Dr. Kaleb Abbott on Burnout Research, Career Chapters, and Finding Your Ikigai

What if burnout does not mean you hate your work?

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Kaleb Abbott, optometrist, assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, researcher, speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur. Kaleb shares how his personal experience with burnout led him to study professional wellbeing in optometry, and how his career has evolved through clinical care, dry eye and ocular pain, entrepreneurship, writing, consulting, and research.

We discuss:

• Why burnout and job satisfaction can exist at the same time
• The value of building a niche and exploring a portfolio career
• Kaleb’s experience launching and selling Suns Snapp Kids
• Saying yes early in your career, then learning when to say no
• Practical changes Kaleb made to recover from burnout
• Ikigai and the search for work that aligns with love, skill, need, and income

Kaleb’s story is a reminder that career happiness is not about following one perfect path. It is about experimenting, setting healthy boundaries, and building work that feels sustainable from the inside.

Connect with Kaleb:
Email: Kalebabbottod@gmail.com

Transcript

Fred H. Cho 0:01

Today we're joined by a great guest, Dr. Caleb Abbott. He's optometrist and assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. he also earned his optometry degree and Master's in physiological optics from the University of Houston. Now beyond the clinic, Dr. Caleb co-founded Suns Snapp Kids, a pediatric sunglasses startup that won a national pitch competition, published an optometry burnout, which was really insightful, and also podcast for the American Academy Optometry Foundation. He lives in Aurora, Colorado with his wife and three young children. Welcome.

Kaleb Abbott 0:37

Oh, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Riyad Khamis 0:39

I was reading a little bit about yourself, so Colorado but I think I saw you were a Texas a and m fan. Was that right?

Kaleb Abbott 0:45

Yes, I'm a Texas native. All of my family went to Texas a and m. That's where I went. It's where I met my wife and we probably have over 50 Aggies in our family. And so pretty much grew up Texas,

Riyad Khamis 0:58

Okay.

Kaleb Abbott 0:59

Until I was 26 before moving to Colorado.

Riyad Khamis 1:02

Ah, amazing. Okay, now you got the mountains in Colorado and you got that part of it there as well, right?

Kaleb Abbott 1:07

Yes.

Fred H. Cho 1:09

Yeah. And, and rhe the, just before the show, we were talking about how it's like, was it five 30 in the morning for Dr. Caleb

Riyad Khamis 1:15

Oh, right, because you're, yeah.

Fred H. Cho 1:18

He is a morning person. He, he usually wakes up at four 30,

Riyad Khamis 1:20

okay. Okay.

Fred H. Cho 1:22

It's like a theme that we have, you know, like we talk to a lot of guests who are so like productive and they are all morning

Riyad Khamis 1:28

Yeah.

Fred H. Cho 1:29

all trying to follow that.

Riyad Khamis 1:31

I was trying to get up earlier every 10 minutes at my alarm 10 minutes earlier.

Kaleb Abbott 1:35

Hard for me to get work done in the evenings with

Riyad Khamis 1:37

Yeah,

Kaleb Abbott 1:37

kids.

Riyad Khamis 1:38

might be on that one.

Kaleb Abbott 1:38

my time to get things done.

Fred H. Cho 1:42

It's so true. And now, before we really dive into the podcast, I just did a talk about burnout and a lot of those key statistics that I presented was from your research. Caleb and I do wanna just point out that the research has been so. Wonderful in terms of providing real insights, translating the experiences that a lot of us have been having into real research data. But even more importantly, I think it made a lot of people feel like they're not alone. Like 54%. I mean, that's like every other. So, and, and as someone who also faced burnout myself, I just wanna say thank you for the research. I think it's, you're doing amazing work and looking forward to seeing even more. Yeah.

Kaleb Abbott 2:27

Thanks for

Fred H. Cho 2:27

I.

Kaleb Abbott 2:28

that. My whole journey with burnout really was a personal journey where I was suffering from burnout myself. And, you know, that is what prompted me to. start this study to try to figure out, am I alone in this? What are the risk factors for burnout? What are the protective factors for burnout?

Fred H. Cho 2:45

And we're really looking forward to getting into all that. But on the show, we like to kickstart with something called a Monday. You all you'll, you'll catch on as we go along. But I'll start with you riyad. What's your Monday fuel today?

