Studio Life Hazards: The Audio Pro’s Guide to Healthy Relationships

The Feast of St. Valentine aka Valentine’s Day takes place on February 14^th, a celebration of love and amore that unfurls annually worldwide. Expectations overflow for this holiday where chocolates, flowers and intimate meals are the currency.

But many pro audio practitioners are going to miss the party. Instead of ordering champagne and oysters, they’ll have to flake out on dinner reservations. Why? They’ll be squinting at waveforms, moving mics, or shipping a mix to meet the demanding deadline. There’ll be no sharing of beef bourguignon this night, but their significant other – if they have one – will be stewing all the same, as the intense pressures that impact audio professionals’ careers reverberate far beyond the studio.

The love life of an audio professional has challenges all its own.

Of course, Valentine’s Day isn’t the only time of year when personal relationships feel hazardous to producers, recording engineers, mixers, audio post pros, mastering engineers and more. For most people in the industry, dealing with stress brought on by economic forces and rapid technological change is a daily challenge.

These stresses can have a very real impact on their daily dealings with family, significant others and spouses. In many cases, the demands and ambitions that accompany audio careers can destroy relationships, leading to nasty breakups or divorce. Or it can prevent intimate relationships from even happening in the first place, forcing many into what feels like a hard choice between having a career and having a love life.

What is Healthy?

Dr. Joshua C. Klapow Ph. D. is a licensed clinical psychologist who sees the romantic challenges of audio professionals first-hand. An associate professor of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he is the co-host of the weekly radio show “The Web: Love, Lust and Life with Tony and Dr. Josh” on Cumulus radio 99.5 FM WZZR, and appears regularly on national outlets like The Weather Channel. And he doesn’t just see audio pros when they’re setting up his mic – he has had many of them as psychotherapy clients in his private practice.

A rabid student of the media, communication – and the people who power it – are a particular passion for Klapow. It’s a perspective that has given him special insight on how people that work in sound cope with their family life beyond the facility. “Very often,” he says, “on the show we’re talking about issues of people in the industry.”

According to Klapow, although there is a barometer for measuring healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships – no matter what the profession – it’s one that rarely holds steady. “I would liken it to the same way that we tend to get headaches during changes in barometric pressure, but that doesn’t signal anything of imminent danger,” says Klapow. “You have to look at a relationship the same way. There are times when it is great. There are times when it’s terrible. There are times when it’s kind of neutral.

Dr. Josh Klapow (left) knows why sonic practitioners can have it tough in their family lives.

“But the best way that you can sort of think about relationships in general,” he continues, “is that you have three components to that relationship: You have Person Number One, Person Number Two and the relationship itself. The relationship itself is a living breathing thing that is greater than just person Number One and Person Number Two.

“The barometer for a healthy relationship on the whole is: Person One, Person Two, relationship on whole, are they thriving? Are they somewhere between neutral and thriving? They may take a dip down. There may be problems. There may be a bad day. There may be a bad week. There may be a bad year, but what you’re looking for is, in general, is the interaction between those two people causing benefits for each individual and the relationship or is it causing harm?”

Often, Klapow will bypass science and go for the gut check to make that measure. “I tell people to ask themselves, ‘How do you feel in this relationship? Not just today, but when you look back and you look forward, what does your heart tell you?’ We are very good reads of each other if we’re honest with each other. If the answer to those things is, ‘Yes, I am successful, he or she is successful and this interaction we have feels successful,’ then generally speaking, it is successful. But you have to be honest.”

Audio Adversity

While sound specialists have their own unique stressors, Klapow points out that they also have common challenges with anyone else who’s attempting to balance family and career.

“As different as audio professionals may be in terms of their career choice, they are human,” he notes. “As humans, they need to have their basic physical needs addressed. But if you are sleep deprived, if you are unhealthy physically, if you’re not eating well, if you’re managing some sort of illness, if you are physiologically not good, then it will impact your relationships and it will impact your job. That’s common to everybody. You have to have that in place, that’s number one.

