What if there was another way to beat burnout? In the Netherlands, close to 70% of people are on the edge of burnout, and available treatments are mostly ineffective. We spoke to Nuthan Manohar, founder of Me met Me and The Happiness Tour, about the five key skills to combat burnout and the clinical research that could prove the effectiveness of happiness interventions to reduce burnout symptoms.
What three words best describe you today, and how have those words evolved since you started your professional journey?
Nuthan: When I started, the words that best described me were: strategic, naive, and ambitious.
And now they are: human, empathetic, and patient. I was originally hired for my strategic abilities. I used to put the numbers before the human story – in that way, I was naive.
Now, I’m fearless enough to see the deeper truth behind the numbers. For example, research shows that children in the Netherlands are the happiest in the world. And yet the Netherlands also has the highest number of burnt-out young people. This does not make sense – we have to explore the reality behind the numbers to get the bigger picture, from which we can see how to make a better world.
In that sense, I have more heart-led common sense than I used to.
You transitioned from a high-pressure corporate strategy career to happiness researcher, which is quite a transformation. What were the specific circumstances that led you to make that shift?
Nuthan: When I was living that corporate life, all the boxes were ticked and the bucket list was met, but I was unhappy. I experienced a dark phase in my personal life – depression, anxiety, the whole lot. That strategic, research-focused part of me began asking: if my thoughts are making me ill and unhappy, are there mental shifts I can make? At the time, I was not responding to traditional therapy or modern medicine, but I was responding to yoga. I found sanity while putting myself through challenging poses, breathing through them. I began thinking this could be a calling. I went on a yoga holiday, and, in 2010, I decided to do a yoga teacher training course. After that, there was no looking back.
In 2013, I set up Me met Me, an evidence-based therapeutic center. Eventually, I realized that while helping people physically through breathwork and attitude shifts was helpful, that alone was not enough. We had to go deeper, which meant that I had to learn more about the subconscious. So, the learning continues. I try to spend at least a month every year learning a new modality, which helps me better understand the world and how I can help.
You moved countries and expanded your work internationally. What does it take emotionally and strategically to reinvent yourself in a new environment?
Nuthan: My partner is Dutch, and I moved to the Netherlands for love. That being said, I was always fascinated with the Netherlands because it’s a country that does really well in terms of health, well-being, social factors, etc. Now, the Netherlands feels like home, but the professional shift has been challenging. Everywhere I’ve worked – Southeast Asia, the Middle East, India, America – work brings you visibility.
But in the Netherlands, visibility brings you work. You have to network to be visible. That has been a big shift for me because I am an introvert and I prefer the peace and quiet of smaller groups. The Netherlands is the first country where I’ve forced myself to actively network. Something else I observed is that people in the Netherlands have a strong work-life balance, which is fantastic, but can make professional networking go at a slower pace.
I think we have to support each other, help each other get visible. That’s what Female Ventures is all about. Offering a platform to women, including introverts who don’t naturally gravitate towards networking, I think this is one of Female Ventures’ unique features. For me, it never feels like networking. It’s the one place I come to chill. No agenda – I go because I’m going to have a nice evening and meet lovely people.
Offering a platform to women, including introverts who don’t naturally gravitate towards networking, I think this is one of Female Ventures’ unique features.
When you founded Me met Me, what was the primary gap you saw in the world that you felt uniquely qualified to fill?
Nuthan: When Me met Me was set up in 2013, the idea was to promote mind-body interventions in a new way: supporting people who perhaps didn’t realise that they had a problem, to have fun and make genuine connections and in the process feel better. Me met Me offered workshops, programs and trainings. It did very well and developed 90 different modalities for physical and mental conditions, from depression to high blood pressure to back pain and bipolar disorder. It was based on the Indian philosophy of finding yourself and, in the process, healing yourself – this could be through asana and dhyana (yoga), but in a fun and accessible way. It has won international awards, and many of our projects became UN best practices and national best practices. For example, we’ve worked with organizations that deal with disaster management, children who’ve been abused, and women who’ve been subjected to violence; we’ve also worked with the Kerala police and the Indian navy.
The idea was to set up Me met Me in the Netherlands, but thanks to conversations I had with Female Ventures, I decided to take people on a nice walk instead, and thus The Happiness Tour was born. The concept is based on social prescribing models leveraging the power of community and environment for prevention, healing, and recovery. The ROI for such models is between €2-9 and a whopping €28 for youth mental health.
Every time I gave a tour, I realized how much of an impact it could have on people with burnout. Burnout is a €12 billion problem in the Netherlands, and 72% of people who have experienced it say that treatment was too-little-too-late and ineffective. This is in line with global research, which says that what is being offered to treat burnout is not really helping. It’s important to look for alternative methods, and that’s what we’re doing. Now, we’re working towards clinical research to quantify how The Happiness Tour can help people reduce burnout symptoms.
72% of people who have experienced burnout say that the treatment offered was too-little-too-late.
Could you tell us a little more about this happiness research?
Nuthan: We are working towards studying the well-being, social and economic benefits of the happiness tour. We are incorporating real-time biomarkers, in our case “speech patterns and pace”, to study changes. How you speak, the pace at which you speak, and what you speak will change based on how you feel.
There are five pillars, or skills, that are most effective in beating burnout:
- How to be happy: What is within our control?
- How to make genuine human connections, because the first symptom of burnout is to feel disconnected and even cynical.
- Building resilience: All of us at some point in life are going to fall down, so how do we get back up?
- Mindfulness: Not the mindfulness where you close your eyes and sit and meditate disconnected from the world, but the mindfulness with which we sip our tea and enjoy the moment.
