Speaking With Nathalie Rachel Sinyard: Avoiding Burnout In Everyday Life

About Nathalie Rachel Sinyard

Nathalie Rachel Sinyard is a behavioral economist and investor focused on wellbeing and real estate. She studied at Oxford University and was a research and teaching fellow before moving into consultancy, helping individuals and organisations, particularly in the finance and technology sectors, build systems for optimising wellbeing and preventing burnout. In 2023 she founded Cadence Behavioral, a research and consulting company focused on applying behavioral science to the relationships between wellbeing and real estate. You can follow Nathalie on Twitter at @NathalieRach 

1) Your work is centered around burnout and building a life for optimal wellbeing. What was the inspiration for you getting into this particular field?

My interest originally came from looking at how chronic stress affects our ability to make good decisions. The more I observed, the more a sadly familiar pattern emerged of smart, driven people starting their journeys energised and hopeful, and ending up drained and cynical.

I thought this was tragic, and such a loss, both to the individuals themselves of course, but also to the world missing out on all this potential. So I wanted to dig deeper into the burnout phenomenon, unpick the mechanisms behind it, and help people design their lives so that they can achieve amazing things without destroying themselves in the process.

2) What are some of the major warning signs that people overlook when it comes to burnout?

The early stages of burnout don’t all feel obviously bad, and definitely you can push yourself and make sacrifices in the short term in service of a greater goal and it can be very rewarding. However, one of the insidious things about burnout is that as you go down that path, the narrower your vision becomes as you’re just focused on getting through work and surviving one day to the next.

So you don’t necessarily notice that your relationships are in bad shape, your fitness has gone out of the window, and your memory is deteriorating. So it’s quite important to be able to look at some objective benchmarks to see how you’re doing. Also, I ask people to listen carefully to their self-talk. If you’re saying things like “if I can just get through this week…” or “something’s got to give…”, it’s time to pause and recalibrate.

"One of the insidious things about burnout is that as you go down that path, the narrower your vision becomes as you're just focused on getting through work and surviving one day to the next"

3) In your opinion, what can organizations do better to address employee burnout?

There’s a lot! But it’s really important to address it at the root, rather than just paying lip service to wellbeing and putting out some jars of granola! That can be even more demoralising than ignoring the problem altogether. Think about what examples your leadership is setting first of all, about meaningful delineation between work and home.

Also, spend time understanding research on what has been shown to really impact burnout, for example, organising the day to that people don’t have to keep switching context between tasks more than necessary and also the physical environment they are working in can make a big difference. Really, it comes down to organizations making it a priority and not treating burnout as an inevitable part of working life, which is definitely a culture change in some places.

4) Tell us a bit about Cadence Behavioral?

Thank you for asking! Cadence started this year and is a research and consulting company applying behavioral science to wellbeing and real estate. In particular, we have been working with organisations on redesigning both their working days and their physical working environment to support flourishing of their teams.

Behavioral science, wellbeing, and real estate have an exciting and under-explored relationship that has a real opportunity to make people’s lives better; more productive, healthier, and happier.

5) As a behavioral economist, what are some aspects of this relatively new area of the social science that you find fascinating?

Essentially, I love people - in all aspects of our brilliance and our weirdness! Behavioral economics offers a constantly expanding framework for exploring these. Applying it methodically suggests ways that we can build our lives to support the things that are important to us: relationships, health, meaningful work.

I am particularly interested in routines and rituals that take us closer to where we want to be, or towards our full potential (which is mind-bogglingly huge and wonderful) and behavioral economics gives us some tools to investigate what those might look like.

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