“Number two, the way they act in the job comes to define a part of who they are, and that part of who they are may or may not jive well with their significant other outside of their culture. So you can have a job in which your personality and your style in that job is very circumscribed, very defined. It may match up well with people you know and love outside of that job, but it may not. People in the industry have to realize, ‘Who am I with? Who am I interacting with? Are they inside or outside? If they’re outside, does my inside culture and my inside interactions work well with my outside?’”

Klapow points to himself as a case study in the struggle for work/home separation. “My wife tells me all the time, when I come back from a show, she’ll say two things,” he observes. “One, ‘You’re talking too loud. You’re talking like Dr. Josh.’ Two, she’ll very often say, ‘You’re interacting with me like Dr. Josh. I’m your wife. Don’t give me psychological advice.’ My point is the industry has unique aspects to it, that people in the industry have to recognize are not universal and they’ve got to be able to turn it on and turn it off.”

There are many specific pressures that audio professionals face, as well, which Klapow identifies as barriers to maintaining healthy relationships. “Number one, very often unconventional work hours, so not 8:00 to 5:00,” he says. “Number two, depending on where you are within the profession, interacting with strong personalities, unique personalities. The third is the desire for many to reach superstar status while others are content with where they are.

“Are you doing your job to move up within the company, within the organization? Are you trying to break out on your own? Are you trying to stay in this market, or are you trying to move to another market? Does your desire dictate that you need to be someplace else? You’ve got all of that kind of swirling around. It can be a very cutthroat, dollars-oriented industry that is constantly being tested by new avenues and new business models, some of which are successful, some of which fail. Not to mention the advent of technology that keeps changing.

“So it’s very easy for audio professionals to become outdated, to become wedded to the wrong skill set, to get too old too fast. And possibly to not make enough money. It takes somebody who has to be incredibly nimble and essentially a desire to learn and grow, sometimes at a pace that’s much faster even than they want or, if we’re talking about relationships, their significant others want. Very often your job is rote and then suddenly after it’s been rote for two years, now it’s completely different. That doesn’t bode well for relationships at home.”

Chaos Reigns

Exacerbating the complexities of an audio career is its ability to keep practitioners constantly playing catchup, as new platforms and plugins come out constantly while an avalanche of educational offerings vie for their attention.

“It’s chaotic — it doesn’t have a start and stop time — your job may but the industry doesn’t,” Klapow says. “It’s audio, it’s on all the time. The medium is on all the time. It never closes, which means there’s always an opportunity to do something, to make a stride, to fail, to be affected, to be impacted. So it’s a 24/7 thing. That’s number one.

“Number two, the people in it represent very diverse sets of skills and personalities. Let me give you an example. A producer could be somebody who’s trying to become on-air talent and working his or her way there, or a producer could be somebody who has no desire in the least to be on-air talent and is a master at what they do.  On-air talent could be somebody who found themselves thrusted there and really wishes that they were behind the board, behind the glass doing producing.

“So people have very different job skills but they’re very often working very hand-in-hand, and so you’ve got personality clashes that happen all the time. You couple that with a highly-competitive environment in which the unit revenue is often not gigantic, you’ve got lots of people with very strong personalities trying to do something that’s very public that never ends and they’re fighting over small amounts of dollars. That sets itself up for a lot of competition, a lot of insecurity, a lot of fast pace which can feel chaotic.”

From that tempest, some very negative outcomes can be borne. “The worst that can happen is mental health problems including depression, anxiety, substance abuse, other sorts of drug abuse, domestic violence — that’s not uncommon,” says Klapow. “But let’s just take a step back from that and maybe it’s not quite that bad. Exhaustion, mental fatigue, difficulty coping at home because they don’t have any coping resources left, disengaged or detached, detached from the relationship at home — not because they don’t care but they don’t have the emotional energy to attach, boredom at home. There could be lack of excitement at home because they’re in this world that’s kind of intense and going and all over the place, and they get home and home might just be home.”

