Sometimes I write my own articles, sometimes I want to share with you articles that I find to be very informative and useful in the quest of getting the happiest life possible. Here's something that I read today about burnout.
Take the test below - use the link to go to the MindTools website, http://www.mindtools.com/ and while you're there, read some of their other stuff, too.
Burnout Self-Test: Checking Yourself for Burnout
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_08.htm
Burnout - An Introduction
Burnout happens when people who have previously been highly committed to a job lose all interest and motivation. Sadly, this can spell the end of a successful career.
It mainly strikes highly-committed, passionate, hard working and successful people – and it therefore holds a special fear for those who care passionately about their careers and about the work they do.
This section explains what burnout is. It then helps you to recognize the warning signs in yourself, shows you how to avoid it, and helps you to know what to do if you have already burned out.
Understanding Burnout
Two important definitions of burnout are:
· “A state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by long term involvement in emotionally demanding situations.” - Ayala Pines & Elliott Aronson
· “A state of fatigue or frustration brought about by devotion to a cause, way of life, or relationship that failed to produce the expected reward.” – Herbert J Freudenberger
Between them, these definitions embrace the essence of burnout, with the first stressing the part that exhaustion plays in it, and the second stressing the sense of disillusionment that is at its core.
Anyone can become exhausted. What is so poignant about burnout is that it mainly strikes people who are highly committed to their work: You can only "burn out" if you have been "alight" in the first place. While exhaustion can be overcome with rest, a core part of burnout is a deep sense of disillusionment, and is not experienced by people who can take a more cynical view of their work.
Exhaustion – an important factor
In our article on the mechanisms of stress, we looked at the way that Hans Selye, one of the founding fathers of stress research, looked at burnout. Over many hundreds of experiments, Selye looked at the way in which animals handled long-term stress. What he saw was that after an initial period of adaptation, they survived very well for quite a long period of time until, then all of a sudden, their resistance collapsed without any obvious direct cause.
Selye also saw this with bomber pilots in the Second World War, who would fly effectively for many missions, but who would then fall apart as pilot fatigue set in.
We have probably all seen similar patterns in the past, where people become exhausted and their performance suffers. We may all have worked so hard at something, for so long, that the easy things become difficult and life loses its flavor. These are times when rest (often in the form of a good holiday) helps us to approach the situation with a new vigor.
Exhaustion and long-term stress contribute to burnout, but they are not the most destructive parts of it.
Disillusionment – the underlying cause
The real damage of burnout comes from the sense of deep disillusionment that lies at its heart.
Many of us get our sense of identity and meaning from our work. We may have started our careers with high ideals or high ambitions and may have followed these with passion.
This is easy to see in doctors and teachers, who may have a strong desire to help other people to be the best that they can be. Good lawyers may have a passion for justice. Others may be ambitious for promotion or may want to “make a difference” to people or organizations in some other way. In all of these cases, these ideals can drive a highly motivated, passionate approach to work.
It is incredible what we can achieve when we truly believe in what we are doing: We are hard working, effective, full of initiative, energetic and selfless. We can find ourselves doing much more than we are contracted to do, working much longer hours. Even more, we enjoy doing this. We find it easy to enter the hugely satisfying state of flow. Particularly when we are appreciated for what we do, and when we are able to see good results from our work, this satisfaction can help us to overcome enormous difficulties.
It is not surprising that people showing this level of resilience and commitment to their work are often spectacularly successful.
The problem comes when things become too much. Perhaps exhaustion sets in because people have been working too hard for too long. Perhaps performance begins to slip because of this. Perhaps the problem being solved is too great, and the resources available are too meager. Perhaps supportive mentors move on and are replaced by people who do not appreciate the heroic job that is being done, or do not subscribe to the ideals that drive performance. Perhaps co-workers or team members make just too many emotional demands, or people being served prove to be ungrateful and difficult.
Being proactive, energetic, committed people, it is likely that we respond to obstacles like these by increasing our commitment and hard work. However, in these circumstances it is possible that these efforts may have little or no impact on the situation.
This can be where burnout begins to set in. As we get less satisfaction from our jobs, the downsides of these jobs become more troublesome. As we get more tired, we have less energy to give. If our organizations fail to support us, we can get increasingly disenchanted with them. We become increasingly disillusioned.
In extreme cases, we can lose faith completely in what we are doing, and what our organizations are doing, becoming cynical and embittered, and feeling that our ideals and meanings in life count for nothing.
This is full-scale burnout.
Symptoms of Burnout
Given what burnout is, the symptoms of burnout are much as you would expect them to be. Physical symptoms can include physical fatigue, frequent illness and sleep problems.
Emotional symptoms include disillusionment with the job; the loss of a sense of meaning and cynicism towards our organizations or clients; feelings of helplessness; frustration of efforts and a lack of power to change events; strong feelings of anger against the people we hold responsible for the situation; and feelings of depression and isolation.
Behavioral symptoms can include increasing detachment from co-workers, increased absenteeism, an increased harshness in dealing with our teams, marked reduction in our commitment to our work, and increased alcohol consumption. These symptoms reflect exhaustion and a loss of satisfaction with work.
Introducing the Tools
The first two tools that we look at help you to understand where you stand with respect to burnout.
The first tool, “Identifying Burnout Pressure Points”, helps you to think about what you want out of your job and rationally assess where your particular areas of risk lie. The second tool, "The Burnout Self Test" then helps you to assess whether you are currently at risk of burnout.
