It’s not your fault you’re burnt out
Raise your hand if you’re burnt out.
Burnout is the result of prolonged exposure to chronic demands and stressors. While it is most frequently associated with work, it can also result from other roles in life, such as being a caregiver.
While the pandemic created long-term exposure to new chronic stressors, it was placed on top of our existing extreme-stress culture. As a result, burnout is now widespread, with one survey showing over half of the respondents report experiencing it.
Despite popular belief, burnout isn’t just about fatigue. The leading research has identified that it has three specific components:
Exhaustion
Cynicism (feeling negative about your work or your life)
A sense of ineffectiveness (believing that you cannot do the things that you need to)
Experiencing burnout can lead to multiple physical problems, such as fatigue, headaches, issues sleeping, and even more serious health conditions. We know from many studies that chronic stress, which often overlaps with burnout from work and other challenges in our lives, is a risk factor for many chronic diseases, too. Psychologically, burnout can lead to depression, anxiety, and extreme distress.
The pandemic has exacerbated many of our existing demands and added new stressors. These include working from home with children, the economic crisis, widespread job loss, increased pressure to maintain performance in an uncertain economy, the loss of many of our positive routines and social support, fear of contracting the virus, and constant worry for loved ones. Members of specific communities have experienced this to an even greater extent: not only are members of the BIPOC community at a greater risk of burnout, but they have also experienced extreme additional trauma over the past year.
If you’re burnt out, it is not your fault
As the leading researcher in burnout, Dr. Christina Maslach, says, “The bottom line on burnout is that it is a social phenomenon, not an individual weakness.”
All of us have certain resources, and all of us have certain demands. Burnout occurs when the demands of a specific situation are too high for too long — your environment or situation is overpowering you and any resources that you have.
While you can increase your resources to help to cope with the environmental situation, that will not be sustainable in the long run. It is extremely problematic to ask employees to bear the burden of continually increasing their resources without companies also reducing their demands — but that is exactly what is so frequently happening.
Many of us can push through an especially busy month or two at work with tough deadlines because we know that there is a slower-paced schedule or a break around the corner. But when there is no end in sight, no sign of environmental changes, or no signs of support from your leadership team, your resources will eventually become depleted by those ongoing demands.
Burnout warning signs
One thing that is within our control is learning to spot our burnout warning signs. Burnout presents itself uniquely for each of us, based on our personalities, our work and home environments, the communities we are a part of, and a multitude of other factors.
Consider how you are feeling on each of the three dimensions of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness. It can be helpful to look at your emotions and behaviors in each of those areas.
Do you feel tired and fatigued? Do you rest but never fully recover?
Are you feeling inadequate or like you can’t get anything done? Are you struggling to do the things that you need to do to take care of yourself?
Do you feel negative about your work or your purpose? Are people frustrating you or upsetting you more than usual?
Addressing Burnout
To manage burnout, take a look at your demands and your resources. Depending on how burnout is impacting you, it can be helpful to come up with a short-term solution and a long-term solution.
You will also want to take into account your experience of the three elements of burnouts and which is affecting you most strongly at this moment. For example, high exhaustion burnout might require more self-care; high cynicism burnout might require connecting to a purpose or to other people; high ineffectiveness burnout might require breaking big tasks into small, achievable wins.
Decreasing your demands
Start with evaluating what you can take off of your plate. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Many of us have burdened ourselves with very high expectations for what we should do every single day. If you are worried that you might be experiencing burnout, it’s a good time to release yourself from them. What can you let go of right now? (Just because you let go of it doesn’t mean you can never pick it back up!)
Schedule time with your manager at work and discuss what is on your plate. If it is safe to do so, have an honest conversation about how you are feeling. What projects are work are not the priority? Where can you decline unnecessary tasks (like side projects or ‘nice-to-do’s’?) How can your manager better support you?
Take a break. If you haven’t taken your vacation days, schedule them right away. Consider exploring short-term leaves of absence if necessary.
If your workplace is a burnout pressure-cooker, as so many are, eventually, you will likely need to explore taking your gifts elsewhere. It is a painful truth that these environments are not likely to change anytime soon, no matter how hard you work. You are valuable and you deserve a workplace that supports you for who you are.
Increasing your resources
Take a look at your psychological, social, and economic resources, and evaluate where you can bolster them.
Make rest a non-negotiable. While this can involve tough tradeoffs, it is essential for you to cope with the situation you’re in. Can you fit in small moments of rest throughout your day? Can you take a day off of all work once a week?
Reach out and ask for help. When you’re burnt out, even this can feel like too much effort to expend. But spending ten minutes considering, “Where could someone in my community lean in to support me?” could pay off in tens or hundreds of hours of effort down the line.
Ensure that you are being a good friend to yourself. Be honest with yourself: where are you subconsciously holding on to Old Happy burnout beliefs, and how can you release them? With awareness, we can start to unwind the myths in our own lives: every time that we catch ourselves pushing ourselves too hard, saying yes to too many things, breaking boundaries, or deprioritizing what we need, and we hold firm, we are taking a radical step against Old Happy culture.
Reconnect to a purpose. How can you keep top of mind why you are doing what you are doing? Focusing on the beneficiaries of our work can help us to regain a sense of fulfillment and motivation.
Define the self-care habits that you need to stay strong. Then, hold yourself accountable for them. Often, we neglect them because we feel like we don’t have enough time — however, that feeling is often a sign that we need to do them more than ever!
The responsibility of leaders
If you are a leader, you have an absolute responsibility to create an anti-burnout culture. If your team is burnt out, it is not their fault — and it's your job to help fix it.
A study from Gallup found the top five reasons for burnout are:
Unfair treatment at work
Unmanageable workload
Lack of role clarity
Lack of communication and support from their manager
Unreasonable time pressure
Take a look at this list, and grade yourself on each item. Be careful not to base it on your experience of the workplace, but to consider what it is like for your employees (taking into account who they are, their roles, their lives and experiences outside of work.)
Once you’ve graded yourself, challenge yourself to implement systematic changes that will help you to improve each area. In what ways can you help your employees to increase their resources and decrease their demands? Adjusting deliverables, removing ‘nice-to-do’s from their list, canceling meetings, re-prioritizing or cutting projects, advocating for what they need to your boss — these are all things that you can and should be doing.
We’re well overdue on building a work culture that doesn’t promote burnout. With increased awareness about what leads to burnout, increased clarity on what is in our control, and a renewed sense of responsibility from those leading workplace institutions, we can start to take meaningful action to improve work for everyone. Burnout is a problem that must be solved with widespread systemic change, not only with individual effort.
