[00:21:16.04]

Jack Muskat: So how did you get out of it? Because I want to talk about—we've had an interesting two-and-a-half to three years. You wrote the book before the pandemic, we had the pandemic with the forced lockdown, where people got—some of them—that ah-hah moment. "Gee, I now realize what I'm doing with my time." But I still want to hear more from you what you did to get out of that mindset that was basically your life driven, is what you were, and you changed it. And, I don't know, I haven't taken a train ride in a long time, but you got to tell us about the train trip, and how that fits into all of this because it almost sounds like it was a forced bootcamp in leisure.

[00:21:55.05]

Celeste Headlee: It absolutely was. And frankly, I think about it all the time. I need to go on another one. But it took two weeks, and I travelled the entire continental United States. The continental United States is quite large. So I essentially left from DC, I travelled down to New Orleans, then hopped on another train and then across to Los Angeles, another train up to Seattle, another train to Chicago, another train to Boston, and then back home. And the train tracks, they don't always go through towns, right? They go through very remote places. So you don't always have internet. There's just not always towers where you are. So your phone doesn't always have a connection, you can't always log on. So as you say, it's kind of a forced mindfulness practice, a forced disconnection, which is what I needed. It was rehab.

[00:22:47.04]

Celeste Headlee: But, you know, the other thing that's great about an overnight train is that you eat meals in a dining car. So you have to eat meals with other people, and you are forced to be social and you're forced to talk to strangers. And so I turned that into a—tried to turn that into a positive. I bought a giant amount of truffles. I made a sign that says, "Tell me a story in exchange for a chocolate," and I put it on my dining table every time. And I heard incredible stories. But I gotta say, on the way back home, I still can call up that feeling I had as I was on the train, feeling that pulse of the train over the tracks. And headed home from Boston, and just thinking, "God, I don't want to emerge. I don't want to be plunged back into that ball of stress that was my life." That train trip was very enlightening to me in that A) when you unplug, the world doesn't fall apart. Your career is okay. If people have to wait for an email, they do, you know? I let everyone know, hey, I may not always have access, and they were like, okay. And suddenly, all these things that they thought were urgent, were not as urgent as they believed. And that sort of just made me—it removed my fear, I guess.

[00:24:26.01]

Christopher Shulgan: That was the first part of Medcan clinical director of mental health Dr. Jack Muskat's conversation with Celeste Headlee, the author of Do Nothing. We'll post a link to that book at EatMoveThinkpodcast.com, as well as links and a full episode transcript. Make sure to come back next week for the second half of their interview, which talks about how to restore balance to our lives.

[00:24:45.23]

Christopher Shulgan: Eat Move Think is produced by Ghost Bureau. I'm executive producer Christopher Shulgan. Senior producer is Russell Gragg. Patricia Karounos is associate producer. Social media support from Andrew Imecs and Campbell MacKinnon.

[00:24:58.14]

Christopher Shulgan: Remember to rate and subscribe to Eat Move Think on your favourite podcast platform. Follow our host Shuan Francis on Twitter and Instagram @ShaunCFrancis—that's Shaun with a U—and Medcan @Medcanlivewell. We'll be back soon with more on the latest in health and wellness.

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