Key Takeaways
- Recognise Workplace Burnout: Understand that burnout is an official syndrome for people at work, involving exhaustion, cynicism, and lack of effectiveness due to chronic, unmanaged stress.
- Know the difference between Stress and Burnout: While stress is about being over-involved and panicking, burnout is about being so disengaged, apathetic, and hopeless.
- Identify symptoms in three areas: Look for the signs of fatigue (physical); detachment (emotional); and withdrawal (behavioural).
- Audit your energy & workload: Learn where your energy and time are being invested at work and discover any aspects that are disordered or out of alignment with you, including overwork and lack of autonomy.
- Set Ironclad Boundaries: Take control of your health and set firm limits for work-related contact, save up online time for your hobbies, and ensure that your value is not tied up in productivity.
What Is Burnout? (And How It Differs From Stress)
Before getting on to the warning signs, it is important to make sure one knows what the term means. In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognised burnout as an occupational phenomenon in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). It defined it as a syndrome caused by prolonged stress at work that is not officially managed.
Burnout typically has three aspects to it:
- Fatigue or lack of energy.
- Lack of psychic attachment to the job, or negative or cynical attitudes towards the job.
- Reduced professional efficacy.
Stress vs. Burnout: Knowing the Difference
While stress and burnout can often be misinterpreted, they are two different experiences:
- Stress is defined as having too much – “I can’t handle everything that’s going on in my life at once,” “There’s too much going on that makes me feel stressed,” “I feel too pressed for time.” You may feel you’re panicking, but secretly you think that you can work more and then everything will be okay.
- Burnout involves disengagement: When you’re burnt out, you feel empty, emotionally drained, and lacking in motivation. You stop caring. Hopelessness—it doesn’t matter what I do—is the emotional keyword of burnout.
Why Burnout Happens: The Root Causes
Burnout doesn’t develop overnight. It is a long-time smouldering fire that erupts in the months and even years when there has been a chronic misalignment of employee and environment.
Six main workplace mismatch factors are typically cited as causes of burnout:
- Workload Overload: When the amount of work is greater than the time, resources, and energy available, it is not possible to carry out that work sustainably.
- Lack of Control: When you feel that you do not have much or any control over your time, your job performance, or project direction.
- Insufficient Reward: Feeling a lack of reward for your hard work and talent, be it in terms of pay, public acclaim, or job development opportunities.
- Breakdown in the Community: Being in a negative, adversarial, or remote workplace without a support force, psychological safety, or team dynamics.
- Absence of Fairness: Fairness is a major issue of favouritism, inadequate performance measurement systems, inequitable pay systems, or otherwise arbitrary management decisions.
- Values Conflict: Engaging in work that is in direct opposition to an organisation’s mission, ethics, or day-to-day practice in direct opposition to one’s personal core values and integrity.
The Silent Creep: Warning Signs Across Three Dimensions
A blaze does not often manifest burnout. Rather, it slowly and gradually shows itself in the truest indicators of your physical body, emotional states, and actions. It is important not only to become aware of these symptoms early, but also to acknowledge them before you come to a complete stopping point.
Phase 1: The Physical Red Flags
- Unrelenting Fatigue: This is not a normal feeling of tiredness that resolves with a good night’s sleep. This kind of tiredness is physically, bone-exhausting, and you wake up feeling as tired as when you went to bed.
- Frequent illness and a compromised immune system: Because your nervous system is constantly being put into fight-or-flight mode, your immune system is being lowered. You could be infected with every cold that’s out there, always having sinus problems or suffering from tension headaches.
- Chronic muscle tension (ache): Often results in a permanently clenched jaw, tight neck and shoulders, or low back pain, which can all be attributed to stress about work. Also, gastrointestinal problems like stomach aches, nausea, or irritable bowel reactions are highly prevalent.
- Sleep Disturbances: You may not be sleeping well as your mind replays those work emails over and over again, or you find yourself awake at 3:00 AM with a racing heartbeat, dreading work.
Phase 2: The Emotional Red Flags
- Cynicism and Detachment: When you used to really love your work, your clients, your employees, but you now feel like you don’t really care or are very cynical, then it’s the classic “detachment” stage of burnout in your life. It could be you think: “Why bother? All this is irrelevant, anyway.”
- Dread and Anxiety: The physical “Sunday Scaries” of dread thinking about work turns into a large, nagging anxiety which starts to invite itself into the evenings and weekends, and begins to interfere with your own time.
