Covid-19 may have, er, settled (for lack of a better word – it certainly hasn’t disappeared, but it seems to have reached a point of equilibrium), but the ripple effects are still being felt, particularly in hospitality, retail, nursing, and education. These are the front line industries where employees were hit particularly hard with shortage, illness, troublesome customers/clients, and massive workloads that are only just now starting to recede.
It’s absolutely no wonder that more and more people are reporting feelings of burn-out.
What is Burnout?
Before we look at ways to deal with burnout, it’s important to figure out what it is. Many people think that burnout is simply feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or incompetent at the job. For example, perhaps you had a rough evaluation or a rough few days and you feel exhausted and like your confidence is shaken.
This sucks, but it’s not burnout.
Burnout is characterized by three things:
- Reduced efficiency on the job, in the small and large things
- Increased mental distance from the job or feeling negative/cynical about the job
- Feeling exhausted all the time
Tied to these are things like:
- Anxiety, difficulty leaving work at work
- Being irritable, resentful and cynical about the job
- Procrastinating
- Forgetfulness
- Boredom
- Insomnia/trouble sleeping
- Self-doubt to the point of impacting your well-being and work quality
- Morning dread
- Social isolating
- Hyper-arousal (constantly on edge)
- Stress eating
- Compassion fatigue (particularly seen in the education and health fields)
Obviously, these things can be caused by more than just work, but if you notice several of them in tandem and they get worse when you think about working, you may be burned out.
Burnout is on the rise – Google is showing an increase in searches on burnout and the cost are high for businesses and for the population – up to $190 billion per year in the US in health care costs and at least 120,000 deaths, per year. And Millennials are bearing the brunt of it, experiencing more burnout than other generations and are more likely to quit over it. This means greater turnover in many industries.
Causes of Burnout
There are many causes of burnout, but they tend to boil down to a few major factors: environmental (too much work, being treated poorly, lack of agency and control, poor communication and poor job clarity, too much pressure and not enough time for deep work), Internal (perfectionism, poor self-care, procrastinating, self-critique and a lack of assertiveness). The external/environmental factors and internal factors tend to reinforce each other until you end up with burnout. For example, you may be stuck doing a lot of busy work which makes you feel bored and stale, so you procrastinate on it, get in trouble with a manager who isn’t managing your skills very well, and then you grow resentful of the fact that you feel mismanaged, and the cycle continues.
Contrary to popular myth, things like more vacations and time off, having a passion for the job, taking medications for depression or a major career change won’t do much for burnout. In fact, burnout rates are high in jobs with people who went into that career due to a passion (teaching, nursing, caretaking, etc). The only way to deal with burnout is for the organization to start taking a harder look at what their employees actually want and for employees to step up and ask for what they want.
But organizational shift takes a long time, so what can you do in the meantime?
Figure Out Your Stressors
Stressors are the things/people which are the root cause of the stress, not just the stress itself. For example, if your printer is slow, then the stressor is the printer itself, not the work you are printing. If you are stressed because you keep getting work given to you over the weekend, the stressor is the person giving you the work! Take some time to do a stressor inventory. This can make you feel better simply by the act of writing it all down and then you can figure out what to tackle.
A stressor inventory is done by first writing down all of the things which are causing you to feel stressed and then tracing back the root of that stress. For example, if you are feeling stressed because you feel overwhelmed at work, then the stressor may be a lack of training, too much being put on your plate, or an unsupportive team. Figuring out the stressors can put you on the road towards figuring out how to deal with it in a productive manner.
Identify Early Signs
Do you know when you are starting to burn out? Do you have some ‘tells’? It’s important to identify these so that you can head of major burnout before it even arrives. I know I’m getting burned out when I eat way too much junk food and my sleep quality drops.
If you aren’t sure, talk to your friends and family and see what patterns they have seen.
The Power of No
If a major stressor is a manager giving you work right before the weekend or getting dragged into meetings that you really don’t need to attend, start practicing the Positive No. This is a strategy where you say no to the task or proposal without making the other person feel bad. It’s also called a ‘yes no yes’ with the structure being along the lines of thanking the other person for thinking of you, but outlining why you can’t do it (briefly) and then suggesting an alternative. For example, if your manager asks you to take on a project, you can say that you appreciate the thought, but you have another project which is taking up your time; however, someone else (named obviously) would be a good fit as well. This can also be known as setting your boundaries. It can take some practice, and some managers aren’t going to like it, but whenever you say yes to one thing, you are already saying no to something else and wouldn’t you rather stop saying no to yourself all the time?
Plan Ahead
Plan your next day at work, while still at work. Take five to fifteen minutes at the end of the workday to plan what needs to be done the next day. This way, your brain won’t be chewing it over at home and you’ll come in with a clear plan.
The Impact of Deep Work
One of the causes of burnout is surprising to many: too much busy work. Busy work can also be defined as ‘shallow’ work or work that feels kind of pointless. For example, attending a lot of meetings, doing a lot of shallow paperwork that could have been done faster in other ways, or other work that doesn’t seem to do much but pile up. When you are in the thick of it, you know full well that it’s not good for you – it’s the kind of work that quickly makes you irritated and tired out.
Instead, you should be striving to be able to do more ‘deep work’. This is work that is characterized by intense bursts of creativity and thought – the kind of work where an hour or two can fly by without you noticing. It’s this push for more deep work that is making many analysts push for the end of meetings and many employees to push for hybrid models of work, claiming that their best hours of work don’t necessarily line up with the 9-5 and are much harder to achieve in an office where there are constant interruptions.
Deep work has been shown to help get rid of burnout because it lets you learn things more quickly and create quality work that you can be proud of, rather than the constant deluge of answering emails and phone calls which never really end.
Experts say that you should aim for at least sixty to ninety minutes of deep work at least a few times per working day. The best way to do this? Turn off all of your communication devices, shut the door (or hide somewhere) and start working on a single project or task. You’ll be more productive and less burned out at the end. Plus, it won’t kill anyone to not yammer at you for an hour or two while you try to work! You can also do things like spearhead no meeting days with your manager and team, block out time when you will work on one task, and even block any communication entirely for that period of deep work.
It takes some getting used to, for everyone involved, but the results are worth it and for many, it’s an ideal antidote to burnout.
We didn’t mention the usual things like self-care, asking for time off, counseling, and so on because these things are usually a given when dealing with burnout. They are helpful, but it’s very important to address the root cause(s) of the burnout and this means identifying your stressors, practicing saying no, planning ahead, and trying to instill things like more deep work and less shallow work in your day.
Have you been going through burnout at work? What do you plan to do about it?