Where you have identified that this is a danger, the third tool (“Avoiding Burnout”) gives pointers on how you can avoid it. The final tool, “Coping With Burnout”, helps you to think through your options if you feel that you have already burned out.
Recovering From Burnout
It may be too late to talk about avoiding burnout. Maybe you've already reached the stage where you are thoroughly disillusioned with your job and where you no longer get anything of emotional value from it. You may feel let down or betrayed by your organization, and may be "going through the motions" just for the money your job brings in.
While you can deal with exhaustion by taking a good break, rest may not cure this sense of disillusionment. The passion and commitment that you previously brought to your job may now have completely burned out. Without this, your career may not progress much further.
People deal with this situation in a number of different ways. Some are effective, while others are not so good:
· Doing Nothing: Often, one of the worst ways of dealing with burnout is to accept it and do nothing about it. By remaining in place, you risk becoming bitter and angry as opportunities pass you by. Your organization may come to regard you as “dead wood” and if things do not change, you may be doomed to a gradual or sudden decline. You need to change the situation in some way.
· Changing Career: If you have lost all interest in the values that led you into your profession in the first place, then career change may be the best option open to you. The first downside of this, however, is that you lose the benefit of the precious experience you have already gained within the profession. In entering a new profession, you will be competing equally with people much younger than you, and these people may be willing to accept much lower salaries. A second downside is that you risk a strong sense of failure in the way you handled things, whereas burnout will only have been a temporary setback if you succeed in turning the situation around.
· Changing Jobs: Job change within the same profession is usually less of an issue than full-scale career change, in that many of your skills and much of your experience will be transferrable. Job change gives you the opportunity to rededicate yourself to your original goals. It also provides a fresh start in a new environment, without the painful reminders that come with staying in the same job. Changing jobs is an appropriate response where you are disillusioned with your organization more than you are with your career. What you risk, however, is ending up in the same situation again: In changing your job, you must make sure that you understand what lead you to burn out, and ensure that history does not repeat itself. Looking at this positively, you should know what to look for, and have a good idea of how to avoid it!
· Using Burnout as a Trigger for Personal Growth: This is probably one the most positive ways that people manage burnout: By using it as a wakeup call to re-evaluate the way they want to live their lives and what they want to achieve. We look at this in more detail below.
Using Burnout as a Trigger for Personal Growth: Understanding Why You Burned Out
An important first step in managing burnout is to deal with the sense of failure that you may experience following it. A starting point for this is to take a long, rational, dispassionate look at the circumstances leading up to it.
A good way of doing this is by talking to someone who you trust and who is experienced in similar situations in similar organizations (you may find a personal coach helpful here). Avoid people within your own organization, as these people will be tainted with its assumptions and thinking habits: These may contribute to the problem. Take the time to talk the situation through in detail, looking at the circumstances before your involvement, your workload, your actions and the actions of other people, and the situations that evolved.
If you are the sort of person who has been committed enough to your work to burn out, it is more than likely that you will have already done everything in your power to resolve the situation.
In reflecting, you will probably find that you made some mistakes, but you will most likely see that these are excusable under the circumstances. You will almost certainly see that a great deal of blame should be attributed externally to the situation, to people around you, or to the people who set up the situation in the first place. In your mind, make sure you place this blame where it fairly belongs.
Lessons that people typically learn through this process are that they are not superhuman, that hard work does not cure all ills, and that major achievements need the commitment and support of other people: In many circumstances, the intense commitment of only one person simply is not enough. They also learn to look at situations with skepticism as they go into them, and to trust their own judgment in spotting and communicating problems early on.
Learn the lessons of your mistakes so that you do not repeat them.
Moving On… Finding New Direction
Having come to terms with the situation, the next step is to re-evaluate your goals and think about what you want to achieve with your life. We touch on this briefly in our Avoiding Burnout article; however in recovering from burnout, it is worth doing this in detail.
Articles on the Mind Tools main site guide you through the processes of thinking about what you want to achieve with your life and of reviewing and setting life goals.
Inform these processes with the increased wisdom and self-understanding you will have gained by understanding why you burned out. Ensure that you give due weight to the relaxation, quality of life issues and social activities that will help to protect you against burnout in the future. Make sure that your goals are set in a balanced manner so that they do not conflict with one-another, and that they are not so challenging that they become a source of excessive stress in their own right.
Next, use SWOT Analysis to more fully understand your current position with respect to these goals. Use it to identify where you need to develop new skills and capabilities, and to understand where you need the help of other people.
Make an Action Plan for achieving these goals and start work on it. While part of this Action Plan may include changing job or career, you will be doing this as part of an active plan for the future, not as an escape from one job into another one that is equally bad.
As well as taking these active steps to put burnout behind you, make sure that you adopt the steps towards a healthy lifestyle we looked at in our Defenses Against Stress section. These will help you to avoid exhaustion and long-term stress in the future.
Warning:
Stress can cause severe health problems and, in extreme cases, can cause death. While these stress management techniques have been shown to have a positive effect on reducing stress, they are for guidance only, and readers should take the advice of suitably qualified health professionals if they have any concerns over stress-related illnesses or if stress is causing significant or persistent unhappiness. Health professionals should also be consulted before any major change in diet or levels of exercise.
article author James Manktelow
This is a very good location for articles to help you get emotional and mental good health and a happy life https://www.mindtools.com/
permission to reproduce this article from MindTools is pending
Burnout Self-Test: Checking Yourself for Burnout
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTCS_08.htm
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