Overcome Burnout and Restore Balance

We can define burnout as a chronic stress that has not been successfully managed.
Common signs of burnout are:

• Exhaustion, apathy and negative feelings every time you think about your work.
• Feeling depleted and exhausted. Overwhelm. Feeling that you are not able to handle another thing on your plate. Even if you go on holiday and you have a week of rest you feel this emotional exhaustion of not being able to handle any stress.
• Mental distance from your job, negative feelings and cynicism about your job.
• Reduced professional efficacy

Burnout is not:

• being tired,
• being stressed occasionally
• working many hours

Usually burnout is caused by a combination of factors. Contributing factors are: stress, personal and family difficult situation, problems at work, lack of connection/community life, world events, trauma and personality traits such as perfectionistic tendencies, anxious personality, high achieving personality, need to be in control and reluctance to delegate.

Burnout can also be caused by a mismatch between people and their work especially at level of values. For example if fairness and justice are important values for you, it will be very difficult to work in a place where discrimination and favoritisme are common.

A bit of mismatch is tolerable but mismatches in areas that are important to someone can lead to burnout. In order to prevent burnout it is important to address these mismatches. Burnout affects especially people with mental health conditions.

Psychological impact of burnout

You may experience:

• Sense of failure and self-doubt
• Feeling helpless, trapped, and defeated
• Detachment, feeling alone in the world
• Loss of motivation
• Increasingly cynical and negative outlook
• Decreased satisfaction and sense of accomplishment

And you may withdraw from responsibilities, isolate yourself, procrastinate, taking longer to get things done, skip work or coming in late and leaving early.

Recovering from a burnout is difficult and takes a long time. The best is to recognise the symptoms on time and prevent it.

How can you prevent burnout?

Both employee and employer have to address the mismatch.

The employer should set reasonable expectations, fair and manageable workloads, care about the mental wellbeing of their employees.

The employee should take good care of themselves, introduce healthy habits, change mindset, not connect their identity to work, not put all their satisfaction at work, look at their values and try to honour them, discuss work challenges with manager, reach out before it is too late.

Resilience is the ability to adapt and recover from stress, adversity, or trauma. It can play a crucial role in preventing burnout by helping individuals manage stress, maintain emotional well-being, and sustain motivation.

Stress management techniques such as mindfulness, meditation, deep-breathing exercises, and regular physical activity will help you to build resilience and help in reducing overall stress levels and prevent it from escalating to burnout. I will talk more in depth about resilience in one of my next blogs.

If you are experiencing symptoms of burnout you can schedule an intro call with me.

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