- Irritability and Short-Fused Patience: Things related to work that you would normally ignore or forget to do annoy you to the point of frustration or anger. You could be becoming short-tempered with work colleagues, clients, or even in the home environment.
- Loss of Satisfaction and Imposter Syndrome: Things once believed to make you feel good about yourself no longer do. You may think that you’re an imposter, feeling not competent enough, and wonder if you ever really were competent at your job at all.
The Behavioural Red Flags
- Procrastination and Decreased Productivity: Simple things that previously took only a few minutes now take hours, and others are put off till later. You’re constantly scrolling through social media, tidying up your work area, or staring at your screen helplessly with no idea why, since you have no control over your rational brain.
- Withdrawal/Isolation: Stop going to optional team meetings, stop going to social lunches, don’t respond to messages from others, hang out in isolation. You view work as a mechanical job, and it’s a transactional job, meaning you have contact with as few people as you can.
- Using Coping Mechanisms to Numb Out: To “make it through” the day or to unwind at night, you may be turning to unhealthy coping behaviour more and more, such as drinking a lot, binge-eating, endlessly scrolling through doom-filled information, or sleeping too much or getting a full night’s sleep to escape the world.
- Presenteeism: Physically at work but mentally absent. You’re maybe clocking in hours but making little or no real value because of the intense cognitive weariness.
Self-Assessment: Are You Heading Towards Burnout?
Consider your present working life thoroughly. Write ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to each question below:
- Are you feeling emotionally exhausted most of the time after your workday?
- Is there a place that you don’t want to be in the morning, because you’re not enjoying it, whether it’s online or in the office?
- Are you becoming noticeably more intolerant with co-workers, clients, or customers?
- Have you ever felt that you don’t feel appreciated at work, or you do whatever you do, but nobody is on board with you?
- Are you feeling totally disheartened about your job or passion project?
- Have trouble switching off work when you are not at work?
- Ever had physical symptoms such as headaches, stomach problems, or chronic muscle tension that have been related to stress at work?
Actionable Steps to Recover from Burnout
1. Conduct a Strict Energy Audit
Manage your financial bank account – manage your energy account. Monitor energy use for one week.
- What draws you down immediately, whether it’s a specific task, meeting, or project?
- What activities make you feel good or like you’ve accomplished something?
2. Establish Ironclad Boundaries Between Work and Life
With the new age of telecommuting and smartphones, the lines between work and private life have gone out the window. Working all day, every day is easy when you’re in your pocket or in your living room.
- Set Hard Stop Times: Set laptop drawer, mute work notifications, etc. at a specific time. Avoid checking work email after hours.
- Reclaim Your Lunch Break: Completely disconnect from the work desk. Take a break for lunch away from screens or go for a short walk outdoors or practise sitting quietly. A real reset for the afternoon’s brain bandwidth.
3. Seek Professional Support and Open Communication
If work is overwhelming, don’t keep it a secret since you won’t get anything done.
- Talk to Your Manager: Make an appointment to meet with your supervisor directly and find a solution. Don’t focus on a grievance; talk about it in terms of performance and sustainability. (e.g., “I want to assure myself that I am giving the very best on our key projects, but with the load of work I have, there are some things at risk if we don’t get a chance to review and reprioritise my workload before the Christmas break starts.”)
- Try Therapy: Oversee your self-esteem from your productivity and process workplace trauma with a licensed mental health care professional and develop healthy coping skills.
4. Reconnect with a Life Outside Your Job
Burnout is when everything becomes reduced to your job. People who find no real satisfaction from their careers except at work can experience serious crisis moments when it goes bad.
- Take time to practise activities with no monetary value. Engage in painting, gardening, playing a musical instrument, hiking, or cooking for pleasure, no provocation or purpose.
- Focus on building authentic, real-world relationships with those who care for you and who enjoy YOU more than your work.
Summary
If you find you are suffering from burnout, let this one sink in: Burnout is not a personal problem! Don’t think of it as weakness, lack of effort, or lack of ability. Actually, burnout almost always only occurs when you have a conscientious, high-performing, driven individual who cares deeply about their work and is not willing to compromise on quality until their body won’t allow them to.
It is a very courageous thing to acknowledge and realise the symptoms of burnout. It’s actually the Universe’s red flag saying, “Stop, turn around, and head in another direction.” People don’t have to sacrifice their health in exchange for productivity.
Breathe, remind yourself where you are now, and make choosing to be happy for yourself your top priority for today!