Is trouble brewing? Start shifting out of your job mindset before coming home.

Whether its audio or any other industry, Klapow has the same advice to those who reach this unsettling juncture. “I’m always telling my clients, ‘On your way home from the time you’re done, you shut it down. I don’t care if you work at home or not, you need at least 20 minutes to re-orient your mind,’” he explains. “I’m not talking about unwinding. I’m talking about making a shift from where you are to where you’re going to be, because this is not just about having a beer and relaxing. That’s fine. I’m talking about recognizing and having your brain shift from the intense adrenaline or concentration of audio industry jobs to kids, wife, partner, a home environment, family. It is a cognitive shift. You cannot come home in work mode.

“I tell people, ‘Do not come home and ask for that shift. Come home having made that, at least starting to make that shift on your way home.’ Your family, your other people whoever they are, should not see you the moment you leave your job if you have a particularly intense job.

“And intense can mean just intense concentration. I’m not saying ‘lights and showtime,’ but even just focusing on the mixing of sound etc… You can’t go from that to a significant other who wants to talk about the roof falling in and how do they look in these jeans. Most people can’t make that shift very easily. It has to be a conscious shift.”

XLR to TMZ

In a culture that’s obsessed with celebrity, audio pros can get more than their fair share of exposure to the rich and famous. While the heightened level of access can be seen as a perk, it can just as easily morph into a relationship hazard.

“Obviously, not everyone in the audio industry deals with celebrity exposure directly, but for those who do you’ve got a couple of things going on,” states Klapow. “Number one, when you’re talking about celebrity status, that recognition is unique and different in quantity and quality than your tight intimate relationships.

“You’re a producer on a giant show that’s getting tons of recognition, or a mixer on a highly anticipated album, and you come home and you’re just ‘girlfriend’ or ‘Dad’ or ‘husband’ or ‘wife.’ When you come home, you are just as important, but you’re not important as an audio professional. If you’re trying to be important as an audio professional, you’re trying to be Mr. Producer or Mrs. Producer or Mr. and Mrs. Talent, it isn’t going to fly at home because those people don’t love you for that.

“As much as that sounds like common sense, where you see strife in the relationships of audio professionals, nine out of ten times the person at home is saying, ‘He or she acts like they’re still on the job. They don’t pay attention to me. They’re bored.’”

Here’s where Dr. Josh suggests another gut check. “Before you get your butt home say, ‘Am I home as this person or am I home as Mr. or Mrs. Audio Professional?’  If you’re home as Mr. or Mrs. Audio Professional, you’re not helping your relationship. They may care about your career, but they don’t care about you as Mr. or Mrs. Career when you’re home.”

For people who operate at the very high end, whether it’s recording Taylor Swift or holding the boom mic for Robert DeNiro, things can get particularly exhilarating – and disorienting. “Let’s call it celebrity status by proxy,” he says. “You’re not Taylor Swift, but there’s also a lot of people who don’t set up the microphone for Taylor Swift. So in your own mind, and amongst friends and others, you achieve the access. Your access to celebrities very often can make you feel celebrity, and with reasonable justification because you’ve got friends, family members, and other people going, ‘Hey, weren’t you just with Taylor Swift?’

Unbalanced inputs: Celebs in the studio, followed by everyday headaches at home.

“What that does to your ego is it makes you special. The reason you have to watch that is because that begins to change you, or it can change you: If you’re a producer, if you’re a grip, guess what? You got to hang out with Taylor Swift or Robert DeNiro all day. Your family didn’t. And there’s a difference between what you understand intellectually and what you understand emotionally. You say, ‘It’s no big deal. It’s just my job,’ and your ego down below is going, ‘Hey, I hang with Taylor Swift all day and then I came home to this?’ It’s something that affects how we interact with other people and it’s unique to that profession.”

