Women at Work - How We Take Care of Ourselves

0:00Amy B, how much self-care do you do right now? Well, I will say right now I'm taking way better care of myself than I was a week ago. So I'm hitting the gym going to yoga I'm not you know eating my stress or drinking it you know not answering emails at all hours and Being a lot more mindful of the boundaries I need to set. How about you, Nicole? I think I take pretty good care of myself, but I think there are a lot of people who would disagree with that. I don't know if my coworkers would say the same thing. I don't know if my partner or my parents would say that I take good care of myself. What about you, Amy Chi? It's in fits and starts. I'm also in a good place right now where I'm doing more exercise, gotten a few massages in the last month. I've been...

0:57more boundary around my use of my phone, but there are times, even days where it just is not good. And once you lose that discipline of self-care, it's like gone. Yeah. It's like opening the gates. Yeah. And they are floodgates. Yeah. And then you really, it's like a downward spiral and you have to put...

1:20Rules for yourself back in place. I mean it's just so easy not to take care of yourself. Yeah, it's amazing that any of us do it Yeah, well sometimes it feels luxurious like like self-care as it as a term feels like a total luxury But why is it self-indulgent to you know? Not to answer email in the middle of the night, you know or to go to a yoga class. I mean that's go to a yoga class Yeah, I think the problem is calling it self-care. It's just what we do to be okay

1:54You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Amy Gallo. And I'm Nicole Torres. A lot of the self-care that we're going to be talking about here isn't meant to be captured in a photo and posted to Instagram. It doesn't look like models drinking juice at a workout class on the beach surrounded by all their friends or some other ideal that makes us feel guilty for not taking care of ourselves.

2:19Yeah, no. In this conversation, we're considering more realistic ways to take care of ourselves, specifically at work. Self-care that's about paying attention to what we need to do our jobs well. So it means blocking off time to set priorities, asking for help, and letting go of unrealistic expectations of who we should be as employees. And of course, attending to our lives and relationships outside work as well.

2:44We hope to relieve guilt around prioritizing our health insanity within our career. Our guest expert has helped us appreciate this kinder, simpler type of self-care. And we're excited to share her insights and advice with you. Ashley Willens is a professor at Harvard Business School. And in her research, she's trying to understand how we should be spending our time and money if we want to be as happy as possible. Ashley came into the studio to talk to me and Amy B.

3:11And we started by asking her to tell us what she thinks self-care means. So, I mean, I'm a subjective well-being researcher. I study happiness. And so when I think about self-care, I think about really the predictors of happiness. Do I have enough time to spend with people that I care about? What are the quality of my social interactions? Am I on my phone the whole time? Am I rushing from point A to point B, meeting A to meeting B?

3:39spa appointment one to lunch date two, so that I'm not actually driving any satisfaction from my social interactions. Do I have meaningful work that feels purposeful? What are the kinds of things I'm doing at work? Do I feel like I have control over my time, over my schedule, over the tasks that I'm completing? And do I feel optimistic about where my life is going? So when I think about self-care, I think really about the outcome of self-care, which is well-being and meaning in life.

4:07And then I work backwards from there to think, what are some of the predictors of well-being? I think that's a really helpful view of self-care as this holistic thing that also includes work and interactions with people. It's not just a marketing concept. It's not just all face masks and massages. Self-care is a lot bigger than that. And that's helpful for me as I think about how does self-care fit into my life? Why is it even important?

4:32I've always thought of work and self-care as being kind of separate. Even though I don't think, I think maybe that's wrong. You know, I've wondered like, isn't prioritizing my career and spending a lot of time at work and trying to advance, isn't that taking care of my future self? Yeah, and so you're thinking about kind of the fact that we all have multiple goals, needs, and motivations in life. So the way I think about it, and because I'm a time use researcher also, I really do think about the structure of our whole days.

5:01And how we're spending our time, does it map on to the things that we care about? The more that the way that we spend each and every day maps on to all of these things that you're talking about, having a productive and fulfilling career, feeling like you're moving forward in it, having productive social relationships, having me time, those all kind of fit within buckets or kind of different categories, different things that you care about, different values that you have, different goals that you have. And I think about it the extent to which you spend your days.

