By all accounts, the former Princeton provost approached his new position with a mania for detail, using the tools of another era. He had a habit of composing dozens of handwritten notes late into the night – to the football coach, to Harvard Crimson editors, to his staff and to dormitory house masters. He fretted over banquet menus. He argued the benefits of having faculty members make either $10 or $15 copayments to see a doctor. After three years of intensive nonstop toil in a hypermetabolic climate, Rudenstine hit the wall. His life was devoured, his sleep habits scrambled, his waking minutes assaulted by a hail of never-finished tasks. “My sense was that I was exhausted,” Rudenstine told reporters two weeks ago in his Cambridge, Mass., mansion. And his doctor agreed. After a three-month “sabbatical,” during which he read Lewis Thomas, listened to Ravel and walked with his wife on a Caribbean beach, Rudenstine returned to his post last Thursday, promising to delegate more and obsess less.
The head of Harvard joins a recent list of famous flameouts. After losing a wearing war with superstar Chris Webber, Golden State Warriors basketball coach Don Nelson checked into a hospital in January complaining of exhaustion. He was later forced out and is now on a monthlong vacation, incommunicado, in Maui, Hawaii. At about the same time, Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K) succumbed to stress, a bad back and fatigue. He is sitting out the season under doctors’ orders. UNLV coach Tim Grgurich also sought hospitalization for fatigue. Last month Los Angeles District Attorney William Hodgman was forced to take a break from the O. J. Simpson case when he experienced chest pains during the trial’s opening statements. His wife, Janet, was initially convinced it was a meltdown after months of “working 18-hour days” on three hours of sleep. His doctors now say Hodgman is suffering from an undisclosed medical condition. Apparently hoping to avoid more casualties, last week Judge Lance Ito cut court hours by about a dozen a week.
“Fame breeds exhaustion,” says Harriet Lerner, staff psychologist at Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kans. But the famous are not the only ones living in truly tired America. The Annals of Internal Medicine recently reported that 24 percent of people surveyed complained of fatigue that lasts longer than two weeks. Fatigue is now among the top five reasons people call the doctor. People are frayed by the inescapable pressure of technology, frazzled by the lack of time for themselves, their families, their PTAs and church groups. They feel caged by their jobs, even as they put in more overtime. We are fast becoming a nation of the quick, or the dead-tired. “People are stretched financially, stretched in terms of time and stretched emotionally,” says Leah Potts Fisher, codirector of the Center for Work and Family in Berkeley, Calif. “So it doesn’t take much for them to snap.” Maui is rarely an option.
Certainly, Marge Sullins can relate. A Bay Area single mom, she spent the last dozen years blazing trails in the male world of the corporate rent-a-car business. Work was her life. She toiled upwards of 70 hours a week, leaving no time for herself and her friends, and barely enough for her son, now 20. Finally, the thin dynamo, who prefers jean jackets to suit coats, began having stomach pains and nausea. Doctors could find no organic cause. “I just fell apart. I couldn’t do anything anymore,” says the 45-year-old. After a two-week stay in a psychiatric hospital and two months off work, she’s reformed. Where she used to manage 350 people, she’s shifting to overseeing a handful. Her workweek is down to 50 hours. “I try to realize that it’s the quality of the work,” Sullins says, “not the quantity.”
Exhaustion is as old as sleep. George Washington used to disappear for months to nurse his nerves, grinding the nation’s business to a halt. And for some – particularly the rich and addicted – the E word is a convenient euphemism. Michael Jackson, for instance, stalled his 1993 world tour a number of times, citing exhaustion. Later it was revealed that he was tending to his painkiller addiction. Others may use it to slide through a sensitive situation. Geneva Overholser, the well-regarded editor of The Des Moines Register, announced two weeks ago she was resigning after six and a half years. “I don’t have the energy” anymore, she said. But sources say Overholser had also tired of cost-cutting pressures imposed by Gannett, the paper’s corporate owner.
Nevertheless, exhaustion is real. And experts say the fatigue of the ’90s – the kind that a weekend’s rest or reading a trashy book on the beach can’t cure – is more widespread. Where once doctors, nurses and inner-city youth workers were the most common burnout casualties, now exhaustion afflicts almost all professions. Physicians are quick to say that “exhaustion” is neither a medical term nor a diagnosis. It’s an umbrella term. Our forefathers referred to it as being “driven to distraction,” or suffering a “nervous breakdown.” Despite its amorphous definition, when patients complain, doctors listen. Fatigue symptoms can also herald any number of serious illnesses (chronic fatigue syndrome is very rare, affecting only 5 percent of those who suffer long-term fatigue). Most commonly, though, exhaustion is a sign of depression. More than half the burnout cases that make it into the doctor’s office are depressed patients. Whatever the cause, exhaustion is the body crying out “I’ve had it,” says Dr. Sheldon Miller, chair of psychiatry at Northwestern University.