Riyad Khamis 2:58

Yeah, so I think we were talking about just earlier and we'll kind of jump into it, like non-traditional career paths and, and things like that. So I was just saying it had been a little while since I there's a little bit of a break there, so I got to do a couple and I have like. Three coming up in the month of April and yeah, kind of reinvigorated the kind of getting to travel, speak and do all the, the speaking and and dinner and networking and yeah, forgot how much I enjoyed it. So it's been, it's been great and I've I've really enjoyed that and that's kind of fueled me, I think for this, for this month, I would say. How about yourself, Fred?

Fred H. Cho 3:31

That's awesome. I know, I know. April's been really busy for you. I think for me it's the lecture that we did, Riyad we co-presented to our alma matter university of Waterloo, fourth year students. I love connecting with students because, I mean, I've always enjoyed mentoring, but especially those fourth years, like just at that exciting phase in their life where they're concluding the school, and then heading off to their career. So I just, it's such exciting energy to connect with those students, so I really enjoy that. And then if we can, I think maybe you're catching on Dr. Caleb do you have a Monday fuel for us?

Kaleb Abbott 4:07

Yeah, I feel like my Monday fuel is a little bit more specific, but I don't know. Recently I've been getting very interested and. Antibody drug conjugate. Associated ocular toxicity. So it's these, you know, specific chemotherapies that patients go through oftentimes for breast cancer or cervical cancer or lung cancer. And they have this unfortunately profound effect on the cornea causing. Pseudo microcysts and bad dry eye and things like that. And we're starting to see a lot more of these patients in our clinic, and we're trying to figure out if there's research projects we can do to better understand what's going on or how to help these patients out. So that's kind of on the top of my mind as I begin this work week.

Riyad Khamis 4:50

I'm thinking there's probably a lot of side effects or things that kind of probably need to be studied that can affect the visual system in a lot of different ways. Interesting. Well, why don't we dive into your journey. You were clinician, professor, entrepreneur medical writer, speaker, researcher, is there something that's a common thread that ties all this together that, that you really enjoy?

Kaleb Abbott 5:14

Yes, I, I would say when I first graduated from optometry school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I, I just, I, I started working at a refractive surgery center, but from there I realized pretty quickly that I loved the cornea. I love dry eye, but I think more than anything, I like to help eyes feel better. Like I feel like my main purpose in my career is to take eyes that, that are in pain, that are uncomfortable, and to try to help them feel better. And so that's really been kind of the common theme amongst everything that I'm doing now is is, is that kind of centers it on dry eye, but I do a lot of speaking and consulting and writing. That's pretty much all with the emphasis of trying to help eyes feel better.

Riyad Khamis 5:56

And when you have that central theme and you kind of know, you know, it's funny, it's interesting how it kind of takes you on different, different paths as well. So the startup company, I'd love to hear a little bit about what motivated you to start that and kinda lessons that you've learned along the way when and kind of diving into that entrepreneurship.

Kaleb Abbott 6:15

Yeah, that was totally different from anything that I. You know, typically do in my field of dry eye and ocular pain. But when I moved to Colorado, so I figured out that Colorado has over 300 days of sunshine per year. And just walking around parks and you know, as I was familiarizing myself with the state, I realized I had no kids really wear sunglasses. And I started. to parents and asking why because I was just curious. And the number one reason that we heard was that kids just lose their sunglasses. So I partnered with two other people from California. We were trying to figure out how to solve this problem, and we came up with the idea of having slap bracelets that are attached to the temples of these sunglasses. And then we built a bridge that could fold so it could make these slap bracelets become parallel and kids could slap them on their wrists and and therefore not lose their sunglasses. So you could slap it on your wrist, on grocery carts, on strollers, car seats backpacks, things like that. So we launched that company that would've been in. 2019 and we grew it for about four years, and I believe we sold it in May of 2023.

Fred H. Cho 7:26

Why did you decide to sell it?

Kaleb Abbott 7:28

We decided to sell mostly because I had gotten a job at. At the University of Colorado. At that point, my career was really heating up. I was starting to do a lot more speaking, consulting, traveling, and I would say that my main passion is ocular pain. And I, I just felt like it was a good time to sell the company, to try to you know, make sure that I was dedicating all, all of my time towards towards my career growth.

Riyad Khamis 7:54

So you have this great product, you have this great idea, how do we bring it to life? Or what challenges or what things did you learn about that?