5:30in a way that's consistent or aligned with these goals, values, and aspirations, create this feeling of self-care generally, this general feeling of well-being, of everything being coherent. So then your work isn't necessarily in conflict with your personal life. It's part of a greater whole. It's one motivation. And fulfilling that and being fulfilled in one area and having a diverse set of motivations will make you happier and healthier as a whole person.

5:59You're really speaking to me There's good data to back this up to you Does this like map on to how you think about self-care Amy? It definitely what what you're saying Ashley really does resonate with me and I've learned you know that I need to figure out what helps me function Happily in the world and if it means going to the gym and cutting into you know the nine to five work day and I'm curling my fingers ironically around nine to five. You know, that's okay. That's actually, that's what I need and it's the only time I can do it. But it means I'm gonna be healthier and my head's gonna be on straight and you know, I'll be able to function better. I also think as a manager, I need to communicate that and particularly to women in the office because it gives them permission as well to take care of themselves.

6:55That's where exactly, as you're saying, as managers, especially to groups, junior people, women especially, we need to start communicating and having very clear guidelines for how do you ask for more time in the workplace? What does that look like? How do you ask for personal time? We've find in some of the data that I've collected that asking for more time on adjustable deadlines at work.

7:21Unsurprisingly, people, employees who do it and feel like they can are less burnt out. They're happier. They perform better because they ask for more time and they turn in higher quality work. But the problem is junior people and women who could stand to benefit most from additional time, women on average take on more tasks at home. So that can cut into time that they need to spend at work. That they are the ones that are least likely to ask because they're the most likely to think that they're going to be penalized, even though in my data we don't show different penalties based on gender, based on junior-senior status. So I think this communication, these clear organizational structures for how do we ask for more time, how do we have self-care and us not be secretly judging the person who's taking it, which is what's running through everyone's mind. It's a sphere of evaluation. Well, if I take that time off, if I'm the person that's gonna go to the gym in the middle of my work day,

8:21triumphantly, I still have this sneaking suspicion that that promotion might go to the person in the corner office who's working all the time. So that's the question is, you know, we know what to do to get to self-care, but like, how does it operate in practice? Right. But really, the other thing that I think we need to bring is this notion of the ideal employee. So I think that some of that is just resetting our expectations and also articulating goals that are more human. For everyone, starting with the corner office. And it has to be from the top down. So there's research showing that if managers truly disconnect on their vacation, then employees are more likely to do that too, of course. And it's while you don't send emails after a certain hour, that's closer to six o'clock than 11 o'clock p.m.

9:18And it's why you don't send emails on the weekend. Mm-hmm It's it's sad though to in American work culture to get employees to take these kinds of benefits to actually truly disconnect The best data suggests you have to regulate people taking time off if they're not going to spontaneously do it because they still have this idea in their mind of this ideal employee Then say well too bad. I'm forcing you to if you check Slack if you check email I will doc you pay. We need to set a cultural norm that that's not okay. That's not what the ideal employee looks like. Actually, the ideal employee works really hard when they're in the office and then goes home at a reasonable time and has a really great fulfilling self-care filled life outside of the office. Because when you have a whole self that's not just work, you perform better.

10:11What other processes and messages can a manager put out there to keep us from getting to I'm not gonna pay you if you don't take a week off. Yeah, so in some of our data and our ongoing research We're doing small things like giving employees mandated from the top down two hours of time where they get to plan their week Uninterrupted we're not gonna schedule meetings during that time where you can think about what's urgent versus what's important, both at work and outside of it, and we'll keep that part of your schedule clear. And that's a pretty simple intervention. And we find that employees who take time every week to prioritize their own work and their life outside of work, when given that permission by a manager, self-report being 30% to 40% more focused on tasks at work, much happier, less stressed, feel less of this...

11:10that we were talking about earlier between work and life demands. But what is the role of a manager then? If you try to model good behavior, you don't send emails late at night, you don't check emails on vacation, what if you have an employee, and I'm definitely guilty of this, who emails you late at night, who you can tell is working more than they should and not taking care of themselves.

11:34What do you do as a manager? Is it your job to say something or do you just like roll with it? I think you do need to have this conversation. I've had this happen with students who I feel like are just working too many hours. I kind of sit them down and I say, look, I've got a few more years of experience than you. If you keep going at this pace, it's going to be counterproductive in the long run. That's what all the best data shows as well, in addition to anecdotal evidence.

