How women can manage stress, find rejuvenators, and “restore some sense of harmony.”


When her blood pressure spiked to 200/110, Kandi Wiens GrEd’16 knew that burnout was not only causing her extreme stress, but actually putting her life in danger. “The thing that’s scary about burnout,” she said, “is that it’s insidious. It will sneak up on you faster than you can say burnout.”

Jane Muir Gr’24’s interest in the topic was sparked by an undergrad class on mindfulness and compassion. She’d anticipated “an easy A involving napping and resting,” but instead found herself researching how burnout among clinicians affects patient outcomes. “Nurses and other healthcare professionals are entering the profession wanting to help people, and they come out harming themselves and even harming the patients that they’re caring for” due to the effects of burnout, she said. “That was really fascinating to me.”

And as a workplace advisor and executive coach, Farnia Fresnel EAS’98 has seen burnout strike employees at all levels in companies around the world.

While their entrees into the subject varied, all three of these burnout-conscious alumnae united in early November for a Homecoming panel presented by the Association of Alumnae. Under the title Women Shaping a Better Tomorrow: Increasing Productivity, Reducing Burnout and Improving Resilience, they spoke directly to other alums via Zoom about their research and personal experiences.

Moderator Halcyon Francis SW’03 GrS’15, a private-practice therapist, kicked off the conversation with a question about self-care—a term, she noted, that’s thrown around “to the point where I’m kind of tired of hearing about it.” Still, she asked the panelists how they define it, and how they recommend managing stress.

“People are tired of hearing about self-care,” Wiens agreed, “and being told to practice yoga and mindfulness and all these things that may or may not work for them.” As a senior fellow in Penn’s Graduate School of Education and the author of Burnout Immunity [“Life Hacks,” Sep|Oct 2024], Wiens has discovered how crucial it is for people to let their brains and psyches settle into an equilibrium every so often.

“Get to that level where you’re not so amped up that feeling amped up feels normal,” she said. It looks different for everyone, and she encourages people to identify when they’re in the sweet spot of feeling challenged and motivated but not overly stressed. Paying attention to the conditions that get you there, she said, can help you stay in that sweet spot more often.

Muir, an assistant professor in both Penn Nursing and the Perelman School of Medicine, recommended that all workers take stock of what is most restorative for them. Standard approaches like spending time outdoors and moving your body are worth considering, but it’s also worth the effort to pinpoint more idiosyncratic rejuvenators. It can take a long time for your system to regulate after a stressful day at work, she said, and “just documenting what you know you can turn to … is an important first step.”

Taking breaks during the workday can help, too—and they don’t have to be time-consuming or focused on one major act, Fresnel noted. She said it’s about finding “micro-moments,” often as brief as 10 seconds, “that restore some sense of harmony.” (An example Muir provided later: spend 30 seconds slowly rubbing on hand sanitizer while feeling its texture and how it glides across your skin.)

“Just taking micro-breaks of restoration makes a massive difference in how we end up at the end of the day,” Fresnel added, since “restoration is happening constantly.” For those who need a more structured mini-break approach, Wiens outlined the Pomodoro Technique. It involves setting a timer for 25 minutes, working in a productive burst, then taking a short break when the timer dings—“something that gets you up and moving,” Wiens said, “and gives physical distance from the work itself.”

When she’s working with high-performing executives, Fresnel often asks what’s most important to them. These are people who live by their calendars, but the priorities they tend to list—friends, family, hobbies—almost never show up there. “If you’re married to the calendar … but it’s not telling you when you pick up your children or when you go out with your friends, then let’s reevaluate,” she said. She encourages workers to add these essentials to their work calendars, just as they plan for coffee breaks, meetings, or times to walk around the office during the day. As Wiens put it: “find ways to make work fit around [your] life” rather than the other way around.

While all of these strategies to keep burnout at bay can be effective at the individual level, the panelists agreed there is a dire need for cultural and systems-level change. Muir, who continues to research burnout in healthcare professionals, said that she has been talking with clinicians about workplace-policy changes to help them regulate their workloads and take breaks. “It’s very narrow-minded to think that it’s just the individual who’s going to fix this issue,” she said. “We need to hold our administrators [and] systems accountable for greater work-life balance.”

Since her book came out, organizations have been asking Wiens to teach their employees to be more resilient. The stress, they say, is only getting worse, so they need burnout-immune workers. “Many organizations just haven’t gotten it yet,” she said. “We can’t just patch these psychologically wounded employees up and send them back to battle. We have to look at things from a system-change and cultural-change perspective.”

But how can an individual help bring those big changes about? By sharing your own story with people at the decision-making level, Wiens said. “The best thing we all can do,” she added, “is to advocate for yourself” and tell company leaders exactly the supports you need. Would a flexible work policy change your quality of life? Could normalizing blocked calendar time for childcare dropoffs and pickups eliminate constant daily stressors? Tell them.

“The more voices they hear from people like you, and the more examples they see,” Wiens said, “that will motivate them to consider making some of these changes.”

Molly Petrilla C’06

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