The shine has worn off the new year and, given the long slog of winter that still lies ahead, you might be feeling less excited about work. Theres a good chance that what youre feeling is more than just the winter blahs. According to a study last year, an alarming 82% of workers feel at risk for burnout. If you think you, your coworkers, or even your boss might be part of that group, here are the red flags to look out forand what you can do about it.
Red flags for personal burnout
You likely know many of the obvious signs of burnout, such as feeling exhausted and disengaged at work. But there are plenty of other less obvious red flags that you should pay attention to, in both your own feelings and attitude and in your work environment.
One is if you regularly feel cynical or negative about your job. Other signs of burnout are more about what experts call “workplace misalignments,” where your needs or capacity dont match your work demands. These thing include: not having the autonomy to do your job in the way that you like to; not feeling fairly compensated; or feeling your values are incompatible with your companys values.
What to do: If you feel overloaded at work, the most important and obvious (but sometimes the hardest) thing to do is to say no to more work. There are a few ways to do this successfully. One is to make a list of all of your responsibilities along with the approximate time each takes. Its always best to go to your boss with solutions and suggestions, rather than just problems. Once youve made your list, look for places where things can be cut to make space for whats being asked of you.
Red flags for coworker burnout
If the people around you treat everything like it’s an emergency (and you dont work in an actual emergency room), it could be a sign that they are burned out, worried about the state of their jobs, or dont feel they have a strong sense of purpose and mission. As Fast Company contributor Art Markman points out, Living life in emergency mode is exhausting. It is hard to make progress on any long-term plans at work when you are forced to grapple with some critical issue that has gone wrong.
What to do: Markman explains that if your workplace feels this way, you and your coworkers may be prioritizing the wrong things. People may be working on tasks that are easy to do and leaving the difficult things until later and then hurrying at the last minute. He advises prioritizing making progress on tasks before the deadline looms too large.
Red flags for burnout in your boss
Leaders set the tone for the whole team. “When a boss experiences burnout,” Fast Company contributor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explains, “it often leads to shifts in leadership effectiveness, communication, and decision-making. A burned-out boss may unintentionally affect the mood and morale of the team. Detecting burnout early helps address the issue before it negatively affects the entire teams energy, motivation, and enthusiasm.One red flag that your boss may be burning out: If they stop talking about the why behind projects. Chamorro-Premuzic notes that this is a critical marker of vision. Or maybe they resist discussions about long-term growthanother sign that they are checked out.
What to do: Chamorro-Premuzic says you can support your boss by facilitating brainstorming sessions where you and your team explore new ideas. Offer gentle encouragement for high-level discussions, focusing on the bigger picture rather than immediate outputs, he advises. Even brief engagement with creative conversations can lift them out of the burnout rut.
The Super Bowl is one of the worlds most significant single-day sporting events.
It attracts over 100 million U.S. viewers and tens of millions of international viewers, making it an entertainment phenomenon. For Eagles fans who are not making the trip to the Superdome in New Orleans, there will be plenty of places to watch in Philadelphiaincluding rowdy bars, living rooms and even home tailgates, all while the city is lit in Eagles green.
For me, the Super Bowl is a real-life laboratory. As a sports scientist, neuropsychology professor and the former athletic director at Drexel University in Philadelphia, I investigate how high-performance athletes prepare cognitively and psychologically for a winning performance on game day.
When the stakes are at their highest, what can psychology reveal about who is mentally prepared to win the Super Bowl?
Tough-minded and open to experience
Research suggests that super-elite athletes are tough-minded and not easily rattled.
Their psychological profiles look similar to those of high-performance solo classical guitarists or fighter pilots. On personality tests, athletes typically score at least average in extroversion, openness and agreeableness, and high in conscientiousness.
Professional athletes work incredibly hard and are disciplined, well organized, goal-oriented, reliable, and generally sociable.
A new focus in personality research in competitive athletes is on creativity and, specifically, being open to experience, which includes being receptive to new ideas and being flexible.
Openness has become increasingly important in the modern blueprint for winning football games. Daniel Memmert, a sports scientist at German Sport University Cologne, calls this tactical creativity. It is a cognitive style that allows one to be imaginative and engage in divergent thinkingwhich is an ability to think flexibly outside of routines and devise multiple solutionseven in real-time competitive situations.