The technology boom adds a peculiar twist to stress in the ’90s. Certainly, our ancestors worked hard, with less sophisticated tools. Grandma stoically stocked wood for the stove every morning and scrubbed the laundry on a washboard. Grandpa clocked in long, arduous hours on the railroad, or in the mines. But when he came home, there were no faxes waiting for him to answer, no cell phones or e-mail to interrupt his after-supper smoke. Home was home, not a pit stop for data-gathering before heading back to the office. Today, there is no downtime, no escape – from work or from other people. We have cell phones in the car and beepers in our pockets, and we carry them to Disneyland, to the beach, to the bathroom. It means, says Boston University Medical Center’s Dr. Mark Moskowitz, that “a lot of people are working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even when they’re not technically at work.” A formula, says Moskowitz, for first-class exhaustion.
Stewart Noyce, a 33-year-old software-company executive from Berkeley, Calif., has been to techno hell, and back. Noyce’s epiphany came several years ago, when he was on the road and forgot to bring his cell phone. Fearing he was missing something, Noyce used a pay phone to check his voice mail on his cell phone. Someone had called his cell phone to tell him about a conference call. The cell phone kicked it into his voice mail. Noyce ended up in the Palo Alto, Calif., library, calling Asia on the pay phone. “Everybody was looking at me because I was yelling,” says Noyce. The experience encouraged him to dial back his manic work pace. He had lost it before. After he graduated from business school six years ago, Noyce once slept for a week on his couch in a fit of exhaustion. “It’s really important to have some balance,” says Noyce. “Otherwise, it won’t be fun anymore.”
Americans move at a more rapid pace, driven by a staccato sense of time. First, the clock created artificial pressure on our ancestors’ inner rhythms. Now we have computer technology based on the nanosecond, an increment of one billionth of a second. “Time,” says Leah Potts Fisher, “hasbecome an even more valued commodity than money.” It’s bought, sold, traded and . . . constantly interrupted. Working families – those who can afford to – are so pressed for minutes, they hire “stress buster” agencies to pick up packages, run errands or simply wait at their homes for the cable technician. In Washington, D.C., at least, business is booming. One Rent-a-Mom servicing the nation’s capital is so busy that the owner, “General Mom” Robin Sherman, rarely takes a vacation or eats a leisurely dinner. Rent-a-Mom may soon need to rent another mom, for herself.
The ingredients for nationwide fatigue had been slowly accumulating long before CD-ROMs, according to Juliet Schor, Harvard economist and author of “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure.” The Pilgrims began our loss of leisure by ridding the calendar of more than 50 holidays enjoyed by the English since medieval times. Sunday was designated the only toil-free day, says Schor. Today, “blue laws” banning Sunday commerce are rare. In most places, Sunday is now a day of sacred shopping.
Once the Industrial Revolution took hold in America, the Pilgrims’ hard-nosed work ethic was woven into management’s expectations; so much so that labor unions had to work for a century to secure eight-hour workdays with at least one day of rest. Then, with the advent of World War II, most unions gave up their vigilance. When the ’80s recession hit, workers were unprepared to resist the vast cutbacks and layoffs ordered by employers. “Downsizing” became a household word. Nearly half of America’s businesses reduced their work force during the last decade, according to the Department of Labor. Today companies routinely ask one employee to do the work of 1.3 people – for the same pay, and with less time off. Overtime is at an alltime high, an average of 4.7 hours a week, says Schor, while in the last decade the average yearly vacation and other paid absences decreased by 3.5 days, trends she believes will continue well into the next century. Obviously, a natural consequence of labor cutbacks, Schor says, “is stress.”