12:02And in the moment, a manager can say, why were you up working at 11 o'clock at night? And the answer could be because I was busy doing something I needed to do for myself or my family during the day, in which case, you know, we're adults. We make these decisions. That's flexibility. But sometimes the manager's job is to say, you know, not every pot needs to be on high boil. Yeah. Helping employees prioritize.

12:30And being very clear, if you do send an email at night, at a strange time, you have to provide a justification for why, since it's outside of the normal job requirements. Unless there's something very urgently due, there should be no reason to work past X amount of time or to work these many hours. I think very clear communication is helpful. Yeah, key. So everything you're talking about makes a lot of sense.

12:57for the kind of work that you do, for the kind of work that we do. If you are in retail, for example, and it's important for you to be at the shop at 10 a.m. and not leave till six, how do you do that sort of thing? I think small break. So I have a data set that a collaborator shared with me of a large call center. So that's, you're sitting on the calls for eight.

13:22eight, ten hours a day. Right. And a very measured existence. Very measured. And you need the metrics for everything. And they found that one of the best predictors of customer satisfaction and employee burnout was the top performers took a little bit more time on each call and took a little bit more of a break before they picked up that next call. Not a lot. We're talking kind of 30 seconds a minute. But even trying to encourage small, you know, the literature calls, it's like micro breaks.

13:52and even in these fast-paced environments, reminders, situational cues that it's okay to take your lunch, it's okay to take a step back to stretch, that even these small micro moments can, at least in this one data set that we have, play a really important role for things like customer satisfaction and employee success. And that's something you have to do on your own. Don't ask permission. For the employees? Yeah. I mean, in some of...

14:20these workplace contexts, the manager might never say that. So it might be up to you to make these small decisions on your own. Or the data you just cited are a great conversation starter. I mean, my partner is an emergency room physician. And, you know, he hears me go in my soapbox about having more free time and focusing on time. He's like, a burnt out ER doctor, like I have way more patients than I can manage. There's one doctor on 40 patients in my ER at any given time. And how am I, you know, your studies sound nice and everything, but how am I supposed to? So it's exactly what you're talking about. And it is, it's almost like the self-regulation of not taking minutes, taking moments back, taking a deep breath, assessing the situation.

15:14Making sure that you take time you ask for help you delegate tasks to others if you need to to have a break So before this conversation, I had imagined that that self-care was about you know that it was about massages and going to the gym and Making sure that you know you you made time for you But what I'm now understanding from from you is that it's doing what you need to do to feel whole and that and that includes maintaining your personal relationships Taking care of who matters to you in addition to what matters to you, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's about spending the minutes moments Hours and days of your life in a way that's consistent with the things and people you care about mm-hmm mm-hmm And sometimes it's stuff that may not be fun in the moment, but it's absolutely necessary to you Yeah, and there's good research on this that

16:14Sure. Sometimes taking care of our kids, taking care of people that we care about that are sick, those things feel stressful in the moment. But they're exactly the kinds of things in our lives that give us meaning and purpose and a sense of belonging. And sometimes they're the things that if you don't do them actually add to your stress. Exactly. Because then you're thinking about the fact that you're not doing them. Well, and you feel guilty.

16:42So how does guilt factor into self-care? It comes up all the time in my research about why people don't engage in self-care enough. They feel bad. So when we're thinking about buying things that help us deal with the demands of everyday life, getting a house cleaner, having groceries delivered sometimes, taking an Uber instead of driving every once in a while so you can take that conference call so you can spend a little more time with your kids or...

