Have you ever wondered if you are burnt out or if this is just like what life feels like these days?

Have you ever wondered if your tiredness, your lack of motivation, means that you need a new job,

or if this is just the price of participation in the modern economic climate?

And what if you can't change jobs? You need the money or the market's bad or any number of reasons.

How do you make your job more purposeful, more satisfying if you're trapped in it? You need the money or the market's bad or any number of reasons.

How do you make your job more purposeful, more satisfying if you're trapped in it?

Today we're having on Amina Altai, the author of The Ambition Trap.

She is an executive coach who's helped thousands of women optimize their work lives.

We are talking about the hidden reasons that so many of us are burnt out, including some that really, really surprised me that I've never heard anywhere else before.

We're talking about how you can tell before you even get a job if it's going to burn you

out and how you can find the best job fit that will make you feel energized and satisfied

on a regular basis.

We're talking about the best type of vacation for curing burnout and so

much more. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast where we skip past Fluffy BS. You can do it self-help to get

to the actual solutions to your real problems. So you can feel as good as possible every single day.

I'm going to welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I want to start with how can somebody know if they're burnt out?

Like how do we know what burnout feels like? First of all, are you feeling exhausted? When you get to work for the day, are you having trouble getting started? Do you need those five cups of coffee?

Jumpstart your motivation for the day? Are you starting to feel that negativism, cynicism,

not just for your work, but for your coworkers, for other constituents that you support too?

Are you starting to feel like it's laborious and burdensome to connect with them?

And things that you used to really care about and be delighted about, you're starting to feel like, actually, I don't really care about that thing. It almost makes me feel empty. People also have physical symptoms, too, right? So a lot of the times it manifests as GI issues, hair loss, brain fog, things like that, too. Are there types of work, though, that lead to burnout more? like if we are not working in line with our values, is that going to lead to burnout more? Okay, I'm going to answer this kind of backwards, but I feel like there's five things that really contribute to burnout. The first is biology. So women and people with a uterus, we have a tendency to become dysregulated and stay dysregulated longer because of something called corticotropin release factor. And listen, I am by no means an expert on the biology piece of this. I've just looked at the research and it takes us a little bit longer to process those chemicals and then stay in that state of dysregulation. Okay, so this is actually biological. This is something that's happening in our brains and our bodies with our hormones, etc. Exactly. So we just have to be a little bit of aware of that, right? I think of it like babies with Fontenelles, right? We have a little bit of a soft spot and we just have to be conscious that we have that tendency. The next piece is invisible labor. So invisible labor is the work that's unseen and unpaid for. And so many of us do that, especially women, we do that at work and we do that at home. Right. So it's, you know, offering to be the office therapist or take the notes, all of those types of things, doing too much of that contip us into burnout. Then there's visible labor. So that's the work that we do that's seen and paid for. And so many of us do way too much of it. Actually, I was reading, my book was part of the next big idea club. And one of their books of the day was talking about how we should move into a four-day work week because historically, people only worked 15 hours a week, but it was the industrial revolution that led us to the five days. So we're all doing way too much of the visible labor anyway.

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