How To Prevent Burnout
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Prioritising self-care, learning to shift your perspective, reducing stress exposure and seeking out connections are fundamental strategies for preventing burnout.
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- How To Prevent Burnout
According to the National Library of Medicine, burnout is a psychological syndrome that emerges as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. While burnout is not currently recognised as a standalone clinical diagnosis, the World Health Organisation officially listed burnout as an “occupational syndrome” in the eleventh edition of its International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) May 2021. Researchers from UNSW’s School of Psychiatry and Black Dog Institute have carried out two Australian-first studies looking into burnout.
Perfectionistic and work-focused traits have been discovered to be the biggest red flags for those developing burnout.Burnout can just creep up on us, and we may not notice it, for example because we are so driven to achieve a goal at work. However, burnout doesn’t just happen at work, it can be overworking yourself at home as a mum or overtraining in a sport. Spending too much time on any activity is unhealthy and can lead to stress, exhaustion and burnout.
We may all be feeling some level of burnout from the past couple of years, from dealing with the cumbersome measures to avoid COVID infection, hibernating away from our social support and dealing with things on our own, emotionally, working from home, and perhaps juggling that with family commitments too.
Research has linked burnout to many health problems, including stress, difficulty sleeping and low mood. It can lead to relationship problems and jeopardize career prospects.
Symptoms of burnout
Burnout is described in the ICD-11, as well as in the broader research literature, as encompassing emotional exhaustion, lack of empathy and reduced performance. However, in one of UNSW’s studies, the responses indicated nine other factors commonly affecting people experiencing burnout. These included:
- Stress
- Low mood
- Irritability and anger
- Sleep disturbances
- Lack of motivation or passion
- Lack of concentration, memory loss or brain fog
- Withdrawal from others
- Physical symptoms such as aches, headaches, nausea and low libido
- Emotional fragility
How to prevent burnout
Prioritise self care
When you take time for yourself and give your body the food, rest, and activity it needs, you will actually have more energy to meet the demands of daily life. Bringing more balance to your daily routine will help you be more productive and more resilient to stressors.
This includes things that will help replenish your physical and emotional energy, by prioritizing good sleep habits, nutrition, exercise, social connection. It also includes practices that promote calm and well-being, like meditating, journaling, and enjoying nature. If you’re having troubling squeezing such activities into your packed schedule, it might be worth tracking your time and what you’re doing in that time for a week. Hopefully this can help you identify where there are times you could be prioritising yourself instead of tasks, people, and situations that aren’t essential and put you in a negative mood. Try to increase your investment in those that boost your energy and make space for restful, positive time away from work.
Black Dog Institute’s Self Care Plan is a four-step plan that guides you to manage your emotions during periods of high stress. It can be used as a starting point to manage symptoms of burnout by helping you evaluate your coping skills, identify your daily self-care needs and replace negative coping strategies with positive alternatives.
Shift your perspective
Take account of what aspects of your situation you can change or delegate to others to free up time and energy for self care or for other important work.
Focus on most important tasks first, which would include those that produce income. Leave those that don’t produce income to last.
Once you have completed some heavy and intense tasks, you could switch to some more simple and easy tasks to give yourself a break.
Try to gain a sense of control over your environment by agreeing on times with others of when you will be available for work.
Plan your work so you know what work is coming and how to map out what you will be working on.
If cynicism is a major issue, can you shield yourself from the parts of the organization that frustrate you? Or could you build some positive, supportive relationships to counteract the ones that drain you? And if you’re feeling ineffective, what assistance or development might you seek out?
Sometimes letting go of perfectionism may also be needed.
Reduce exposure to stressors
Try to identify activities and relationships that trigger unhealthy stress. This involves resetting the expectations of colleagues, clients, and even family members for what and how much you’re willing to take on, as well as ground rules for working together. You may get pushback, however know that you are you’re making these changes to improve your long-term productivity and protect your health.
It’s about saying no when you have too much work on, or if you are unwell or if someone else could well do it.
Seek out connections.
The best antidote to burnout, particularly when it’s driven by cynicism and inefficacy, is seeking out rich interpersonal interactions and continual personal and professional development. Find coaches and mentors who can help you identify and activate positive relationships and learning opportunities. Volunteering is another effective way of breaking out of a negative cycle.
It may be likely that others in your organization are suffering too. If you band together to offer mutual support, and brainstorm and advocate for solutions together, you will all increase your sense of control and connection.
Burnout doesn’t just affect employees
It’s important to note that the studies carried out by UNSW included people from diverse backgrounds. “Interestingly, our findings also show that burnout doesn’t exclusively affect those in paid employment,” said Professor Parker. “By broadening the study’s scope to include those with unpaid home or care duties, we were able to note that burnout is not limited to those exposed to work-related stressors, which suggests burnout may be ‘context free’.”
Interestingly, more research is being planned by UNSW to look into how personalities affect burnout as well as a check-list of signs and symptoms by people experiencing it.
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