17:13taking care of someone that you care about, that we don't engage in these kinds of behaviors because we feel so guilty. You've been so ingrained that we need to be the perfect parent, the perfect spouse, the perfect employee that even though we're going to the market economy with our hard earned money and having solutions to some of these daily hassles, we don't actually follow through. We don't actually make those purchases or we try to take on everything ourselves because We feel guilty. We feel lazy. We take on the burden of other people doing our tasks for us. When we want to outsource at work, we think about it not as an opportunity to help someone more junior get experience on a project. We think about it as offloading something we don't want to do to someone else. So we're always constantly monitoring and thinking about too much, like to a too high degree, the extent to which we're burdening other people. And it goes with self care. If you can't make that space in your life by

18:13delegating tasks at home, delegating tasks at work, you're never going to get to self-actualization. You're just going to be going from point A to point B, task A to task B forever. And a lot of what prevents us from getting there is we don't want to ask for help. We worry about burdening other people. Yeah. Well, learning to delegate is also part of advancing. Exactly. Right? So if I feel like I need more time, for myself. If I feel like I'm just too hyper-focused on work right now, I'm not taking any time for me. How do I communicate that to my boss? How do I ask for more time to focus on me and my self-care? Depends on who your boss is, I think. We have some data showing that you need to provide some justification about why you need more time.

19:03Just saying you're busy and need more time is not a good strategy. Our best data suggests that you can be penalized for saying, I can't do this because I don't have time. We all have the same amount of it. And it signals how we spend our time, signals what we care about in life to other people. So we need to be a little bit careful if we need more time at work, that we're very clear about why. And we're also clear about when we're going to get things done. And we ask well ahead of when something is due.

19:33If you ask for more time in advance, your boss in my data sees you as more thoughtful, more caring, more considerate because you're looking to the future. You're realizing you can't get something done without it costing you personally in terms of your health or well-being. And you're doing the adult thing and asking for more of something you need. And so managers actually really appreciate that. The only trick of this is you have to give yourself enough time each day to know you're not going to have time in the future.

20:02And that's where those kind of planning blocks become really important. Where you're not just focusing on urgent, urgent, urgent, 55 emails in my inbox, but you're able to take a step back for yourself, no email, no communication, and think, not only what is urgent, but what's important that's on the horizon that gives you that extra time to plan. One way people take care of themselves is to go to therapy.

20:27And that's a regular thing. It's a thing that often happens during work hours because it's very tricky to schedule. It's something that costs money and takes time. And it's something that you would have to communicate, I think, to a manager, especially if it's something that you have to do in the middle of the day. You have to duck out at a certain time each week or every other week. How do you approach that kind of request, especially if it's something that we don't...

20:54tend to talk about in workplaces very much. We don't talk about mental health. We don't talk about therapy appointments. What do you think is the best approach for handling that? Yeah, so I mean, I would think that we have to, I don't have data directly on this question, but I think we need to treat it like we would treat anything else, like put it in our calendar, not let work try to move it around and be really firm that this is something I need. You don't have to.

21:22review all the details and if it's a personal matter, workplaces can't ask and be very clear with yourself that this is something you're not going to move. Be very clear with your managers that this is something you can't move and maybe it'll move around a little depending on appointment availability but it's something that's really important. It'll help you show up and be your best self. You don't need to provide a lot of information and you just are very clear and set clear boundaries.

21:52But that's true not just for therapy but for anything that is important. You have to schedule these self-care activities in your life as seriously as you would the most important meeting of your life because it is really important and we can keep telling ourselves we'll have more time in the future but we know that's just the planning fallacy. So we need to be treating anything that is really important to us. Exercise, family time.

22:21caregiving, therapy as being something that's as important as your most important meeting and being inflexible and being very clear. Also, as a manager, I don't really care what you're doing. I just need to know you're going to be out of the office. So I'm not going to plan a meeting where you need to be present if you've blocked your calendar. If it's something where you sort of think you're going to raise questions by being out regularly, You can say to your manager, I have a standing appointment. So on Tuesdays, I'm going to take off at three. And I can virtually guarantee that your manager will say, OK, and not even ask. If you say doctor's appointment, chances are she'll say, I just want to make sure you're OK. Is there anything you need? Right? OK. So we've talked about how managers can better model.

23:18you know, self-caring behaviors. We've talked about how managers can encourage their employees to take better care of themselves. But what if you work for someone who does not take care of themselves, who eats lunch at their desk, who works late, who emails you at all hours, who does not prioritize self-care in the least? Like what do you as their employee do with that? How do you manage up? How do you take care of yourself?