Kaleb Abbott 8:01

Yeah, it's all, it's all stuff that we're not really taught in optometry school at all. I mean, you're having to work with different companies, with different suppliers and manufacturers. You're having to learn all about how to tool a product. You know, people are always kind of surprised to hear this, but. The most expensive pair of sunglasses that you would make is that very first pair. You know, I always like to joke around saying that, you know, the first pair that we made cost $5,000. Every additional pair we made costs 75 cents to produce. It's just the tooling costs are astronomical at the beginning. And so, and you're trying to work with different companies and suppliers and make it a good product, and you're dealing with shipping. other countries and, and that's a whole different world. And then there's a marketing aspect and building websites. So, I mean, it's just all stuff that I was very unfamiliar with. And so there, I mean, there's quite a few challenges and I, I think the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is you never know what's coming the next day. You know, that's part of the fun, but it's also part of the challenge is you have no idea what challenge you're about to face.

Fred H. Cho 9:04

It, it seems to me like because you try so many different professional pursuits that you almost enjoy being a beginner again, you like learning, you like the challenge. Would that be accurate?

Kaleb Abbott 9:17

Yes definitely. I, I like, I don't know, flipping the script and, and trying to do different things and you know, it is funny 'cause I've always been more of an entrepreneur at heart. I had started. Businesses as a kid. And this was the, the first really big business that I started, that I actually ended up selling and then making a good profit on.

Fred H. Cho 9:37

I think it's really chapters of your career, right? Like, I think we were talking about that off air too, how we shouldn't really just do the same thing and expect to be happy for our whole career. So I think it, to me just speaks to having different chapters and. Right now you're in the chapter of consulting, speaking, writing for the Neuropathic Pain.

Kaleb Abbott 9:57

Yes.

Fred H. Cho 9:58

yeah, who knows? Maybe you might go back to entrepreneurship full-time in in the future

Riyad Khamis 10:03

and like I find that one thing you said too, and and, and this, or anyone else who's kind of listening in that is in that entrepreneur mode is even though the, as Fred said, like there's. Chapters. You take something from everything you do and you never know when you can. That's something I've learned too, is even if you do something and it's not as successful as you like the product you did, and you may have had ideas before that, that may not have, but every time you kind of learn something and then the next time you take it to it, and then even if it's not entrepreneurship. If, let's say you're doing something else, you may take what you learned in those aspects and kind of bring it to what you do next, and it kinda all blends together to create that that different kind of skillset as well, which I think is really important.

Kaleb Abbott 10:45

I totally agree.

Riyad Khamis 10:47

So let's jump into portfolio career. It's something we've chatted about on this podcast previously there as well, but I think it's such an important concept that we've, we've kind of learned more from our guests about as well. And you embody it really, really well, would you say portfolio career, in your opinion, is it more beneficial for a profession like optometry where work can get repetitive and portfolio career versus burnout? I'd love to kinda get into that is how that can help in, in your opinion as well.

Fred H. Cho 11:15

And just to clarify, portfolio career is a term to describe. A career made up of multiple roles, either like paid or unpaid, doesn't matter. Multiple things you're doing rather than one full-time paid job.

Kaleb Abbott 11:27

thanks for clarifying that. Yeah, I was not sure what, what a portfolio career was until you said that. Yeah, I, I think in terms of burnout. At least from our study, it's very difficult to have a 30 year long career where you're doing the same thing all day every day. You know, it's one thing to have a niche focus and, and to say, you know, the, my passion is X, Y, or Z. I'm going to see patients like this. And I think that that's a good thing to have. And, and, and our study, we found that people that did have a niche tended to have less burnout and more job satisfaction and less work-related stress. But I think if you can try to have multiple avenues for, you know, for your creative passions and, and try to figure out ways to make money in, in multiple methods, that that is really beneficial for people. Or even if you're not making money, like you said, like, you know, writing articles or, or things like that, that is, you know, getting you outta the monotony of just seeing patients all day every day. I think that that's extremely beneficial, but not many people do that.

Riyad Khamis 12:31

Yeah, for.

Fred H. Cho 12:31

I think part of the problem is the lack of exposure too. I mean, we were never told how. To get into things like speaking or medical writing, consulting. You have to just figure it out on your own. And that's what I see for most people. But not knowing the exact path I think keeps people stuck. 'cause even if they kind of want to explore, they don't know what to do, like what does that even first step look like? Any thoughts on that?

Kaleb Abbott 12:58

I think the first step is trying different things. I mean, when I first came out of optometry school, I had done a lot of research on retinal ganglion cells and I thought maybe I'm a retina guy. And so I started writing on liber hereditary optic neuropathy and you know, all of these different conditions, LCA and I, I thought I liked the retina in the optic nerve. From doing that, I realized, oh no, I do not like this at all. And so I think if you don't try different things when you first graduate optometry school, you have no idea what you like and what you don't like. So you have to get out there, say yes to opportunities, try different things, and that's gonna help you narrow down what you like. And then from there, you know, you just start working hard towards you know, that, that theme of your career. So, you know, I became a lot more passionate about eye pain. And started writing on it and, and speaking on it. And, you know, once the ball starts rolling, there's more and more and more opportunities that you start to have. So, you know, but it, it's hard to get the ball rolling initially. But I think the first step is just figuring out what it is that you actually like.