Sue Pederson, a 31-year-old receptionist in Seattle, is one very tired example. She and her husband had twins four years ago. That alone would be cause for fatigue, but Sue has other worries. She’s about to lose her afternoon babysitter – her mother, who has to be on call all day in case her boss at Boeing (a company that’s laying off 7,000 employees this year) wants her to work overtime. “My grandma was always there to help out when I was growing up,” Sue says. “I feel none of that. My folks are struggling, too.” Ken Pederson works as a mason apprentice; if he’s let go again it will be the second time. As a couple, Ken and Sue have not been out to dinner for four years. They can barely pay the bills on a joint $25,000-a-year income. The stress of it all is causing Sue to sleep only four hours a night. Chronic headaches began plaguing her three years ago. Last fall she added hives to her list of symptoms.
The stress toll on working women tends to eclipse that on men, according to psychiatrists. That’s partly because women still take more responsibility for life at home. When they can’t be perfect at both jobs, they drive themselves off the edge. “Women are so good at guilt,” says Lerner. “And guilt is exhausting.” The extra pressure on women is also attributable to the fact that they tend to hold repetitive jobs with high stress and no glamour – “pink-collar ghetto” jobs such as Sue’s receptionist work. Sometimes they wear two pink collars. Single mom Gloria Garcia, 37, works 40 hours a week as a secretary at Purdue University, and an additional 30 hours a week as a switchboard operator. Her workday begins at 7:30 in the morning and ends at 9:30 p.m. Though she’s never taken a vacation, she still worries more about being a good mother to Ermelinda, 18, and Melissa, 11, than about getting enough sleep. “I want them to have all the opportunities I didn’t have,” Garcia says. According to the Department of Labor, 6 percent of all American women (roughly the same percentage as men) now moonlight, compared with 2 percent more than two decades ago. But even though the numbers of stay-at-home moms may be declining, the 24-hour-a-day stress they feel is just as strong. Gretchen Rubin, 37, a mother of four in La Grange, Ill., says her idea of a vacation is a trip to the dentist. “I can’t wait just to lie back in that chair and relax,” she says.
Men and women react differently to burnout and fatigue. Women are more likely to see the danger signs sooner, says Gene Ondrusek, a clinical psychologist at Scripps Hospital Center for Executive Health in La Jolla, Calif. “They’re more prone to see it as something to solve,” he says. “Men are prone to say, “Doesn’t everybody feel that way?”’ This may explain why so few top CEOs, who are mostly male, bag their high-anxiety jobsto walk in the woods. Mostare still “excited about killingtheir competition,” says Fred Wackerle of Chicago’s McFeely Wackerle Shulman, a top executive-recruiting agency. Certainly men rule in the ranks of the Staminacs – those rare and wired creatures who seem to thrive on three hours of sleep and a life lived in nanoseconds. For these driven people, “to acknowledge burnout or exhaustion would be almost tantamount to committing suicide,” says Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, director of Emory Business School’s Center for Leadership and Career Studies. And if they can’t survive on catnaps, the Institute for Circadian Physiology in Cambridge, Mass., will train them to do so. The Staminac ranks are not reserved for only the young and the ambitious. Joseph B. Kirsner, a gastroenterologist at the University of Chicago, still gets to work by 6:30 a.m. after only six hours of sleep. The 85-year-old does remember being tired . . . once, after D-Day during World War II. “Some of the marches were pretty long,” says Kirsner. “I was tired then.”
Not everyone buys the macho code. Some are lucky enough to recognize that their lives are spinning out of control in time to change. President Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Roy Neel, 49, quit about a year ago to take a lobbying job. He was working 55 hours a week, tethered to his beeper 24 hours a day. “I got downright tired of being on call,” says Neel. A seemingly tame but wrenching episode with Walter, his 9-year-old son, convinced him that work, even for the president of the United States, is not worththe price. Walter and his dad were heading out the door for a long-promised baseball game when the phone rang. It was Clinton. Little Walter was not impressed. When Neel looked up an hour later, Walter was gone. He had bummed a ride to the game with a neighbor, leaving Dad holding the phone. “Our society has become schizophrenic,” says Neel. “We praise people who want balance in their lives, but reward those who work themselves to death.”
The pressures on the famous and the anonymous are both real and increasing. Employers and politicians are not likely to solve these problems – can we make living in truly tired America more manageable on our own? We will have to learn to unplug the fax once in a while, or even ignore the click of call waiting. The Bay Area’s Marge Sullins hit the wall and then dialed back her hours. Even the Harvard president is revising his life. Rudenstine has promised he will take charge of his calendar, leaving time in the day for a good book or a walk with his wife. And as far as those reams of handwritten notes, Rudenstine says he won’t stop scribbling . . . but he’s learning to use a Dictaphone.