23:40You do not try to manage up. Do not try to fix a sinking ship. I think it's really hard. I mean, I think it's really hard to change someone's ingrained behavior. It's really hard to change our own behavior. And we live in our own bodies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it's hard to make small tweaks around the margins to help ourselves have happier and healthier lives. I think trying to slip in yoga passes or try to get them to you know, would not bug them every time they send an email probably is going to be counterproductive to your cause. But you can set boundaries. And you can protect yourself. You can try to protect yourself. And if this is really negatively impacting your performance and wellbeing, maybe you look elsewhere. It's really hard to work for a toxic boss. It's really hard to work for someone who has really high expectations all the time.

24:31And if you take your self-care seriously, happier people are more likely to quit situations that make them feel bad. Sometimes you have to, there's no one to fold them. You have to know when to get out of a bad situation. So in the absence of being able to set your own personal boundaries, you might need to just slowly start looking for someone else to work for who shares more of the similar values and goals that you do.

25:00All right, Ashley, let's bring all this insight home. How do you practice self-care? Talk about how that's evolved for you. Yeah, so I used to joke in grad school with my colleagues, do what I say and not what I do. This has been a journey for me just as my research has progressed. My own personal experience with self-care has also gone through some progression over the years.

25:28And I have definitely done it wrong and definitely struggle like so many of us to prioritize multiple competing demands, stressful job market, demanding job, having a personal life and family responsibilities. It seems impossible, right? And for me, my research really says small shifts around the margins. Do small things every day. It doesn't have to be when things get hard, think about quitting your job. I don't think about it in like, long stretches, like I'm going to defer all of my relaxation to one week, five months from now when I can take a week off of all of my responsibilities and just lie as a vegetable on the couch. I think of how can I build in some self-care into every day if it's not answering email in the morning? So before I came here, I did three hours of work in the morning writing the intellectual stuff that's hard that I don't want to be constantly panged on my email.

26:26before my day starts, I get up early, I do some work, and then I spend an hour and a half lounging around on the couch with my boyfriend. I would have never done that before for the record, I would have just filled that time with meetings and work and emails and whatever else, but over time I've tried to take seriously the idea that if my partner and I have an hour off together, obviously we have hard to coordinate schedules.

26:55then we should both be capitalizing on that hour. Because we might feel like we will have another hour in the future or like a day off sometime two weeks from now. But really like, it's about that hour. And how do you get more of those like 30 minute stretches with the people you care about? More of that taking back those hours to go to the gym, go for a walk, spend time with your friends and family.

27:22I studied time, money, and happiness and how it's so important to prioritize time in quality time with people you care about. And first year on the tenure track, I got a divorce. My partner of 10 years left me. And I think it's because he didn't think that there was any space in a new life here for him. And that was probably true the way that I was working. Working all the time, head down.

27:48didn't make time. So even when I was present in the moment, I was always on my phone. I was always, even if I wasn't on my phone, I was cognitively thinking about the next thing I was going to do. I was not present in the moment trying to cultivate a relationship with this other person. So when I moved here for work, he didn't want to move with me. And I thought, you know, I was like, how dare he not want to move for my career? Like this is the opportunity of a lifetime.

28:15And upon reflection, I realized he didn't want to move because he felt like there was no life here for him, for us together. Because we hadn't made that space. I hadn't made that space in our relationship. And again, it's not about taking nice vacations. We did those things. But that doesn't fix day in, day out, minute in, minute out conflict that happens when you're not fully attending to the people in your life that you care about.

28:42My research suggests small, simple changes around the margins. Can you outsource something? Can you cancel a meeting? Can you move something so that you have a little bit more time today, right now, not five months from now, not when you get your next promotion, right now. How can I capitalize more on the opportunities in my life to do the things I care about in each day? And I think that's what I've really learned.

29:08in thinking so much about this topic is I actually take that a lot more seriously now. I used to kind of just say it because my research shows it. And now I'm like, no, when I'm doing something, I'm trying to do it. And if I need more time, I ask for it. I ask for more time on my third year promotion materials. And I cited my own research to my department head. You show off. And she was like, yeah, it's fine. You can have more time. It seems your study works. She was a little like, ugh.