Riyad Khamis 14:03

One of the biggest things we get people asking, where is, okay, so you have all these like exciting things. Even the students, they're like, how do we get into it? Like we're passionate about ocular disease but. How do we get into doing medical writing? How do we get into speaking? So, and I know you just touched on it a little bit, but if, for those colleagues who are really interested in, okay, so I wanna do something like that, what would be your advice to like, get started into that space, like the speaking and the writing and, and all that space there?

Kaleb Abbott 14:31

Yeah, it's funny, I, I've had many people reach out to me that say, you know, I went to a presentation by Tarsus or Basch and LA and I listened to the presenter and I said, I could do that. And, and, and they said, that should be me up there on the stage. And, and they, and you know, there's a lot of people that. Hear those presentations and say, yes, that should be me. They don't realize the legwork that you have to do to get to that point though. You know, the company is taking an enormous risk whenever they say that they're gonna hire you as a speaker and and pay you to do that. So it's a ton of legwork to get started. And I would say the legwork to get started is just writing and writing and writing and writing and trying to do. Podcast and trying to do free lectures and go lecture at the American Academy of Optometry or a OA or things like that. The, the amount of work that you have to do initially for free before you start getting paid to do things is astronomical. And most people don't want to put in the work to get to that point. You know, they simply say, you know, I want to go and speak for a company, or I want to consult for a company, but it takes a lot of work, you know, to get to that point.

Fred H. Cho 15:37

This is really amazing stuff. I, I really resonate. With a lot of what you said as well. 'cause that's certainly been my own professional journey. 'cause for eight years I really was just a full-time clinician.

Kaleb Abbott 15:48

Mm-hmm.

Fred H. Cho 15:49

And then I faced a major burnout and I was looking into just leaving the profession. I was like, okay, maybe I'll go to the like law school or something. But then in the last few years I've been really diving into creativity side of things like writing and speaking consulting. And that's just been like the lifeline for me and changed everything, but exactly to your point. People don't really know too well what they're gonna like or not like without actually trying it.

Kaleb Abbott 16:16

Mm-hmm.

Fred H. Cho 16:16

think you mentioned you tried retina, you thought you might like it, you didn't really like it. Well, that's exactly my experience as well. Like I, I didn't think I would, you know, enjoy public speaking. I never enjoyed it, but then the more I did it, I got better. And I was like, you know what? I actually enjoy connecting with audience in this way. So, so much of it is really about following what piques your interest, and then that first, yes, like you mentioned, has a compounding effect. And then I found also that you gain clarity over time, like your career starts to have more of a theme. And that's just a pattern that I see in a lot of people's journeys. Anyone who's going into nonclinical pathways it's really about self-exploration, I think, and learning new skills outside of optometry.

Kaleb Abbott 17:02

My wife and I, early in our career, we said, we had a motto that we were just gonna say yes to everything. So any opportunity that came our way, we are just going to say yes. And you know, I think that that motto was really good. Initially, however, you reach a point that you can't keep saying yes, you reach this point that you have to start saying no to

Riyad Khamis 17:23

Yes.

Kaleb Abbott 17:23

to start being selective in your commitment. So saying yes initially helps you figure out your passions. It's going to

Fred H. Cho 17:29

Yeah.

Kaleb Abbott 17:29

you figure out what direction you want to go. But if you keep saying yes, you will become burnt out. And so you, you would then have to flip the script and, and decide that you're going to be more selective with your commitments.

Fred H. Cho 17:42

I, I once read that in a book. It's unless it's a hell yeah. It's a no. So it has to be really selective about what Yeah. There's a great book about that. But, you know, let, that's a great place to pivot into burnout because you've published a peer reviewed research on burnout for optometrists in the us. And. I had a question about that, you know, the female to male differences, which was a 60 to 40% burnout, right? So much bigger risk for female ods. And I had a question in the audience and they were saying, Hey, women in general, they have more family burden, how do you tease that apart? Like did you look into that as a confounding factor? Because they do have more. risk in other ways as well

Kaleb Abbott 18:28

think you'll find this interesting. So firstly, in our study we did ask if the respondents had children. And it turns out if you had children. You were, you had less professional burnout and you had more job satisfaction.