Divergent thinking in high-performance sports includes focusing on the task at hand and paying attention to relevant information while ignoring irrelevant information in the athletic arena. The creative athlete knows when and where to look in order to win a play or avoid a costly error.
Creative and cool under pressure
Creativity is essential in unscripted football playswhen a planned play has not been executed properly, like a fumble or an interception.
Intentionally distracting your opponent has become an important part of sports competition. It is why quarterbacks often change the play at the line of scrimmage. But it becomes even more critical during improvised offensive plays when everything is unscripted. In a sport where milliseconds matter, being creative and engaging in something your opponent doesnt expect can be the difference between winning and losing.
When the Eagles won the Super Bowl in 2018, backup quarterback Nick Foles calmly executed a trick play on fourth-and-goal, becoming the first player in history to both throw and catch a touchdown pass in a Super Bowl. The play is now called the Philly Special.
To engage in tactical creativity, however, an athlete must be relaxed. Thats not easy when millions of people are watching your every move.
Brain connectivity at its finest
Performance anxiety is a leading cause of poor athletic performance. Research suggests an athletes competitive anxiety can be cumulative and maybe even be contagious, affecting teammates negatively.
That makes the Super Bowl as much a battle of nerves as it is about the physical execution of plays. So, how do professional athletes do it? The athlete practices how to think as much as they practice to play. Training is intentionally hard and uncomfortable to assist with preparing the body and mind.
Since emotions and thoughts affect behavior and performance, the concept of emotional self-regulationor intentionally focusing on the present momenthas been introduced into competitive sports. Mindfulness, meditation, yoga, breathing exercises, and grounding techniques are now integral to the toolkit for high-performance sports.
For athletes, it is relatively easy to elevate their emotions to push the ball forward with a play like the Philadelphia brotherly shovean almost unstoppable offensive play used by the Eagles in which the team pushes the quarterback through the opponents defense for a short gain when needed.
But calming those emotions to execute a synchronized, attacking, complex passing play is more challenging cognitively.
A successful football player must easily transition from being highly aroused to remaining composed on command within seconds.
This cognitive efficiency and fluidity requires many hours to master. I am fully aware that while watching the Eagles Jalen Hurts, I am not just observing a great, innovative quarterback; I am witnessing brain connectivity at its finest.
Psychology of Eagles fans
How fans experience Super Bowl Sunday is entirely different, psychologically speaking, from the players.
To perform at the highest level, the players are process oriented. They attempt to be present in real time and play without fear. On game day, it is advantageous for the competitor to play like a kid, full of joy and confidence.
Fans, on the other hand,are results oriented. And they are nervous wrecks, like parents watching their kids compete.
One remedy for managing this stress is watching the game with other fans. Philadelphians represent diverse socioeconomic and ethnic groups that often unite through sports. These social connectionswhich Germans, who were among the first settlers in the city, call Gemeinschaftsgefühlare a hallmark of good psychological health.
I know I will never forget when the Eagles won Super Bowl LII: the game, the season and the parade.
And new research indicates why.
According to University of California, Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner, these authentic awe moments are shortcuts to happiness. Football fans might experience awe when a seemingly unpredictable interception or touchdown has significant consequences.
In other words, the thrill of the game and the excitement of winning not only unite fans, but they can also transform them into happier versions of themselves.
Eric Zillmer is a professor of neuropsychology at Drexel University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Are you ready for it? February 9 is Super Bowl Sunday. The Kansas City Chiefs are looking for the first-ever three-peat in Super Bowl history, while the Philadelphia Eagles are looking for redemption after their last unsuccessful attempt for the Lombardi Trophy . . . against the Chiefs. Super Bowl LIX is a rematch of Super Bowl LVII, in 2023, which the Chiefs won 38-35, and was the start of their three-peat quest. (Fun fact: The term three-peat was actually trademarked by NBA legend Pat Riley back in the late 1980s when he was head coach of the L.A. Lakers. This past week, the NFL struck a deal with Riley to use it if the Chiefs win.)
