How To Beat Burnout
5 minute read
Is burnout a new buzzword or are the headlines citing mass resignations and anxiety overload more than just clickbait? According to a study conducted by a County Clare-based software firm, which interviewed 1,000 employees around the country late last year, the anecdotal evidence is rooted in hard facts. Over half of full-time workers in Ireland are now experiencing burnout.
Two years of remote working, home schooling, antigen testing and social distancing has taken its toll on even the most robust among us. Interestingly, in the study cited above, Generation X was the only group for which burnout levels were reported to be less than 50%, at 39%, with Gen Z reporting the highest levels at 58%. At the risk of making midlifers sound like martyrs, I wonder if we reported lower levels of burnout because we’re simply so used to being overburdened with professional and personal responsibilities. We’ve always juggled caring with career, children and parents with work commitments, and we’ve traditionally been the worrywarts, balancing a variety of people’s demands, desires and needs.
In any case, there’s a wave of exhaustion enveloping the nation right now, and it will take more than a public holiday on March 18 to rectify this. There are some seeds of rejuvenation being sown. Global investment bank Citibank banned work calls on Fridays last year in an attempt to combat Zoom fatigue and the relentlessness of the pandemic workday, while in response to employee feedback, PwC Ireland has told its more than 3,000 employees that they will only be required on site two to three days a week post Covid. While there will be some individuals pushing to get back to their office-based 9-5 routine, what these developments demonstrate is a shift in the power structure between employees and employers.
I remember very clearly a time when requesting to work from home for a day would be interpreted as a masked attempt at a duvet day.
You would ask for it sheepishly and apologetically and feel embarrassed for having even suggested it when the request was scoffed at and then flatly denied. This renders an employee with a degree of powerlessness that can lead to its own kind of fatigue. The move towards a more give-and-take relationship between employers and employees shifts the dynamic considerably and gives the latter back some much-coveted control. Psychologist Adam Grant has described the Great Resignation being rumoured not as “a mad dash away from the office…[but] the culmination of a long walk toward freedom. Flexibility is more than choosing the place where you work. It’s having freedom to decide your purpose, your people, and your priorities”.
Positivepsychology.com confirms that lack of control, coupled with an increasing workload and job insecurity, is a key cause of burnout. It also reinforces that the damage from burnout is two-fold: an employee is left mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted, but “organisations with burned-out staff experience low productivity, lost working days, lower profits, reduced talent, and even damage to their corporate reputation”. Galway-based holistic counsellor and psychotherapist Mary Lynn agrees. “Burnout has a dramatic effect on workplace productivity and it’s in a company’s best interest to provide a burnout prevention programme. Happy employees equate to happy customers.” So companies rethinking their business model in terms of how, where and when staff work are employing a commercial strategy as much as extending an olive branch. I imagine in the past, burnout levels were considerably lower and therefore had insufficient impact on a company’s bottom line for it to take action. But if half your workforce is jaded and unhappy, you're looking at a potential profit and loss problem, and this has undoubtedly forced companies to deal with burnout in a more meaningful way.
While the term burnout has permeated our consciousness for years as some form of professional overwhelm, it was only officially recognised by the World Health Organisation as a work-related phenomenon in 2019.
Last year, The New York Times coined the term “worry burnout” for a new strand of extreme overload particular to the past two years, and it’s a double-edged sword, because it involves not simply being professionally overworked but being overburdened with existential worries too. Worry burnout is a little trickier to deal with, not least because many of us have never experienced it. The New York Times described it as “an all-consuming exhaustion during extreme stress”. After two years of being on our guard and in a heightened state of vigilance against Covid-19, many of us have wound up in a chronically exhausted emotional state.
We’re in a catch 22 situation too of course, because one type of burnout will quickly foster the other, so it’s difficult to imagine any one of us failing to identify with the feelings of fatigue, hopelessness and anger that can characterise either condition. It should be said, too, that many people whose workload hasn’t increased, who haven’t had to home-school, and who may actually have gained more time by not having to commute, are also reporting feelings of burnout due to the oppression of the quasi house arrest we’ve been under for so long and the weariness of sitting at the same computer in the same room in the same home for 24 months straight. I imagine it’s how frontline healthcare workers feel dressed in PPE all day – suffocated and stifled.
Lynn explains that, “An individual is often in burnout before they even begin to recognise the signs.” So if as you read this article you’re getting a fresh perspective on your frame of mind, there are a variety of strategies you can adopt to help dampen the flames of burnout, from lightening your workload to asking for help and taking mental and physical breaks (all of which we’ve heard before). But the one that struck me most was the practice of compassion; toward yourself and others. An article in the Harvard Business Review last year reported on research that suggests compassion is a muscle that needs to be trained and that developing and practising compassion is essential to combating burnout. It’s refreshing to hear a solution that offers a more softly softly approach, because the kind of chronic fatigue intrinsic to burnout robs us of our capacity to ask for help, engineer changes in our workload or summon the energy and enthusiasm for any kind of physical exercise.
I often think kindness is an antidote to many of our demons, but it’s good to see the concept being expounded by professionals now. So as the government draws up a roadmap for life after Covid, we can begin to steer ourselves beyond burnout by simply being kind, because as a wise man once said, “Kindness begins with the understanding that we all struggle.” I suppose the mantra of 2020, which we all became so weary of hearing, is true. We’re all in this together.
Marie Kelly, January 2022
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