Riyad Khamis 18:46

Good stuff.

Kaleb Abbott 18:47

having children was protective in terms of professional wellbeing. The second thing is we did run multivariate analysis. So you can just run univert analysis and see what is associated, but then you can actually factor out everything else. So you can factor out. Someone's age, you can factor out you know, whether or not they're working in a certain setting. You can factor out their commute times and you know, things like that. And even when we ran multi-variate analysis and factored out every single extraneous factor women with children still had less burnout and more job satisfaction, which was pretty interesting. It was also very controversial. That was a little bit harder to justify. To the reviewers whenever we were trying to get this published. So that was an interesting finding and we don't necessarily have an answer as to the why for that. But, but we did know that notice that that was true. And then when it came to Yeah, mid-career yeah, people who were mid-career in general. Had more burnout. So there was kind of a period of time when you first graduated from optometry school. In those first five years, you have very low job satisfaction but you also have low burnout. And then once you get to about year five or so, year five, year six, your job satisfaction typically goes up, but your burnout also goes up.

Fred H. Cho 20:12

How do you explain that?

Kaleb Abbott 20:14

I think when you first get out of school, it's harder to get a good job that you love and you don't really know what you're doing. A lot of these people are graduating with tremendous amounts of student loan debt. They're taking whatever job is going to pay them the most. They're working you know, a lot of weekends and things like that. Then I think typically you find a better work-life balance. You figure out what you love to do. You, you maybe get that job in private practice that you really wanted, but you couldn't find a good opportunity when you first graduated school. So I, I think that it's easier to get better jobs once you have experience.

Fred H. Cho 20:51

So you get higher job satisfaction, but then the burnout is increasing the, what's the cost for that?

Kaleb Abbott 20:57

Yeah. So. It was, it was interesting in general with our study, burnout was linked with lower job satisfaction, but not always. So there, there's plenty of times that when we look through the data, we saw that, that those are not necessarily mutually exclusive. So for instance one of the highest settings for professional burnout was optometrists working in departments of ophthalmology. So that was number three in terms of optometrists having. Being professionally burnt out, but it was actually number one for job satisfaction. that you

Fred H. Cho 21:32

Oh

Kaleb Abbott 21:33

job, so you work

Fred H. Cho 21:35

yeah.

Kaleb Abbott 21:36

and you're satisfied with the job, but you're burnt out because you're working very hard.

Fred H. Cho 21:41

Yeah. two sides of the same coin perhaps.

Kaleb Abbott 21:44

Yes.

Riyad Khamis 21:45

I think definitely interesting facts and as you said, there's probably confounding there, different variables, but. It really gives a clear picture of potentially what could lead to that. So I think it's super valuable, which is, which is important.

Kaleb Abbott 21:59

So you had briefly touched on the gender disparities and professional wellbeing. So in general, we found that females fared worse in pretty much everything. So they had more job stress, they had more burnout. had less control over their workload, less time for EHR documentation. They felt that their values didn't align with the leadership within the practice that they worked as much. They reported worse team efficiency, and they also reported having to take their work home with them more. So actually do a lot of patient charting from home too.

Fred H. Cho 22:35

Yeah. Yeah. And these are, these are important to really point out the issue that's out there. Do you have any plans for like follow up studies to see what we can do?

Kaleb Abbott 22:48

well, the first thing we want to do is we feel like we've been quite negative in all of our findings, so we want to actually now look at job satisfaction. So we've got a manuscript that is in review right now. For job satisfaction. 'cause interestingly, although optometrists are burnt out, we also have overall good levels of job satisfaction. So that's the next paper that we're gonna publish. And then the next step is we want to expand this study into Canada. So we're gonna work with some Canadian optometrists and try to do the exact same study, but in Canada. And then the next step after that is we want to repeat these studies. Probably three to five years later and see how these numbers are changing over time.

Fred H. Cho 23:33

Now let's talk about this on a personal level because you've been very honest about talking about your own burnout and I think you even joked that you were burning. Working on the research on optometry burnout. I'll tell you too, I was also burning out at time preparing for my burnout lecture. So obviously it's not like a one and done thing and you have to just keep managing it. So do you have maybe an early sign of burnout that you can tell us to look out for? How, how do you recognize that early.