Heres what you need to know about Super Bowl LIX at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, including where to tune in and how to stream it live:
High interest in Super Bowl 2025 commercials
While diehard sports fans are hoping to see a great game with some really stellar plays, other viewers are there for the halftime show or maybe even the commercials. Not your basic TV commercials, Super Bowl commercials can captivate a crowd sometimes as much as the game itself (sometimes more).
That’s because brands spend big bucks on Super Bowl commercials, and ad agencies burn countless brain cells coming up with clever and creative campaigns. The reason? The Super Bowl is the most-watched TV broadcast in the U.S. every year. Some of the ads for Super Bowl 59 have been teased or even released ahead of time in an effort to create more buzz: For a Hellmann’s Mayonnaise spot called “When Sally Met Hellmann’s,” Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal recreate the famous deli scene from 1989s When Harry Met Sally. For Taco Bell, rapper Doja Cat is caught in a Taco Bell drive-through, and David Beckham learned some family secrets when working with Stella Artois.
More about the three-peat
Technically, winning three consecutive championship games has been done before in the NFL, just not in the so-called Super Bowl era. In 1966, the National Football League (NFL) and the American Football League (AFL) merged and created the Super Bowl as the championship game. This change wiped previous records, so stats before the merger are not officially counted. If they were, the Green Bay Packers would be credited for having three-peated twice.
How to watch the Super Bowl on a TV
Viewers with traditional cable or an over-the-air antenna can tune in to Fox: Game time is 6:30 p.m. ET, with the pregame kicking off at 1 p.m. ET. And in a pair of firsts, Tom Brady makes his debut calling the game for Fox Sports from the broadcast booth in the Superdome, where he won his first Super Bowl as quarterback for the New England Patriots in 2002.
You can also see the game on a live-TV streaming service that includes Fox as part of a bundle, including:
Tubi (free option)
Fubo
DirecTV Stream
Sling TV
YouTube TV
Hulu with Live TV
Note: This is the first time the Super Bowl will be available on Tubi, where viewers can watch it for free.
How to watch the Super Bowl on a mobile device
You can stream the game on a phone or tablet (iOS and Android) via the NFL app.
As millions of Americans gear up for the Super Bowlstocking the fridge with wing sauce, beer, and myriad other snacks and confectionsemployers are also preparing for the inevitable avalanche of sick-day requests on Monday.
Last year, the day after Super Bowl Sunday (dubbed Super Bowl Monday) saw nearly two-thirds more sick-day requests than the average day in 2024, and 51% more requests than the average day in February, according to recent data from cloud-based human capital management software company Paycom.
Interestingly, employers seem to empathize, as the data also shows that managers approved 91% of sick-day requests on Super Bowl Monday last year, which was the second-highest percentage of approved sick days for the entire year. The data was sourced from sick-day and time-off requests made by 6.8 million workers in Paycoms data set.
Super Bowl Monday has long been a day when many people call in sick or otherwise take off from work, as many are recovering from the food-and-booze-fueled frenzy of watching the big game. Last years Super Bowl LVIII drew nearly 124 million viewers, the largest TV audience on record. For reference, thats roughly 35% of the U.S. population.
And workers are already prepared to miss work. Survey data from UKG released last week found that nearly 23 million employees in the U.S. are already planning to stay home on Monday. Thats a significant increase from the 16.1 million who did so last year, and the 18.8 million who did so following the 2023 Super Bowl (which also featured the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles).
But again, UKGs data also shows that managers are more or less accommodatingperhaps because they want to take a day off themselves. We launched this research years ago to start a conversation to help organizations prepare for unplanned absencespeople playing hooky or ghosting work altogetherbecause of the Super Bowl and other pop-culture events that impact work, said Julie Develin, senior partner of HCM advisory at UKG, in a release.
Although a record number of employees plan to miss work on Monday, Develin said, we continue to see forward progress with managers and employees having more open conversations about taking the day off, swapping shifts, or making arrangements to come in late so that the business is covered.
For two guys about to fly a camera rig 30 miles per hour above the heads of clashing players, Alex Milton and Vinnie Scaffidi seem utterly at ease. Despite the fact that some 100 million people are about to watch their work in real time during Super Bowl LIX, the SkyCam pilot and operator, respectively, are not daunted. Theyre ready. They got to New Orleans around 10 days before the big game. Theyve set up. Theyve rehearsed. Theyve got the entire season under their belt. And, well, now is the fun part.