Even more problematic is that this distortion field takes shape gradually. “It begins to shape you very often without you realizing it, and that’s where people get into trouble,” Klapow cautions. “It goes from, ‘Hey this was really cool — I was with so-and-so today!’ to when you come home its, ‘I hang out with these famous people all the time and look what it is at home,’ and your personality begins to shape. Very often you don’t even realize it. Then your husband or wife or significant other and your kids say, ‘You’re a jerk. You’re acting like such an ass.’ And then you end up coming to see people like me.”

Time to Take Stock of the Situation

As a clinical psychologist, Klapow can offer up a checklist of proactive steps to head off relationship doom. “I think one of the easiest things for people to understand is what I said before, which is that your relationship exists. It’s a living breathing, entity,” he says. “It needs time, energy, and effort. It is separate from you and the other person, and so what I tell people is, ‘Ask yourself this question: How much time do I dedicate physically and emotionally to my relationship?’

“When I say physically, this is important, that’s the easy one. ‘How many hours a day am I actually doing something that has to do with my relationship?’ But that’s not all of it because people can be very physically present and emotionally absent. So, for whatever amount of that time that you are there, that you are at home, that you’re with your significant other, be honest with yourself: How — on a scale from zero to a hundred — connected are you to that, in that moment, versus thinking about work?

“There’s physical time that you dedicate to your relationships and there’s emotional time. You can have 50 hours of physical time and zero emotional, so that’s the first thing is literally look at your balance books and say, ‘Am I physically spending time with these people and of that time, how engaged am I?’ Answer honestly. That’s the first thing.”

If the results are negative, corrective action is required. “If things are out of whack like, ‘Oh my God, I’m spending no time or I’m spending lots of time but I’m not engaged,’ you must carve out, even if it is for 10 minutes, 10 or more minutes of quality connection with people at home. It is much better to spend 10 minutes of 100% connected than an hour of you not being there.

“This is something that’s like a workout. You must make yourself do it. You must put it in your day planner. You must put it as an alert every morning. One of the simplest things I tell people to do is have in your calendar — morning, midday, after work and bedtime — you need cues about your outside relationship. It’s morning, it could be as simple as saying ‘Hello’ and be nice. Midday, ‘Check in with family at home or my significant other.’ After work, shift to home mode. Make tiny compliments, the small compliments before you go to bed.”

A few simple steps can return the family unit to equilibrium.

According to Klapow, these essential steps can ground a person and anchor them back to their relationship. “They don’t take away from your job, but they keep you from being so caught up in your job that your relationship just completely falls by the wayside. Those are the simple things you can do. The harder thing that you can do is to have a conversation with your significant other, your family, whoever it is and have the guts to ask them, ‘How are things going between us? Please tell me honestly.’ There are a lot of people who don’t ever want to ask that question because they’re afraid of what they might hear.

“Don’t ask it every day because then you get annoying, but if you ask it you’re going to get feedback early enough that might say, ‘No, things are not going great.’ That doesn’t mean that it’s over. It just means that things are not going great, and then it means much like you’re not performing in your job, you’re not performing in your relationship. What do you do about it from there? I’m biased, but there’s nothing wrong with talking to a shrink or a marriage counselor or some sort of relationship counselor. It is much better to do it earlier than later.”

Hit/Single

All these dynamics shift, of course, for the myriad audio professionals who find themselves single on Valentine’s Day – some by choice, others not. Klapow acknowledges that it may not be easy to see what restrictions their career commitment is placing on their relationship status.

“Careers in general take time and energy, but let me say this: The concept of work/life balance is kind of BS, to be honest with you,” he opines. “What I mean by that is it’s not how much you can juggle. We used to think that if you’re just more efficient, more organized, more this, more that, you can handle more. It doesn’t work that way.

