Strategies and Practices to prevent and recover from burnout.
Burnout is not just for Type A’s anymore. Although certain personality types are more susceptible, burnout is now an official medical diagnosis.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines it as a “syndrome conceptualized resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:
1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
3) reduced professional efficacy.
Burnout refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
To put it simply, burnout is a state where human needs go unmet due to ongoing stress.
Moreover, this ongoing stress shows structural and connectivity damage to the brain. Not only have studies of people suffering burnout shown an enlarged amygdala, but they’ve also revealed a thinning of the prefrontal cortex. In effect, it ages your brain, causes reduced cognitive function, and is correlated with heart disease, immune disorders, and insomnia.
The costs of burnout are high not only for the individual, but burnout leads to reduced productivity, absenteeism, high turnover, and high insurance costs across industries. Although certain professions are more prone to burnout, such as medical and legal professionals, caregivers, teachers, and those in customer service and sales positions, everyone can benefit by learning strategies to build resilience and prioritize self-care.
At the same time, employers can look to create a culture that purposefully mitigates the possibility of burnout.
Cultivate the skills to build resilience and avoid Burnout
It should be a relief to know that it is possible to protect yourself from burnout by deliberately cultivating the skills that lead to resilience, or "the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change."
Practice mindfulness meditation
One of the best things you can do is commit to a daily mindfulness meditation practice. Mindfulness practice teaches you how to train your attention, build self-awareness, gain clarity, and create space between you and your emotions.
When we quiet the mind, we calm the nervous system and can see our situation more clearly. Becoming more intentional and purposeful can help to decrease negative thoughts. With mindfulness, nothing is off limits, so we don’t deny, avoid, or suppress. Rather we learn to stay with the discomfort, be it physical, mental, or emotional.
Practice Self-awareness & Regulation
The ability to pay attention to your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors leads to the ability to change your thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
This powerful ability to look at situations from multiple perspectives and to think creatively and flexibly gives you the mental agility to broaden your perspective. This alone develops emotional and cognitive resilience. When it comes to burnout, being able to change the channel or turn down the volume of our thoughts and emotions is a superpower.
When we are in burnout, we can’t see the forest for the trees. Since we naturally pay more attention to the negative than the positive occurrences in our lives, finding ways to reframe our situation can make us more resilient. The other option is to stay stuck in rumination and catastrophic thinking.
Instead of asking:
What’s another way to look at the situation?
How might a friend view the situation?
In the long run, how important is it?
What can I learn from the situation?
What are some examples where this thought is not 100% true?
Is this thought helpful?
What is the worst-case scenario?
If we can talk to ourselves in a more optimistic explanatory style, it can have a profound impact on our lives. We can bolster the positive:
With Gratitude: What three things are you grateful for today?
By Looking for the Silver Lining: How might this situation work out best in the long run?
By Envisioning: See the situation working out for you and how you’ll feel in the process
With Empowerment: What went well today and how were you responsible for it?
By Savoring the Moment: What can you enjoy right now?
When we intentionally work to calm the mind, practice an optimistic explanatory style, and reframe toward opportunity, we begin the process of hardwiring it in our brains. Neurons that fire together, wire together
The more we repeatedly look for the good, the better we get at it.
Cultivate Self-Compassion
Finally, if we can get to a place of radical acceptance where we willingly experience and accept all that is happening, we become free. Self-compassion is a powerful way to do so. It is an accepted practice of being kind and understanding with ourselves when confronted with personal failings and difficulties.
The three parts of self-compassion include:
Mindfulness: being aware but not over-identified with mental or emotional phenomena.
Common Humanity: recognizing that you are not alone and that suffering and personal failure are part of the shared human experience.
Kindness: meeting oneself with warmth rather than harmful self-criticism or self-judgment.
Self-compassion is an effective way to meet our challenges and enable self-confidence. When we’re in the midst of struggle, the first thing to do is to bring awareness to it. You can say to yourself, “Ouch. This hurts, and I’m stressed.”
The second step is to acknowledge and reinforce the fact that struggles are a part of life and that everyone struggles
Lastly, you can show yourself some kindness with a few deep breaths and maybe a hand over your heart. Say to yourself, “You’ll be okay. You’ve been through tough times before.”
Gain clarity and connect with people to avoid burnout.
In sum, using these practices, which are rooted in mindfulness, enables us to develop clarity which gives us tools to shift our perspective and open up to possibilities.
These practices are strengthened when we know someone’s got our back. Ultimately, we are most resilient to burnout when we have the ability to build and maintain strong, trusting relationships.
Connection is the final piece to building resilience. It’s a fine line between going through some hard times and bad days and falling into burnout.
High-quality connections and having people in your corner can be what keeps you above the line. In the end, a lack of resilience can have a significant impact on your motivation, performance, engagement in your work, job satisfaction, and overall well-being. The more resilient you become, the less likely you’ll end up with burnout.
Build Self-Care Rituals
In fact, being intentional about doing these practices is an act of self-care.
Self-care is the practice of taking an active role in protecting your own well-being, pursuing happiness, and having the ability, tools, and resources to respond to periods of stress so that they don’t result in something like burnout. Self-care often conjures up images of manicures, aromatherapy, bubble baths, and facials. But self-care is much more than self-indulgence, rather it is essential to keeping you stable, functioning well, and emotionally healthy.