It’s exciting to get to the end of the year and everyone’s playing for real, from the camera people to the production crew to the players themselves, Milton says. Everyone’s doing the best they can. So when it comes, I’m like, Yes, all right, here we go.
Youve likely seen their work before in one of the hundreds of games theyve shot. Thats because SkyCam pilots and operators occupy a bit of a rarefied spaceMilton says there are only around 20 pilots and 20 operatorsand the best and most experienced tend to work in tight-knit teams like these two, where instinct and symbiotic connection combine to capture some of the most dramatic moments in sport at large.
[Photo: SkyCam]
EYE IN THE SKYCAM
Contrary to what you might think, SkyCam is not a drone, nor is it automated. A pilot drives it. Or rather, they technically control the four taut cables that the 45-pound camera head is mounted to, which spool in and out as the pilot moves the rig around the stadium in real time. (Those cables are a feat of engineering in their own rightthough theyre thinner than an iPhone cord, theyre made of braided kevlar and can hold up to 800 pounds each, and they have the ability to carry fiber optics and electrical signals.)
Milton, 38, was raised in upstate New York, and now lives in Moab, Utah. He got into television by way of lifting boxes and unloading golf carts. He says he networked his way to the folks who ran and built jibs. After getting an operating job, he started working on his pilots license, and word of his dual interest reached the SkyCam team, who invited him for a tryout.
Scaffidi, meanwhile, operates the Sony HDC-P50 1080p HDR camera on board the SkyCam. The 66-year-old was raised and lives in New York state, and has a deep background in sporting events. In the 90s, when remote robotic cameras cropped up for hockey, basketball, and other sports, he was right thereand when SkyCam needed camera controllers, he was there, too. Now hes just operating a robotic camera that happens to be flying, Milton says.
Despite its technological advances, SkyCam is a relatively old system. Inventor Garrett Brownthe guy who also won an Academy Award for creating the Steadicamdesigned it in the early 1980s. It debuted in a football game a few years later, and took a more prominent role in the sport in the early 2000s, delivering viewpoints not unlike those in the popular Madden NFL video game series, and offering perspectives that on-field cameras cant replicate. Milton says SkyCam was initially used for replays, but in the modern era it constantly appears on live broadcasts, and the list of shots keeps growingso much so that todays football viewers have come to expect it.
Now, everybody wants it, Scaffidi says.
I feel like we’ve crossed a line, Milton adds.
[Photo: SkyCam]
TALENT, IN TANDEM
At this point, Milton is on his sixth Super Bowl. Scaffidi says its his ninth or . . . tenth. The pair says that you generally start at the bottom, in, say, college games, and work your way up from there. Directors and producers take a shine to certain peoples stylesthe way they fly, the way they shootand often end up requesting specific pilots and ops. After a while, As long as you’re doing your job well, that’s your seat, Milton says.
Everybody’s very comfortable with each other, and we know what they expect from us and what we expect from them, Scaffidi adds. As the games escalate, eventually you get to the Super Bowl. And we never like to say the Super Bowl is just another game, but that’s kind of what it is. At the core of it, it’s still essentially a football game.
So they do what they do. They sit shoulder to shoulder in an operating location overlooking the field, with a feed of their SkyCam. Scaffidi uses a rocker switch to zoom, a rolling wheel to focus, and a stick to pan and tilt the camera. Milton sits with his face 6 inches from the screen and uses two joysticks; one controls the direction of the rig, and the other the camera elevation. Fox Sports says that at the Super Bowl, Milton will be capturing the main action at a height of 12 to 35 feet, while another team operates at an altitude of 55 to 90 feet for broad shots.
Vinnie and I are listening to a headset, listening to our announcers tell a story, Milton says. We’re trying to match their story as best we can visually.
If the announcers reference a player, the pair finds him. They also think ahead to where the game or conversation might lead nextand they go there. If someone turns their back to an on-field camera, the team glides in place to offer a fresh angle, racing back and forth between the main plays.
We’re just moving all over the field and trying to sell all kinds of shots, Milton says.
