Mend: The app for career burnout
For someone who’s worked in technology for 12 years and spent the last five of them developing an app, sacrificing social media and de-digitising her life seemed like an admittedly weird move. Still, that’s the case for Elle Huerta, founder and CEO of wellness app Mend.
What followed informed the next stage of Mend’s mission: to provide support for career burnout, which builds on the original goal of supporting those going through a breakup. The newly revived app is a solution to Mend users’ continuous concerns over work stress – something that’s been consistently highlighted over the years.
Elle’s digital declutter started with deleting Instagram and Facebook in 2018 and creating a new spam-free email account, followed by a purge of online media, including Netflix, YouTube, blogs and podcasts. She stopped using her phone for alarms and switched to an analogue alarm clock. “There came a point where, after letting go of so many things, I could no longer picture my future no matter how hard I tried,” Elle says. “What I did see clearly was my life in the present moment.”
Burnout is a term typically characterised by mental and physical exhaustion, cynicism about work and a lack of productivity. Those are the three dimensions of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) that have been used to measure burnout since the 1970s. “It’s the feeling when your gas tank is empty, but you have to keep going anyway,” Elle describes.
Elle’s journey towards mentally decluttering her life extended over to Mend. She decided to give up her business office, in favour of complete remote working, and began to focus on thoughtful growth and sustainability. It was as if she had unknowingly prepared for the pandemic. Other changes included a new minimalistic look and quieter presence on Instagram. After all, Mend is a cause rooted in mindfulness; it felt disingenuous to Elle to “invest so much money and time” into social media.
Instead, Mend’s new holistic program encourages us to turn inwards through daily self-study, as opposed to being fixated externally, whether on social media or reaching an external goal. “What you really need is rest and nourishment, not a highly-curated comparison tool,” Elle says. “Social media is an easy place to go when you’re burned out because you can just zone out and scroll, but it can actually contribute [to the problem].”
With the pandemic leaving us with so much time and incentive for self-evaluation, it has been the perfect opportunity for Mend to branch out into support for burnout. The app also helps to bridge the gap between work and play as working from home means personal and professional lives become blurred.
“The secret is there is no finish line. You have to let go of the idea that one day you’ll figure it all out and everything will fall into place”
“In order to reach our peak performance, we have to take breaks and rejuvenate,” explains Happiness Expert & Founder at The New Happy, Stephanie Harrison. “That means fully disconnecting from our work so that we can come back to it as our best selves. “Prior to the pandemic, you might have a workout class, drinks with friends or a dinner party that you planned for after work; that gave you a firm [incentive] to leave work and truly disconnect,” Harrison says. “Now that many of us can’t leave our houses and engage in these activities, it’s easier than ever to either continue working well past the time we should or never let ourselves disconnect. [This may also mean] engaging in things that are less rejuvenating, like watching TV.”
It’s because of this why the pandemic has given the phrase “bringing work home” a whole new meaning. I asked Elle what the secret was to a healthy work-life balance: “The secret is there is no finish line,” she reveals. “You have to let go of the idea that one day you’ll figure it all out and everything will fall into place.” I agree. We shouldn’t live according to the ‘I’ve just got to get through this week’ mentality – we’d be chasing an impossible goal and running ourselves into the ground while doing it. Elle stresses that figuring out how to live life with a little more ease is a daily practice – the components [of which] will look different for everyone. But with some self-reflection, we can gradually begin to fine-tune that process.
“Many employers are aware of the heightened burnout risk due to Covid-19 and are trying to figure out how to support their employees,” Elle says. As for her view on it all: “Some will do a better job than others, so don’t feel like you have to wait for your manager to give you a solution. If you’re burned out, talk to your boss (one-to-one) about what you need, whether it’s time off or respect for quiet hours on weekends.”
As well as offering ongoing support via the app, Mend now hosts live virtual training sessions for organisational teams. This aims to not only make help for burnout more accessible, but highlights the severity of it on employees’ wellbeing, which is especially key now that international lockdowns have amplified our focus on work. Some of us are inadvertently putting in overtime because it’s easy for things to spill over into our leisure time (which may be because there isn’t much else to do).
Our conversation turns to the notion that regardless of our personality type, we all crave interaction at some point or another. “We get some of that interaction from work. This is why it’s so important to actively seek out meaningful connections, [whether] through phone calls or video calls, with people who make you feel good,” advises Elle. “Even a short conversation a day will make a huge difference,” she adds.
What started out as a self-care app for broken-hearted singles has evolved into a virtual mindfulness retreat, which is now a product of Elle’s own journey inwards. A year on, the pandemic has reiterated that grief can come in many forms. Mend reminds us that balance isn’t about having it all figured out, but rather learning to let go of the idea that we ever will.