Kaleb Abbott 24:06

Yeah, I think the first thing is realizing that there's different stages of burnout. So I mean, the first is having stress. The second is really when you are becoming chronically stressed. Then probably the third stage is burnout. And the fourth stage would be exhaustion. And when we're talking about this, we're really talking about how we ourselves are becoming the patients. We're working so hard to try to take care of patients and and serve patients, but in this case, we ourselves are becoming the patients and. Being stressed is not necessarily a bad thing, you know, stress is typically what is actually driving us. It's how we grow. So you're supposed to be stressed in optometry school. You're growing, you're learning things, you're trying to work on your clinical skills. Stress is not a bad thing. Being chronically stressed starts to become. A bad thing. You, you need stress to push you and to help you grow, but you don't want to be chronically stressed. And I guess the, the stage after that is when you start to become burnt out and these really go through different, th there's different pathophysiology for what's going on. So when, when you have acute stress, you know, that is regulated by epinephrine and norepinephrine. This is catecholamine release, you know, within the body, and this is kind of your fight or flight. But the, I think the problem with humans is that we have this chronic stress, and the chronic stress that we have is regulated by a different pathway. This is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. So this is the cortisol pathway, and you really don't want. High levels of cortisol running through your body long term. When you have that, it leads to a lot of problems. It's, it's not good for your body. You, you can start to get sleep disorders and migraines and things like that. It's not good for your mind. You start to have worrying and indecision and negativity. It's not good for your emotions where you can have, you know, irritability and loss of confidence and it's not good, you know, for your overall behaviors too. Where we see a lot of people start to have alienation and, and more difficulty sleeping and just not connecting with people that are around them. So I, I think the first thing is understanding that that stress exists on a continuum. So for me, back in 20 23, 20 24 or so I was just, I loved the work I was doing, but I, I was starting to have trouble sleeping. I was exhausted all the time. You know, starting to have weight gain and things like that. I just didn't feel like I was. You know, very happy or professionally fulfilled. And even though I was accomplishing a lot, which is kind of interesting 'cause the, the whole idea of burnout is that there, there's several different pieces to it. You have emotional exhaustion, cynicism, depersonalization, and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment. And even if you're accomplishing a lot, you don't feel like you are. And so I started to reach that stage. 20 23, 20 24, which is why I really wanted to launch the burnout study to figure out am I alone in this? Are other optometrists burnt out? What are they doing? Right. What am I doing wrong? I wanted to figure out the risk factors and the protective factors for burnout.

Fred H. Cho 27:10

Thank you for letting us know about the physiological differences of stress versus chronic stress. So that was new to me. Very interesting. And like, how, how do you really differentiate? That because as you mentioned, it's on a continuum, which makes it very hard to know, like, is this burnout? Like a lot of people are not even sure. I didn't know I was burning out until like much later. So how do I know that this is just a tough week in the clinic versus maybe this is burnout.

Kaleb Abbott 27:38

Yeah, I think it, it's insidious. I think it's difficult. It slowly worsens. Over time, but you're gonna be talking about really chronic stress and, and I think you'll start to realize that you're having negative attitudes towards work. You're regretting

Fred H. Cho 27:54

Mm.

Kaleb Abbott 27:54

to work more than than usual. You're starting to see it affecting other areas of your life. But I think the biggest thing is that it's happening over an extended period of time.

Fred H. Cho 28:05

Yeah. And that, yeah, that, that really resonates with me too. 'cause when I was burning out, I didn't have the most healthy attitudes towards work. So I think that's a good, good tip. And what is the one advice you'd give to manage burnout then?