Meanwhile, the two are constantly communicating in a stream of consciousness: That guy ran off; where did he go? As one person looks, the other counts down the clock and tells him when the ball is about to be in play. Wait, who just landed that tackle? Ill watch him; you shoot the player who got injured.
The two are very much a bonded pair who know each others instinctsand the game for viewers at home is all the better for it. Milton says SkyCam tries to keep continuity between its pilots andops, and so do the networks.
Alex and I can almost do this in our sleep, we know each other so well, Scaffidi says. It just shaves off a couple of seconds here and there. And that can make all the difference.
A SkyCam Wildcat crew preps for an NFL game at Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, California, in December 2024. [Photo: Matthew Huang/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images]
A FLOW STATE
Sure, shit happens. Milton says that in his 13 years working for SkyCam, two cameras have hit the field from technical issuesone from loss of power, and one from a computer crash, essentially. But none have involved player contact, and its always been when the field is empty. (Safety is the utmost responsibility at all times, he says.)
Milton and Scaffidi try not to dwell on the possibilities, and they scale their approach to how the system is performing on a given day.
When I’m really confident and everything’s working really well, and everything’s in place, we’re jamming, man. We’re getting right in the huddle. We want to see eyes, Milton says. And then when you’re a little nervous and youve had some equipment issues, you start backing off those things, taking a menu item off. . . . You can’t just run the camera the same all the time.
Like the sport of football itself, camera operating is highly manual. It has not been automatedand the process is surprisingly human.
I dirt bike and mountain bike. I love motorcycles. I really like machines and feeling connectedand I feel some major connection to this camera, and how it moves, and how it feels, Milton says. It’s a flow activity for me. Vinnie and I, when we’re flyingnot that we are the camera, but we’re really feeling it and really working togetherthat’s the coolest part of this job.
In a game that thrives on elemental bonds to achieve the extraordinary (this year, Jalen Hurts and AJ Brown, Patrick Mahomes and DeAndre Hopkins, Joe Burrow and JaMarr Chase), perhaps the remarkable thing about SkyCam is not the action viewers see but rather the team behind the scenes.
The move to electric vehicles is the auto industrys biggest transformation since cars replaced horses early last century. Just about every traditional automaker is going through its own reckoning with the EV transition, one that presents huge opportunityand existential risk. So far, it has been rough.
Buyers havent turned up in the numbers the industry projected just a few years ago. Now many automakers are racking up heavy losses on their EV businesses. Many traditional automakers have had trouble cranking up their EV factories and getting the battery technology right. Some carmakers are now slow-walking their plans for new factories and scrapping some future electric models. Some have dubbed this the EV winter.
And yet, battery plants and electric-car factories are still going up across a swath of the Midwest and South. Dozens of new battery powered models will hit U.S. showrooms this year, backed by multimillion-dollar ad campaigns.
As messy as the EV story is today, automakers cant afford to rip up their EV strategies. Thats because two forces that pushed the legacy automakers down the electric path in the first place arent letting up. Elon Musks Tesla and a slew of surging Chinese players are mobilizing to extend their leads in what many industry players still see as the future of transportation.
You might be wondering why the EV transition has been such a slog for traditional carmakers like General Motors, Ford Motor, and Volkswagen. An electric car still has four doors and brakes and a dashboard. It is actually a simpler design mechanically than a combustion-engine car, and can be assembled more quickly. Why would legacy carmakers need to spend gobs of money and mental energy to figure this out?
First, it requires a massive rewiring of supply chains. Swapping out the guts of the car from an engine and transmission to battery and motors is like a combo heart-and-lungs transplant. And the stuff the automakers need for the transition to EVs is generally not the stuff that they are good at. Batteries, motors, and electronicsthose are the domain of big Asian suppliers like LG and Panasonic and Chinas CATL. If the world gravitates to electric cars, GMs or Toyotas mastery of cylinder blocks, pistons, and valve trains eventually wont matter.
Second, the batteries are still egregiously expensive, accounting for as much as one-third of an EVs cost. The companies are betting that this will change, battery costs will fall, and they will be able to profit handsomely from all that growth as the world switches over to electrons. But claims of some imminent breakthrough that will slash battery expenses never seem to pan outgetting costs down likely will continue to be an incremental grind over years.
