Pressure
Welcome to Clock In, TIME's monthly LinkedIn-only newsletter about the changing world of work. This edition focuses on when work and life intersect.
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Are You Just Tired or Truly Burned Out?
Lauryn Higgins reports: Being tired is a normal part of life, especially when you’ve had a late night or a busy week. Fatigue is usually temporary and goes away with rest, sleep, or a short break. Once you take a step back, your energy typically returns.
“Burnout is completely different,” says Dr. Marjorie Jenkins, chief clinical officer at Incora Health, a women’s health tech company. “It causes us to question our purpose, lose our motivation, and destroy our emotional wellness. In essence, we lose our sense of self.”
Burnout is often rooted in chronic stress, emotional exhaustion, and a sense of detachment from work or life responsibilities. It’s not just a psychological state: burnout can lead to measurable changes in the brain's structure and function.
Read here about who is most at risk for burnout as well as prevention and recovery suggestions.
Column: I’m an Economist. The GOP Budget Undeniably Takes From the Working Class and Gives to the Rich
"Counties that currently rely heavily on Medicaid to cover their potential workers (those between the ages of 19 and 64) also have higher-than-average unemployment rates," writes Josh Bivens. "This means that the Medicaid cuts called for in the OBBB will especially impact counties that are already struggling economically. If we just look at the Medicaid cuts likely to fall on counties with an unemployment rate that is 0.5% above the national average (a decent marker for a fragile local economy), this would imply roughly 850,000 jobs (only about a quarter of them directly in health care) could be destroyed by the Medicaid cuts in those counties."
Bivens writes about how the "big beautiful bill" will affect the working class here.
Column: Becoming a Mom Made it Impossible for Me to Lead an Emergency Room
"When I was 33 I became an emergency department medical director and chair, roles rarely held by women. Perhaps naively, I thought I could leverage my new position to make our emergency department a better place for everyone, and especially for our female staff and patients," writes Dr. Melody Glenn. Glenn describes a workplace culture that refused to change, and only got worse when she got pregnant.
"Although motherhood was molding me into a better doctor, I felt like I was failing both at work and at home, with migraines, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and mom-guilt my constant companions. I began to wonder if it was worth it, especially since I hadn’t been able to make any of the meaningful changes I had hoped for. My choice seemed daunting: suffer in a misogynist work environment in order to try to make it better for other women, or find a job that was more supportive yet less impactful."
Glenn writes about the job structures that prevented her from practicing here.
Column: Adam Smith, The Inventor of Capitalism Lived With His Mother. Here’s Why That Matters
"The man largely credited with inventing marketplace capitalism, Adam Smith, lived at home with his mother. While he wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, she cooked and cleaned for him. This juicy morsel of history makes for such perfect satire, I can hardly stand it. How magnificent that the person responsible for defining what capitalism needed in order to function had unpaid help at home making his paid work possible!" writes Katie Gatti Tassin.
Read more about the role of unpaid labor that makes capitalism operate here.
Column: The Quiet Dread of Wedding Season—and How to Cope
"A year ago, I was made redundant from my job at a technology magazine," writes Rohan Banerjee.
"Although I’ve made a decent fist of freelance journalism and copywriting since, the feast or famine routine is a far cry from the stability I had hoped for in my 30s. Mortgage lenders don’t look kindly on the self-employed. I don’t have any paid holiday or sick leave. So as my partner and I clinked glasses and twirled under the moonglow, with our own wedding to plan and pay for in a few months, I was racked by guilt for not having surer footing.
I should be further ahead by now. I should be more settled. These are anxieties I deal with most days. But weddings tend to exacerbate them."
Banerjee writes about coping with not hitting supposed milestones here.
Why People Around the World Are Having Fewer Kids, Even If They Want Them
Chantelle Lee reports: People across the world have been having fewer and fewer children, and it’s not always because they don’t want them.
“There are a lot of people out there who are willing to have children—and have more children than they have—if the conditions were right, and the government’s obligation is to provide those measures of well-being, of welfare, which enable good work-life balance, secure employment, reduce the legal barriers, provide better health care and services,” says Shalini Randeria, the president of the Central European University in Vienna and the senior external advisor for a UNFPA report that studied why people aren't having children. But she says policies that some governments are implementing—such as cutting Medicaid in the U.S. and enforcing restrictions on reproductive health and autonomy—are both a step backward for people’s rights and “counterproductive from a demographic point of view.”
Read more about why people are having fewer kids here.
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This newsletter was curated by Kari Sonde and edited by Meg Zukin
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