Are You Okay? Fight Burnout Using Play
& Lauren Yee
"Employees who often experience burnout are 2.6 times more likely to be actively looking for a new job, and that attrition is costing American businesses a trillion dollars a year. Not a billion, a trillion."
What it was about
Burnout is a complex, highly individualized state rooted in an unbalanced relationship with all forms of labor, not just work. Deliberately reintroducing play into daily life is a scientifically grounded way to rebuild the brain connections burnout erodes.
By the numbers
Key notes
- Identify your childhood 'play values' (e.g., outdoors, community, creating) and use them to design small, shrunken versions of play you can fit into a busy adult schedule ('Joy Dosing').
- Build consistent transition rituals (a specific action repeated every time) to mark the start and end of your workday and reinforce mental boundaries between labor and rest.
- When you feel stuck or negative, use 'priming manipulations' (e.g., 'What would a 7-year-old do?' or 'What's the goofiest way to solve this?') to unlock more creative and abundant problem-solving.
Take this back Monday
Ask each team member their childhood 'play value' (outdoors, creating, community) and help them design a 10-minute daily 'joy dose' around it.
Burnout-driven attrition costs US businesses a trillion dollars a year, and burnt-out employees are 2.6x more likely to be job hunting.
Watch out for
- Assuming burnout is only caused by workload and overwork, ignoring emotional labor and labor outside the workplace (caregiving, home administration).
- Waiting until burnout reaches 'boulder' severity to address it, rather than intervening early at the 'pebble' stage when it's far easier to reverse.
- Forcing toxic positivity ('what's the best thing that could happen') instead of neutral or playful reframing, which can backfire when the environment genuinely isn't positive.
Before co-founding Betterment Works, Lauren Yee helped grow the largest LEGO-inspired learning-through-play company in the US.