Of course, treatments such as massage can be effective at alleviating stress, but self-care encompasses many other beneficial activities and isn’t about a quick fix. Self-care might consist of:
Spending more time with friends and family
Socializing more
Regular exercise
Getting a good night’s sleep
Improving one’s diet
Working with a wellness coach
Spending time in nature
Doing yoga
Meditating
Remembering to breathe
Walking
Alone time
Working on hobbies
Listening to your favorite music
Improving relationships that matter most to you
Taking a break from work
Setting an end-of-the-day, concrete, quitting time
Disconnecting from technology
Self-care is health care. Self-care activities create daily improvements in our lives that have long-term effects, and they take work. It’s a way of prioritizing what’s most important. Maybe,
it’s watching one less episode on Netflix to get to bed earlier.
Drinking only on weekends.
Waking up earlier to meditate.
Exercising three times a week.
Or Shutting down your phone and reading a book.
It’s about setting clear boundaries for you, along with a healthy set of indulgences as needed. In the end, self-care makes you into a better human being. By intentionally practicing self-care, you will be more resistant to burnout and, instead, become a healthier, more engaged, compassionate, productive, and resilient human being.
Self-care is crucial to combatting burnout.
Empower your company culture to reduce burnout
Burnout is contagious. You are more likely to suffer from burnout if you’re around others who are burned out or work in a culture where there are greater conditions of burnout.
When stress is due to not only life events but job challenges and lack of support at the workplace, it’s important for employers to re-evaluate how their leadership influences others. Leadership sets the tone for open, safe, and honest conversations on mental health within their organizations.
Leaders must act on behalf of their employees where they can. If they are constantly demanding more and more work in less and less time, employees will be frustrated, angry, and distrustful.
Instead, if employees see that their leaders are supportive, they will be more likely to share their own experiences, access resources, and proactively seek help when needed. Managers and employees must be given the proper tools with which to work. Some might include:
More flexible work hours
Access to telehealth
Access to health and wellness coaching
Subsidized gym memberships
Building in mindfulness practices
Creating an environment of psychological safety, where no one is punished or humiliated for speaking up
One workday a month or a week without meetings
Limiting hours for email and Slack
Promoting offline hours from technology
Helping employees unplug from business
Balancing workloads
Making priorities clear and closely monitoring progress on projects
Keeping the company’s vision and values at the forefront
These are just a few ideas of what employers can do to help alleviate burnout. The most important piece centers around the idea of “the way we do things around here.” This may include changing work design, organizational structure, systems, policies, procedures, and more.
The costs of burnout are heavy for the individual and the organization. Leaders must listen and respond to the needs of employees on an ongoing basis. An extra vacation or a random gym membership is only a short-term fix. Those things must happen in combination with long-term practices to promote employee wellness. In the end, it’s important for employers to work to support employees’ overall wellness in the areas that are under their control to avoid burnout.
Nurture Balance in your life to recover from burnout
As a final point, there is much discussion on the topic of work-life balance, but in the end, it’s all just life in balance. What happens at work carries over to home and vice versa.
But burnout is not a life sentence, and it is possible to manage and recover from it. Understanding what gives you energy and what drains your energy is imperative. Being deliberate about the way in which you work and manage your energy is even more so.
Cultivating resilience, building in self-care rituals, and calling on the support of friends and family, combined with a compassionate workplace, will enable you to find your way to fulfillment and well-being. The good news is that once you learn and start to practice these burnout prevention skills, your brain will rewire itself and make these habits easier and faster.
I leave you with some of my favorite go-to practices:
1.) STOP:
Use the STOP acronym in your day, especially if you feel overwhelmed, anxious, or triggered in any way.
S - Stop whatever you are doing
T - Take a breath
O - Observe what’s going on in the mind and body
P - Proceed in the most skillful way possible
2.) Take three deep breaths at any moment
Take three full deep breaths:
First breath: Bring your full attention to breathing.
Second breath: Relax the body. Drop your shoulders.
Third breath: Ask yourself: What’s important right now?
Or check in with the head, body, and heart.
Take three full breaths, scanning one area of the body with each breath.
First breath: Scan the head, representing thoughts.
Second breath: Scan the body, representing emotions and sensations.
Third breath: Scan the heart, representing values and intentions.
3.) Practice Gratitude
Keep a gratitude journal. At least once a week, write down three things you are grateful for. Better yet, try to write down one thing you are grateful for each day.
Research shows that those who practice gratitude - whether through reflection, writing, or in everyday life - report higher levels of positive emotions and a stronger sense of connection. Plus, they also have stronger immune systems, lower blood pressure, and experience fewer feelings of loneliness.
4) Practice R.A.I.N
When we’re stressed, we get caught in thoughts that distract us from concentration. We try to solve the problem by circling thoughts or rumination. Of course, that only makes matters worse.
RAIN can get you out of your head and into the present moment. It can help us counteract the deep-seated tendency to reject aspects of our experience, such as anger, sadness, loneliness, and grief.
By practicing these steps in a moment or as a seated practice, you’ll be less likely to self-identify with difficult thoughts and feelings. Instead, you’ll begin to see their impermanent nature, leaving you with a greater sense of freedom and ease.
R - Recognize the stress and step back and observe it without reacting to it.
A - Allow means to pause and let the stress be there without trying to change it.
I - Investigate means you try to find where the stress is living in your body. You stay with the somatic experience of it without analyzing or avoiding it.
N - Nurture means bringing comfort to what’s there and not identifying with it. This brings you back to clarity.
5.) Self-compassion letter
Write a letter to yourself as if from a close friend or mentor. This person knows you well and wants the best for you. What would they say to you about the challenges you are facing?
Want to change your relationship to stress, anxiety & the ups and downs of life?
Learn more about the special program Emotional Wellness Coaching.
Want help to empower your employees and prevent burnout at the workplace?
Learn more about my Corporate Wellness Services.
If you want help avoiding or recovering from burnout, email me: sharyn@truenorthwell.com or book a call with me.