- Purpose: Understanding the purpose of our challenges or the purpose of our lives
Each happiness tour explores one skill, the idea being that after five tours, you experience a shift. Right now, we study every person who comes on one of our tours. We have started applying for grants to enable us to take 30 people across five tours, and then we’ll have some measurable data.
We’ve done a trial tour with Rabobank, and we are reaching out to other corporate businesses to do pilot tours. If this is successful, we could study the impact. This is where networking comes in. It has been hard to get those contacts, but fingers crossed, we’ll get there. I used the word “patient” to describe myself earlier because I used to be an incredibly impatient person, and the Netherlands is teaching me patience. This is a beautiful project. It’s going to take time, but it’s worth it. The Happiness Tour is teaching me to slow down in terms of how quickly things can grow.
What does female leadership mean to you in the context of well-being?
Nuthan: I’ve been lucky to have some incredible women bosses, as well as my mom and my aunts. For me, female leadership was the standard. What I have seen is that women are more committed – whatever challenges come their way, they just stick with it and overcome obstacles. They’re also more empathetic – they take care of the people in their teams, it is not always work, work, work. And they’re more strategic – they don’t work from brute force but from intelligence. That’s something I really admire.
In the Netherlands, I often hear that we need female leadership. Well, in India, we’ve had women leaders for a long time. Our current president is from the lowest caste, and she’s leading the country. We’ve had a woman prime minister; she was considered the toughest Indian prime minister. Our health minister, who really ramped up the health system in Kerala, was a woman. Kerala, in particular, is matrilineal. So to me, having women in leadership positions is normal.
So many ambitious women in our community struggle with chronic stress, burnout or loneliness, even when things look successful on the outside. What patterns do you see most often in the Happiness Tours, and what practical shift would you recommend?
Nuthan: Loneliness is a big problem. The thing is, if we feel connected and supported at a genuine human level, our stress tends to lessen. The way we mitigate stress is by connecting with each other. I do see how hard it is in practice. I think again, it comes from that work-life balance. People are always busy. They are not there for each other as much as they could be. I come from a community that is hyper-connected – are you okay, is everything good, did you eat? It can be exhausting, and you might lose your individuality in a community like that.
But in the Netherlands, what I see is that individuality is given so much importance, so the healing power of community gets lost. That’s something I would encourage people to do: connect with each other through genuine conversations. What I would love is for people to get together and speak about moments of kindness they have experienced. When we do that, our brain goes into the part related to relaxation, away from stressors and pressure. The other suggestion I would make is to learn diaphragmatic breathing because, especially when it’s cold, we tend to round our shoulders and the breath becomes shallow, which exacerbates the feeling of stress.
If we feel connected and supported at a genuine human level, our stress tends to lessen.
So to recap: you can lessen chronic stress through kindness stories, connecting with each other through proper conversations, and breathing from your abdomen.
In your research, what specific qualities or daily practices have you found to be the most effective to build long-term mental resilience?
Nuthan: The latest research I published in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society goes along with findings from the Harvard study on longevity and human flourishing. It’s always the same: human connection. When people’s social relationship scores improve, they do better.
My last project was about the impact of happiness interventions on social relationships. I chose to study MBA students in India during their placement period – a time when students obtain jobs. What we tend to see is that, after an MBA and during this placement period, friends become enemies and social relationships suffer. The same kind of happiness interventions as the ones offered by the Happiness Tour resulted in people being happier. The students connected with and supported each other and became financially successful and stable as well. I don’t think it is all exclusive. You can have it all.
What kind of impact do you hope your work will have in the Netherlands in the next five years?
Nuthan: Did you know that 67% of people in the Netherlands are on the verge of burnout? They have symptoms already. The number is 84% among IT workers, and 82% among young people. And every time someone has burnout, it takes on average three to five months to recover, which has huge implications in terms of economic loss and loss of quality of life. If we can help people to connect with each other and scientifically prove that the Happiness Tours help us flourish, bring back those gentle joys, bring back that sense of play, that purpose, this will have a huge economic impact as well. Sadly, we are in a world where economic impact is what we always want to measure, more than health and well-being.
I hope to be able to show that by doing activities like this, you’re not just improving your health, which has a positive economic impact, but you’re also giving back to the local community. Because when we go on a tour, and we stop for coffee, or we work with a local artist, that has an economic impact. So altogether, that’s how Happiness Tours can improve both the economy and our mental health.
We know that 80% of positive health outcomes for chronic conditions, whether it’s burnout or arthritis, depend on social and environmental factors. Happiness Tours are exactly that: social and environmental. We could scale Happiness Tours to have twenty or thirty locations across the Netherlands. Why shouldn’t there be a Happiness Tour in every major city? Let’s make it happen. We started in one location, and thanks to the support from Female Ventures members who said to me, “Let’s do this”, we are now at eight locations. Let’s spread the word!
80% of positive health outcomes for chronic conditions, whether it’s burnout or arthritis, depend on social and environmental factors. Happiness Tours are exactly that: social and environmental.
If you could offer the Female Ventures community just one life skill to practice this month, what would it be?
Nuthan: Love yourself. Imagine you’re your own child, your own pet or a plant you love, and take care of yourself that way. The commercial world tells you: Hey, you need this cream, you need this perfume to love yourself. That’s not love. Love is how you take care of yourself – you feed yourself right, sometimes you indulge yourself, sometimes you rest a bit more. That’s what we need, gentle parenting. Because maybe we were not lucky with the parents we had, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be good parents to ourselves. I think that’s empowerment.
Maybe we were not lucky with the parents we had, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be good parents to ourselves – that’s empowerment.
Thank you, Nuthan, for taking the time to interview with us!
Connect with Nuthan
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/nuthanmanohar/
Me met Me – https://memetme.com/
The Happiness Tour – https://www.thehappinesstour.nl