Are you feeling completely drained day after day? Perhaps you feel you don’t care about your work anymore, and that you’re just going through the motions? Or feel that no matter what you do you just can’t really make a meaningful difference?
If you recognise these experiences, and they’ve been around for a while without signs of shifting, you might be experiencing burnout.
What is burnout?
The World Health Organisation defines burnout as a syndrome caused by chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. There are three core dimensions to burnout:
- Exhaustion
- Detachment from work and/or increasing cynicism
- Reduced effectiveness
Burnout is defined as an “occupational phenomenon” rather than a physical or mental health problem. This is important because it highlights that the causes of burnout are problems within the workplace, rather than within the individual.
Burnout is something that can creep up on us – often developing over a long period of time. Often an acute burnout response can be triggered by a relatively minor event, and it is only when we take a step back to reflect that we notice how it has, in fact, been developing over a long time. Freudenberger outlined 5 stages of burnout – it can be helpful to be familiar with the early signs so that you can take action to prevent it developing into something more serious.
Sometimes people use the word “burnout” to describe distress that has been caused by work, but that in fact maybe better understood as trauma or moral injury. It can be really helpful to have clarity about what you are going through in order to get the right kind of support. My Burnout Toolkit can help you distinguish between these different experiences of burnout and work-related distress.
Burnout in healthcare: the stats
If you work in healthcare and are feeling burned out it may be of little comfort to know that you are not alone. According to recent Medscape surveys 47% of doctors and 65% of nurse practitioners reported being burned out. This figure has been increasing year on year.
Burnout figures vary according to specialty (e.g. 60% of doctors in emergency medicine report being burned out compared to 26% in public health and preventative medicine). Burnout also affects women more frequently than men (56% compared to 41%). This is understood to be related to additional caring responsibilities women often take on outside of work.
How does burnout affect us?
Burnout is not a physical or mental health condition per se, but it can result in significant physical and psychological distress. If people don’t get the right kind of support they might start to suffer from physical ailments, including poor sleep, tension headaches, and lowered immune responses. Burnout can have a major impact on our relationships as we may have little left to give to our loved ones.
People struggling with burnout may also experience psychological problems such as anxiety or depression. This can become a vicious cycle because anxious thinking and low mood often lead us to blame ourselves for our struggles, making us feel bad for finding things hard. This can prevent us from identifying the problems in the workplace that are the root cause of the problem, and leave us feeling more exhausted, detached and helpless – thus reinforcing burnout symptoms.
What causes burnout?
There are 6 key causal factors related to burnout.
- Workload: This is about how realistic the demands of your job are. A manageable workload not only needs to be realistic given your working hours, and the resources you have, but also needs to include opportunities for variety and professional development.
- Control: Having autonomy about how we work is important. Are you able to make choices and decisions about how you fulfil your job responsibilities? Are expectations clear? Do you have the resources you need?
- Reward: Do you feel recognised and rewarded for the work you do – both financially and socially? When an organisation has a meaningful reward system people feel that they and their work are valued. This may be in relation to financial reward, but can also be about how your efforts and achievements are recognised by managers through regular formal or informal feedback, appraisals etc.
- Community: People thrive when they feel a sense of belonging at work. Organisations that foster psychological safety and inclusion create community support that acts as a buffer against stress.
- Fairness: We can withstand a lot of stress when we feel things are fair. However, if an organisation is not transparent about its processes, treats people differently or allocates resources inconsistently this communicates a lack of respect and damages our relationship to our work.
- Values: When our values are aligned with an organisation we are able to share success and meaning in our work. However, tension is created when we feel there is a mis-match between our personal values and those of our employer, or if an organisation does not practice what it preaches.
If there is significant tension in one or more of these areas over a long period of time we can start to feel worn out and drained by our work, ineffective at our jobs and cynical about our employers. If these issues are not meaningfully addressed we are at risk of burnout.
What can you do if you think you might be burning out?
Burnout can be very challenging to address as individuals because often the things that cause it are not within our power to change. However, if we can identify the issues that are contributing we can empower ourselves to take action to support our wellbeing.
This blog series will explore how we can respond to burnout in more detail. If you want a personalised ‘deep-dive’ into your burnout symptoms, the work-related factors that cause them and bespoke recommendations for tackling these check out the Burnout Recovery Roadmap.