“We have a finite amount of emotional resources. It’s about priorities. It’s about decisions. If you decide to focus on your career, that means by definition that you have less time to focus on your personal life. It doesn’t mean you have no time, but it means you have less time. So what I would say is, if you find yourself alone and you attribute that to your career, that in and of itself is not bad unless that is distressing to you.

“So ask yourself, ‘Is this career path something that I’m passionate about? Am I in love with this? Is this something I’ve chosen to do? Is this something I want to happen?’ If so what it means is that my interpersonal relationships may take a second stage to them. It’s not all or none. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have any, but it does mean if you’re reading this on Valentine’s Day then yes, you may not have a date because — guess what? — you’ve busted your hump to focus on your career.”

Did you intentionally choose your career over having a date on Valentine’s Day?

Just because that’s the case doesn’t make it a bad thing. But if it feels like it is, then Klapow believes some fresh thinking might be in order. “If on Valentine’s Day you don’t have somebody because you’re working at your job and you say to yourself, ‘You know, I’m not just upset about this day. I’m upset by the fact that I have nothing, I don’t have relationships in my life the way I want it.’ Then maybe it’s a time to re-evaluate your job.

“That’s really important. I tell people, ‘Spend a few minutes a few times a week reflecting on your life: ‘Am I where I want to be? Do I like this? Do I wish I had something different?’ We so often get so caught up in our career, particularly if it’s fast-paced and high pressure, that we look back and ‘x’ number of years of our relationship has slipped by.

“I say, ‘Don’t be afraid to evaluate where you’re at in your life for a moment or for five minutes. There’s nothing wrong with that and it may not change a thing, but not looking at it means that you wake up one day and you go, “Whatever happened to him, her or this opportunity or that opportunity?”’”

Be True to Your Heart

If audio pros don’t like that they’re hearing, either from the person in the mirror or their significant other, they have a responsibility from there to listen, learn, and move to improve.

“It’s very important to be honest with yourself enough to say, ‘I’m struggling. I’m struggling in my relationship. I’m struggling emotionally. I’m struggling physically,’” says Klapow. “There are so many people in this industry who suffer because they don’t go get help. If your relationship is on the rocks, if you feel like you are just struggling, struggling emotionally, struggling physically, please go talk to somebody.

“When I say talk to somebody, I want to be specific: If it’s physical, emotional, sleep, any of that, go talk to your physician, a primary care physician, a doctor. If you have benefits from your employer, go talk to a psychologist. Nobody every wants to say that they’re talking to a psychologist, but nobody knows that anybody else is talking to a psychologist. You will not progress in your career, in your relationships and in your life if you reach a point at which you need help and you do not get help.

“But guess what? We’re really good at getting people better! I don’t want to see you when it’s too late. I don’t want to see you when the relationship is broken up. I don’t want to see you and have to admit you to a psychiatric hospital. I see people in the audio industry professionally. I see them as confidants and friends and they struggle like everybody else and as a result, the ones that don’t get help continue to struggle and they don’t make it where they want to be. The ones who actually do go get help get better.”

Victory on V-Day

For all those studio rats who have successfully scheduled a lockout on Valentine’s Day, Dr. Klapow offers up both encouragement and caveats.

“Valentine’s Day is a little bit like Christmas!” he laughs. “It’s about the anticipation. We have an author who’s on our set named Laura Corn, she wrote the book 101 Nights of Great Sex and she talks about how the key to intimacy is anticipation. Valentine’s Day is wonderful in that you have a whole lot of warning. You know when it is. You have a lot of time to create wonderfully romantic anticipation, but don’t let your expectations become so unrealistic that they will never match up to the anticipation that you’re trying to build.

“The idea is it doesn’t have to be the most romantic day of your year. Embrace it — it’s an excuse to be romantic and that’s great, but don’t put all of your relationship eggs in the Valentine’s Day basket. Connect with your significant other and your family at an emotional level, but it’s not just about what you do: Make sure your head and your heart are connected to them on Valentine’s Day.”

• David Weiss

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