29:37Annoying that you're citing yourself but go for it And so yeah, I think like over time over you know It's hard and I still feel a little bit of that guilt that we were talking about About not putting work so central in my life But I've already experienced the cost of doing it in a short period of time and I'm certainly not gonna perpetuate that that work focus into the future I think life is worth enjoying now in the moment While we have it, no matter what else we're trying to do or accomplish. Ashley, thank you so much for joining us in the studio today. This has been great. Thank you so much for having me. You've been great. Thank you. Thanks. I'm so bummed I missed that conversation with Ashley. It was so good, you guys. Where were you? In that particular moment, I think I was in Barcelona, which I won't complain about, although I was traveling 12 days in Europe with a broken foot. Oh, God. Yeah.

30:36What led to that broken foot? Too much travel. I broke it in an airport. I was rushing. I had been sitting for three hours totally focused on my phone. And I stood up and my foot was asleep and I rolled over it. And it was exactly that kind of thing of like if I had been thinking about what do I need in this moment? I needed to not have had a full day of meetings before a flight. I need to not sit without moving for three hours in an airport.

31:05If I had been thinking about what's actually good for me, I'm really pretty sure it wouldn't have happened. I have to say though, it has prompted me to take much better care of myself. And since I've gotten back from my trip, I've been really good about eating better, getting a lot more sleep and just physically taking care of myself, trying to do yoga as much as I can and getting massages because it's what I need to stay sane.

31:35at this moment and to like take back my body. It's interesting because so much of, for me, of self-care is about dealing with stress and anxiety and pressure and all that stuff. But it really comes out in the form of physical collapse for me. Physical collapse and a really short fuse. And that's when I have to stand up and just walk away.

32:02Give myself physical distance so I can get some psychic distance. Yeah Yeah, well that I really liked what Ashley said around those because I think of self-care we think of like Social media and people posting, you know, they're getting their manicures. It's self-care day But I liked what Ashley said around it can be really small moments like you said even getting up walking around Just remembering to breathe remembering to move your legs so they don't fall asleep. Yes, like it can be small things. And for me, something I make sure to do that I really prioritize is getting enough sleep at night. So that's the one thing I know I need in order to like function as a human being the next day. If I'm really like lower than seven hours of sleep, it's hard for me to like be a good person and good colleague. And so getting like eight hours of sleep is something it feels a little luxurious, but it's like the one like ultimate

32:58self-care thing that I need to do for myself. And when you say it out loud, the absurdity of that really hits you. How is it luxurious because I'm supposed to be like posting on Instagram to build my brand at 2 a.m.? Like what are we doing with our time that we can't take care of ourselves? Well, we know what we're doing with our time. And the other thing, so the thing that I know really just that I really have to guard against.

33:26is becoming an empath, absorbing everyone else's panic and sense of urgency and making it my own instead of just putting things in perspective. You have to constantly remind yourself what you're responsible for, what you can control, and you have to distance yourself from the stuff that's out of your control.

33:55Need to think about self-care more because we do so much of that You know because the gender stereotype is that we look out for the collective we are thinking about other people's needs We get emotionally involved right and so then it's important we disconnect from that and recharge ourselves But at the same time I think that self-care is kind of this like it's seen as this like fix it all approach like women if you are having a bad day or if you are stressed out about things at work like all you need to do is take better care of yourself you just need a little self-care like no there are real problems in workplaces and in the world that are like forcing women into these bad circumstances that those should be addressed it's not women need to take better care of themselves it's that there are certain

34:41aspects about like their work and their house and their world that needs to be like improved. So it's not always on women to fix the stuff that's wrong. Right. But I do think that self-care can help you deal with the stuff that can go wrong and the stresses that fall on you and the anxieties you may feel. I mean, that's how I understand it. Well, and also I agree completely, Nicole, and I think adding self-care to one more thing that women need to do to be okay. It shouldn't be thrown on us as something that's a task. We have yet another task or yet another box we need to tick. But I do think that when we do self-care in the way that Ashley described, it doesn't have to be this big spa day with all your girlfriends and champagne. If you do it in the way she described of taking moments for yourself, walking around the office, taking a breather, moving,

35:40that it can give us the energy and the space and the resilience to address some of those larger issues. Totally. Yeah. That's our show. I'm Nicole Torres. I'm Amy Bernstein. And I'm Amy Gallo. Our editorial and production team is Amanda Cursey, Maureen Hoek, Adam Buckholtz, Rob Eckhart, J.M. Olajars, Mary Dew, and Corey Brosnahan.

36:09We want to hear from you email us at women at work at hbr.org Thank you for listening