Kaleb Abbott 28:19

Oh man. So I mean, I can discuss what I did specifically for my burnout. 'cause I really would say I did about nine different things all very strategically. So I'd say the first thing is that. I cut the number of days that I was working in clinic. So in our studies we found that those with severe burnout were averaging 4.2 days a week. In clinic, those with no burnout were averaging 3.8 days a week in clinic. Those with mild and moderate burnout were averaging four days a week in clinic. So the first thing I did was I actually went from four and a half days a week in clinic down to four. Now I'm actually at three and a half. The second thing I did is I actually dedicated my schedule to nothing but dry eye, inocular surface disease. And, you know, I, I decided I wanted to have a niche. I wanted to see the patients that I, you know, truly care about the patients. I feel like I can make a biggest difference for. So I switched my schedule to only do dry. I started focusing on projects that I enjoyed also. So I, I actually started working probably harder. I was doing more research projects, more clinical trials, more epidemiological studies, but I was only doing dry eye which really brings me a lot of joy in life and I feel like I'm able to help people. I started setting evening work commitments or so limits on my evening work commitments. So my wife and I both travel and, and speak and do a lot of consulting and so we, we just started setting up firm boundaries. So essentially like if we already have a certain number of commitments in a. or in a month, it's an automatic no. So we, we won't say yes to anything because it breaks our rules. I got more involved in my church. I think one thing we see with burnout is that the last thing you wanna do is spend more time with other people. You want to kind of distance yourself from other people 'cause you're exhausted. But all the data tells us that you have to do the opposite of that. You really have to surround yourself. With more people, you have to have more workplace civility. You have to try to connect with friends and family. And so I started trying to work on that. I started using more of my PTO, so trying to get out of work more often. I had a lot of PTO, but I just wasn't using it. I also found that on the iPhone there's a setting called Personal time and you can, you can set this setting to essentially block notifications from anything that you don't want to receive. So when I put my phone on personal time now I cannot get any emails, I can't get LinkedIn messages, I can't get EHR notifications anything like that. So I really can't do work from my phone if I put it on that setting. So I would say that those are the main things that I did to address my burnout and, and it definitely got much, much better. I make less money now 'cause I'm in clinic you know, less half days per week. But I'm overall way happier with life.

Fred H. Cho 31:01

There's, there's a lot of good nuggets there. I think there's reducing clinical work so that you can focus on other nonclinical work that you are passionate about. Right. So that goes back to the portfolio career. also spoke of connection, like community, right? You said church was that connection for you. and boundary setting. I think that's key too. Like a lot of us need to have a better. We need to get better at just setting our personal boundaries so that we can show up with the same positive energy. But I, I think these are all great. I think you need to publish

Riyad Khamis 31:35

Yeah, they're really,

Fred H. Cho 31:36

Kayla's plan for

Riyad Khamis 31:38

yeah, I wrote them down. So it would help me.

Kaleb Abbott 31:42

That's a good

Riyad Khamis 31:43

I would say like what what I really liked too, what you were talking about is sometimes we get into this mode of trying to figure out burnout. It's all career related. When we talked about like, well do something you're passionate about, take on more roles, take on interesting things, but. And that's a good really point that you made too. That's not necessarily the case. You could be still accomplishing a bunch of stuff and doing like being in everyone else's eyes, like, oh, this person's such a high achiever, really successful. But that still leads to burnout. So I liked the lifestyle things you had mentioned too, and I think we had Brittany on the podcast a little while ago and she had mentioned something similar too, is like. Yeah, things like not feeling as healthy, the sleep patterns, like things in your life that you're probably able to notice a little bit more, that these are slipping and, and maybe the cynicism, you don't ne necessarily recognize it yourself, but someone else might tell you, you know, like your attitudes like changing quite a bit. So then associating that with work and kind of making that connection. It's something I took from that is, is such a big, a big thing there.

Kaleb Abbott 32:44

There's a concept,

Fred H. Cho 32:46

Yeah.

Kaleb Abbott 32:46

in a Japanese concept called Ikigai, which we talk about quite a bit in the Ocular Wellness and Nutrition Society. But Ikigai, essentially, there's four different aspects for what you're trying to achieve in your life. So number one is doing what you love. Number two is doing what the world needs. Number three is doing what you can be paid to do. And number four is doing what you're good at and you're really trying to find your iki guy that you are actually fulfilling all four of those and, and you'll find that if you're missing just one of those. In, in the Japanese culture, that's not your iki guy, so you're missing something. So for instance, if you've got all three but you're not necessarily doing what the world needs, then you have satisfaction. But a feeling of uselessness if you are doing the other three, but maybe you're not doing what you love. So you have comfortable comfortability, but, but you have a feeling of emptiness. If you're missing what you're good at, then you've got excitement but a, a sense of uncertainty. And then if you are missing what the world needs yeah, you have a feeling of uselessness, so you're trying to really meet. four of those, but it's very difficult to reach your iki guy. So the goal I, I think, is to try to have all four of those in your career. And it's easier said than done, but if you can reach that, I, I think you're helping a lot of people and you're overall pretty happy.

Fred H. Cho 34:17

I, I think we're always looking to explore what. Work happiness looks like. And I think you summarize it very nicely with that concept, some of the pillars that we should be striving towards. And I think you ask most people, most people will be like, I want that, like I

Riyad Khamis 34:32

Yeah, that sounds great.