For now, EVs remain 1015% higher than a comparable gas-powered car in the U.S., and there arent many available for under $40,000. Those higher prices are perhaps the biggest hang-up for car shoppers who are still nervous to make the leap to a fully electric car.
The other big drag on consumer acceptance of EVs is worries about charging. There arent enough public chargersespecially in the United Statesand wont be for a long time. The ones that do exist are often broken, cant connect, or dont sync with the app. A J.D. Power survey in 2023 found that one in five EV drivers who stopped at a charging station left without powering up at all.
But what if both of those problems were solved? Just look at China.
Beijing put in place a strategic plan two decades ago to leap ahead of the rest of the global car business. It made a massive bet that incumbent automakers like VW and GM wouldnt fully embrace EVs, because their bottom lines were anchored to combustion-engine cars. That also was the same bet that Elon Musk was making around the same time.
Now a slew of Chinese car brands enjoy huge advantages that allow them to churn out stylish, quality, affordable EVs. They are leveraging a lower-cost supply chain, access to raw materials for batteries, government funding, and cheap labor to offer EVs at prices around 30% below those of their large global rivals. And Chinas network of the most powerful fast chargers mainly used along highways is roughly 20 times larger than that of the U.S.
As a result, EVs and plug-in hybrids account for about half of all new-vehicle sales in China, the worlds largest car market. That compares with 20% in Europe and about 10% in the U.S.
In China, domestic automakers have seized a ton of market share from the multinational players. Now the Chinese companies are expanding overseas, the spillover effect from a glut of car-making factory capacity. A decade ago, China shipped very few vehicles to other countries. In 2023, it surpassed Japan as the worlds largest vehicle exporter, extending that lead last year with nearly five million cars shipped.
Political and business leaders in Europe and the U.S. feel pressure to check Chinas onslaught. Last year, both the United States and European Union slapped tariffs on Chinese imports of electric vehicles and batteries. President Trump has vowed even more.
This state of play leaves GM, Ford, and other global car titans with a choice. Does the EV slowdown in their home markets mean they can scale back on tens of billions theyve already directed to new supply chains, EV designs, and factories? Will they stop working hard to get battery costs down? Will they stall, again, on developing an affordable EV for the masses?
Doing those things could stem the steep losses on their EV operations and maybe lift their stock prices. But auto executives know what happened the last time American carmakers ignored shifting market dynamics. Japanese automakers in the 1970s and 80s blitzed the U.S. market with smaller, fuel-efficient imports, and eventually set up shop with American factories. The Detroit automakers barely survived and have never regained that lost market share.
Some executives see the China threat as even more dire, and arent taking comfort in the idea that tariffs will protect them long term. They say that eventually, if Chinese carmakers are the only ones offering good, affordable EVs, consumers will seek them out. Thats why auto executives arent ripping up their EV plans. Dozens of new battery powered models will hit U.S. showrooms this year, backed by multimillion-dollar ad campaigns.
In Europe, its no longer a theoretical risk. In just a few years, Chinese car brands have grabbed 20% of the European market for electric cars. More are coming.
On a cold morning in February 2024, news crews gathered at Germanys port of Bremerhaven on the North Sea to watch as more than three thousand cars rolled off a massive blue-and-white cargo ship emblazoned with the letters BYD, the Tesla of China It was the maiden voyage for the BYD Explorer No. 1, the Chinese automakers first chartered vessel. Another seven car-carrying ships already were on order. BYD was now cranking out so many cars at its home factories that it had begun ramping up exports to Australia, Brazil, Israel, and other Europe, with plans to open a factory in Hungary by 2026.
North America could be next. BYD has confirmed plans to build a factory in Mexico. In a 2024 interview with Yahoo News, BYD executive Stella Li said the automaker had no plans to enter the United States. But the read-through for U.S. car executives was plain: a BYD plant in Mexico would give the company a potential beachhead for U.S. expansion.
If that thought wasnt daunting enough for rival carmakers, the interviewer finished the conversation by asking Li what she thought of recent decisions by some global automakers to delay or cancel EV-related factories and investments because of the shaky demand picture.
If yu are not investing for electric car, you are out. You will die, she said. You have no future.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Adapted from Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles by Mike Colias. Copyright 2025 Mike Colias. All rights reserved.
