Arianna Huffington: Women pay the highest price for our culture of burnout

Arianna Huffington seems to have perfected her understanding of the needs of her time, pre-empting the conversation and nailing its zeitgeist. In her various endeavours over the years, she has gradually become an icon of leadership, and is now using her power to battle toxic male-run corporate culture to remake and usher in a space where women and men can thrive and not just survive. Be it writing an open letter to Elon Musk outlining the efficient way of using human energy or expanding Thrive Global, her health and wellness company, into Greece, Huffington has been busy championing a good night’s sleep, most of this year. She tells me how this is part of the latest wave of feminism, and how the seeds for Thrive Global were actually planted during her student days in India.

Image: Bikramjit Bose. Jacket, Alexander McQueen

Your ideological position has moved from conservative to liberal. How do you understand your evolution?

At the core level, my values and the issues I care about and the goals and outcomes I would like to see on those issues never changed. What did change was my understanding of the role of the government in bringing us closer to those outcomes. I used to believe that the private sector could step up to the plate and address the major issues our country was facing—income inequality, for example, and the need to care for those left out of America’s prosperity. But I saw first-hand that this wasn’t happening and was not going to happen. So, it became clear to me that we could never really address some of our society’s most fundamental problems without the raw power, scale and agenda-setting that only a government can exert. And then on an individual level, one of the through-lines to my life has always been my love of helping people engage and connect. That’s what fuelled many of my books, it’s what HuffPost was about, and it’s definitely what drives Thrive Global.

Let’s rewind to your first visit to India as a student at the Visva-Bharati university in Santiniketan—can you share a memory that has stayed with you?

There are so many things that struck me and so many reasons I instantly fell in love with India. But one of the things I particularly loved about studying comparative religion in India was how it gave me the ability to recognise the common patterns among all religions and traditions—for instance, the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, and Stoicism. The questions they’re all tackling are similar, but the particulars of how they approach them and where they end up are unique. I also loved wearing saris and learned that the best way to cool down on a hot day is to drink endless cups of hot tea, especially masala tea.

Thrive India launched earlier this year. Why was India the first global market you decided to tap?

India has long held a special place in my heart. India faces many challenges with stress and burnout—employees in Mumbai work 64 hours per week on an average, the most in the world, and 80 per cent of working professionals in India feel stressed at work—but it also has many of its own solutions. Its ancient wisdom and spiritual traditions, in addition to traditional Indian practices like yoga and meditation, have been validated by modern science and form the basis for many of Thrive Global’s tools and strategies.

Calling out the “macho culture of burnout” was a courageous step. Success has long been defined in masculine terms. How do you think women are redefining leadership today?

Women certainly pay the highest price for our culture of stress and burnout, in which long hours and sleep deprivation are taken as proxies for seriousness and dedication, so we have the most incentive to change it. Even when working women are doing the lion’s share of the work of keeping up the household, this becomes a backdoor way of excluding women or at least making it harder for them to advance. That’s one of the important reasons why it’s so urgent that we change the way we work and live.

This is part of what I think of as the Third Women’s Revolution. The first was led more than a century ago by those who fought for the right to vote. The second was about granting full access to women in every part of our society. It’s still underway, as it should be. But we can’t wait for the third one to begin, and that should be about transforming workplaces in ways that allow women to unlock and realise their full potential. The easiest way to get something to thrive is to create the ideal environment for it. But right now women are not thriving in a workplace built by men—and neither are men. The Third Women’s Revolution will be about not just getting women into leadership positions, but also about what they’ll do once they get there: leading the way in redesigning the way we work and the way we live.

Ambitious women invariably face harsher and often sexist criticism. How do you deal with the trolls?

For me, it’s not about feeding off criticism but learning to stick with what you know is right, despite that criticism. The most freeing thing about getting older is realising how little power the naysayers have over us—unless we give it to them. It also helps to surround yourself with other women who will always be in your corner, whether you succeed or fail. This is your Thrive Tribe, and we all need one, especially because fear of failure is so deeply embedded in women. This means dealing with the voice I call the obnoxious roommate living in our head, the voice that feeds on putting us down and strengthening our insecurities and doubts. We all live with that voice, but the times it comes out the most is when we’re tired, stressed and run down. And one of the ways to silence that voice is to take care of ourselves, which creates a more robust inner immune system that prevents that voice from breaking through and wreaking havoc.

Your latest campaign, #repeats, takes on how women are judged for what they wear and celebrates the repeating of outfits. What sparked this?

Men wear the same thing again and again, so why shouldn’t women wear something they love again and again? Men slap on the same thing, but women are expected to wear a different outfit for every occasion. This might seem trivial but it’s not. There are real issues at play here. Women already bear the biggest cost of our culture of sleep deprivation and burnout. And outdated notions of professional dress only add to that. Being able to spend only a few minutes getting ready versus an hour or two deciding what to wear is a serious competitive advantage, and that’s why at Thrive we began our #repeats campaign. Celebrating the idea of style repeats is a great way to begin to close the style gap, affording women the same freedom (in the form of time, money and mindshare) that men have in putting together their outfits for the day.

To steal a tweet you recently quoted from Adam Grant: “If you knew five years ago what you’d accomplish now, how proud would you have been?”

Disbelief would be a better word, since five years ago I was still under the assumption that HuffPost was going to be my last chapter—and the last company I would found. But an even better word would be grateful. I would have been incredibly grateful that I had been able to go beyond just speaking out and raising awareness about stress and burnout to running a company devoted to helping people make real changes in their lives.

THREE CARDINAL RULES TO THRIVE (AND NOT JUST SURVIVE)

1. Charge your phone outside your bedroom at night.

2. Don’t pick up your phone the moment you wake up—take a few moments to breathe and set your intention for the day.

3. Unplug and disconnect from your to-do list at least for a few days during a holiday.

Read more in Vogue India’s November 2018 issue that hit stands on November 5, 2018

Photographed by: Bikramjit Bose. Styled by: Anaita Shroff Adajania

On Kareena: Bikini top, Melissa Odabash

Hair: Ajay Kaloya (Ranbir); Priyanka Borkar (Alia); Yianni Tsapatori/ Faze Management (Kareena). Makeup: Mickey Contractor (Kareena); Hemant Naik (Ranbir); Puneet B Saini (Alia). Production: Imran Khatri Productions; Divya Jagwani. Photographer’s assistants: Vikas Gotra (Ranbir). Assistant stylists: Priyanka Kapadia; Fabio Immediato; Aradhana Baruah. Editorial assistant: Janine Dubash