Fred H. Cho 34:34

four pillars. Right? But the tricky part again is like you said, like how do you get there? And I think we touched on the ideas a little bit, and I'm always trying to understand this too, like how do we get there? And I think part of it is that our strengths. Can change, our passions can evolve. We can get better at something like even if like that's the pill that's missing, we can get better by investing in more courses and maybe going back to school to get better at that thing. So that's the journey I aspect, I think, like, I think people expect to find. That four pillar IQ guide like right away. I just wanted it yesterday. Right. But that's like you said, that's not so easy. But I think that's why you have to work at it. And I think if you ask people who resonate with these cliches about work, you know, like find the work you love, you'll never work a day. Kinda like they, people who resonate with that probably have what you are talking about, like some version of Ikigai,

Kaleb Abbott 35:29

Mm-hmm.

Riyad Khamis 35:30

And sometimes it's a journey, right? Getting there is the part That's the exciting part too, is not just getting it right away, but that work you put in the sweat. Equity, all of that stuff you put in to get there, that's, that's tends to, when you look back at, it tends to be the exciting portion or a portion that you've really enjoyed as well. We're gonna finish off with some reflection questions what does work happiness mean to you at this point in your career? Would you say?

Kaleb Abbott 35:56

I think work happiness is, I don't know, not dreading going to work. It's earning an income to support my family. It's feeling like I am helping people too. So focusing on projects and a patient population that I, that I feel like I'm truly making a difference and for me. I love clinic. I, I like being in clinic. I like seeing patients, but in the end of the day, when you're seeing patients, in my opinion, you're helping one patient at a time. work that I like to do now, I, I feel like I'm trying to work further upstream. I'm trying to, you know, speak to groups of doctors to help them understand. You know, disease state and, and how to treat things or how to think about ocular pain, or, I'm trying to work with companies and consult and help the company then help a lot of people and. you know, I, I think some people love the individual connections of helping a patient one-on-one. For me, I feel like I'm shifting some of my you know, purpose towards trying to work further upstream. And I feel like if I can help a company, help people, or I can speak to doctors that then go out and help patients, that I'm having a bigger impact overall than just helping a patient one patient at a time.

Fred H. Cho 37:11

I, I think that's a great point and, it's about having impact outside of the exam room in different ways that you mentioned. And I think it's also about seeing your work as something more than just clinical optometry. I think if full-time optometry clinically lights you up, then that's great, but if it doesn't. Then there's other ways to express that passion. a related, reflective question on that is if your younger self could see your career now, what would they be most surprised by?

Kaleb Abbott 37:42

That's a good question. I think my younger

Riyad Khamis 37:46

So tough.

Kaleb Abbott 37:47

Be surprised at how much I enjoy trying to understand pain. So it's such a strange it's something that I've kind of feel like I've dedicated most of my career and and life into, and I never thought I'd be somebody that would be focusing on that. 'cause in general, these patients are very difficult to deal with. I feel like they were patients that early in my career I didn't like seeing. But now that I feel like I can make a difference and help them out, they're the patients I typically gravitate towards.

Riyad Khamis 38:16

Just kind of listening to everything. I know a lot of people probably took a ton of stuff from this and we'd love to have you back, especially if the Canadian, when the Canadian numbers launch, like it would be so interesting to have you back as well. And because I know we get a lot of Canadian listeners and especially working with Waterloo, that would be something that would be, I think, really fascinating there as well. Just to kind of wrap things up, is there any exciting projects you have coming up?

Kaleb Abbott 38:39

I always have of projects that I'm excited about that I'm working on right now. We're in the process of finishing up a study that we're trying to better understand pain perception and, you know, risk factors that a patient's going to have heightened symptoms of dry eye and eye pain. So we're wrapping up that project and gonna probably present a lot of that data at the American Academy of Optometry. This year. So that one's pretty exciting. I, I'm pretty excited about a lot of different drugs that are being developed on the market that are gonna provide some new opportunities in the field of ocular surface disease. Azure's got a great drug for MGD that will hopefully be reaching the market in early 2028. I'm excited about a lot of drugs that we see coming out that are focusing more on. corneal nerve pain, which is I think gonna be a big step in the right direction in our career field. And yeah, I'm, I'm happy to discuss really any of this ocular surface disease or burnout and professional wellbeing with anybody. You can always just send me an email at Caleb Abbott od@gmail.com.

Riyad Khamis 39:48

We'll pop that in the show notes so people can get in touch with you there. And yeah, my friend and I are planning hopefully to be at Academy this year, so hopefully we'll, we'll get to run into you there. We'll, we'll kind of chat a little further, but, but thanks for having us. Have, thanks for coming on and we'd definitely love to have you on again as well. Thank you.

Kaleb Abbott 40:06

Of course, thanks for having me.